Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

Gavin Biery had loaded a mobile version of the service onto Jack and Dominic’s iPhones for quick reference while in the field, and he was even testing out a proprietary application he had created himself whereby the operators could speak commands into their phones and have answers computed for them using MOTW information, and then read aloud back to them.

As they ate their dinner and discussed the capabilities of the software, Gavin asked Jack to give it a try.

“What do I ask?”

“Whatever you want. Like I said, she’s still in beta, so don’t be too rough on her.”

Jack thought for a moment, then pushed the button on his mobile. “MOTW,” he said, letting the computer know he was talking to the Map of the World app. “Tell me which airport in Prague has the least police presence.”

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.