Loyal in theory, anyway.
Court sighed again. “Another potential compromise. Do I really need them?”
Hanley did not answer, so Court said, “What’s the asset involved with?”
“It’s a drug thing.”
With furrowed eyebrows, the younger man said, “But she’s run by the Agency. Not the DEA.”
“Yeah…from what I understand, there might be Nicaraguan intelligence involvement in some transnational drug shipments.”
“From where?”
Hanley held his hands up. “I don’t know. Watkins was vague, our conversation was rushed.”
Court rose. Mumbled, half to himself, half to Hanley. “Not as rushed as this fucking operation, apparently.”
Hanley himself stood. “What’s your chief concern?”
“A couple, actually. I don’t know what I’m flying into down there. Plus, I’m a little worried about this government-wide intelligence compromise up here that you just mentioned.”
“Job security for us, Six. If the DDO doesn’t know who inside to trust, he’ll look outside. Just go to Nicaragua, do what you do best, get back home, and we’ll take it from there.”
“You make it sound so easy.” Nicaragua sounded like a shit sandwich,but like the older man had said, neither of them was in a position to say no to the deputy director of the CIA.
Hanley said, “I’ll drive you to the airport.”
Court turned towards the companionway stairs to the main deck. With the motion, the itch and burn in his right hip flared. He said, “Fuck that, Matt. I’m taking the bike.”
Ten
Almostnothinghappens on the streets of London without the authorities there knowing about it.
London has more cameras observing the citizenry than any city in the world, nearly one million by most estimations, and there was little that went unnoticed, but the man in the gray Donegal tweed herringbone cap leaning against the metal fence lining a path running through the middle of Cadogan Place Gardens, in the center of London’s bustling Knightsbridge district, knew all this, and he behaved accordingly.
First, TfL, Transport for London, monitors the city’s traffic and street cameras at CentreComm, formerly known as the Network Management Control Centre.
Second, the London Metropolitan Police Service piggybacks on the traffic cams and on certain private CCTV cameras, in addition to using their own security cameras, equipped with facial recognition and automatic plate number recognition technology.
The man in the cap knew it would be folly to spend his time in London actively trying to avoid all scrutiny, but still, he walked a circuitous pattern, had done so the past two days in this neighborhood, and now that he was in position here at the edge of the park, he had a pretty good idea where he could move, in any compass point, without having his face picked up by one of the eleven cameras he’d identified on the block.
Not that anyone was actively looking for him. He was a free man, unwanted, this he knew, but he was still careful with his countersurveillance measures.
He wore a raincoat; his hood was up but his beard was wet, and he seemed all but oblivious to the steady shower that had persisted since before ten a.m. It was just past eleven now, and he’d not moved from his position; he just stood there, his bones chilling in the cold rain, his eyes peering down Sloane Street at the traffic there.
He’d stayed in place so long that an incident response technician at the Met, an actual human being, had noticed him on one of his many monitors, and he’d zoomed in.
The name on the technician’s screen had read Jon Jo Sheehan; his identity set off no alarm bells, so the incident response technician soon moved on, scanning other camera angles of other areas of Knightsbridge.
But the man under the tweed cap was not Jon Jo Sheehan; he was Campbell Coyle, and Campbell Coyle’s history would have raised every single alarm bell in the United Kingdom if the tech at the Met knew the real identity of the man standing in the rain.
At 11:40 a.m. a silver Rolls-Royce Ghost appeared on Sloane Street and pulled to a stop in the middle of the road, right in front of Cadogan Place South Garden, its foliage mostly beaten back by the autumn, though a few persistent trees hung limp in the wet gray.
A large man in a gray suit climbed out of the front passenger seat, popped open a black umbrella, then opened the door behind him, and another big man, his suit dark blue, unfolded from the back passenger seat, then made a show of scanning the area as he himself opened an umbrella.
Both men were young, perhaps under thirty, and they had serious eyes as they looked around, but Coyle noted that they took no more than three or four seconds to scan all the real estate around them, and neither of them locked on him there, forty yards away inside in the garden.
The man in gray walked around and opened the other rear passenger door, and a smaller individual, a man in a blue pinstripe suit under a fashionable black raincoat, emerged and stepped into the street. The silver luxury carrumbled off, and the pair of security men converged on their protectee and ushered him towards the sidewalk that ran alongside the garden.
