Coyle said, “Five targets in three days. I understand my assignment, chief.”
Campbell Coyle climbed into the car with the Donnelly brothers, and they followed the Jeep with the Walsh brothers out of the parking garage of the Wegmans grocery store.
Twenty-Seven
The balcony of the ninth-floor corner suite at the rear of the Hotel AKA Washington Circle overlooked L Street NW, as well as New Hampshire Avenue NW, along with parts of 22nd Street NW. On the other side of this intersection sat the Carriage House Condominium, and here Irene Ortega lived in a unit on the eighth floor, also overlooking L Street.
She was home right now, and the blinds in the living room were open.
At ten thirty p.m. the balcony door to the corner suite of the hotel just across the street from Ortega was closed; it was icy cold and misty outside, but just inside the glass, four men sat, looking across the street. Court Gentry and Chris Travers had binoculars on tripods, and they sat on dining chairs moved here from other portions of the suite. Matt Hanley was deeper in the residence, looking across at Ortega’s unit with his naked eye, and Zack Hightower was all the way back by the kitchen, his own smaller set of binos in his hand, giving him some magnification, but not as much as the two guys seated closer to the balcony.
This was four people essentially doing the work of one, and a fifth person in the suite, Arnold Reyes, was resting on the king-sized bed in the bedroom, essentially accomplishing no work at all.
But the sixth person in the room was doing more than her fair share.
Jill Mori sat in front of four laptops splayed across a dining room table, monitoring cameras in the condo across the street; she wore a headset thatpicked up sounds inside the property and watched more images of CCTV in the building. She had a view downstairs at street level through more cams she’d hacked into in the area, and she had an app open on her phone that fed her real-time local police radio transmissions.
Hanley had decided that there would be no attempt to make contact with Ortega, but instead the team would concentrate on looking out for any surveillance. They knew she’d been followed today as she herself surveilled ODNI employee Lewis Shaw, so it was their intention first to find out who else was interested in Ortega.
Were these the good guys or the bad guys? Was Ortega herself one or the other?
So the six people stood, sat, or lay down in the hotel room, all the lights out so that they couldn’t be seen by anyone.
They tracked her through the evening, in her living room, her kitchen, and her dining room.
She’d spent the time on a laptop set up at her kitchen bar, she’d ordered DoorDash around eight p.m., and then she’d opened a bottle of red wine and drank a glass while eating ramen.
At one point—Jill marked the time at nine fifty-five—she actually stepped out on her balcony with a glass of wine and looked down through the cold mist at the street.
Her eyes rose slowly, and then she looked across the cold street at the hotel, and Court felt her eyes right on him, though he knew she couldn’t see through the glass into the darkened suite.
She went back inside, sat down on her sofa, and turned on her TV, then immediately focused her attention on her phone, and soon after this Hanley pulled his own phone out of his pocket.
“I’ll check in with Lacy, see if Pace has learned anything since this afternoon.” He stepped out into the hallway of the hotel to take the call, leaving the others to work inside or to continue the vigil.
He’d only been gone a few seconds when Gumdrop spoke up from her bank of laptops. “We’ve got a vehicle parking on the west side.”
There was constant traffic on the streets below, but a car parking on the street next to the target location was definitely worthy of note.
Court rose, moved into the darkened bedroom, and set his tripod upthere. Looking down through a window, he called out to the room. “Yep. I’m clocking it. Dark gray four-door Audi.”
“Nobody’s getting out,” Jill said.
“Is the engine on or off?” Hightower asked from the kitchen.
Court couldn’t tell from his vantage point, but Jill said, “Appears to be off. No lights, no vapor from the tailpipe.”
Court said, “I can see the car where it’s parked, but I’d have to go out on the balcony to get a good view of the street. Gumdrop, just keep an eye on it, let me know if anyone climbs out. I’m going to stay in here but watch the street and sidewalks to the west.”
Jill did not respond at first, and Court was about to call out again to her from the next room to make sure she heard him, but then she spoke up. “Hey, guys…I’m monitoring local law enforcement channels. There’s an urgent BOLO in the District on a black motorcycle with a male driver.”
Hightower had stepped over behind Jill to take a look at her screens. “Why?”
“D.C. Metro PD has been notified by Fairfax County Sheriff’s Office that there’s been a double homicide in Tysons Corner.”
All heads turned to her.
“Male and female victim in a car stopped at a red light. A lone person on a motorcycle. Witness said they thought it to be a male, but they couldn’t make out a face. A pistol with a suppressor. Did it right in the middle of a busy intersection, less than a quarter mile from CIA headquarters. There was no tag on the bike, the shooter got away.”
