11:55A.M. “You’re through. Did you feel it?” Reuven was perched on a ladder on the opposite side of the wall.
“Yes.” Tom held the drill steady, eased it out, and hung it on his belt. He pulled the minivacuum up and sucked dust out of the hole, then inserted the fiber-optic. “Looks clean.”
Now he took the minicamera out of his breast pocket, activated the power, and, using the measuring rod, eased the device into the hole. As he did, he heard Reuven scramble down the ladder. “I’ll check the video.”
Tom waited until he heard Reuven say, “Okay-go.”
“Roger that.” He pushed on the rod, eyes focused on the measurements. “One-half centimeter.” He felt slight resistance. “See anything?”
“No.”
Tom grunted. He applied more pressure, pushing the camera another twenty-five millimeters. “Now?”
“Not yet.”
Tom examined the markings on the rod. The lens should have cleared the crown molding by now. He squinted and counted the lines etched on the rod. “You’re right, Reuven-I was one centimeter off.” Holding the rod steady, Tom pushed.
Too hard. The rod shot forward more than two centimeters-about half an inch.
“I can see very clearly now,” Reuven said facetiously.
“I’ll bet you can.” Tom was pissed. He’d shoved the goddamn camera right through the crown molding. He clambered down the ladder and went around the other side to examine his handiwork. He wasn’t impressed. “Jeezus H,” he said, hands on his hips. “Let’s do it all over again.”
12:36P.M. The entire back of Tom’s coveralls was wet with perspiration. The front was covered with dust from the drilling. But he didn’t care. He stared at the image on the monitor and grinned. It had taken three attempts, but he’d finally gotten it right. He looked over at Reuven, who gave him an upturned thumb and a mischievous grin. “Am I that big an asshole?”
“You show real promise, Tom. A few more run-throughs and we’ll make you into a regular second-story guy.”
“Thanks.” It might have been easier if Reuven had done the drilling, but Tom had insisted on doing the work himself. “I’m simply a little out of practice is all.”
Tom noted the noncommittal expression on Reuven’s face. Who was he kidding? The last time Tom worked with silent drills was during the breaking-and-entering refresher he’d taken down at the Farm in 2002 as an excuse to get out of the office. He was on shaky ground here and he knew it.
“If we have to drill from the back, maybe it would be better if you did it.”
“Nah.” Reuven waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “You know what Suvorov said.”
“Suvorov?”
“Eighteenth-century Russian general. ‘Train hard, fight easy.’ That was his credo.” The Israeli jerked his thumb toward the wall section. “You’re getting the feel of it. We’ve got, what-a week perhaps, before we can move. By the time we do this for real, you’ll be fine.”
1:58P.M.
RUE LAMBERT, MONTMARTRE
Tom thought, You have to hand it to the bad guys: they plan well. This frigging street is going to be impossible. Rue Lambert was narrow-barely wide enough for a panel truck. It was short-just over fifty meters in length. It was one-way-dead-ending into another one-way street. It was the kind of street on which people know one another, where the one small bistro served the same customers every day. Where the owner of the corner café knows everyone in the neighborhood by name and keeps a wary eye out for strangers. It was, all in all, a perfect milieu forcounter surveillance. And a lousy environment in which to do the surveilling.
Oh, it was possible. If you had a crew of sixty. You could run them through as tourists and workers, changing clothes and appearances over a ten-day period. Or if there was enough time to preplan, you could rent a flat-or break into one if the owners were away-and use it as an observation post. But Tom didn’t have sixty people, there was nothing for rent-he’d had his French employees check-and no one was on vacation. So there was no choice. They’d have to do this the hard way.
Tom eased the two wheels on the passenger’s side of the truck up onto the curb so traffic could pass. He and Reuven had changed into the anonymous sort of coveralls worn by tradesmen and laborers. The old tan Renault with its junk-filled cab and dented, rusty cargo bay didn’t rate a second look. Tom and Reuven had changed their appearances. Tom’s face was obscured by a thick mustache, and his hair-a wig-was frizzy brown and stuck out from under a knit cap. Reuven wore a neat beard and a full head of short gray hair.
As he parked, Tom angled the Renault so that his side-view mirror caught the entrance of the old house that sat adjacent to the bistro. He’d memorized the angle of Shahram Shahristani’s surveillance photograph, and the run-down bistro-L’Étrier was the name on the awning-had to be the place. The awning was rolled back and the tables and chairs had been removed.
Tom eased the door open, pulled a newspaper from between the seats, and extracted himself from the van. He tucked the newspaper under his arm and waited as Reuven opened the passenger-side door. They locked the vehicle, then ambled to the end of the street, toward the café, which was on the southwest corner where rue Lambert dead-ended into rue Nicolet. Tom pushed through the door. The place had the sour smell of stale beer and old cigarette smoke. He dropped onto one of the bar stools that sat facing the smoke-stained window, opened the newspaper, and turned his back to the bar.
Reuven walked across creaking floorboards to where the proprietor stood, cigarette dangling from his lips, his elbow resting on discolored copper, perusing a newspaper. He ordered two glasses of red wine. Tom watched as the man reached down and pulled an unlabeled bottle from the well, drew two smudged glasses off the shelf, gave them a halfhearted wipe-down, then filled them.
“Merci.”Reuven dropped coins onto the bar, picked up the glasses, walked over to where Tom was perched, and set them down.
Tom nodded at the Israeli, who drew a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his coveralls, pulled one out, then set the pack on the window shelf. The pack held a wide-angle video lens that transmitted a signal to a digital recorder in the truck. The high-definition images were date- and time-stamped.
The two men sat silently, sipped their wine, and scanned the street. L’Étrier was just emptying out. The bistro occupied the basement and
ground floor of a narrow, nineteenth-century four-story house. Above it, according to Tom’s research, there were four apartments. To the left of the restaurant was another four-story building of about the same vintage. The ground floor had once held some sort of shop. Now the shop had been gutted and the whole building was in the process of being renovated. Above the shop were six apartments-two to a floor-one of which was Ben Said’s safe house. Problem one was separating the intelligence wheat from the intelligence chaff so they’d know which flat to bug.
But for the moment, what Tom and Reuven wanted was to get a sense of rue Lambert’s rhythms and pace so they could find ways to adapt themselves to the street and become a part of the environment. Surveillance is one of the most basic yet difficult aspects of intelligence work. It requires long hours, intense concentration, flawless record keeping, and constant focus. A surveillant has to be able to hide in plain sight-much the same way as hunters or snipers camouflage their positions. Indeed, in many ways, surveilling is similar to hunting or sniping. A good hunter, for example, identifies the track used by his prey and sets up an ambush position long enough in advance so that the jungle, or the forest, or the mountain trail returns to its normal condition: the crickets chirp, the birds come and go, the insects resume their normal activities.
It’s much the same on a surveillance detail. If you’re using an OP23to photograph a target, for example, you run a two- or even three-man team, one of whose eyes are looking through a telephoto lens every second of every minute of the day so there is absolutely no chance that the target will show himself and not be noted or photographed. Every single sighting is logged. Every individual entering and exiting the location is logged and photographed. The license plates, make, model, and physical description of every vehicle-cars, taxis, trucks, vans, motorcycles, bicycles, jitneys, rickshaws-that comes into contact with the target location is noted.