Petane was apparently one of the people leaving early this Friday afternoon. It wasn’t quite four thirty when he came out the door carrying a gym bag and walking towards the parking deck. One advantage to her of his early departure was the sidewalks were still open enough that she could drop her wheels and skate between pedestrians, dropping down into a fire lane here and there to get around clumps of slow walkers, and getting to her deck well before he got to his without drawing attention by appearing to hurry.
She paid the exit machine and got her car out and into the fire lane quickly, but it was always touchy doing a solo surveillance. Sometimes you just had no choice but to let the subject out of your sight, and sometimes you lost him. When you did, of course, you just picked him up again when and where you could. On a mission like this, better to lose him for a bit than to get too close and risk him spotting the tail. Especially since she had assistance, if needed, in picking him back up. She glanced at her PDA whose screen was displaying a single big red button. If she lost him, it was just a matter of pressing the button and having the beacon pinged. The location would cross reference to the metro Chicago street map she’d loaded and display a map section and his location. The nature of the street made some part of tailing him out of the deck a matter of guesswork. His patterns suggested that west to Lakeshore would be the best route to location B, and east to 94 would be the best choice for his probable home. On Friday, location B was more probable. She had her shades on again so her face could be turned slightly away from the other parking deck’s exit, while her eyes watched every car and driver coming out for Petane in his ’45 Ford Arabian. Her breathing loosened when he appeared at the exit at the wheel of the cherry red sports car, the rearing horse logo on the front grill sporting the distinctive arched neck.
Following was a delicate balancing act of staying far enough back not to be noticed, but close enough not to lose him too many times. There was always a chance, however small, that a beacon transmission would be detected. It helped, of course, to know roughly where he was going. The route he chose was obvious and direct, the behavior of a man of fixed habits who feels safe. The apartment he drove to was in a lower middle class suburban complex. After he entered, she watched the building carefully for changing lights. Not a sure thing, since it was still daylight, but the best she had. Fortunately, most people turned on the lights inside even when the natural light was good, and Petane and whoever he was meeting were no exception. Well, that was probably the right apartment, anyway. A good place to start. It was still early for the evening rush, so Cally made good use of the deserted parking lot, walking casually over to the building entrance and hiding the door knob with her body while she picked the old-fashioned key-lock. She had to look at the first and second floor apartments to get the numbering scheme.
Once she had the address, it was child’s play to use the back door into the phone company to tell the phones in apartment 302C that they were off hook, making them into instant bugs. Does this guy take no precautions at all? She set her PDA to dump the audio into storage on a cube and play real-time. Judging from the sounds and Petane’s first name being “Charles,” she had the right apartment for his mistress. She pulled up her notes from the camera search. There’s always something slightly obscene about listening to a target screw. Okay, he visits the mistress Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, looks like. Maybe he’s not that regular, but he sure looks like a creature of habit. Drug the mistress and bring a sound damper and I can interrogate him here — he won’t be officially missed until his wife gets anxious, maybe not noticed by Fleet Strike until the next morning. If I check in after cleaning up from the job, I’ll have my makeover into Sinda and it doesn’t get more off the radar than premission prep. Monday, then. Heart attack. Mistress wakes up with a fuzzy memory and a corpse. Not a nice morning for her, but a clean hit that leaves her alive. Flunitrazepam and alcohol for her, a viagra, insulin and coke cocktail for him, a nice little party. I’ll have to be gentle with the scumbag at first, on the very small off chance that there’s more to him than meets the eye and he’s the Comstock lode of sources or something. Yeah, sure.
When he left to go home, she followed him to note down his home address, found a cheap motel and paid cash for three nights. She settled in, set her alarm for four a.m. and laid out her clothes in easy reach. On the one hand there was no point surveiling him on Saturday since she had to have the job done by Thursday. Weekend patterns were useless. On the other hand, she could pick up some random piece of information helpful in evaluating his value as a source, and some access to his house Monday would be nice, if it were possible.
New Orleans. Mardi Gras parade, no war, no training, freedom for a long weekend. Strings of cheap plastic beads and hurricanes, and a young-looking soldier of the Ten Thousand who looks like he puts in a lot of time in the weight room. She’s Lilly tonight and laughing up into his face and she tries not to go this time but she always does, and now it’s morning and he’s telling her about his wife, again, and she’s trying and trying to get off the bed and kick the bastard in the crotch, but she can’t move, and she’s back in survival training in Minnesota, and the snow falls, and falls, and falls.
She slapped the off button to stop the annoying beeping and rolled out of bed, keeping the lights off to preserve her night vision. This early in the morning her face was clammy and damp, but not quite soaked yet. Oddly enough, she couldn’t remember whatever it was she’d been dreaming about. But then again, when she had to get up in the middle of the night, she never did. The baggy jeans, T-shirt, and windbreaker were all in medium shades of gray. The cotton bandana she shoved in a pocket had once been black and white, but several washings with dark clothes had turned the bits of white patterning a dingy gray-brown. The canvas-topped skate sneakers had started off light blue, but were well broken in and had picked up a solid coating of casual dirt and dust. The hem of the windbreaker covered the black nylon strap of the gray canvas butt pack she fastened around her waist.
She went to his home first, parking down the street and jogging in. Placing the cameras was a matter of setting the little gray dots, half the size of a dime, for short range IR transmission, using the PDA screen to line them up and securing them in place with a bit of adhesive putty. Once they were secured on target, a tap on a screen button set them to record only. Half a dozen of them covering the target’s garage and strategic intersections from trees and signposts and she was back in the car and headed for the mistress’s place. It was five thirty and the pre-dawn gray was beginning to be tinged with pink when she planted a couple of cameras on trees and posts in the apartment parking lot, watching carefully for early risers — a possibility even on a Saturday. Somebody always had to work, and once she had to abort to jogging down to the end of the row of buildings and back, before she got two good camera angles on the door and one on the apartment windows.