The man skulking in the shadows pushed away from the wall, began strolling toward the alley and the three Middle Easterners, who were now just passing in front of him. As he walked he brought his hand to his face. In a second broadcast received in his earpiece, the American in the blue linen shirt heard, “Okay, Dom, I’ve got ’em. Shift one road over, overlap the target, and move up to the next choke point. I’ll update you if he stops.”
“He’s all yours, Sam,” Dominic Caruso said as he turned left, departing the alley via a side passageway that led up a staircase that emptied out on al-Badistand Road. Once he hit the larger street, Dom turned right and moved quickly through pedestrians and bicycles and motorized rickshaws as he maneuvered to get ahead of his target.
Dominic Caruso was young, fit, and relatively dark-complexioned. All these traits had served him in these past few days of surveillance here in Cairo. The latter, his skin and hair color, helped him blend in with a population that was predominately dark-haired and olive-toned. And the former, his fitness and relative youth, was helpful on this operation because the subject of his surveillance was what was known, in Dominic Caruso’s line of work, as a hard target. Mustafa el Daboussi, the silver-haired fifty-eight-year-old man with the two musclemen serving as his bodyguards, was the focus of Dom’s mission in Cairo, and Mustafa el Daboussi was a terrorist.
And, Dominic did not need to be reminded, terrorists did not often make it fifty-eight years on this earth by being oblivious to men following them. El Daboussi knew every countersurveillance trick in the book, he knew these streets like the back of his hand, and he had friends here in the government and the police and the intelligence agencies.
A hard target, indeed.
For Caruso’s part, he wasn’t exactly a debutant at this game himself. Dom had been tailing some scumbag or another for most of the past decade. He’d spent several years as a special agent in the FBI before being recruited into The Campus along with his twin brother, Brian. Brian had been killed the year before on a Campus black op in Libya. Dom had been there, he’d held his brother in his arms as he died, and then Dominic returned to The Campus, hell-bent on doing the hard, dangerous work that he believed in.
Dom stepped around a young man selling tea from a large jug hanging by a leather strap from his neck, and he picked up the pace, anxious to get to the next decision point for his target: a four-way intersection some hundred yards to the south.
Back in the alleyway, Caruso’s partner, Sam Driscoll, followed the three men through the winding passageways, careful to keep his distance. Sam had decided that if he lost contact with his target, so be it; Dom Caruso was making his way forward to a choke point ahead. If el Daboussi disappeared between Sam’s and Dom’s positions they would look for him, but if they lost him today they would pick him up later, back at his rented house. It was better, it had been determined by the two Americans, to chance losing the target rather than to press their luck and run the risk of compromising themselves to their target or his protection detail.
El Daboussi stopped at a jewelry store; something had caught his eye in a dusty glass display case just inside the wide entrance. Sam continued forward a few yards and then stepped into the shadow of a canvas tent, under which young salesgirls sold chintzy plastic toys and other tourist kitsch. As he waited for his target to move on, he stepped deeper into the shade. He felt he blended well into the scenery, but a teenage girl in a chador saw him and approached with a smile. “Sir, you wanna sunglasses?”
Shit.
He just shook his head, and the girl got the message and moved on.
Sam Driscoll had the ability to intimidate with a glance. An ex-Ranger with multiple tours of duty in the sandbox and beyond, he’d been scooped up by The Campus after an introduction from Jack Ryan Sr. Driscoll had been chased from the military by Justice Department lawyers doing the bidding of a Kealty administration hungry for Sam’s blood after a cross-border incursion into Pakistan left a few too many dead bad guys for Kealty’s taste.
Driscoll would have been the first to agree that he’d violated those terrorist shitheads’ civil rights by firing a .40-caliber hollow-point into each of their brainpans. But as far as he was concerned, he’d done his job, and no more than what was necessary for his mission.
Life’s a bitch, and then you die.
Jack Sr.’s publicity of the Driscoll affair was enough to get the DOJ to drop the matter, but Ryan’s recommendation along with John Clark’s personal appeal to Gerry Hendley had gotten Sam hired into The Campus.
At thirty-eight, Sam Driscoll was several years older than Dom Caruso, his partner on this op, and even though Sam was in excellent physical condition, he wore his extra mileage on him, manifested in a graying beard, deep-set creases around his eyes, and a nagging old wound to his shoulder that he woke up to each and every morning. The injury had come in a firefight on the exfil during his Pakistan mission; a jihadi’s AK round had shattered a rock in front of Driscoll’s firing position, sending natural shrapnel into and through the Ranger’s upper body.
The shoulder didn’t bother him so much at the moment, the stiffness and soreness melted away with movement and exercise, and a couple hours of “foot follow” surveillance through Cairo’s Old Town had given him plenty of both today.
And Driscoll was about to get some more exercise. He looked up and noticed el Daboussi was on the move again. Sam waited for a moment, and then stepped out into the alleyway to resume his tail of the silver-haired terrorist.
A minute later, Sam stopped again as his target entered a busy kahwah, a boisterous neighborhood coffeehouse ubiquitous in Cairo. Men sat in chairs around small tables that spilled out into the center of the alley; they played backgammon and chess and smoked hookah pipes and cigarettes while drinking thick Turkish coffee or fragrant green tea. El Daboussi and his men walked past these open-air tables and continued deep into the dark room.
Sam spoke softly into his cuff mike. “Dom, come back?”
“Yep,” came the reply into Driscoll’s earpiece.
“Subjects have stopped. They’re in a coffeehouse on …” Sam scanned the walls and corners of the impenetrable market alleyway for a sign. Up and down the souk he saw stalls and canvas-covered kiosks but no signs referencing his exact location. Sam had had a better sense of direction humping through the mountains of Pakistan than he did right here in Cairo’s Old Town. He chanced a surreptitious glance down to his map to get his bearings. “Okay, we just made a left off of Midan Hussein. I think we are still just north of al-Badistand. Say fifty meters from your location. Looks like our boy and his goons are going to sit and chat. How ’bout you come over here and we can split the coverage?”
“On the way.”
While Sam waited for his backup, he wandered over to a chandelier shop and gazed appreciatively at a glass light fixture. In the reflection of a large crystal bauble he could see the front of the kahwah well enough to watch it in case his target left. But instead of anyone leaving, he saw three other men step into the kahwah from the opposite direction. Something about the look of the leader of this little pack gave him pause. Driscoll chanced a pass by the entrance, and he looked inside as if he was searching for a friend.
There, in the back against a stone wall, Mustafa el Daboussi and his men sat at a table right next to the new arrival and his men.
“Interesting,” Sam said to himself as he wandered off a few yards away from the coffeehouse’s entrance.
Dom arrived in the alleyway a minute later, shouldered up to Sam as both men picked through the wares of another tiny kiosk. Driscoll leaned over a table and pulled a pair of jeans out of a pile as if to look them over. He whispered to his partner. “Our boy is having a clandestine meet and greet with an unknown subject.”