Full Force and Effect Read online

  All eyes in the cabin looked at the mobile. After just a few seconds, a female voice replied, “I am sorry. I do not understand.”

  Jack made a face at Gavin. “Sorry, Gav, but I don’t think this is quite ready for a field test.”

  But Biery snatched the phone out of Jack’s hand. He said, “MOTW, how many police officers are at Václav Havel Airport in Prague?”

  Another brief pause, and then, in a slightly computerized voice, the mobile replied, “Exact answer unknown. There is a municipal police precinct at Václav Havel Airport, a federal police station at Václav Havel Airport, and an airport police office at Václav Havel Airport. Shall I give you terminal locations, phone numbers, or e-mail addresses?”

  Jack and Dom both raised their eyebrows.

  Gavin smiled. “There are millions of bits of data at its disposal. You ask the right question in the right way, and it can be of use.”

  Dom joked, “Now that we’ve got this, what the hell do we need you for?”

  Gavin rolled his eyes and went back to his dinner, and Adara refilled everyone’s wineglass.

  After dinner Adara cleared the table and offered coffee to the three men. Ryan and Biery never hesitated to thank Adara for her great service and even ask her if there was anything they could do to help out on the journey, but Caruso was the only passenger on tonight’s flight who actually spent time up in the galley at the front of the cabin, helping with the dishes and the linens.

  Neither Gavin nor Jack noticed it because they were engrossed in their work, but Caruso spent a lot of time on the flight over to Europe up front chatting with Sherman.

  —

  The G550 landed at nine a.m., and the three men of The Campus climbed into a black Mercedes E-Class sedan Sherman had arranged to be waiting for them at the hangar where they parked after clearing customs. They threw in several pieces of luggage, and then drove directly through morning traffic to Prague’s 3rd district.

  The workup Ryan had done on Skála over the past day gave the team some basic information about the man, but not much illumination into his habits and movements. Since Skála worked out of two different offices in two different locations, Ryan decided that in order to keep their operation simple they wouldn’t try to surveil him at work. That seemed like it would be a fifty-fifty prospect at best. Instead, they would watch the man at home, tail him as he left the house, and spend a couple days determining his habits and movements before proceeding, unless of course some great opportunity presented itself earlier.

  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 dea
dbolt 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.

  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.