Vince Flynn - Consent To Kill

He and his partner had used a medium-range parabolic microphone to listen in on the Turkish man's phone calls as he went for his midmorning walks. The man had told a friend yesterday that the Russians were simpletons, but that they weren't crazy enough to try to kill him in London. The comment struck the assassin as pure idiocy, and it caused him to wonder how the Turk had lasted as long as he had. The man was fifty-eight years old and had been involved in this type of stuff for twenty-plus years. Underestimating one's enemy was a classic tactical mistake-one that was usually born out of stupidity or arrogance or both.

He leaned against the street lamp and checked his watch, careful to keep his head tilted down. There was a camera pod mounted on the light above him. It was twenty after ten. He was dressed in business attire with a long black trench coat and fedora. His black hair had been lightened to a sandy blond, special contacts made his brown eyes appear hazel and they were further concealed by a pair of black-rimmed glasses with clear lenses. An umbrella dangled from the crook of his left arm that held a twice-folded copy of the Times. The sky was gray and looked as if it might bring rain at any moment.

Two days in a row the Turk had appeared at ten in the morning to take his walk to the park. He donned an earpiece and the entire trip, there and back, he talked on his phone and smoked cigarettes. He was oblivious to the fact that he was being watched, which, when one looked at his comments, was not surprising. Like the majority of the men the assassin had killed, the Turk was a man of habits. He always stayed at the Hampshire when in London, and, weather permitting, he took daily walks to St. James Park, went back to the hotel for lunch, then to the bank where he kept an office and then afternoon tea at Browns.

Something was throwing him off his normal schedule this morning and the assassin was beginning to worry. Yes, it looked like it could rain at any moment, but the weather was no different than the previous two days. There was a fine line between rushing a job and sitting on it too long. Long surveillance periods could lead to boredom, hesitancy, and sometimes inaction. They also increased the chances that someone would notice you. On the other hand, rushing a job before you had a complete sense of the overall tactical situation could be even more disastrous. Maps had to be memorized, schedules scrutinized, and multiple modes of transportation put into place. And in London one could never forget about the omnipresent security cameras.

The assassin was beginning to doubt that the Turk would show. He would either have to dispatch him when he was coming out of his afternoon tea or wait another day to kill him in the park. As he was weighing his two options the Turk stepped out under the wrought-iron-and-glass canopy of the hotel and the doorman handed him an umbrella. Pleasantries were exchanged, the Turk lit a cigarette, and he was on his way. The assassin had thought about this part very carefully. He was already positioned in front of his subject. If the police ever got around to reviewing the tapes, they would be looking for someone who had followed the Turk to the park and would in all likelihood not bother to see if someone had been in front of him every step of the way.

The assassin had also found a hole in the way the security cameras were set up. He would take a slightly different path to the park and avoid having his movements recorded. The park itself was a bit of a problem. There was usually a bobby or two loitering about, a fair amount of state workers, and one particularly pesky camera pod that was in close proximity to the spot where the hit would take place. He was disguised enough that the cameras would never get a clear shot of his face, but they could begin to build a profile. In addition to that he would prefer the act itself not to be recorded. Such footage had a way of galvanizing those who were in charge of solving violent crimes. The assassin had been struggling with this problem the day before when a solution popped into his mind.

He reached up and touched the side of a tiny wireless Motorola headset affixed to his right ear. A second later he could hear her phone ringing.

"Amanda Poole speaking." The voice had a crisp British accent.

"Amanda, I'm going to take a walk. Would you swing by and see if our friend is going to join me?"

"I'd love to, Harry."

The assassin rounded the corner, careful to keep his chin down. There was a tendency in his line of work to over think things. Much of this stemmed from the fact that most of the people were either former intelligence operatives or military. In Harry's case it was the latter. When you worked for a big government the resources were vast. Field equipment was tested and retested under every conceivable condition, billions of dollars worldwide was put into the development of new ways to communicate and better ways to encrypt. The problem as Harry saw it, though, was that as much-or more-money, was spent on new eavesdropping technology and vastly powerful and complex decryption systems. The National Security Agency of America alone had dozens of satellites circling the planet that were designed to do one thing-record people's conversations. They had the world's most powerful computers ensconced in football-field-size subterranean chambers under their headquarters in Maryland.

These Cray supercomputers churned away day after day, night after night, sifting through e-mails, radio transmissions, and phone intercepts. Highly specialized programs were written so the computers could home in on the key words bomb, gun, kill, and assassinate in every foreign language of interest. Certain types of transmissions were prioritized. For America, anything coming out of Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan, for example, was kicked to the top of the queue. Anything intercepted in those countries via secure and encrypted modes was further kicked up the queue. And so it went, with the programs designed to focus on the methods used by people who were trying to keep secrets.

All of this left Harry with a simple question. If superpowers, with nearly unlimited financial resources and brainpower, could not keep secrets from each other, what hopes did a two-person operation have to stay up on the technology and out in front of those spending billions? The answer was easy. He couldn't, so the only solution was to go in the opposite direction. The spy agencies around the world didn't care about inane conversations by business associates or lovers. The trick was to stay with the herd. Use the same mode of communication everyone else used and stay away from any discussion of the real business at hand. Consequently, upon arriving in London, they had purchased new phones. They signed a yearlong contract even though the phones would be used for a week at the most.

He walked quickly but calmly down St. Martin's Street and then cut over to Whitcomb. A few minutes later he was walking along the north end of the park. The Turk would be a few blocks behind him at this point. They would enter the park from different spots and meet where the older man liked to stop and feed the ducks while chattering on his phone. At Marlborough Road he came upon a small black delivery van, which his partner was driving. He stuffed his folded copy of the Times under his armpit and popped the back cargo doors. Reaching in with a gloved hand he grabbed a sash of balloons and closed the door. The delivery van drove off without a word while he crossed the street to the park.

This part made him a bit nervous. A man dressed in business attire with a long black coat and hat carrying a cluster of balloons was not your everyday sight. He was sure to catch a few stray glances, but like most things in life it was a trade-off. He kept the collar of his coat turned up, his chin tucked against his chest, and his shoulders hunched. All he had to do was make it one block with the balloons.