Kearney thought a moment. “Those at the front? The Donnelly brothers. Jack and Alfie. They’re good, the both of them. They’ve done dirtywork, as I suspect you’ve figured out. I’ll also throw in the Walsh boys for you. Three lads, a little younger, but wicked smart. Able. Can have them here, bags packed, in an hour.”
“These Walsh boys can handle themselves?”
“Aye. Gavin, Barry, and Nolan. Nolan’s just a lad. Twenty-three, twenty-four. But he’s loyal. His brothers are older; they’ve been heavies for me for years.”
“They know guns?”
“It’s America, son. We all know guns. I’ll outfit them. You, too, if you need it.”
“That would be grand,” Coyle said. “Pistols only. I can pay.”
“Your money’s no good here.”
Coyle said, “Then…what do you want in return?”
Gerry Kearney took Campbell Coyle’s hand, squeezed it tight. “I want to go to my grave knowing I did something for the great Roderick Coyle. Even posthumously. My big brother’s best friend. And the man I wish I was.”
Kearney’s eyes misted as he released his grip. Coyle thought this bloke seemed to like his father much more than he himself did.
Coyle said, “The money I make in America is yours, there’s no debating that. I’m on a different mission. But we have to leave today. I have a meeting in Washington, and I want those five heavies of yours watching my back, because you can best believe I won’t be trusting anyone else.”
Kearney agreed, and the two men stood. The older man said, “I wish you all the luck. But…whatever you’re here to do, if you don’t make it back alive, young Campbell, it would be my great honor to handle your burial, free of charge, of course. There’s a nice plot at St. Michael, where—”
Coyle interrupted. “Much appreciated, but we’ve a family plot, up north in County Antrim. Haven’t been there in ages, but nevertheless, I’ve family there, and something tells me that’s where I should be planted for the ever after when I go.”
Gerry Kearney nodded, then headed to his desk to pick up the phone to round up the five men he’d send out into the field with the son of his dead brother’s dead friend.
Twenty-Three
Zack Hightower wasn’t usually the man sitting in the back of the surveillance vehicle, but here he was, eating a tuna salad sandwich he’d bought at a gas station in Arlington before dawn, and downing it with Gatorade.
It was two thirty in the afternoon; laptops sat in front of him on a table fashioned out of particle board and two-by-fours and attached to the inside wall of the white GMC Savana, and he leaned back in a swivel chair bungeed to the opposite wall.
His boots were propped on a stack of hard-shell Pelican cases and nylon Eberlestock modular bags of various shapes and styles.
His left thigh was stiff, the effects of the gunshot wound still bugging him a little, but it wasn’t that bad. He’d taken some Advil this morning and he had more if he needed it, though in typical Zack fashion, the loose pills were mixed in with the lint balls in the front left pocket of his jeans.
Up behind the wheel, Arnold Reyes sat with his head back on the headrest and his cheap sunglasses on, shielding his eyes so that anyone walking by might think he was asleep.
The logistics coordinator of this small team of assets had been drafted to drive one of the two vehicles today, the decision being made hastily this morning when Irene Ortega surprised the team by driving to work from her condo, though it was less than a fifteen-minute walk through D.C.
The team quickly decided to split up, so another vehicle was rented,and now Zack and Arnold, the two non-operational team members, sat in the original van with the equipment, making sure the subject didn’t leave her work and either come back here to her car or head out on foot in some other direction.
Zack was dressed in a leather bomber jacket with a knit cap, jeans, and boots. Arnold, on the other hand, was dressed in a coat and tie; his wool overcoat lay on the seat next to him. He wore a suit to Ghost Town every day, Hanley had mentioned, and apparently no one had thought to tell him he didn’t need to dress for the office while driving a backup van in the field.
This was the first day of surveillance, and the first day of any surveillance operation was often a mess.
While Arnold watched Irene’s car in a parking garage on G Street NW, just a block and a half from the Department of State where she was working at the moment, and Zack watched images from a camera positioned under a bench across the street from a rear exit of Irene’s workplace, Court Gentry and Chris Travers had gone to her short-term rental at the Carriage House Condominium near Washington Circle, just a mile to the northwest. The men code-named Six and Teddy were dressed in disguise as telecom repairmen, head-to-toe in blue coveralls, tool belts adorned with the accoutrements of their trade, and shoulder bags over their working-class winter coats that kept them warm as they walked towards the building.
Court held a small ladder, and after slipping through a back door in a rear loading area and into an elevator, they shot straight up to Ortega’s eighth-floor condo, picking the lock there just seconds after Jill Mori remotely shut down the woman’s wireless service to disable any Internet-based cameras she might have had inside.
The men carried signal scramblers on their tool belts; they were fashioned to look like flashlights but designed to disrupt any recording devices left on in the room, a typical countersurveillance measure, and they swept the unit for bugs with handheld radio frequency scanners just in case someone else was as interested in Ortega as they were.
They found nothing amiss, so they separated and went to work. Moving silently throughout the space, independently from one another, the pair placed three bugs and three pinhole cameras, and they photographedeverything they could see lying around. Books, magazines, mail, even the contents of her fridge and freezer and the bottles in her medicine cabinet.
After just a few minutes of searching, Court’s phone vibrated, and he tapped the AirPod in his right ear.
Travers did the same, indicating to both men that someone had initiated a conference call with the assets.
