He took a narrow masonry staircase down to the basement, followed a turn around stacked kegs of beer, and pushed open the accordion door to the tiny men’s room. He stepped up to the one dirty toilet, unzipped his fly, and closed his eyes.
He didn’t hear any noise until the accordion door opened behind him. The restroom was large enough for only one person, so he started to tell the other man to fuck off, but before he could even see who was behind him the light flipped off and he was shoved past the toilet and up against the wall.
He felt the knife against his lower back.
The man whispered angrily into his ear, but it was something in a foreign tongue he did not understand. Salvatore said, “English? English?” and the man quickly barked at him again.
“Your money! Give me your money!” the man said.
Salvatore couldn’t believe he was being mugged at knifepoint. He felt his wallet pulled from his pants, his pack ripped from his back, and he heard the sound of someone rifling through his belongings. He kept his eyes slammed shut, he didn’t say a word, and he fought the urge to piss down the wall he was pinned against.
And then, as quickly as the man had appeared, he was gone. First Salvatore felt the pressure of the man holding him against the wall removed, and then his wallet was tossed in the basin of the sink on his right. Last, the knife was pulled away from his back. Before Salvatore could even think about turning around to look, he heard the noise of his backpack being dropped to the ground in the basement outside the bathroom.
A minute later he left the bar with his backpack over his shoulder. He’d not complained to the manager and he surely hadn’t reported the robbery. He was here in town for reasons that precluded his filing police reports.
Twenty minutes later, when he was sitting back in his hotel room, he checked his wallet and saw all his money was indeed gone. But his credit cards were there, as well as his Italian driver’s license. He opened his backpack and saw that he’d been relieved of a few euros he’d kept in an outer pocket, but his cameras were still there, as was his mobile. This would have comforted most people, but the Italian didn’t care as much about either of these things as he did the other item in his bag. Frantically his hand fought his way to the bottom of his pack, and he pulled out his bag of smack. He breathed his first sigh of relief since the mugging when he saw his heroin had not been touched.
Dom Caruso ran a thirty-minute surveillance-detection route after his operation to plant the tracker on Salvatore’s backpack and the surveillance software on his mobile phone. His route took him past both Chavez and Ryan, who each sat alone in outdoor late-night cafés drinking beer.
Once the team was convinced Dom was in the clear, they all returned to their safe house on Rue du Commerce.
Dom said, “It’s not the most understated way to plant a bug on someone, but it will work. I had him convinced I was just a street criminal who had followed him into the john.”
Chavez said, “You made a good call and did a good job.”
“Thanks,” Dom said, then held up a wad of euros. “And I scored sixty-five euros. Do we need to tell Gerry, or can I order us a couple of pizzas for dinner tomorrow?”
It was a joke, at which Chavez laughed, but Jack was already watching Salvatore’s position on his laptop. “He’s back in his room at the Stanhope.” He then checked the app on his phone that informed him of any use of the man’s mobile. “The RAT did its job. We’ve got visibility on both audio and text messaging, but he hasn’t used either yet.”
“What about photos, e-mails, that sort of stuff?” Chavez asked.
Jack looked at all the apps on Salvatore’s phone, visible now on Jack’s laptop. “There’s not a single picture on his phone from Brussels. But he’s got cameras with him, so that doesn’t mean he’s not up here doing some sort of recon. And he doesn’t even have an e-mail app on this thing. Either he’s one hell of a Luddite—”
Dom said, “Or he’s practicing operational security.”
“Exactly,” Jack said. “He didn’t impress me with his tradecraft at all in Rome, but this might be a different kind of op. We’ll just have to keep watching him to see what he gets himself into.”
70
Vlad Kozlov stood in the doorway of Terry Walker’s bedroom, remaining stone-faced while Walker tearily said good night to his wife and son over the walkie-talkie.
The routine had been set since Kozlov’s second night here in the islands. Each evening at seven-thirty he and his four security men would deliver Walker and Limonov back to the rented villa on the top of Saint Bernard’s Hill, where Kozlov immediately checked in with the two men maintaining the safe house. Then all six Steel Securitas men would split into two-man teams. Two would sleep while two held inner security in the villa and two more patrolled the grounds.
Limonov would eat something and retire to his room, then Kozlov would enter Walker’s room, hand him the walkie-talkie for three minutes for him to communicate with his family. Once three minutes was up, he’d take the device and leave the room, locking Walker inside for the night.
Tonight had been no different from all the others until he returned to the kitchen to pour himself a vodka from the freezer. As soon as he lifted it to his lips, his phone rang.
“Allo?”
He recognized the voice of President Valeri Volodin. “Give me a report.”
Kozlov hadn’t heard from the Russian president personally since before he and Limonov had left London.
He cleared his throat quickly. “Things are proceeding as planned, Mr. President.”
“Walker is giving you no trouble?”
“None.”
“And Limonov? He is proceeding as advertised?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So… no problems at all?”
“No, sir. Well… yes. We did have a security issue, but it has been dealt with.”
“I pay you so that we do not have security issues.”
“My apologies, Mr. President, but you pay me to deal with them. A man, an American, took a special interest in the boat where we are holding the family of Walker. I sent mercenaries to warn him off, but he persisted. When it became clear he was going to be a problem, we eliminated the problem very quietly.”
“Who was he?”
“Undetermined, but we made sure he was alone. He is out of the picture now, there is nothing to worry about.”
Volodin barked angrily. “Don’t be a fool, Kozlov, he will have confederates who will come looking for him.”
“If they do, they will not suspect us, and they will not find us.”
“Listen to me! I order you to bring in more help. You know this is a matter of particular interest to me. If anything happens to this operation—”
“Nothing can or will happen, Mr. President.”
“You interrupt me again and I will have Grankin send someone down to slice your tongue out of your mouth.”
A short pause. “Izvaneetya.” Sorry.
“If anything happens to this operation, I will hold you responsible. You can imagine what that means.”
“I can, Mr. President. I will contact specialists who will add support, another layer of support, to assist in our operation here in the British Virgin Islands.”
“You will do it now.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
The Sikorsky MH-60 Romeo helicopter moved slowly, just barely more than a hover five hundred feet over the blue water of the eastern Baltic. The gray of the helo blended with the gray skies above, a nice feature for an aircraft that did not want to advertise its location to anyone on the surface, or anyone below the surface looking through a periscope.