Andrew Kaplan - Carrie's run

“I could say the same about you,” she said.

“They’re on the move,” Leonora said, indicating one of the TV monitors. The screen showed the Petra Fitness Equipment Company building and parking lot as viewed from the hidden video camera they’d installed on the roof of the building across the street. On the screen, two men-one of whom they’d identified as Bassam al-Shakran, the Jordanian salesman, from a frozen image that, though blurry and enlarged, appeared to be of him, and the other, the driver, an Arab-looking man they didn’t know-had gotten into one of the Petra company’s panel trucks.

It was 9:46 A.M. Carrie rubbed her eyes. They’d been up all night and they had a long day ahead of them. She’d just come back from the restroom, where she’d stepped inside a stall to take her meds before going to the sink and splashing her face with water.

“Assuming they’re going to the Waldorf, how will they go?” Saul asked.

Gillespie shrugged. “Fastest would be Shore Parkway to the Gowanus Expressway to the Brooklyn Bridge,” he said.

“So we don’t know if they’re going to hit the bridge or the hotel,” one of the FBI men with Sanders said.

“Yes, we do,” Carrie said as the truck passed out of the camera’s view. “It’s the wrong truck to hit the bridge. They’re headed for the Waldorf.”

“Do we have air surveillance?” Sanders asked.

“Over here,” Koslowski said, pointing to one of the monitors that showed traffic on a Brooklyn street as seen from above. “We’ve got one of our AW119 helicopters flying high enough so they won’t hear it. See the truck?” He pointed out the white panel truck in the traffic flow.

“They can’t follow continuously,” Saul said. “We don’t want it spotted.”

They watched the truck make a right turn onto a highway.

“They know. There it is. They’re on the Belt Parkway. Looks like they’re headed for Manhattan all right.”

“We could take them out now,” Sanders said. “Set up a roadblock. My sharpshooters. Never let them get near the Waldorf.”

Koslowski made a face. “I don’t think-”

“The minute you do you alert the other team. You think there are no media in New York City?” Carrie said, jumping in. “Once that happens you don’t know what they’ll do. And if they spot your roadblock and start improvising, what then? How many dead civilians do you want? Not to mention we don’t know what’s in that truck. A couple of pounds of C-4 would make one hell of a hole in Park Avenue. We want them contained.”

Sanders stared at her. “You understand, Miss Mathison, you’re here to observe,” he said.

“Well, you just heard my damn observation, Special Agent,” she said, and heard Gillespie snort, stifling a laugh.

“Easy, boys and girls,” Koslowski said. “We’ve got two full Hercules teams, all of them ex-Navy SEALs, Delta, CIA, who spent the night in suites inside the Waldorf, just two floors above Jihan’s room. We’ve got another Hercules team set up in the UBS office on Forty-Ninth across the street and another team inside the FedEx on Park Avenue. Plus, we’ll have plenty of regular NYPD to lock down the block completely before the main event. Once we close it, we won’t let a mosquito in or out.”

“What about this woman, this Jihan? Are we sure she’s in the hotel?” Sanders asked.

“We’re monitoring the hotel corridor security camera. Here’s the feed,” Gillespie said, pointing out another of the monitors, showing the hotel corridor. “She went into the room at 12:17 P.M. and hasn’t come out.”

“Let’s look at her going in,” Koslowski said.

“Go to double oh sixteen hours,” Gillespie said to one of his officers, who typed on his computer. They watched the corridor flash back in time to sixteen minutes after midnight. They waited, then saw a slim, stylish woman with long blond hair get out of the elevator and walk to one of the rooms. “Freeze it.”

“You know this woman?” Sanders asked Carrie.

“As a double agent in Beirut. Yes,” she said.

“Triple,” Saul muttered.

“And that’s her? No question?” Sanders said persistently.

“She’s wearing a blond wig, but yes, that’s Dima, a.k.a. Jihan.”

“And nothing since?” Koslowski asked the officer.

“Nothing. Yesterday she requested room service for breakfast for after eleven A.M. We suspect she gets up late,” the officer said.

“Okay. You keep your eyes peeled on her corridor. Nothing else. And let’s keep monitoring her phones and the room phone, everyone,” Koslowski called out. “Anything she does, let me know ASAP. Don’t be afraid to interrupt me.”

“What about the other two possibles we came up with? The Egyptian doctor and Ghaddar, the Lebanese businessman. Anything?” Saul asked, looking up from his laptop.

“We put front and back surveillance on them. Apart from the fact that our Egyptian doctor seems to have a fascination with the hookers on Tenth Avenue, they seem to be who they say they are,” Gillespie said.

“And the truck? Where is it now?” Carrie asked.

Gillespie looked at the monitor showing the view from the helicopter camera.

“Looks like Fort Hamilton. See the water?” he said, referring to the bay. “They’ll be coming up on the Verrazano Bridge shortly.”

“What about the other truck? This refrigerated storage facility? The HMTD?” Sanders asked.

“That’s where we’d like your Hostage Rescue Team,” Koslowski said. “The problem is, we don’t know who’s watching. If we did, we could set up and the minute this Abdel Yassin shows up, take the son of a bitch down.”

“We have no idea where he is right now?” Saul asked.

Koslowski shook his head. “We’re checking to see if he bought a cell phone and we’ve been monitoring all the calls in the Midwood-Flatbush section of Brooklyn for the past two days. So far nothing.”

“When do you think he’ll move?” Sanders asked Carrie.

“Late afternoon. Early evening. They don’t want to do something that will alert the authorities before their Waldorf operation is in motion. The Veep is scheduled to arrive at the Waldorf at eight thirty-five P.M. Figure Yassin and whoever else is with him will be at the storage place probably after six P.M.,” she said.

“Where is this place?” Sanders asked.

“Red Hook in Brooklyn. Mostly an industrial area right near the waterfront,” Koslowski said.

“We’ll move our people in undercover this morning,” Sanders said. “Set up so we can close it down.”

“No uniforms, no badges, nothing that attracts attention of any kind, especially from locals. If they send an alert, we could blow the whole thing,” Carrie said.

“Why are you so worried about locals? Won’t they cooperate?” Sanders said.

Koslowski half-smiled. “Listen, you remember the movie Casablanca ? You know the part where Humphrey Bogart tells the Nazi that there are certain sections in New York he advised even the German army not to try to enter?”

“What about it?”

“He was talking about Red Hook,” Koslowski said.

Park Avenue, New York City

There were two of them: Bassam al-Shakran, the Jordanian pharmaceutical salesman, and another man, whom they couldn’t immediately identify. They watched on the monitor showing the view from the hidden camera across the street from the hotel as two men brought what looked like a treadmill machine wrapped in plastic off their panel truck and into the service entrance of the Waldorf Astoria on a dolly.

“That’s him. That’s Bassam,” Carrie said.

“Who’s the other guy? Is it the cousin?” Gillespie asked.