Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

They set up their three-man static surveillance operation in the corner of the office space, and hid the operation from the rest of the big room by stacking desks six feet high. Once they had their space, from a suitcase they pulled a pair of binoculars and mounted it onto a tripod. The lenses were centered and focused on the entrance to Skála’s apartment building and the parking lot next to it. The men also pointed a second directional microphone out an open window, and they hung bedding in the windows so no one looking up from the street below would see any hint of the team.

They also laid two bedrolls, placed rubber doorstops at the entrances to the locked office to supplement the deadbolt lock, and they attached two large photos of Karel Skála to the curtain near the binoculars so they could study his face in their downtime.

Gavin placed one of his laptops on a desk, and the other he kept in a backpack by the door. Jack had explained that he would need to come along if they tailed the government official through the streets or metro of Prague, because if the operators were able to take possession of the man’s mobile then they wanted Gavin close by and ready to hack the device and download all the data as quickly as possible. In an ideal scenario, they all agreed, they would get the phone back into Skála’s pocket without him ever knowing anything was amiss.

Jack told Gavin he needed to be prepared for anything, however, because most scenarios don’t come off the way the planners hope. Jack had been the planner of this mission, and he had the good sense to build some wiggle room into his operation wherever he could.

—

Jack, Dom, and Gavin were set up and in position by three p.m. The laser mike picked up no noise at all from inside Skála’s apartment, so they were reasonably sure he wasn’t home. This was no surprise. They assumed he’d return from work sometime after five, so they settled in to wait.

While they sat there Gavin did some research into Map of the World on his computer, and he used the basic data about Skála there to hack into his condo rental records. From this he saw their target owned a white VW Golf. The license plate was noted on the rental record, but Gavin couldn’t find any information about whether or not Skála had a reserved parking space at his building on Krišt’anova.

Caruso used the binoculars on the tripod to look for a car matching the description in the parking lot adjacent to the apartment building. He found the white Golf quickly, and although he couldn’t see the tag number from his position, he thought it likely to be their target’s vehicle. This was odd, because this was a workday and they had assumed Skála to be at work right now.

Caruso said, “Probably took the metro to work.”

That was a convenient theory, but by seven p.m., when they had seen no one who looked anything like their man coming in or leaving the apartment, they had their doubts.

And when midnight came and went without a single sighting of their target or any noise from inside the apartment, their concern grew.

The men passed the time speculating. It was the most common game to play on a stakeout. Any thoughts that their man might have stayed to work late in the office diminished with each passing hour. Skála wasn’t married, so they wondered if he stayed over at a girlfriend’s place.

Or a boyfriend—Ryan didn’t know enough about his target to make any real assumptions about his life.

The team slept in shifts, one man up, two men down, two hours each, all through the night.

At nine the next morning Skála still had not shown himself, and the men braced themselves to wait through the workday for another chance to see the man they’d flown halfway around the world to target.

The lengthy surveillance was tougher on Gavin than it was on the younger men. Dom had well over a decade of experience on surveillance operations, both with the FBI and then in his career with The Campus. He’d gotten used to the boredom, the exhausting concentration necessary for the work, and the poor sleep and bad food that came along with the job when the target, not the watcher, was in control of the daily schedule and activities.

Ryan had spent considerably less time living this arduous life, but in the past few years it seemed to him that a key component to his job involved sitting for hours in a parked vehicle, or days in a cramped and darkened room, eating takeout or cold food in plastic wrap and smelling the breath and sweat of one of his teammates.

He didn’t much care for the downtime, but he very much did love the thrill of the chase and the payoff of succeeding in his mission, and that made all the downtime worthwhile.

Gavin had decades of experience with bad food and weird sleeping hours; this came from his life as a sedentary IT expert. But the frustrations inherent with having no idea when you needed to be awake, where you might need to go, and what you might need to do from minute to minute took a real toll on him, and sleeping in a thin blanket curled up on a hardwood floor made the fifty-six-year-old’s back and neck cramp in protest.

—

When Skála didn’t come home after twenty-four hours of surveillance, they realized their plan to follow him from his house wasn’t going to work.

The bastard must have been out of town.

From the very beginning of the surveillance Jack and Dom had bandied around the idea of doing a quick entry on Skála’s building, not to go to his apartment but instead to break into his mailbox, which, they knew from the images on Map of the World, would be down in the lobby. But they’d initially decided against it. Neither of them expected for a second that some letter relevant to the Hazelton situation would be sitting in the mailbox, so the probability of scoring anything useful would be low and, if something bad and unexpected happened on this op and things went loud, it would take only one nosy neighbor to remember the guy in the lobby who didn’t belong. Both Jack and Dom had experienced plenty of Murphy’s Law rearing its ugly head at the wrong time while on the job, so they made the decision to leave the mailbox alone.

But now it wasn’t a question of discovering useful intel, it was simply a case of trying to find out where the hell Skála was. A look inside his box would certainly tell them if someone had been picking up his mail, and it would give them another piece of the puzzle.

Dom was chosen to do the walk-through. While both men had become excellent at lock picking in the past few years, Dom was slightly better at it. The tiny tumbler lock of the mailbox wouldn’t be any challenge at all for him.

He made entry on the apartment building at one p.m. by holding the door for two movers delivering an antique wooden table and then following them inside. There were two people in the small and soulless lobby when the movers disappeared into the elevator, but Dom walked and acted like he belonged, and no one looked up at him.

He went directly to Skála’s box, which had his name in handwritten block letters on the tab over the lock, and he picked it with one hand, as if the two-piece pick set were a single key. It took him twelve seconds, and when the box popped open he immediately shut it again and locked it back up without removing anything.

—

Ten minutes later he was a half-block away, back in the sixth-floor office space.

Ryan asked, “What did you learn?”

“It was crammed full. He hasn’t been here in a few days, at least.”

“Damn,” said Ryan. “This has been an epic waste of time.”

“Not necessarily,” Caruso countered. “That lobby was dead. We already know where the cameras are from Map of the World. How about we make something happen?”