Act of Treason

7

LIMASSOL, CYPRUS

R app was careful to stand back from the window. He looked through the telephoto lens and adjusted the focus. A second man entered the frame. Rapp’s right index finger pressed the trigger halfway down, and the digital camera automatically adjusted the focus. He pressed the button all the way down and snapped off two quick images. With a deep exhale he lowered the camera, but kept his eyes on the street.

A frown creased his brow and he said, “Who the f*ck are these guys?”
He’d been asking himself that question since mid-afternoon, and he wasn’t any closer to an answer. The photos had been sent back to Marcus Dumond at Langley so he could run them through the facial recognition system, but so far they’d come up with nothing. The system worked well when you could narrow the parameters a bit, but Rapp didn’t have a clue where these guys came from or for whom they worked. Rapp told Dumond to start with the assumption that they were local cops, so the cyber tech hacked into the Limassol Police Department database. Dumond ran through the personnel files and came up with nothing. Then it was on to the national police, and after that the Hellenic National Intelligence Service. Again they came up with nothing.
Rapp had spent time in Cyprus before. Most of it in Nicosia, the capital of the Greek side of the island. The Northeastern side was controlled by the Turks. Geographically, Cyprus had occupied a position of great strategic importance throughout history. It dominated the eastern end of the Mediterranean. For thousands of years the island had been fought over due to its value in controlling the sea-lanes between Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. The Phoenicians, Assyrians, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, Romans, Arabs, the Frankish Lusignan dynasty, Venetians, Ottoman Turks, and many lesser-known countries had all controlled the island at one point or another throughout recorded history. Because of its significance to the trade routes, the island had also long been favored by outlaws. Real pirates and slave traders and their modern day cousins; narco traffickers, mafiosi, and now terrorists. After 9/11 it was discovered that Cyprus was one of Osama bin Laden’s favored banking venues. The island was famous for its seedy underbelly, which only deepened the mystery of who these guys might be.
The only thing Rapp did know for sure was that he had spotted three of them. To do really good surveillance you needed bodies and gadgets. Rapp was in short supply of both at the moment. He’d sent Brooks to pick up Coleman and his men from the airport. He could have asked Kennedy to send some bodies from the embassy in Nicosia, but there was a real downside to going that route. It was likely the ambassador would end up catching wind that the CIA was running an operation in his backyard, which would lead to him throwing a shit fit and calling the State Department, and then the whole thing was likely to spin out of control. The key with these operations was to move slow and stay off everyone’s radar screen if at all possible.
On the gadget front, Rapp wished he’d at least brought along a parabolic mike so he could hear what these guys were saying to each other. Since they were flying commercial, Rapp had made the decision not to load himself and Brooks down with surveillance kits. It was hard enough to sneak a gun, a silencer, and two extra clips of ammunition into a country. The electronic listening devices, scopes, cameras, scanners, and parabolic mikes took up a lot of room and raised a lot of eyebrows. It simply wasn’t the type of stuff newlyweds brought on their honeymoon. Coleman and his boys were in charge of transferring that stuff and they were doing it under the guise of a director doing location scouts for a film. They had business cards with the name of a development company, an address in Beverly Hills, and a phone number with a 310 area code that was answered by a woman in Langley, Virginia.
The sun was setting over the Eastern Mediterranean. There was maybe another ten minutes of sunlight at best. In this part of old town the streets were narrow and winding, so the shadows were already falling across large areas of the street and sidewalk cafés below. The hotel was four stories high and Rapp was on the top floor. The contact in Istanbul had said the man they were looking for used a front company called Aid Logistics Inc, the office of which was located on the third story of the stone building directly across the street. The first floor was the café and the second floor was a real estate company. There was no alley behind the building so the only way in was through the front door of the café and then up the stairs to the right. Rapp knew this because he’d visited the real estate office earlier in the afternoon and walked to the landing between the second and third floors before coming back down.
Rapp watched an old man come out of the café located below Aid Logistics Inc and the real estate office. As best Rapp could figure, this guy was the owner. He wore a white apron and doled out a lot of orders to the wait staff. The man walked down the sidewalk to where the sedan was parked and began talking with the two occupants. This was the first time Rapp had seen the old man converse with these guys.
Stakeouts all had their own vibe. Their own rhythm. Most of them were literally as boring as watching paint dry. Sometimes the subject knew he was being watched and he tried to lull you to sleep so he could make his move. That’s what the real pros did. You could watch them all day and have no idea that they’d done two dead drops and a pickup. It was like they had eyes in the back of their heads. Which was partially true. Like Wayne Gretzky, gifted hockey players had a bird’s-eye image in their mind of where everyone was on the ice at all times. The great spies had the same ability, but in an infinitely more complex and dangerous game. They remembered faces and shoes and pants. Things that were hard to change. They ignored hats, glasses, jackets, and facial hair. Things that were easy to change. They cataloged each face that passed them and anticipated not just the actions of those in front of them, but those behind them. Even people they couldn’t see.
Very few criminals were actually that good. Most had no idea they were being watched, but more importantly, they knew on some level they were doing something illegal. And in many of these countries they were doing something that could result in having their head separated from the rest of their body. Under this type of pressure, it was next to impossible to stay relaxed and normal as you prepared to do whatever it was that might get you killed. Whether it was making a dead drop, meeting a contact, or preparing to grab someone, it didn’t matter. People’s body language changed. Their pace quickened and their moves became more rushed and sporadic.
Rapp had noticed the pace of things below begin to pick up over the last hour or so. He was watching the body language of the café owner and the other man standing next to the car. He was trying to read their lips, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. It did look like they were speaking English, though, which Rapp found interesting.
Rapp’s mobile phone started ringing. It was lying on the bed, but he didn’t bother to leave the window. He had a tiny Motorola wireless earpiece stuck in his right ear. With his longer hair it was nearly impossible to detect the device, which picked up his voice through vibration in the ear canal. Rapp tapped the end of the device and asked, “What’s up?”
“We just landed.”
It was Scott Coleman. Rapp wanted to ask him what in the hell had taken so long, but he didn’t bother. “Brooks rented a blue minivan. She’s waiting at the curb.”
“We’re stuck on the tarmac.”
“What do you mean stuck?”
“There’s another plane at our gate. We can’t pull up to the gate until it leaves, and then we have to wait for our luggage.”
Rapp watched the big man standing next to the car put his arm around the older man in the apron. As the big guy moved to put something in the shirt pocket of the old guy, Rapp pressed the trigger on the camera and held it all the way down. The camera clicked off six photos in quick succession. The big man then patted the café owner on the cheek several times before releasing him.
Rapp frowned as he watched the older man walk back into the café. He looked down at the viewing screen on the back of the camera and toggled back a few frames. He then increased the zoom until he could see what the man had placed in the owner’s pocket. It was cash. Cops, for the most part, didn’t go around stuffing cash in people’s pockets. Especially in this part of the world, where they could throw someone in jail for a week by simply making up a reason.
“Did you hear me?” asked Coleman.
“Yeah.” Rapp looked at the horizon. Nightfall was fast approaching and when the darkness came something was going to happen. “Have one of your guys wait for the luggage. I need you to get your ass here ASAP.”