4
The rain had stopped, and there were even a few stars pushing their way through the breaks in the cloud.
I made my way past the opera house, taking the same route as earlier. It was my job to clear the area from the direction of the hotel; Charlie was doing the same from the other side of the Primorski.
The streets and pavements were still busy, even half an hour before midnight. Most of the shop lights were on, and McD’s was heaving. I’d hoped Tbilisi wasn’t a city for late-night people so our life would be easier, but no such luck.
I’d left the hotel at about 8.30, after asking the concierge for a couple of suggestions for places to eat. It sounded perfectly normal, as the hotel was jammed with the Gore-Tex version of the UN. The BP Georgia conference had ended and the restaurant and bar boasted even more European languages than polo shirts.
Not that I was in any position to take the piss. Charlie had been in charge of buying us both some oilman kit to change into for the flight. We’d be getting wet and shitty later on, trying to make entry, so would need to smarten up a bit before we exited the country. I had a rather fetching blue sweatshirt with matching Rohan trousers and a slightly padded khaki jacket to come home to. With that on tomorrow, I should be close to invisible.
I had checked that the screechy American had left Prospero Books, the English bookshop, café and internet place, and went and logged on with a hot chocolate and sticky bun. It seemed to be a general meeting place for Brit and US expats working on the pipeline, and at their respective embassies. Or it might just have been the only joint around that had its own generator, so when the power failed they could stay online.
My first big question for Google was Baz’s date of birth. With luck there’d be a list of Georgian politicians somewhere, with personal information; whatever, I’d just get in among the web and find it.
One approach to cracking the combination of a safe is to crack the psychology of the owner. Surprisingly often, combination locks are left on their factory settings – usually 100, 50, 100. I wasn’t too up on eastern bloc defaults, but Charlie would be.
If you bin the default and choose a new combination, chances are you’ll spend the whole time flapping in case you don’t remember it; it’s the same as it is with PIN numbers. So people tend to use numbers they know, like their birthday, car registration or phone. If they choose random numbers, they are almost certain to write them down somewhere. An address book is usually a good place to start looking.
It was easier than I could have hoped. The Georgian government had a website, and they published personal details. Baz was only forty-five; he was born on 22 October 1959. He must have had a hard life, though; his picture showed a balding man with a few wisps of grey hair, skinny as a rake. He could have done with a few of the sticky buns I was getting down my neck.
The small sign above every PC kindly reminded users that they must not erase their history. Maybe the shop had to hand a printout to the police every twenty-four hours, or perhaps they checked it after every user. Trying to cover up my history as comprehensively as possible, I wiped it clean then had a quick look at today’s helping of doom and gloom on CNN’s website.
Two junctions past McD’s, I took the left and headed uphill towards Barnov. The river was behind me, the big telecoms mast up to my half-left, its warning lights blinking red. The ambient glow from the main drag faded as I moved further into the residential area, and nothing much took its place apart from what spilled from behind curtains and the occasional car headlamp. Up here the street lighting wasn’t just poor, as it was around the target; it was non-existent.
My cell vibrated in my jeans pocket as a blue-and-white cruised downhill. I pulled it out and hit green.
‘All clear my side, and the obvious is pretty busy.’ He had cleared the road that paralleled the target street, leading to the obvious, the Primorski club, checking there hadn’t been a murder or anything that might persuade the blue-and-whites to pile in and block off the street. He’d said he wanted to be there fifteen minutes before me; team leader and all that. It wasn’t my place to argue; he was the mechanic; I was the oily rag.
Charlie was carrying all the MOE kit in the satchel, over his shoulders. All he needed to complete the mature student look was a roll-up and a woolly hat. To help me blend in, I’d bought myself a black Tbilisi Dynamo basketball cap. It also covered the black ski mask that was folded on top of my head, just in case we f*cked up and kicked off any of the CCTV cameras we could see, or any that we couldn’t. So confident was he that I was going to stay, Charlie had bought it for me before I’d even got there.
I started to feel the trickle of sweat down my back once more as I made my final checks. I ran through my jeans pockets, just in case I’d inadvertently kept some loose change since leaving the bookshop, and made sure my clear rubber gloves were still there. It wasn’t as if they were going to jump ship on their own, but it made me feel better to check again that they had-n’t. Check and test, check and test; that was what this game was all about.
I had the gloves but no change; the charity box in the bookshop had done well out of my tradecraft skills. Everything else was in the room safe, and my entry card was shoved behind the toilet next to the hotel’s restaurant. Going on a job sterile was something that always felt uncomfortable to me. Not having my passport meant not having a means of escape. But if we got caught, we lost our passports and they knew who we were. This way, if we got caught and escaped, we still had a chance of making it out of the country. I also had $400 in cash rolled up in my jeans pocket. Not for any particular reason, it just made me feel a little better.
I made sure the mini-Maglite was in my bomber jacket’s left pocket. If I tested it any more, I’d run the battery flat. The heavy steel CO2 canister from one of the fire extinguishers was secure in my right. It was about nine inches long and as effective a truncheon as I could wish for.
Charlie had the other one I’d extracted from the pair of fire extinguishers I’d borrowed from the top floor of the Marriott. They were our make-like-burglars kit. If we did get compromised, the ‘actions on’ would be the same as we employed over the water: fight our way out and nick something, maybe even mug the person who compromised us.
I had a final look at my boot soles for stones, and after a quick jump up and down to check for noise and to make sure the canister wasn’t going to fall out, I was ready. I just wanted to get this over and done with and start listening to flight attendants with Australian accents as soon as possible.