“Naomi, this is your last chance. Are you sure you want to do this?”
She was annoyed that he felt it necessary to question her commitment again, but she pushed it down. “I’m sure. Just…”
“What?”
“Just be careful, okay?”
He nodded once and clambered out to the pavement, closing the door softly behind him. She watched through the passenger-side window as he walked down the darkened street at a brisk pace, his hands jammed into his pockets. She followed him with anxious eyes until the night closed in behind him. Then she started the engine and drove on.
The German chancery, the brainchild of famed architect Egon Eiermann, had clearly been designed with diplomacy in mind. Located far from the tumultuous rhythm of downtown Washington, the building was a true aesthetic achievement, a six-story amalgamation of glass, delicate wooden sunshades, and tubular steel support beams. The grounds, which encompassed 9
acres of prime real estate, were as unobtrusive as the building itself, marked only by the occasional poplar or oak. It was this very lack of vegetation that was troubling Kealey as he turned right on Foxhall Road and followed it north, adjacent to the chancery grounds. Garden lights were strewn about the grass, but from where he was standing, the narrow building was nothing more than a dark haze against the blue-black sky. To reach his objective, he would be forced to cross a great deal of open ground.
Kealey turned away from the fence, adjusted the straps of his backpack, and continued walking.
A small SUV swept past on the indistinct road, followed by a D.C. Metro police car. At the sight of the cruiser, Kealey made an effort not to visibly react. The vehicle slowed but continued on.
Once it faded from view, he breathed an audible sigh of relief. On foot he was vulnerable. His dark clothes and pack, combined with the early hour, made him stand out in this affluent neighborhood, where the heavy police presence was designed to intimidate people just like him, or at least what he appeared to be: a transient of dubious means. He was extremely fortunate the officer had not stopped to investigate further, but given what was at stake, he couldn’t count on that kind of luck; he had to get off the street as soon as possible.
The black-iron fence was waist high and did not present much of a challenge. He scaled it quickly and began making his way through the grounds. He had crossed several hundred feet when his earpiece came to life, and Naomi’s voice sounded clear. “Ryan, I’m in position. Where are you?”
He keyed his mic and said, “I’m in the grounds, approaching from the northeast.”
“How far are you from the building?”
“About two hundred fifty meters.”
“Okay. Hold on a second.”
From the front seat of the Taurus, Naomi found the appropriate document and spread it across her lap, trying to pinpoint his location. The satellite photographs that supplemented the ORACLE file were shot with half-meter resolution, which made it easy to determine distance and spot specific landmarks. She had parked the car beneath a streetlamp on Hoban Road, directly opposite the embassy grounds, but the light was weak — weak enough to make her task more difficult than it should have been. Squinting into the semidark, she finally managed to pick out his approximate location on the creased paper.
“Ryan, you should see a group of trees to the west, about thirty meters from your position.”
A brief pause, then, “I see them.”
“Stay on your side of those trees, and follow them southwest. They give way to a hedge that will lead you right up to the building.” She grabbed for another sheet of paper and scanned it quickly.
“The cameras are beneath the first balcony, above the door. The second balcony extends from the edge of the building to the spot right over the cameras, so that’s your point of access, the northwestern corner.”
“Got it.”
“Remember, the cameras can pick you up from fifty meters out, so make sure you stay below the hedgeline.”
“Right. I’ll get back to you when I’m in position.”
She nodded to herself and took her thumb off the PTT (PRESS TO TALK) switch, then began leafing through the hefty manila file, searching for the diagram of the chancery’s ground-floor interior layout. All of it, except for the satellite photographs, had been supplied by the source recruited through ORACLE. The source — a senior assistant to the third secretary, responsible for administration — had been promoted and moved to the embassy in France nearly two months earlier. Unfortunately, he had been killed in a car accident less than a week after arriving in-country, a fact that Naomi had confirmed just five hours earlier. If he had still been in place, he would have had complete access to the information they were after. The second option, of course, was to cultivate a new agent within the embassy, but convincing foreign diplomats to switch sides was a sensitive business, and not something that could be accomplished in the space of twenty-four hours.
Not for the first time, Naomi’s eyes flickered up to the rearview mirror. She was parked in a residential neighborhood and knew that she would look extremely suspicious to anyone who happened to glance out their windows. It couldn’t be helped, though, and they needed less than an hour, perhaps as little as forty minutes. All she could do was hope that their luck would hold.
Come on, Ryan, she thought, anxiously fingering the radio hooked to her belt. Hurry.
After scaling the fence, Kealey had paused to pull down his black balaclava. Now, leaning against the exterior wall, just out of sight of the cameras, he looked down at his dark clothes.
They were soaked through from the morning dew, which covered every square inch of the manicured lawn. He had crawled the last 70 meters to reach the building, and as he shrugged off the backpack, he tried to shake off the exhaustion that threatened to overtake him. He had not slept in nearly twenty-four hours, and while he had carried out dozens of missions under similar duress during his military career, he knew that what he was about to do would require all of his strength, both mental and physical. He could not afford to lose focus for even a second.
The Radionics V1160N cameras were just around the corner, mounted 8 feet over the concrete walkway. From there, they were wired to a multiplexer in the control room, which split the monitor into four screens, representing these cameras and two others. The multiplexer, in turn, was routed to a Bosch VMD01, and from there to the tower. Despite its modest appearance, the VMD01 represented the cutting edge of motion-sensing technology. It was capable of adjusting automatically to changing environmental conditions, as well as correcting for camera vibration, thereby reducing false alarms. From head-on, the system was almost impossible to beat.
Kealey thought back to the file that he’d studied for hours on end. Naomi had been the one to point out the obvious problems. For one thing, the cameras were too high to reach without a ladder of some type, which was clearly impractical, considering the distance from the fence to the building. If he was compromised or otherwise forced to leave in a hurry, he could not be slowed by unnecessary weight. Besides, the local insomniacs would be quick to pick out a person carrying a ladder around the neighborhood at 4:00 a.m.
With decreasing enthusiasm, she had also pointed out that the cameras had overlapping detection envelopes. Due to the VMD01 they could not only detect, but analyze motion in an arc of 180
degrees, which encompassed the only possible angles of horizontal approach.
And that, Kealey had realized, was the key word: horizontal. The cameras could not be defeated from ground level; to take them out of the equation, he’d have to go in from above.