As he was musing about the problem, his phone rang, surprising him.
He pulled it out, saw the Zello app as the culprit, and answered, speaking Croatian. “Donnie, so how’s it going?”
“Good, sir. The hit is tonight, and I think it’s going to be exactly what we want. They’re still hell-bent on a capture, which is fine by me, but once the mission is over, I’m out of here. These fucks are crazy, and they won’t last a day.”
“You have to make sure it works. Get out of the blast radius later, but don’t let them screw it up.”
“I got it, sir. I’m on it. The target is taking a small delegation out to dinner at 1900 tonight, at a restaurant called Rodeo Bahrain. Apparently, it’s an American-themed restaurant, and his guests are foreign. The contact that gave us the itinerary said it was a little bit of a tradition since he took command. As for me, I already have my ticket out for tomorrow morning. I’ll make sure it works, and then bug out.”
Garrett saw a van park with a cleaning emblem, then saw three women exit and go inside the building. He leaned forward, hoping they were going to his apartment.
They did not.
Donatello said, “Did you hear me? Hello?”
Garrett realized he had zoned out. He said, “Yes, I hear you. That sounds like a plan. Just don’t let them screw it up like you did with the Vatican ambassador.”
Donatello changed the subject, saying, “Where are you? What are you doing?”
The words snapped Garrett into the present. He said, “I’m at the palace. What do you mean?”
“Nothing. My phone is showing you in the EUR. The Zello app is saying you’re south of the city center. Must be a glitch.”
Garrett felt his face flush at the mistake. He said, “Don’t worry about my location. Worry about your own. Kill that son of a bitch. Tonight.”
He hung up and returned to his vehicle to emplace the alarm, embarrassed at his own lack of operational security.
Chapter 31
I waited on the screen to clear, hoping it was Bartholomew Creedwater on the other end and not George Wolffe. Creedwater—or Creed as he was known—was a Taskforce network engineer, which was a polite, politically correct way of saying “hacker,” and we were using him to penetrate the terrorist bed-down site. But what we’d found wasn’t very useful as of yet, because nobody at the Taskforce spoke Bosnian.
I’d ordered Creed to rectify that oversight. Working out of the Blaisdell Consulting office in Washington, DC—the name of the cover organization that cloaked Taskforce headquarters—he was supposed to come up and tell me what we’d found. I was afraid he’d also told Wolffe, which would lead to nothing but questions I couldn’t answer.
Earlier, Shoshana had returned to our vehicle outside the KFC without issue, her quick reaction force of Brett and Aaron luckily not needed. She’d entered the car and said, “You were right. That location is not suitable for assault. I could feel the energy all around me. It’s a red zone.”
I chuckled, took the pentest device, and said, “Did you get anything from the walk we could use? I mean besides the Wi-Fi exploitation?”
“Yeah. I took photos of every car on the street. May come in handy.”
“Good work. Let’s go see what we have here.”
She continued, “And the stairwell leading up to the apartment has infrared surveillance cameras. One at the base, and one on the landing floor. It’s good you decided not to assault. No way up there without being seen.”
Incredulous, I said, “What? How would you know that?”
“What do you mean? I went up it.”
And that set me off: “You did what? You were supposed to just walk down the street. You penetrated the complex?”
Miffed, she looked at Jennifer, then back at me, saying, “How was I supposed to get the Wi-Fi exploits from the street? We’d be trying to sort the devices from fifteen different apartments. What’s your problem?”
I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, praying for the ability to keep me from throttling her ass. I opened them and said, “So you’re on camera now. Is that what you’re telling me? You never, ever listen to me.”
She leaned forward and, like a child exploring, she traced her finger around my face, saying, “If you had been there, you would have done the same thing, Nephilim. The mission is what matters. Why are you so upset?”
It was just one more bat-shit crazy thing with her. I glanced at Jennifer and saw her trying to hide a smirk. For the life of me, I couldn’t get her to quit using my given name, which I despised. She thought it held some deep biblical meaning, and it should have aggravated me even more, but her use of it reminded me that she’s about four beers short of a six-pack. And she was wickedly skilled.
I put the car in drive and said, “Look, Carrie, you pull that type of crap on the next mission and I’m going to go ape-shit on your ass. Just do what I ask. Nothing more, nothing less.”
She’d leaned back into her seat and crossed her arms, looking like she wanted to rip out my entrails. She spat out, “I’ll do what I must. Nothing more, nothing less.”
I started to retort, but Jennifer laid her hand on my arm, gently shaking her head. I let it go.
We went back to our hotel, plugged in the device to our Taskforce laptop, dialed into the Taskforce VPN, and let Creed go to work. We’d sat around waiting for about an hour, bouncing lighthearted banter between us.
The team we had wasn’t a real Taskforce construct, but we’d worked together enough that it might as well have been. Knuckles gave me shit about not taking the Bosnian at the gas station, and I’d turned it to Shoshana, chastising her in front of the group for penetrating the apartment complex and potentially compromising the mission, knowing I was going to get a rise out of her. Wanting the fireworks.
She surprised the hell out of me. For the first time, she didn’t take the bait.
She smiled and said, “I never knew you were such a pussy. Maybe that’s why Jennifer likes me so much.”
If there was such a thing as the entire room’s mouth dropping open, that was it. In an earlier life, when I’d tried to kill her, I had been sure she was a lesbian. And she knew it, using it now as a jab at me because of her close relationship with Jennifer. There was a pregnant moment of silence, and then Knuckles started laughing, still not believing what she’d just said.
Everyone else joined in, and I raised a finger to my brow in a tiny salute, saying, “Touché, little Jedi, touché.”
She beamed a smile at me, a little embarrassed that she’d caused the reaction, but enjoying it nonetheless. Aaron caught my eye and winked, happy that it had happened. Like me, he knew that Shoshana was a feral animal, and he was relentlessly trying to bring her out of that land, with Jennifer and I working toward that same goal. Tonight had been one more step.
The chuckles died down just as the computer had bleeped. I went to it with everyone coalescing around me. I’d clicked on and saw Creed sitting at the other end.
Whew. No Wolffe.
He said, “Good news and bad news. The good news is their security is shit. I had no trouble getting in. The bad news is there isn’t a lot to exploit. No phones, no laptops, or anything of value that I can penetrate. Not a lot connected to Wi-Fi. They know that’s bad.”