The goal was to get a look inside whatever personal electronics he carried with him, in the hopes there were trackbacks to Hazelton and others that might give them an idea about who killed the American ex — CIA officer. Jack thought they might be able to lift Skála’s mobile phone during his daily commute. He and Dominic had recently trained in pickpocketing under a master of the art in Las Vegas, so they had some confidence in their skills, and they thought they might be able to relieve Skála of his phone while he stood on the metro or at a stoplight. If they could do this, there would be no need to resort to heavier measures.
That said, heavier measures were not off the table. Ryan knew he might have to go overt on this trip — to confront Karel Skála and impress upon him the need for his cooperation, or else to simply mug him and steal his phone.
At this point there was no thought of breaking into his home because, Ryan reasoned, Skála wouldn’t leave his laptop or his mobile phone there when he left the house. For now they would take their time, eye the target to find the best opportunity to close on him, and take it from there.
In most cases Campus operators in the field did not carry firearms, but it had been decided by Clark that, due to the surprising dangers that had presented themselves in Vietnam, both Dom and Jack would carry pistols during their operation in the Czech Republic.
Going armed internationally was problematic — getting into any country with guns would have been impossible if they hadn’t been flying in their own jet. Even with the Gulfstream it was necessary to take measures to ensure the guns would stay hidden while customs and immigration looked the plane over after landing. This wasn’t hard; special hidden compartments had been built into the G550 behind existing access panels in the cabin and cockpit, and once the inspection by customs and immigration was complete, Jack and Dom had simply retrieved their weapons from their hiding places and secreted them on their person.
Now both men wore subcompact Smith & Wesson M&P Shield nine-millimeter auto pistols in covert carry pouches under their pants. The holsters had the clever brand name of Thunderwear because the gun rode just above the wearer’s crotch.
Back in the States Clark had made the operators train for hours with the Thunderwear and the small and thin handguns; Dom and Jack had each practiced drawing their weapons from inside their pants hundreds of times. Dom could complete his drawstroke and hit a target center mass at a range of seven yards in.85 seconds. Ryan got his time down to 1.01. Even with the difficulties of presenting a weapon from deep concealment, their times were faster than most police officers could pull their guns from their duty belts and fire them.
Gavin, in contrast to the younger men with him on this trip, did not have a gun, which bothered him considerably. As a consolation prize Caruso gave Gavin a less-than-lethal self-defense device for the trip. He took Gavin’s iPhone and snapped on a new battery backup case for it. The case appeared to be thicker than normal and more robust than the model Gavin had been using, but Dom showed him how the device worked and he saw that it was no regular phone protector. Instead, by thumbing open a rubber cap on the side of the case and pressing a small red button under it, the case turned into a 7.8-million-volt stun device.
There was only enough juice to deliver one three-second jolt and, Dom explained to Gavin when he gave him the device, the power and efficacy of stun guns has been greatly exaggerated in movies and television. But it was a fair last-ditch defensive option in the right set of circumstances for a man with no other weapons and no hand-to-hand skills.
Both Ryan and Caruso had been offered similar stun devices from the Technology and Outfitting department at The Campus, but they turned them down. Both men decided they’d get better results punching a man in the nose than they would shocking him in the neck, and since they were expert martial artists, they had the training to accomplish this.
Skála lived alone in a two-bedroom unit on the fifth floor of a middle-class apartment building on Krišt’anova Street, just a couple of blocks west of Olšany cemetery. Ryan had secured an overwatch nearby. He used a Campus front company registered in Luxembourg to arrange a three-month lease on a sixth-floor converted warehouse office space on nearby Baranova Street. The windows on the southern side of the office space gave the men a view of the entrance to Skála’s building and the parking lot next to it, but they couldn’t see into the windows of his condo without going up onto the roof and exposing themselves, so instead they placed a wireless camera and a long-range laser microphone on the roof, protected under a rubber container with holes cut to allow the devices a way to “see” the windows across the intersection. The audio and video feeds would be picked up by Biery’s computers, and it would give the men downstairs another set of eyes and ears on their target location.
They set up their three-man static surveillance operation in the corner of the office space, and hid the operation from the rest of the big room by stacking desks six feet high. Once they had their space, from a suitcase they pulled a pair of binoculars and mounted it onto a tripod. The lenses were centered and focused on the entrance to Skála’s apartment building and the parking lot next to it. The men also pointed a second directional microphone out an open window, and they hung bedding in the windows so no one looking up from the street below would see any hint of the team.
They also laid two bedrolls, placed rubber doorstops at the entrances to the locked office to supplement the deadbolt lock, and they attached two large photos of Karel Skála to the curtain near the binoculars so they could study his face in their downtime.
Gavin placed one of his laptops on a desk, and the other he kept in a backpack by the door. Jack had explained that he would need to come along if they tailed the government official through the streets or metro of Prague, because if the operators were able to take possession of the man’s mobile then they wanted Gavin close by and ready to hack the device and download all the data as quickly as possible. In an ideal scenario, they all agreed, they would get the phone back into Skála’s pocket without him ever knowing anything was amiss.
Jack told Gavin he needed to be prepared for anything, however, because most scenarios don’t come off the way the planners hope. Jack had been the planner of this mission, and he had the good sense to build some wiggle room into his operation wherever he could.
Jack, Dom, and Gavin were set up and in position by three p.m. The laser mike picked up no noise at all from inside Skála’s apartment, so they were reasonably sure he wasn’t home. This was no surprise. They assumed he’d return from work sometime after five, so they settled in to wait.
While they sat there Gavin did some research into Map of the World on his computer, and he used the basic data about Skála there to hack into his condo rental records. From this he saw their target owned a white VW Golf. The license plate was noted on the rental record, but Gavin couldn’t find any information about whether or not Skála had a reserved parking space at his building on Krišt’anova.
Caruso used the binoculars on the tripod to look for a car matching the description in the parking lot adjacent to the apartment building. He found the white Golf quickly, and although he couldn’t see the tag number from his position, he thought it likely to be their target’s vehicle. This was odd, because this was a workday and they had assumed Skála to be at work right now.