The black SUV, all its lights still off, stopped and let the passing traffic by.
Sam said, “Be advised, we might have aggressors. This SUV is thinking about either following her or running her over. Can’t tell which yet.”
Dom said, “You’ve got to be kidding. In Manhattan?”
Sam said, “I just call ’em like I see ’em. Wait one—”
The SUV pulled into traffic behind the Audi and went straight on Bayard, passing behind the Chilean UN official, who was now back on the sidewalk and heading north toward Dom on the corner of Canal and Mott. The vehicle turned on its lights as it took off up the street.
Quickly Sam looked back toward the dim sum restaurant. Edward Riley was leaving through the front door, heading off to the south, in the opposite direction of the activity. He was talking on his phone, but he did not seem overly excited or concerned.
Sam said, “The SUV has moved on, but they might be handing off the tail to another team, or else they’re trying to get ahead of her. Can’t explain it, but I have a feeling they aren’t bugging out.”
Ding Chavez said, “Then we go on your intuition. I’ll stay parallel of you to the west, you stay in traffic, get up to Canal, and Dom will take the eye in the foot-follow when the target passes.”
Everyone agreed, and the three men all began the orchestrated ballet that is a coordinated mobile surveillance operation.
Ding was in condition yellow as he moved, his eyes open for any countersurveillance. But he had no way of seeing the seventy-year-old Korean woman sitting back from the window in the second-floor apartment over a bodega, the dirty curtains parted just enough for the lens of a video camera. She took twelve seconds of video as Ding passed below her.
A minute later she had sent the video to her local contact, an RGB officer. In a subsequent phone call she told the man that the Hispanic-looking fellow in the video was, unquestionably, near the British man she had been ordered to watch over tonight.
She was just a watcher. There were other RGB men here in the area, and they had used her for intelligence about the activities in the dim sum restaurant, but she had never seen her contact face-to-face, nor did she know a thing about the mission.
She had been working on this job for the past several days. Once each day she would get a call from her contact, and she would go to the address listed, either a restaurant or a laundromat or a food court or a parking lot or, in this evening’s case, an empty and unlocked but obviously lived-in apartment on Mott Street in Chinatown.
She would then keep an eye out for anything out of the ordinary around her. By her second day she recognized the one constant to each scene was the white man with the dark hair. She was not told his name, but when she pointed him out she was directed to keep watch for anyone else interested in him.
And now that she’d been at this for five days, she finally had success.
The Hispanic man she had identified tonight had not done anything wrong. He had not gotten too close to his subject, nor had he acted in any way different from any other random passerby on the street — any of the three times she had seen him.
That was what compromised him. The old lady had a memory like a trap. Three mornings earlier on 3rd Avenue the short, dark-haired man in his forties had been walking with another man, deep in conversation and with a cup of coffee in his hands. They were across the street and some seventy-five yards from where Edward Riley was having coffee with a contact at a Starbucks. The Korean lady had been stationed in a Hallmark shop, looking out the window and simply noting passersby.
Two days later, in the mid-afternoon, a construction worker in denim pants and a T-shirt sat on a residential stoop in Chelsea, a block and a half from where Riley and one of his agents had gone into a brownstone.
The Korean woman had been browsing in a luggage store on the corner, she’d been far from the construction worker, but she thought he might have been the suited Hispanic from two days earlier. If she’d had binoculars she could have made the connection with certainty, but her cover was more important to her than his cover, so she let it go.
But tonight she saw the same man again, running in the dark, dressed like he was just out for a jog. He was either a businessman — construction worker — jogger, or he was a member of the opposition.
She doubted seriously he was working alone, but she’d not managed to identify any confederates.
She neither knew nor cared about the reasons he was following Edward Riley, no more than she knew or cared about what Edward Riley was up to. But her grown son and daughter lived in North Korea, and her occasional work here in New York for RGB always brought good news from them. The last time she worked an operation here in the city for North Korean intelligence her son sent a letter a few months later telling her he had received a new bicycle and his sister a new radio. They did not know the reason why, but they thanked the Dae Wonsu and professed their everlasting love and affection for him.
The elderly Korean Manhattanite was pleased her work here in America brought her family happiness back home, even if she would have loved to be able to have them come here to live with her.
The three Campus operators continued their coordinated leapfrogging movements through Chinatown, and it was still something of a ballet, but by now the complexity of the choreography had increased because the black SUV had turned up again, this time shadowing the woman on Canal Street. Marleni Allende continued walking unaware, her beige raincoat contrasting with the T-shirts of many of the other pedestrians here shopping for cheap knockoff goods in the rows of sidewalk stalls. Behind her, carefully tracking her, the Ford Escape moved normally through traffic, turning onto perpendicular streets and then pulling back onto Canal moments later.
Caruso still had the eye; he was one hundred feet directly behind the target, which meant at times he was moving right along with the black Ford. He spoke softly, but his earbud picked up his words with no problem. “This is starting to feel like that deal in Vietnam. I count four in the Ford. They aren’t closing on her, but there are a lot of civilians around here.”
Sam had pushed ahead through traffic, and now he raced to the nearest subway stop on Canal. During Allende’s meeting in the restaurant, he’d called Clark and asked for information on the woman. Clark read aloud everything the Campus analysts had given him, and from this Sam knew she lived alone in an apartment in Midtown.
She wasn’t walking home, that was for sure. Unless the Chilean woman hailed a taxi, it was a fair bet she was going to go down into the subway.
He knew there was no way in hell he’d find a place to park to go on foot, but at least he’d be able to identify any threats on the woman when she passed by.
Dom had no concerns the UN woman was going to see him; she walked with her head down and her shoulders rolled forward. If she started to look back over her shoulder, Dom had the training to recognize the telltale body movements that would come before her eyes actually put her in position to compromise him.
But the men in the Ford were a concern. They were alternately behind him, next to him, and facing him as they went up one street and down the other, and he assumed whoever these guys were, they had the training to be on the lookout for countersurveillance.
So Dom stopped now and then to look at cheap T-shirts and tacky wallets for sale in the stalls, and he just made occasional spot checks on Allende to confirm the other team on her tail hadn’t yet closed distance on her.