Hightower said, “How the hell are you going to walk through a museum with a mask on?”
Arnold hadn’t spoken during the entire conversation, but now he said,“It’s the Smithsonian. It’s free to enter, but you must pass through a metal detector first.”
Hanley said, “The security guards? Were they paying attention?”
Arnold shrugged. “I could barely see them, to be honest.”
Jill went back through the video from the glasses, and they watched from Arnold’s point of view as he passed by two bored-looking security officers. They never actually looked closely at his face, only at his keys as he put them in a container, then passed through the metal detector.
Travers said, “Here’s the problem, though. You might have been able to get past those two dummies in a high-quality latex mask, but you wouldn’t have been able to plan that they wouldn’t engage you.”
Hanley said, “Which means our guy put the mask onafterhe got into the building. Just for the meeting with Shaw. Probably in the bathroom.” To Jill he asked, “We have images of people going into and out of bathrooms?”
“Not unless Arnold just happened to catch them doing it,” Jill said.
Hanley quickly shook his head. “There’s no way of knowing when the other guy came in. He could have been in the building for hours before the meeting.”
Court was frustrated. “All that work, and we have no idea who the other guy was.”
Hanley said, “No problem. We focus on two people now. Irene Ortega and Lewis Shaw.”
Hightower shook his head at this. “We have to wait on Shaw, boss. Gumdrop can dig into him, find out whatever she can so when we can target him, we do it effectively. But right now, with a group this small, we can’t split into two surveillance teams.”
Court said, “He’s right. We’ve already got Irene’s place wired. There’s a hotel across the street from her place, and every room in the back of that building is facing every window in that woman’s apartment. I say we put up twenty-four-hour physical surveillance on her with an eye to detecting countersurveillance, because we know she had counter on her this afternoon. We see anybody on the street we don’t like, we hear or see anything in her unit, and we figure out what they’re up to.”
“Okay,” Hanley said. Then, “Okay, we’ll set up overwatch at Ortega’splace, and we’ll evaluate the situation there. What wedon’twant to do is react impulsively. If whoever is following Ortega is investigating her just like we are, we might end up with a blue-on-blue incident that nobody wants.
“I’ll call Lacy at CIA now, tell her to get Jim Pace focusing on Shaw, as well. He’ll be able to see what intelligence he had access to, where he’s been, who he might be affiliated with inside the government.”
The meeting broke up soon after; Arnold headed to the hotel across the street from Ortega’s home to get a high-floor rear-facing suite for an overwatch team, while Jill continued looking through both the video feeds and open-source data about other faces at the museum she’d identified.
Court and Zack poured themselves some more coffee, and they stood in the kitchen when Hanley came in. Out of earshot of the others, even Travers, the only other asset on the team, Matt said, “Listen carefully, gents. I amnotimpressed with how today went. That was basic surveillance tradecraft, and still, you almost fucked it up.”
Court spoke up in defense of the team. “It’s our first day together, we don’t have many bodies to work with, and we’re just figuring out how—”
“I don’t give a damn,” Hanley said firmly. “Trey Watkins is acting like the entire American government is some sort of a threat right now, and we’re right in the middle of Washington, D.C. You guys have to step the fuck up on your game, and you have to do it now.”
The former DDO did not wait for a response; he just left the room.
Zack blew on his coffee, then gave Court a little smile. “We’ve been operational in this new organization for less than thirty hours and we’re already in trouble.”
Court shrugged. “No big deal, I’m used to it. Hell, even when I work alone, I yell at myself a lot.”
Twenty-Six
The Belarusian held the latex mask in his hand, looked it over carefully, and then gave a little smile. The quality of the article was good; he’d tried it on here in the hotel an hour earlier and then stood in front of a mirror. In full light, with his full attention, carefully looking, he could tell it wasn’t real. But he was sure that outside, in the night, to a passerby or to a distant security camera, it made him look real enough, if a little ugly.
But he didn’t put it on now. He had time, still, and he had other things to do.
He put the mask down, then lifted the squat black suppressor, screwed it onto the barrel of his Belgian-made FN pistol, then loaded the weapon with a twelve-round magazine full of 9-millimeter hollow-points.
He racked the slide, ejected the magazine, then put one more bullet in the mag before reseating it in the grip, bringing the weapon to its fully loaded capacity of thirteen.
There were other magazines on the glass coffee table in front of him, and two more boxes of ammunition, along with his phone, wallet, and passport.
And two lines of coke.
He’d arrange his equipment first, then he would go dress, and only then would he snort the coke. He’d been doing this long enough to know the correct process for optimal performance.
