Andrew Britton - The Assassin

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.

Placing the pack on the ground, he opened the main compartment and pulled out the first of two? — inch climbing ropes. It took several attempts, but he managed to sling the free end over the railing of the second balcony. Then he played out the rope until he had both ends back in his hands, after which he tied a hitch knot with an adjustable grip, something he recalled from his days at the Air Assault School in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. By pulling on the base line, he was able to work the knot up to the railing. He took a moment to listen to the environment. There was the distant sound of a siren, but it seemed to be moving away. Otherwise, there was nothing.

He zipped up and shouldered the pack once more, then began to climb. Once he reached the second balcony, he climbed over the railing and pulled up the rope, then untied it and slung it over his shoulder. Walking to the other end of the balcony, he peered over the side, carefully examining the next challenge. The cameras were directly beneath him, about 20 feet down, level with each other and spaced a foot apart. The service door, in turn, was located beneath the cameras.

Straightening, he turned to his right and checked out the windows. It was as he expected: the windows opened only from inside the building. If he tried to force one, there was a good chance the pane would give way. Clearly, the door below was the best option, although that wasn’t saying much.

Dropping the rope from his shoulder, he tied a knot at one end to prevent him from sliding all the way to the ground. The other end of the rope was secured to the railing with an anchor bend, which, once pulled taut, was almost impossible to untie. Loosely coiling the free end of the rope, he dropped it onto the floor of the balcony and opened the pack, pulling out a handful of nonlocking caribiners. He was already wearing a Petzl rappelling harness, which was nothing more than a waist strap attached to fabric loops that encircled the thighs. Kealey hooked a few caribiners to the gear loops on either side of the harness, then selected another object from the pack. The small metal device was known as a shunt. Once clamped around the rope and linked — with the help of a caribiner — to the main attachment point on the harness, the shunt could be used to arrest an uncontrolled rappel. More importantly, it could be locked at any point, giving him free use of both hands.