Like a knife through butter, Court passed the first and second rings of defense with ease. He’d entered the grounds of a mosque, then climbed the wall into Bianca’s gated Western Villas neighborhood via a Turkish pine, and dropped down into the paved and walled rear courtyard of a patisserie. He moved in the dark through the café tables of the closed eatery, then climbed a smaller stone lattice wall and found himself two streets over from Bianca’s home.
Just as Bianca had suggested, it was clear now to Court that security here had indeed been heightened in light of what had happened in Paris. But also as she’d guessed, it was also clear that Jamal was still here. Court could imagine no other reason for all the guns and guys.
A Toyota Hilux pickup bearing the colors and insignia of the NDF drove by with two men in the cab and two more sitting in the bed. Once they were past, Court crossed the two-laned street and entered the property of a small apartment complex, passing a lighted guard shack and the man inside it by no more than twenty-five feet.
At the rear of this property he looked down a gentle hill, through a gardened property, and to a road beyond. Halfway down the road, an NDF vehicle was parked, and at the far end sat the target location.
Medina’s Mediterranean-style home.
Court descended the hill in the dark and walked through the property, and a motion light turned on. A door opened on a second-floor balcony and a man looked out into the light.
Court gave the man a bored wave and kept walking.
The man waved back—seeing the uniform, no doubt—and closed the door behind him.
Court marched along the street for a moment, still in the dark, and was seen by a pair of teenagers holding each other while leaning against the wall of a parking garage adjacent to an apartment building. They paid him little attention and quickly returned to their intimate moment.
It occurred to Court that in many of the Middle Eastern nations he’d visited, this unmarried girl alone with this boy would find themselves in a great deal of trouble. Here in Syria, however, the nation’s liberal views protected them, even if its leadership threatened to condemn them all to death in a never-ending civil war.
He skirted the NDF men in the street by moving through another apartment building property, but this meant he found himself walking through lighted areas next to men and women still out past one a.m. on this Sunday morning. A small market was open, an outdoor café cooked sizzling meat on a grill, and he passed a tea shop with tables spilling out into the common areas of the apartment building where men and women smoked hookahs.
Court marched straight through it all, even past a pair of Syrian police officers who acknowledged him with little head bobs, but he maintained his visage of authority, his air of entitlement to be exactly where he was, doing exactly what he was doing.
No one gave him a second glance, and no one thought of him after he passed.
A minute later he moved back into the dark, through the private gardens next door to Medina’s walled home. His eyes scanned for lights, guards, motion detectors, homeowners, and dogs, and when a Syrian police car rolled to a stop next to the NDF vehicle, Court just held his position against the wall in the forecourt of the residence until he satisfied himself that the arrival of the cops did not mean he’d been sighted. He moved out again and soon reached the wall that adjoined Bianca’s rear courtyard.
He pulled himself up onto the eight-foot-high masonry partition. Once he was settled, he peeked over the edge of the wall in an attempt to spot the roving guard. It was too dark to make out the man, but he could see a flashlight moving around the northern wing of the home towards the front of the grounds. He hoisted himself quickly over and then hung down, dropped silently onto the tiles along the wall, and began moving up towards the house. He avoided pathway lighting by stepping into garden beds, and soon he passed the tiled pool and arrived at a cluster of patio furniture protected just under the second-floor balcony that ran the length of the base of the U-shaped house. Court moved between a sofa and a large chair and knelt down, placing his back to a wall that ran perpendicular to three sets of doors to the home.
A large set of glass double doors was in the middle, covered on the inside with curtains, and next to the doors on the outside wall was a keypad for the alarm system. Twenty feet to the left of the double doors was a single sliding glass door. Court imagined it would lead to a downstairs bedroom. And on the far right, fifty feet from where Court knelt, was a single wooden door. This might have led to the kitchen or perhaps to a garden room.
He saw no movement through any of the windows, but he was sure there were armed men inside. Bianca had explained to him that the guards he’d find on the property were a Ba’ath Party security unit made up of only Alawis. Ahmed pulled from this unit to staff his presidential protection detail, so it was no surprise he used other members as his clandestine security force to look over the woman he saw as the future first lady. And since they were Alawi, they would not hold any sectorial or familial allegiance to Shakira Azzam, a Sunni Muslim.
Whoever was in the house right now, Court knew they would have more skill than the NDF men he’d waltzed past to get there. And since he could see the red light on the alarm keypad by the door, he also knew the three exterior doors at the rear of the home would all be alarmed and, most likely, locked.
Getting inside the house itself was always going to be one of the trickier parts of his operation. Coming here tonight, without the benefit of the tools he’d hoped to acquire for a successful break-in, meant he had to be flexible about his points of entry, and he’d have to be as patient as he could be, while still keeping in account the fact that he wanted to be at the Jordanian border before the sun came up in six hours.
He had the alarm code that Bianca had given him, but he had no way of knowing if it had been changed since she’d been kidnapped, and the last thing he wanted to do was key in a string of numbers that would set alarms squealing all over the grounds.
He knew he could grab one of the outside guards and get the number from him, but he was hoping to avoid any chance of detection as long as possible. He moved to the sliding glass door, careful to keep from being seen through the glass by anyone in the room. As he got to the wall next to it, he peered around the side and saw it was, indeed, a bedroom, but there was no one inside.
He didn’t try the door; even if it had been unlocked, the home alarm system was engaged, so opening it was the last thing he wanted to do. Instead he looked inside at the track the door would travel along to open, checking it for any secondary bracing or locking system. He saw nothing and decided this door would be his entry point when the time was right.
For now he retreated a few feet on the patio, tucked himself into the darkest corner of the grounds near the door, and waited, his eyes on the alarm keypad by the double doors, twenty-five feet away. He was hoping a roving guard might switch positions with a static man inside, a man inside might step out to check on his mates, or a person in the house would decide they needed some fresh air. In any of these cases someone would have to turn off the alarm, and Court told himself he’d be ready.
Court couldn’t wait all night for good luck, but he told himself he’d give it an hour before tackling the guy with a flashlight and beating the alarm code out of him.
Brute force often wasn’t the best option, but sometimes it was the only option.
CHAPTER 42