So the surveillance fell to her, and it fell to her with an urgency she did not like. Haste made for mistakes, and as things stood, there was already too much room for error, too many things she didn’t like.
First, Ruslan and his son were, for all intents and purposes, under house arrest. By her count, there were at least three static surveillance posts devoted to watching the home, each manned by a team of two, each team replaced every eight hours, at five hundred, thirteen hundred, and twenty-one hundred hours. The watchers made no attempts to hide themselves, using automobiles as their staging point, with one person remaining behind the wheel, the second alternately walking up and down the block or lounging against the side of the car. Every other hour of the shift, the two would swap, the walker assuming the seat in the car, the driver assuming the walking post. The occupants of the cars used radios for communication, but from what Chace could see, the walkers did not. She was certain that the drivers not only communicated with one another, but with a central dispatcher as well.
That was just on the outside.
What was going on inside the house was harder to determine, but Chace had been able to confirm a few facts there as well. She knew that Ruslan and his son, Stepan, were inside, because she’d seen them on multiple occasions. Most frequently, she’d caught glimpses of them through the windows of the front room, barely for more than one second at a time. On Sunday afternoon, though, father and son had emerged to play in the backyard, engaging in a game of chase-me-catch-me-tickle-me-do-it-again. Stepan’s delight had been loud enough to echo off the walls surrounding the yard, shrieks of toddler joy that had Chace thinking of Tamsin, and what of her daughter’s life she was now missing.
When Ruslan and his son had come outside, they’d been accompanied by two more men, and neither of the guards had bothered to conceal the weapons they were carrying. The fact that they were so overt about their weaponry hadn’t alarmed Chace; what they’d been carrying, however, had. Each was armed with a Heckler & Koch MP-5K, carried in hand. As far as submachine guns went, they could hardly have chosen better. The weapons, and others like them, were sometimes called room-brooms for their ability to quickly and efficiently clear small spaces of opposition. At close range, the guns would lay down a stream of fire that could only be described as lethal.
And once inside the house, Chace would be at very close range indeed.
In the time she’d been watching, she’d seen the shift change inside the house three times, but had yet to see any of watchers who had entered leave again. Like outside, the interior seemed to be guarded by teams of two, but she was uncertain just how many teams were actually being employed. Her best guess put the number at either three or four, which meant another six to eight armed men inside the house. She found herself praying it was the lower number. Six would be extraordinarily difficult to manage silently, without a fair amount of luck added to what Chace feared were her rusty skills; eight would be impossible, because it led directly to the second complication.
She had no doubt that the guards’ orders were very clear: Ruslan and his son were not allowed to leave the building.
Should they try to do so, they would be killed.
Which meant that if the guards thought they were going to lose their prisoners, they were liable to shoot father and son themselves, and be done with it once and for all.
Third complication, then. She had to get inside quietly.
Fourth complication. She had to neutralize the guards just as quietly. Six to eight guards, and they would have to be taken out before they could raise an alarm, before they could react.
Fifth complication. She had to get herself, Ruslan, and Stepan out again. And Stepan, being all of two years old, would have to be carried, because he sure as hell wouldn’t be able to keep up if they ran for it. Ruslan would have to carry him, to keep Chace’s hands free for the wet work.
Sixth complication. Not only did they need to get out of the house, they had to get out of the city, and far enough away that Porter could bring in the helo undetected for the lift, but close enough that it could be managed in a timely fashion.
Seventh complication. She had to do all of these things alone.
Eighth complication. She had to do all of these things soon.
Because the eighth complication was the man named Ahtam Zahidov. His arrival at the house on Monday morning had come as a surprise, as much as to the guards on watch as to Chace, who recognized him from the photograph Riess had shown her, and it had caused an immediate flurry of activity. The arrival had provided an answer to another of her questions, however—Zahidov’s presence confirmed for Chace that Ruslan was being held by his sister Sevara’s forces, and not by the official NSS.
Zahidov had arrived in a late-model Audi A4, driving it alone, and pulling up to the front of the house. The car was a glossy black, well cared for, and Chace’s first thought upon seeing it was that she’d very much like to steal it; the A4 was a good car if one had to get someplace in a hurry, and it would be a much better escape vehicle than the Range Rover, the engine of which was beginning to give her serious doubts.
Then Zahidov had emerged, and two of the guards—one from the house, one of them walking his beat farther up the block—had rushed to greet him, and that was when Chace had given him a second look through her binoculars. Through eyes strained with fatigue and overuse, it had taken several seconds before the recognition had come, and Zahidov had all but entered the house before she’d truly realized who he was.
She was watching, at that point, from a rooftop a block and a half away. It was her seventh or eighth observation post—she couldn’t remember how many she’d used any longer, yet another sign of her fatigue—and when Zahidov vanished into the house, she had a moment of panic.
Fucking hell, she thought. I’ve waited too long. I’ve waited too long and now the Big Bad Heavy has come to fix things for his lady friend once and for all.
And if that was the case, it was over, the whole damn operation was a bust. She wouldn’t be able to get there in time. Forget the fact that she wasn’t ready, that all she had on her was the Smith & Wesson she’d purchased at the bazaar, forget that the rest of the weapons and explosives were still hidden in the back of the Range Rover. Forget the fact that it was broad fucking daylight, forget all of it. Even if she ran and somehow managed to survive a frontal assault on the house, she was certain she’d arrive just in time to find the bodies of Ruslan and Stepan cooling in puddles of their own spilled blood.
It was the broad-fucking-daylight factor that made her reconsider, that calmed her, that allowed her to recognize she was becoming irrational. Zahidov wouldn’t execute Ruslan and his son in their home, not in the middle of the day. He had complete control over them, he had armed guards on them. If he was going to murder them, he wouldn’t do it there.
No, he’d take them someplace else, use his NSS muscle to bring them to a cell someplace, perhaps, or drive them outside of the city, in the hinterlands, and kill them there.
Chace forced herself to calm down, checking her watch and noting the time. She rubbed her eyes, feeling them sting, then resumed peering through the binos. They weren’t the best set of optics she’d used, not even close, but they served. She’d found them at a camera store on Abdukhamid Kayumov Saturday morning, and bought them solely because they were the most powerful set on sale.