Maybe the dude is just a regular guy, and I’m on a wild-goose chase, here.
What seemed like half an hour was only a few minutes. Business Tourist turned into the arcade.
He never got on the bus. He was just getting in line in order to detect surveillance.
Chris wanted to move deeper into the store and hide, but the sudden movement would attract more attention than if he stood still. With each closing step Business Tourist took, Chris’s pulse pounded harder. There was a guy with a thick white moustache between Chris and Business Tourist. He hoped the cover of Mr. Moustache was enough. Then Business Tourist passed, and Chris was certain he was up to no good. He exited the opposite end of the arcade, and Chris followed. Then the subject went southeast for a couple of blocks. Again, he looked both ways before crossing each street. Soon, he arrived at St. James Park, east of Buckingham Palace.
Chris’s heart sank. At this early hour, there were few people in the park for Chris to blend in with and conceal himself behind. And the park paths branched out in multiple directions, allowing his target myriad escape routes. Chris could either follow close and stick out as surveillance or he could follow from a distance and risk losing his mark. There was the option of doing a snatch-and-grab in broad daylight, but transporting a prisoner the distance to Chris’s office without the assistance of teammates or the use of a vehicle was impractical. There was also the possibility his subject didn’t work for Xander at all. Maybe Business Tourist was simply a thief, casing the area.
Chris chose to follow from a distance and was able to monitor his subject until he turned into Green Park, where the paths were more numerous and the trees denser. He had to close the gap soon, or he was going to lose him.
Business Tourist shifted into a faster walk, and Chris picked up his pace just before his target disappeared behind some trees. Aw, hell!
When he reached the point where Business Tourist disappeared, all he could see were trees and paths. Chris chose one of the diverging paths and followed it, but his target was nowhere to be found. He abandoned it and chose another, but that path was dry, too. If the guy was watching, Chris’s actions would definitely appear suspicious. He searched until he came to the edge of the city.
Maybe I’m being paranoid.
As he turned down a gloomy alley to find a shortcut back to his crew’s rented office, two white men in their early twenties approached from the opposite direction, smiling and joking with each other. They looked like twins, except one had a fuller face and smoked a cigarette and the other wore glasses. Both wore suits with their necktie knots loosened. They talked loudly about having stayed up all night and teased as to whether they should get some sleep or stay up all day, too.
They seemed comfortable in the shadowed alley, and from what Chris could tell of their ages, they should be in college or working their first jobs. The twins stared at Chris like they were looking through him — a way evil men had stared through him before — and he contemplated turning around and leaving the alley. But if these two were indeed bad men, Chris didn’t want to flee like a wounded fish flapping around in the presence of sharks. There were no CCTVs in the alley, and it would be inconspicuous enough to resolve any problems here.
Chris greeted them with a nod, and they nodded back, but when he tried to pass him, they blocked him.
“Could you help us, sir?” the one wearing glasses asked.
Chris raised his eyebrows at the kid. “What do you need help with?”
“We need some money,” the one smoking a cigarette said.
Glasses laughed.
Chris shoved past them and walked briskly forward.
“Hey!” one of them called out, and the sound of their footsteps rushed after him.
He didn’t want this to spill out into the open, so he stopped and turned around. “I have some important business to take care of, so I’d appreciate it if you could get to the point.”
Cigarette removed the tobacco from his mouth and mocked Chris’s American accent. Then Glasses pulled out a switchblade and flicked the blade open. “This is the point. Give us all your money. Now!”
They both smiled.
“No, this is the point,” Chris said, and he fast-drew his pistol and aimed it at the chest of Glasses.
Their smiles dropped. Glasses took a step back and said, “Hang on, now. I was just playing.”
“How do we know that’s a real gun?” Cigarette asked.
“I don’t want to make noise, but if you insist…” Chris aimed his Glock at Cigarette’s crotch.
The kid threw up his hands and backed away. “Hey, we don’t want any trouble, man. We’ll go our way and you go yours.”
Glasses folded the blade back into the handle of his switchblade. “See? No trouble.”
Chris put his pistol back into its holster, concealed once more by his suit jacket. This time, when he resumed his journey out of the alley, the twins didn’t follow.
With no clues as to where Business Tourist had gone, Chris returned to his static surveillance post. There, he tried to ignore the nagging reminder he’d lost his target. He reviewed the surveillance video recorded while he was out, simultaneously watching the live feed.
Nothing.
That evening, when Hannah and Sonny returned, he told them what had transpired. As he was showing them the surveillance video, Hannah raised a finger. “Didn’t we see that guy in the lobby of one of the hotels yesterday?”
“What guy?” Sonny asked.
She pointed to the image of Business Tourist. “That guy.”
“We saw so many people and so many lobbies,” Sonny said.
“I’ve seen him, too. That’s who I was following this morning.” Chris rubbed the back of his head, frustrated. “He could’ve been reporting to Xander. You could’ve found Xander’s hotel.”
Hannah inputted something into her cell phone. “I wish I could remember which hotel we were in.”
As they watched the rest of the recorded video of Business Tourist on one monitor, movement in the live-feed monitor caught their eyes. A marked police car picked up the uniformed officer in front of UKP, and the van with the dark windows rolled away.
“The police are pulling out,” Chris said.
Next, the plainclothes security officer disappeared inside UKP.
“Wow,” Sonny said. “If that ain’t an official invitation for Xander to strike, it’ll do ’til the invitation arrives.”
“Maybe all three of us should stick around here for a while,” Hannah suggested.
Chris and Sonny agreed.
Later, when they watched the news, the local weather forecaster came on the screen with a special report.
“A low pressure system is blowing in from the North Sea, and there will be high tides along the coast and heavy rains inland. The Thames Barrier is being closed to protect the city. We’ll keep an eye on the storm and keep you updated…”
Chris shook his head. “When it rains, it pours.”
17
That night, in a roomy two-car garage of a safe house outside of London, Xander showed Animus how to construct a homemade car bomb. They placed boards inside the back of the van that would carry the explosives, then drilled the boards to the floor in order to keep the thirteen barrels stable while transporting them to the target area.