John Weisman - Direct Action

Tom eased the two wheels on the passenger’s side of the truck up onto the curb so traffic could pass. He and Reuven had changed into the anonymous sort of coveralls worn by tradesmen and laborers. The old tan Renault with its junk-filled cab and dented, rusty cargo bay didn’t rate a second look. Tom and Reuven had changed their appearances. Tom’s face was obscured by a thick mustache, and his hair-a wig-was frizzy brown and stuck out from under a knit cap. Reuven wore a neat beard and a full head of short gray hair.

As he parked, Tom angled the Renault so that his side-view mirror caught the entrance of the old house that sat adjacent to the bistro. He’d memorized the angle of Shahram Shahristani’s surveillance photograph, and the run-down bistro-L’Étrier was the name on the awning-had to be the place. The awning was rolled back and the tables and chairs had been removed.

Tom eased the door open, pulled a newspaper from between the seats, and extracted himself from the van. He tucked the newspaper under his arm and waited as Reuven opened the passenger-side door. They locked the vehicle, then ambled to the end of the street, toward the café, which was on the southwest corner where rue Lambert dead-ended into rue Nicolet. Tom pushed through the door. The place had the sour smell of stale beer and old cigarette smoke. He dropped onto one of the bar stools that sat facing the smoke-stained window, opened the newspaper, and turned his back to the bar.

Reuven walked across creaking floorboards to where the proprietor stood, cigarette dangling from his lips, his elbow resting on discolored copper, perusing a newspaper. He ordered two glasses of red wine. Tom watched as the man reached down and pulled an unlabeled bottle from the well, drew two smudged glasses off the shelf, gave them a halfhearted wipe-down, then filled them.

“Merci.” Reuven dropped coins onto the bar, picked up the glasses, walked over to where Tom was perched, and set them down.

Tom nodded at the Israeli, who drew a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his coveralls, pulled one out, then set the pack on the window shelf. The pack held a wide-angle video lens that transmitted a signal to a digital recorder in the truck. The high-definition images were date- and time-stamped.

The two men sat silently, sipped their wine, and scanned the street. L’Étrier was just emptying out. The bistro occupied the basement and

ground floor of a narrow, nineteenth-century four-story house. Above it, according to Tom’s research, there were four apartments. To the left of the restaurant was another four-story building of about the same vintage. The ground floor had once held some sort of shop. Now the shop had been gutted and the whole building was in the process of being renovated. Above the shop were six apartments-two to a floor-one of which was Ben Said’s safe house. Problem one was separating the intelligence wheat from the intelligence chaff so they’d know which flat to bug.

But for the moment, what Tom and Reuven wanted was to get a sense of rue Lambert’s rhythms and pace so they could find ways to adapt themselves to the street and become a part of the environment. Surveillance is one of the most basic yet difficult aspects of intelligence work. It requires long hours, intense concentration, flawless record keeping, and constant focus. A surveillant has to be able to hide in plain sight-much the same way as hunters or snipers camouflage their positions. Indeed, in many ways, surveilling is similar to hunting or sniping. A good hunter, for example, identifies the track used by his prey and sets up an ambush position long enough in advance so that the jungle, or the forest, or the mountain trail returns to its normal condition: the crickets chirp, the birds come and go, the insects resume their normal activities.

It’s much the same on a surveillance detail. If you’re using an OP 23to photograph a target, for example, you run a two- or even three-man team, one of whose eyes are looking through a telephoto lens every second of every minute of the day so there is absolutely no chance that the target will show himself and not be noted or photographed. Every single sighting is logged. Every individual entering and exiting the location is logged and photographed. The license plates, make, model, and physical description of every vehicle-cars, taxis, trucks, vans, motorcycles, bicycles, jitneys, rickshaws-that comes into contact with the target location is noted.

If audio surveillance is being conducted from an OP, simple but effective means have to be used to camouflage the listening devices, most of which have been developed by the technical section of the National Security Agency, which use lasers and other technical means to pick up sounds as low as a whisper at ranges up to 250 yards. Sometimes, for example, the surveillance team will use a technique that is commonly used by snipers or countersnipers working in urban environments. The team builds a motionless for long periods of time.

Indeed, fatigue is a critical factor in surveillance operations. It is mind-numbing to stare through a long lens, a pair of binoculars, or a spotting scope for hours on end. Concentration becomes hard to maintain. The mind wanders. Other factors also intrude. In vehicle-based surveillance operations, for example, any motion of the vehicle at all will give the team’s position away-something many law enforcement surveillance details find out the hard way. In Hollywood, surveillance is easy. You pull a car into an alley, slink below the dash, and do a Starsky and Hutch sneak-and-peek through the windshield. But that’s Hollywood. In real life, operators have to fight through boredom, monotony, and hour-after-hour, day-after-day, week-after-week tedium, but just…keep…going.

3:46P.M. Reuven was on his fourth cigarette. Their wineglasses were still a third full. No one had entered or left the safe-house building and the workmen were starting to pack up and close down the ground-floor site for the day.

Tom had just lifted the wine to his lips when the cell phone in his coveralls vibrated. He set the glass down, pulled the phone out, and held it to his ear. “Allô.”

“C’est Tony. On peut parler?” Tony Wyman sounded stressed.

“Sure,” Tom answered in French. “What’s up?”

“I’ve just come in from the home office.”

Tom cracked a smile. “Bienvenue.”

“Stow it. The job’s off. Come back to the office. No need to waste your time waiting around where you are.”

“You’re kidding.”

“’Fraid not.” Wyman sighed. Tom could hear the man exhale. He sounded uncharacteristically exhausted-almost as if he’d been beaten. “Get moving-now. We have to talk.”

3 NOVEMBER 2003

6:37 P . M .

223 RUE DU FAUBOURG ST. HONORÉ

“THEY WHAT ?”Tom looked across the desk at Antony Wyman. Wyman had been flying all day. He hadn’t even checked into his hotel, and yet he was impeccably turned out. How the man could do that was something Tom couldn’t fathom. “Who shut me down? I’ll talk to them. C’mon, Tony-let me talk to whoever it was.”

Wyman shook his head. “You know that’s impossible.”

Tom pulled uncomfortably at his wet shirt collar. “How can they be so stupid?” It had been a rush to get back. He and Reuven had made their way from rue Lambert to the warehouse, changed clothes and IDs, then run a cleaning route to the safe house, where they’d changed clothes and identities once more. Since it was rush hour, Tom used the motorcycle to get to the 4627 offices near the Place des Ternes. It had started to rain just as he’d sped through the Place du Brésil and he’d gotten soaked. He’d been riding alone. Reuven declined Tom’s invitation to accompany him, saying there was some trolling to be done and they’d catch up in the morning.