42
Jennifer sat on the bed, toweling her wet hair, and said, “I hate this part. The waiting. All I ever do is start thinking of what can go wrong.”
“That’s a good thing. As long as it doesn’t start to paralyze you.”
“You think Dunkin’s information is correct? We’re basing a lot on it.”
“Well, not that much. We did the recce, and it matched his information.”
It was closing in on midnight, and I’d just kicked out Clifford Delmonty, aka Dunkin, the one bit of Taskforce help Kurt managed to break free to help us.
A five-foot-eight-inch computer geek, at his hiring board for the Taskforce he’d made an impossible claim that he could dunk a basketball. He thought we were looking for some superhuman physical specimen and figured nobody would test him on his claim. Since we were looking for a guy who could work miracles with electronic devices, not play point guard, we hired him. Then made him put his money where his mouth was.
He’d failed miserably and figured he was fired on his first day. We kept him, but he now wore the callsign Dunkin as a reminder that it doesn’t pay to exaggerate. The Taskforce needed the ground truth. No spin. Like Robert Rogers’s famous dictum from the original Ranger unit in the French and Indian War, “You can lie all you please when you tell other folks about the Rangers, but don’t never lie to a Ranger.”
I’d expected a whole team to meet me in Brussels after finding the pendant, but the only thing that had shown up was Dunkin, with a RFID reader and other electronic gadgets. We’d done a Google search on the keycards Jennifer had taken off the Serb bodies in London, and they were for an extended-stay hotel in Brussels. Since that’s where one of the hostages had been taken, and where the body parts of the SECDEF’s son had been delivered, I’d called Kurt, convinced it would lead to Knuckles and a team meeting up with us. I was sorely mistaken. Knuckles had apparently turned up something hot and was headed to Paris, leaving me on my own.
It had been a heated conversation, and I felt bad for putting the pressure on Kurt, but I knew Kylie was with the vice president’s son, and I had proof positive that I had not only found where they’d been kept, but also a follow-on lead. He’d told me it wasn’t his call, and that the Oversight Council was frothing at the mouth for Knuckles to get to France. That’s when I’d dropped the pendant and the blood smear on him. Which, given how his hands were tied, I now wished I hadn’t. I knew he was imagining the worst about Kylie, and it hadn’t done any good to tell him. He couldn’t break a team free to help me, not with the scrutiny, which I should have recognized before I started dropping Freddy Krueger nightmares about blood splatter and stained floors.
In the end, nobody but him believed I was onto something, and he did only because of Kylie. Like a parent agonizing over a picture on a milk carton, he was willing to believe anything I told him, sucking in the leads as if any movement of mine was forward progress and not just motion.
The only good news was that the president was now read onto what I was doing. He knew I was freelancing, and while he wasn’t throwing his weight behind my efforts, it gave Kurt a little bit of cover to help out where he could.
Kurt had an entire support package on the ground in Paris, ostensibly to facilitate Knuckles’s operations, but he managed to break Dunkin free for the short train ride to Brussels.
Jennifer said, “You think we can do this clean?”
“I suppose that’ll be up to you.”
“Great. Just what I wanted to hear.”
She was lying on the bed, pillows propped up behind her. I lay down beside her, our hips touching. We both looked at the TV, the sound off because we couldn’t understand the language. I said, “You don’t want to do it, and we won’t. I’ll find another way in.”
Each dead Serb had two keycards to a hotel near the Grote Markt—or Grand Place—in the heart of Brussels. All four were embedded with an RFID chip, which meant they’d been programmed and held information. Sometimes that information was extreme, including the name, credit card information, dates of stay, and home addresses. Sometimes, it was just the room number. It all depended on the hotel, but that was where Dunkin and his electronic magic came in.
In this case, we got the name, duration of stay, and room number from each key. Two were for separate rooms. Two were for the penthouse on the top floor. I dearly wanted to see inside all of them.
Earlier in the day, Jennifer and I had gone to the hotel, called the B-Aparthotel Grand Place, to check it out. I figured the easiest thing would be to use the cards to enter each room as a patron, as if we were staying there. That plan was cut short by the hotel.
It was a luxury establishment, fulfilling a niche for rich folks looking to stay for a month or more. Situated on the back of the Brussels Grand Place, in a maze of indoor/outdoor restaurants and cafés, it had no fewer than three cameras at the entrance, and Dunkin had told us that any individual card would unlock only a keypad, where we’d have to type in a number code. Something we did not know.
On top of that, just inside the glass front door was the reception desk, which, if it were an Embassy Suites, would have been no problem, but this hotel was a boutique. The reception area was a total of about thirty feet across, and anyone penetrating the front door would have to walk by the desk.
The hotel had only six rooms to a floor, with just two on the top—both penthouses—so, with four floors, we were looking at a total of twenty patrons, and they’d all signed on for a long-term stay. That was the hotel specialty. To top it off, the “reception desk” wasn’t there to help the guests check in. It was to protect them. A beefy guy who did nothing but stare at anyone coming or going manned it, and his sole purpose was problem solving of the physical sort. He wasn’t there to get you tickets to the opera, and I knew he would recognize on sight anyone staying at the hotel.
So using the keycard as though we owned the place was out of the question. Which meant a little high adventure if we wanted to see the inside of the rooms.
Dunkin had cracked into the floor plan of the hotel on a Belgium government server. He’d failed to get into the hotel servers themselves because of an incredibly high amount of encryption, but the Belgium server had at least identified the location of each of the rooms in question. Two were on the first floor—the second floor in American standards—one facing the promenade of the covered shopping district, and one facing the street known as rue de l’écuyer. The penthouse was on the top and out of reach of anything.
We’d taken his information and gone to dinner earlier, ostensibly just a couple of American visitors, and had wandered the lanes and alleys around the hotel, seeing the problem up close. The entire area was a tourist mecca, with Grand Place only a couple of blocks away and the surrounding terrain chock-full of small eateries and stores. The only good thing was the weather. A bunch of storm clouds had settled overhead, threatening to burst open with a torrential downpour. The tourists didn’t care, but they would when the buckets of water started coming down, especially given that it was about forty degrees.
We’d circled the block on foot, getting to rue de l’écuyer and passing right in front of the hotel entrance. Walking down the street, we’d conducted a full reconnaissance, finding a parking garage underneath the hotel with about twelve spaces, along with a laundry room for the cleaning crew and what I thought was an interior stairwell, but it was locked up tight.
Throughout the garage were the ubiquitous surveillance cameras. There had been no monitor at the reception desk, so it wasn’t real-time, but I had no idea if we were now on tape. I’d done my best to stay out of their view. We’d returned to the street and I’d pulled out a neat little Taskforce gizmo we called God’s Eye.
It had been invented by a startup called Panono and originally the size of a basketball. We’d stolen the idea and miniaturized it. About the size of a softball, and surrounded with small embedded cameras, it allowed you to toss it into the air and get a panorama snapshot of the area around you. The higher you tossed it, the greater the panorama. The best part about it was that once it took the picture, a software program allowed you to take a point of view from anywhere on the image.
You could analyze everything, from any angle, like the eye of God. Or Google. Or maybe they were the same thing.
We’d started strolling like a couple seeing the sights, and the clouds had opened up, scattering the tourists. I suppose I should have shouted with joy, but we were getting soaked, which aggravated the hell out of me.
I’d waited on a break in traffic, not wanting anyone to see me toss the ball. I cowered under an awning, saw it was clear, then threw the thing in the air. After I’d caught it, we’d walked a little bit more, then repeated the procedure, trying to get a look inside the room next to the street.
We darted from awning to awning, Jennifer holding a newspaper over her head and acting just like a woman on a date. She’d actually taken her leather jacket off and balled it under an arm, saying it would get ruined. On the last awning, I said, “Some commando you are.”
She looked at me, hair dripping water and trembling from the cold. She said, “Was that you I just heard cursing? As you tried to throw the Eye from under the awning? What did that get you?”
My last toss had actually caught the edge of the canvas and ricocheted into the street, forcing me to chase it in the rain to keep it from getting run over. I held it out to her and said, “Do better?”
She snatched it out of my hand, gave me her jacket, then stood in the rain and tossed it up, waiting defiantly for it to come down. She caught it, darted back under the awning, and said, “Satisfied?”
I said, “Yeah. I was just trying to get that shirt soaked.”
She looked down, saw the damage, and punched me in the arm, now really pissed. She started to stalk off, and I tugged her sleeve, getting her to stop. I pulled off my own jacket, a Gore-Tex one designed for operations in inclement weather. I held it out. She looked at me, and I knew she was going to tell me to stuff it. Arms crossed over her chest, shirt soaked, she was going to let her anger get the better of her.
I said, “So you can keep your leather one dry.”
She glared at me, then took it. She slipped it on, then shoved her leather jacket underneath. Still piqued, she said, “We done yet?”
Knowing I was ahead, I said, “Yeah. Let’s head back through the indoor mall. Remember how to get there?”
She took off at a brisk walk, hood over her head and not looking back. I trotted to keep up, the rain pelting my face like ice cubes.