Brothers In Arms (35 page)

There was killing to be done.

Mike Callan rode in the back of a panel delivery van with big side-sliding doors. Crouched in the back, dressed in leather jackets, work boots, and Levis, with balaclavas rolled up like hats on their heads, were six operators from
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. Following closely behind the van was a Chevy Suburban with blacked-out windows that contained six more men, all heavily armed, the cover car.

“Let me out at the corner,” Callan said to the driver. He stepped over the men crouched in the back and slid into the empty front passenger seat. The van slowed to a stop, and Callan, touching his ear where he wore a radio earpiece, got out without another word. He strode away, down a few doors in the residential neighborhood, then bounded up the stairs to the lower doorway entrance to the safe house where Hans had set up operations. He pushed the button beside the door and waited for the door to buzz open, then went up where he was greeted by one of Hans’s gunfighters, his hand on a weapon hidden beneath the front of his jacket.

“Where’s Hans?” Callan said.

“Right here,” Hans said from the door behind his man. “We’re in here.”

Callan came into the small operations room and looked over the
folding tables burdened with laptops, monitors, cameras, and radio equipment. Dale and Charley stood to greet him.

“Right on time,” Dale said.

“That’s my definition of right on time—ten minutes early,” Callan said. “You ready to go to work?”

“We’ve been working, Massah Callan,” Charley said. “We’s been working hard.”

Callan grinned and helped himself to a cup of coffee from the pot warming on a corner of a folding table. “I know that. Good work, too. We’re just about ready to wrap this guy up.”

“Are you going to run coordination for your team?” Dale said.

“Yeah, I’m going to sit right here and watch the deal go down. You guys working the street or are you going to stay here with me?”

“Working the street,” Dale said. “I want to see this guy go down.”

“Likewise,” Charley said.

“I will be here,” Hans said. “I don’t have the bloodlust of these two.”

“I’ll enjoy the company,” Callan said. “It’s been a long while since we talked, Hans.”

“Run down what your crew is going to do, will you, Mike?” Dale said.

“Sure,” Callan said. “Straightforward and simple, just the way I like it. They’re standing off in a van with a cover car two blocks away from the hotel. When Hans’s people put bin Faisal on the street, they’ll box him in and we’ll know where he is. There’re a number of places along all the routes out of the hotel where we can pull the van in; we pull the van alongside, door opens, my boys go out, grab him, and throw him in the back of the van. He gets hooded and shot up with tranquilizer while the van evacs with the cover car sweeping up behind if necessary. Then they move to a staging area, a warehouse a few miles from here, and we dope him up some more. Then he goes on a military transport out of the airport as diplomatic cargo. He’ll come to his senses in a safe house in northern Virginia, where we will begin the process of straining his brains dry.”

“Sounds good to me,” Charley said.

“Have your guys done a snatch before?” Dale said.

“They swept up that Serbian prison commander in Belgrade and a narco in downtown Bogotá, right out of the middle of his security detail,” Callan said. “They know what they’re doing.”

“Not your usual private sector–type action,” Dale observed dryly.

“We’re a long way past that,” Callan said. “You knew that going in.”

“I like it where I’m at,” Dale said.

“Bin Faisal is leaving his room,” the equipment operator said. “He’s getting ready to go.”

“Let’s hit the street,” Dale said.

In the lobby, busy with guests coming and going from the front desk and the restaurant, Hans’s four streetwalkers prepared themselves. An unshaven young man, casual in a rumpled polo shirt and khaki pants, eased himself out of an overstuffed armchair directly across from the concierge desk. He walked out the tall glass doors and lingered by the taxi stand directly in front of the hotel entrance. His three partners stayed in the lobby, positioned to watch every entrance, exit, and elevator. Their slow movements were unnoticed by everyone except the two middle-aged Greek men parked behind newspapers in adjoining armchairs nudged in a corner. One of them took out his digital pager and tapped out a short message.

Out on the street, slouched behind the wheel of his car, Costas looked down at his pager display.

Subjects moving.

“It’s time to work,” Costas said, looking at his partner Anna, who patted the paper bag that concealed her weapon.

Back at the Hilton, Ahmad bin Faisal entered the lobby from the central elevator. He looked cool and aquiline in a short-sleeved light blue silk shirt and linen trousers. The Arab paused, looked round the lobby as though he expected to see someone, then took out a cigarette from his silver case and lit it with his gold lighter. His
head wreathed in aromatic smoke, bin Faisal went out the hotel entrance doors to the taxi stand outside.

“May I call you a cab, sir?” the doorman asked.

Bin Faisal regarded him for a moment, then said, “No. It’s such a beautiful day, I think I will walk.”

He turned away from the doorman and gazed up at the flags of many countries on the long row of flagpoles that followed the curved driveway out from the front of the hotel to the car-choked Vasileos Konstantinou Boulevard. The flags snapped and fluttered in the morning breeze. Bin Faisal drew deep on his Turkish cigarette, and let the smoke eddy and whirl around him. Then he walked to the crossing in front of the hotel, crossed the street, and turned left onto Vasilissis Sofias, a quiet side street. He had in mind an easy stroll that would take him to the Plaka for some light shopping, and then a late lunch at the Hotel Bretagna in Syntagma Square. As he had been instructed, he took no cautionary countersurveillance measures, and was careful to look the part of the tourist. He suspected he was being watched, though; the hair on the back of his neck stirred.

All around him, careful and discreet action took place.

Two of Hans’s streetwalkers from the lobby followed him out. A woman in a tan pantsuit that was a size too small passed him quickly and paced ahead of him; a tired-looking man crossed to the other side of the street and stayed abreast of the Arab. Fifty yards behind him, two other members of Hans’s team got out of a battered Fiat and followed.

Bin Faisal was in the box.

And Hans’s operators were in Costas’s box.

Close behind the two trailing Dutch streetwalkers were two of Costas’s shooters, heavy-set middle-aged men with the look of grocers or butchers, each armed with a Skorpion machine pistol ideal for close work. As Hans’s surveillance vehicles began to stir along bin Faisal’s route, Costas’s crew moved, too. Costas’s plan took advantage of the surveillance team’s focus on their moving target, which left them vulnerable to the unseen foe stalking them from behind. The
streetwise November Seventeenth terrorists had identified all of Hans’s lurking cars, and waited till the movement of the suspect vehicles paralleled bin Faisal’s. That simultaneous motion cemented the target identification and marked the vehicle occupants for death.

Costas craned his head out his open window and inched his car into the traffic. His target vehicle, a battered mud-brown Audi that moved faster than it looked, was six cars ahead of him.

“Send the message,” he said to Anna.

She reached out and plucked his pager from his belt, then entered the numbers 666 into the message body and hit broadcast, which sent the message simultaneously to all the network pagers.

It was the release code for his shooters.

Once they had that message, they were free to kill their identified targets and any targets of opportunity. The shooters on foot would fall back to predesignated rally points where other November Seventeenth operators in cars and vans would pick them up and take them away before the police could respond. The nearest police station was the thinly manned tourist police post in the Athens Hilton, and their first responsibility was to the hotel guests.

Killing time was here and now.

In the back of the delivery van parked two blocks from the hotel, the
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kidnap team checked their equipment and made sure it was handy. One man examined a slap syringe, designed to inject a powerful tranquilizer on contact. Another operator set into his belt already-looped plastic flexicuffs for the subject’s hands and feet, then tossed underhand to the man across from him a black hood for bin Faisal’s head.

Hans’s voice crackled over the radio net, tinny in each man’s earpiece. “Subject is moving. All call signs, this is Zero, Bravo-Two has the eye.”

“Zero, Bravo-Two, roger I have the eye,” came the response from a streetwalker.

A
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operator, a hulking man with the battered cheekbones of a boxer and a wad of tobacco in his cheek, spat into a sawed-off pop can and said, “Are we up?”

The senior man looked back from his seat behind the driver. “We’re all up.”

The driver nodded and nosed the van out into the street. He pulled into the turn lane that would take him onto Vasilissis Sofias, glancing into his rearview mirror to make sure that the heavy Chevy Suburban with the blacked-out windows was right behind him. When there was a break in the traffic, he goosed the van across and onto the side street where Ahmad bin Faisal strolled, cigarette in hand.

“This is Charley-One,” the driver said, his words picked up by the microphone mounted on his visor. “We’re on Route Blue, in position.”

“Charley-One, Zero.” Hans’s voice was calm and clear on the radio. “Roger you on Blue, in position.”

The voice of the driver in the Suburban came over the net. “Zero, Charley-Two, Blue, in position.”

“Roger Charley-Two,” Hans said.

Just ahead of them, idling at the curb in a shiny blue Volvo, was Bravo-Two, one of Hans’s teams of one driver and one spotter. The Volvo pulled out and closed on bin Faisal, who ambled along, looking in the shop windows through their grated gates, still closed at this time of the morning. The four streetwalkers, two in front and two behind, who boxed bin Faisal began to close on him as well, the leading surveillance operators slowing to let the man come to them, the training ones stepping up their pace. The Volvo driver looked and saw the van grow in his rearview mirror. He nodded and said into his radio, “Charley-One, I have you visual.”

The van driver looked back at the team leader, who nodded. The driver gripped the wheel more firmly, then said, “Charley-One has the eye, Charley-One has the ball. All call signs, stand by, stand by, stand by.”

In the back of the van, the men positioned themselves: two rows of two men each directly behind the door, their hands free; one man braced beside the sliding door, his hand on the handle, the security
man off to the other side, a H&K MP5SD silenced submachine gun held in his hands, ready to return fire if there was trouble. The driver eased a H&K MP5K, the machine-pistol variation with a four-inch barrel, into his lap. Like a cruising shark on final approach to its prey, the van pulled close to the sidewalk and idled along, a half block behind Ahmad bin Faisal.