Everything seemed okay behind him, but he wasn’t going to walk backward and give himself away. For all he knew, Clark was monitoring them right now, making sure he and Adara didn’t violate their cover-for-action by making a game out of today’s surveillance.
Far across the street and ahead, near where Adara had been standing in front of the antiques store, a young man with curly black hair walked with a gait that caught Midas’s eye. He was purposeful, almost storming through the slower moving crowd around him, and his head was fixed on something across the street from him.
Out of the hundred people or more Midas laid eyes on in his sweep while he walked over the next three minutes, only this one man stood out to him.
Midas said, “Adara, what’s your location?”
“South West Street and King Street. I’m making a left onto King, unless you tell me otherwise.”
Midas knew this put Adara a hundred feet or so right in front of the guy in the untucked white button-down.
“I’ve got a possible third unsub. You mind serving as bait to see if he locks onto you?”
“Not at all. I’ve got eyes on the target across the street.”
“Okay,” Midas said, “make a left onto King and stay across and behind the target, and I’ll watch the three guys behind you to see what they do.”
Adara did as directed, kept her head down and talked into her mobile phone now, pretending to have a conversation with her mom about her upcoming visit to D.C. and the different museums they’d visit. This kept her right hand and her phone shielding her face in the event the target looked back over his left shoulder.
Adara lowered her tone to a soft whisper. “Midas, target is four blocks from the Metro and heading in that direction.”
Midas replied, “Roger that. The three unsubs are not looking at you at all. I do believe all three are focused on our target.”
“So weird. Could this be unrelated to the exercise?”
“I have no idea,” Midas said. He had purposely narrowed the distance a little between himself and the two in front of him, and this helped him get a better angle on the face of the man across the street. Even from this distance he could see the man’s hard, determined countenance as he walked forward, his eyes almost never wavering from the direction of the white-haired man.
Midas said, “I don’t like this. I don’t like their attitudes, I don’t like their proximity to you and our target, and I don’t like the two backpacks the duo in front of me are carrying. I’m going to call Clark. I’ll take the hit if I fail today’s course.”
Adara said, “Negative. We are in this together, pass or fail. Plus, my phone is already out. I’ll call him. I want you watching these guys. Call me back if anything changes.”
“Copy that.”
She hung up the phone and dialed Clark’s number.
Saleh answered his cell phone when it buzzed in his pocket. “Yeah?”
It was Badr, behind the wheel of the Nissan Pathfinder, which had been circling the neighborhood to the west, hunting for a place to wait before rushing in to pick up Saleh, Chakir, and Mehdi in case they found a good opportunity to kill Eddie Laird.
He said, “There is a Metro station right here. Three blocks in front of where Laird is walking. What if he is heading there?”
Saleh knew he’d have to improvise. They couldn’t lose this man for an entire day, and they couldn’t follow him onto the trains without losing their getaway vehicle. On top of this, Mohammed and Omar forbade them from going into D.C.
Saleh said, “You park there and keep an eye out for us. We will take him at the station if that is his destination.”
He quickly hung up and dialed Chakir across the street.
John Clark was a dozen blocks away, leaving La Madeleine and heading back to his Range Rover, parked near the market. He felt like he’d given his two trainees enough time to identify their target and settle into their coverage. Now he’d make it tougher. He reached for his phone to call Eddie to tell him to begin an SDR as well as to begin actively searching for his surveillance, but his phone chirped as soon as he started to dial.
“Yeah?”
“John, it’s Adara. We really hope we’re wrong here, but Midas and I think there is someone else tailing our target. Can you confirm you aren’t training anybody else or—”
“Just tell me what’s going on.”
Clark began hurrying back to his SUV.
“Three males, all in their twenties. I am between them and the white-haired gentleman, and Midas is behind with eyes on all three unknowns. First we thought they were with you, just tailing me, but now we are worried they might be doing a foot-follow on the unsub. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to us.”
Clark’s tone was as urgent as Adara had ever heard from him. “Those are most definitely not my guys. Where are you?”
“The target is entering the parking lot in front of the King Street Metro. What do you want me to—”
“I’ll call nine-one-one, and I’m on the way. Your target’s name is Eddie Laird. Get on him, and get him inside the station. There will be armed transit police there.”
Adara was confused. “Why do you think—”
Clark said, “He’s ex-Agency, senior staff. Get him!”
Adara just gasped into the phone. “Jesus. I’ll grab him now.”
The phone went dead and she picked up the pace, closing on Laird now as she reconnected with Midas.
Midas was only one hundred feet behind the men now, but one of the two stepped into traffic suddenly in front of the Hilton and crossed to the other side, joining up with the man in the untucked shirt. Just as this happened, Midas’s earpiece chirped.
He answered to hear Adara’s intense but in-control voice. “John says these three aren’t his, and our target, Laird, is now our principal. He’s ex — senior staff at Langley. We are to move him to the Metro and get him surrounded by armed transit cops.”
Midas said, “Roger that. Be advised, you’ve got two directly behind you now. There is one in front of me, crossing the street into the parking lot. I don’t think they like the idea of him getting out of here on a train.”
Adara said, “The hell with this, I’m running for Laird.”
“Do it!”
Eddie Laird’s phone rang and Adara closed even faster on him while he stopped to answer it. She wanted him inside the station, where at least there would be options for cover and likely some sort of police presence, but instead he started to sit down on a bench outside.
She hadn’t turned back around to look at the approaching men, so she was thankful when Midas gave her an update, although the news itself was bad.
“Packs are off their shoulders, they’ve separated, two have moved wide on your left, one on your right. These boys are gonna fuckin’ hit. I’m running for the guy on your right. If he has a weapon I’ll try to take it to engage the others.”
By now Adara had made it up to Laird, and as he rejected the telemarketing call and stood back up from the bench, she got right in front of him.
“Mr. Laird?”
Eddie Laird looked up now. “Well… if you’re one of Clark’s students, then that’s a definite fail.”