Caruso said, “Probably took the metro to work.”
That was a convenient theory, but by seven p.m., when they had seen no one who looked anything like their man coming in or leaving the apartment, they had their doubts.
And when midnight came and went without a single sighting of their target or any noise from inside the apartment, their concern grew.
The men passed the time speculating. It was the most common game to play on a stakeout. Any thoughts that their man might have stayed to work late in the office diminished with each passing hour. Skála wasn’t married, so they wondered if he stayed over at a girlfriend’s place.
Or a boyfriend — Ryan didn’t know enough about his target to make any real assumptions about his life.
The team slept in shifts, one man up, two men down, two hours each, all through the night.
At nine the next morning Skála still had not shown himself, and the men braced themselves to wait through the workday for another chance to see the man they’d flown halfway around the world to target.
The lengthy surveillance was tougher on Gavin than it was on the younger men. Dom had well over a decade of experience on surveillance operations, both with the FBI and then in his career with The Campus. He’d gotten used to the boredom, the exhausting concentration necessary for the work, and the poor sleep and bad food that came along with the job when the target, not the watcher, was in control of the daily schedule and activities.
Ryan had spent considerably less time living this arduous life, but in the past few years it seemed to him that a key component to his job involved sitting for hours in a parked vehicle, or days in a cramped and darkened room, eating takeout or cold food in plastic wrap and smelling the breath and sweat of one of his teammates.
He didn’t much care for the downtime, but he very much did love the thrill of the chase and the payoff of succeeding in his mission, and that made all the downtime worthwhile.
Gavin had decades of experience with bad food and weird sleeping hours; this came from his life as a sedentary IT expert. But the frustrations inherent with having no idea when you needed to be awake, where you might need to go, and what you might need to do from minute to minute took a real toll on him, and sleeping in a thin blanket curled up on a hardwood floor made the fifty-six-year-old’s back and neck cramp in protest.
When Skála didn’t come home after twenty-four hours of surveillance, they realized their plan to follow him from his house wasn’t going to work.
The bastard must have been out of town.
From the very beginning of the surveillance Jack and Dom had bandied around the idea of doing a quick entry on Skála’s building, not to go to his apartment but instead to break into his mailbox, which, they knew from the images on Map of the World, would be down in the lobby. But they’d initially decided against it. Neither of them expected for a second that some letter relevant to the Hazelton situation would be sitting in the mailbox, so the probability of scoring anything useful would be low and, if something bad and unexpected happened on this op and things went loud, it would take only one nosy neighbor to remember the guy in the lobby who didn’t belong. Both Jack and Dom had experienced plenty of Murphy’s Law rearing its ugly head at the wrong time while on the job, so they made the decision to leave the mailbox alone.
But now it wasn’t a question of discovering useful intel, it was simply a case of trying to find out where the hell Skála was. A look inside his box would certainly tell them if someone had been picking up his mail, and it would give them another piece of the puzzle.
Dom was chosen to do the walk-through. While both men had become excellent at lock picking in the past few years, Dom was slightly better at it. The tiny tumbler lock of the mailbox wouldn’t be any challenge at all for him.
He made entry on the apartment building at one p.m. by holding the door for two movers delivering an antique wooden table and then following them inside. There were two people in the small and soulless lobby when the movers disappeared into the elevator, but Dom walked and acted like he belonged, and no one looked up at him.
He went directly to Skála’s box, which had his name in handwritten block letters on the tab over the lock, and he picked it with one hand, as if the two-piece pick set were a single key. It took him twelve seconds, and when the box popped open he immediately shut it again and locked it back up without removing anything.
Ten minutes later he was a half-block away, back in the sixth-floor office space.
Ryan asked, “What did you learn?”
“It was crammed full. He hasn’t been here in a few days, at least.”
“Damn,” said Ryan. “This has been an epic waste of time.”
“Not necessarily,” Caruso countered. “That lobby was dead. We already know where the cameras are from Map of the World. How about we make something happen?”
Jack understood. “You want to go take a peek at his place?”
Dom nodded. “We go right now, before people get home from work.”
Gavin had been silent — he was out of his element here — but he was curious, so he asked, “Why don’t you do it late at night?”
Caruso replied, “Why? Everybody is home then, sounds are amplified because there is less ambient noise, anyone sees us and they wonder what we’re doing, whereas if we go now and act like we’re supposed to be there, nobody will give us a second glance.”
Gavin understood, then said, “If you want I can disable the security cameras.”
Ryan cocked his head. “Really? How can you do that?”
“This apartment building is using one of the biggest alarm companies in Europe. We established a back door into their servers a couple years ago when we were doing an op in Paris. I can get in, turn the cams off, or just pan them out of the way so they don’t see you when you come in.”
“That’s awesome,” Ryan said. “Let’s shut them down while we are inside.”
Gavin slid to his laptop and let his fingers hover over the keys. He looked up. “What about me? You’re not just going to leave me here by myself, are you?”
Dom rolled his eyes, but Jack said, “You’ll be fine, Gav. We need you to monitor the entrance to the building and listen to your headset. We’ll remain in comms so you can let us know if Skála shows up while we’re in his place.”
“What will you do if he does show up?”
Ryan answered, “We’ll improvise.”
Gavin didn’t like this one bit, that was plain from the look on his face, but he grabbed his laptop off the table and took his seat at the tripod-mounted binoculars. Here with the computer in his lap he could see the view from the camera on the roof as well as through the binos, plus he could hear any noise on the laser mike and the directional boom mike, as well as listen in to all comms from Jack and Dominic.
The two men put hats on their heads and sunglasses over their eyes, and they headed for the door.
Before they left, Jack turned back to Gavin. “If you see anything out of the ordinary, you let us know.”
“Got it,” Biery replied, with an intensity in his voice that sounded to the two operators as if Gavin himself was going to be the one to break into the target location.
23
Annette Brawley arrived at work early this morning. She’d left a sweet and apologetic note for her daughter on the kitchen table next to a box of Cheerios and a cereal bowl and a spoon. She even picked a Gerber daisy out of the flowerpot on the back patio and put it in a tiny vase to go with the table setting.
She knew, without a doubt, that Stephanie would ignore the flower and crumple up the sweet note and throw it in the trash. She probably would have done this anyway, but Annette suspected the focus for Stephanie’s anger this morning would be the fact that her mother had left an alarm clock at the bottom of the stairs to her room, meaning when it went off she would have to get up and storm downstairs to turn it off.