The Operative (33 page)

‘You know something, John Stratton? If there was anyone who could do that for me it would be you.’

They drew an inch closer together, brushed shoulders and carried on walking, enjoying each other’s company. But in the back of Stratton’s mind he was aware of a certain vulnerability that affection for a woman exposed him to. The feeling of endangerment had been bad enough where Josh was concerned but it was worse now. The uneasy premonition of earlier that morning was suddenly stronger than ever.

Valon Duka sat in the back of his nondescript blue van, watching Stratton and Vicky through a pair of binoculars from two hundred metres down the street. He had watched the child-protection
centre for several hours that morning as instructed by Cano before the man who matched the description he’d been given had arrived on foot.

Duka was a surveillance expert, having learned his trade while serving ten years in the Sigurimi, the communist Albanian secret police. Now he worked for the syndicate both as an instructor and an operative on the higher-priority tasks. He was in his fifties, smoked close to three packs of cigarettes a day and drank vodka heavily at night. But when it came to his job he was a devoted professional.

Duka’s techniques were old-school, using little in the way of sophisticated modern technology beyond high-powered optics and, occasionally, listening devices. His stocks-in-trade were patience and thoroughness and his speciality was tailing. He was famous for achieving by himself what others using entire teams could not. His motto was ‘Distance, distance, distance’ and he preached endlessly to his students that the further one could get from one’s target without losing contact the better. But the further back one kept the more easily one lost sight of one’s prey. That was where Duka’s particular genius lay: it was what separated him from others in his profession.

Duka had the uncanny ability to ‘feel’ where an out-of-sight target had gone, as well as the confidence and patience to persist even when it appeared to everyone else that he had made the wrong choice. His comrades back in the Sigurimi used to say that he could see through walls. When asked how he did it he said he could not explain, describing it as lucky, though in truth he did not know if that was so. It was an extra sense, like the sense of knowing when you are being watched.

The target this day had been easy enough though Duka could feel that the man had a kind of natural awareness that would not be obvious to an ordinary watcher. It served as a warning to Duka to be doubly cautious with him. But under these circumstances,
even if the target had had no doubt that he was being followed Duka would have been very difficult to detect. The city was busy but not too busy, and American towns were the easiest of all to conduct surveillance in because nearly all of them were designed on the Roman grid system with all roads, or most at least, straight and heading north-south or east-west. This meant that the target did not need always to be followed directly and could be tailed along parallel routes. Two adults and two children together made it easier.

The move back from the park to the child-protection centre was even simpler since it quickly became obvious to Duka that the man and his companions were returning to the start location. He moved ahead of them along a parallel street and was already watching the centre from four blocks away before they arrived. After the man had left the woman and children where he had met them it was easy to keep him in sight while he walked down the street looking for a taxi. After that it was a straight run to the beach while keeping half a dozen vehicles between them. The final task was to house him and then watch the location for some time to establish it was indeed the target’s home.

Duka knew nothing about the man he was following nor did he care. His mission that day was to obtain an address for the target and nothing else. He watched his man enter the building and a few minutes later saw a figure on the fourth floor heading along a corridor. He did not need to identify the apartment number. That would have been an unwise move during the first tailing of a new target and besides, Duka knew how Cano operated. As long as he had the building pinpointed there were many ways of finding out what else he needed to know.

As the sun set beyond the ocean, Duka left his position leaning against the rails that lined the cliffs of the Santa Monica park opposite the pink towers. He walked to a small car park across the road where he had left his van. Once inside the vehicle he
called Cano to give him the coded details of the day. Then he started the engine, pulled out into the traffic and headed for that first shot of fermented grain that would be waiting for him in his favourite watering hole downtown.

Hobart was sitting back in his office chair, having read the last of his emails for that day. He was thinking about the Leka-Ardian killings as he had done pretty much continuously since hearing Phil’s forensic revel ations.

The main problem that Hobart was having was his inability to decide where to begin searching for clues to the identity of those behind the murders. Phil had given him a list of probable users of the explosive material, with NSA organisations at the top – an enormous investigative task on its own. Then there were the CIA, the DIA, several other intel ligence groups that had anti-terrorist units, and half a dozen or so special forces groups that also used the stuff. Add to that the red tape he would have to wade through just to
talk
to any of those highly confidential, secret and top-secret organisations and the task became painful even to contemplate: Hobart would not be able to delegate much of the liaison work to his assistant due to the seriousness of the matter.

And then, of course, whoever the guilty party was could hogtie any investigation with an arsenal of delaying devices, pleading national security and the like. Frankly, the odds against finding something and then being able to prove it were incalculable. What Hobart needed was a big fat clue to fall right out of the sky and land on his desk. Since he didn’t believe in miracles he was pretty stumped.

Hobart got to his feet and looked out over the city as the last light faded. He hated this time of day. As if the stress of the job
wasn’t enough, he had to leave the office and join that mess of slow-moving traffic for at least an hour before he could pull out of it and into his quiet little backstreet in Van Nuys in the valley. If he was a drinking man he would wait out the worst of the traffic in one of the many bars up the street that would be filled with like-minded people at that time of day. But he wasn’t.

A buzzer sounded and a voice came over a small intercom beside Hobart’s computer monitor. ‘Sir?’ It was Hendrickson.

Hobart turned back to his desk and pushed a button on the intercom. ‘Yes.’

‘Do you have a minute to come look at something?’

‘What’s it about?’

‘What you asked me to do, sir. I found something that doesn’t fit.’

Hobart didn’t reply. He walked out of his office, down the corridor, and into the agent pool a couple of doors away.

‘What is it?’ Hobart said as he stopped beside Hendrickson’s desk by the window. Hendrickson was staring at his computer monitor. He sat up straight and started tapping on the keyboard, bringing up several windows.

‘Well, sir. I’ve been going over Leka Bufi and Ardian Cano’s careers and, well, there’s really nothing—’

‘You know I hate long introductions, Hendrickson. You’re a talented researcher, which is why you work for me. But can you edit it a little.’

‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. The most recent incident that connects the two is the Sally Penton murder – which we believe was coincidence, a wrong-place-wrong-time scenario. But since we’re looking for the
un
obvi ous … Turns out her husband was British special forces. Our people in London were pretty helpful with information about him and sent me this one page.’

Something stirred in Hobart and he leaned on the desk to look at Jack Penton’s photograph on the monitor. He had not briefed
Hendrickson on Phil’s forensics report yet and so the mention of special forces had hooked him.

‘I thought I was onto something until I found out that he died on active service in Iraq nearly a month ago. I continued digging through his wife’s – widow’s – file and noticed that she made a phone call on her cellphone just before she died. It was to a UK cellphone in Austria – a man called John Stratton. I went back to my people in London and they just got back to me. All access to Stratton is denied. When they enquired further they were directed to the Brit Ministry of Defence where they ran into a wall. He’s SIS, sir. The British Secret Intelligence Service.’

Hobart pondered the information for a moment until he could mentally taste it. ‘Get London to push harder. At least find out where he is.’

‘He’s here, sir. Or at least he was. He arrived in town the day after Sally Penton was killed.’

Hobart stood up and exhaled softly. He knew better than to jump to conclusions but despite the rule of never pinning the crime on the first person whom the hat fits something deep inside him was shouting that this was his man. Hobart’s immediate feeling was relief that at least it wasn’t an American outfit behind the killings. Suddenly it didn’t seem like such a serious matter. It was bad in many ways – a Brit SIS operative carrying out a personal revenge operation on US soil – but it wasn’t as big a deal as it had seemed that morning. He was hoping that the Brit was guilty and that it was not too good to be true.

‘Okay,’ Hobart said, getting down to business and sounding more like his old self than he had for a long time. ‘Airports, car-hire companies, hotels, credit cards and cash machines. Let’s find out if he’s still in this country. And if he is, let’s haul him in.’

Hobart then thought about something that Phil had said to him which now impressed him with its approp riateness. ‘A long elevator ride underground,’ he said softly.

‘What was that, sir?’ his assistant asked.

‘Good work, Hendrickson. You’ve earned your weekend off.’

Hendrickson wanted to say something sarcastic but accepted the compliment with a smile. ‘Do you want me to get onto it now, sir?’

‘No. Give it to Gomez. You get on home.’

Hobart walked out of the office and back along the corridor to pick up his jacket and head home. He was feeling altogether better about things and the drive might not be so stressful after all. As he stepped into the office another thought gave him pause. He had planned to visit Skender in the morning to discuss a few things and wondered if he should warn him that there was an outside chance the person who had targeted Leka and Ardian might want revenge against him too. The possibility was a long shot since Skender had had nothing to do with the woman’s death but Hobart’s job was about covering every angle. On the other hand, he couldn’t help smiling at the thought of this Stratton guy bumping off Skender. But, much as he hated the Albanian, at the end of the day he had a job to do and if it meant keeping that piece of scum alive then so be it. He would get across to Skender’s office first thing in the morning.

As Hobart pulled his jacket on a couple more things suddenly niggled him. First, where had this Brit got the explosives from? He couldn’t have known he was going to avenge Sally Penton’s murder before he arrived in LA since he didn’t know the details of her death. That meant he’d got the explosives while in the US. Second, where had he got the information about Leka and Ardian since the cops hadn’t given it to him? If this Stratton guy was SIS he was well connected and the answers to both questions could well point in some intriguing directions. Stratton had to have a relationship with someone in US intelligence or the military. That could be interesting.

Hobart was in the doorway of his office when yet another
thought stopped him in his tracks. If he was going to warn Skender he should do it sooner rather than later.

He went back to his desk, flicked through a Rolodex and dialled a number on his phone. A second later it picked up. ‘Is Skender there?’ Hobart said.

‘Who is this, please?’ a female voice asked.

‘Hobart. FBI.’

‘One minute, please.’

Hobart looked out of his window while he waited with the phone to his ear. The traffic had not abated in the slightest.

‘I’m afraid Mr Skender is busy at the moment,’ the female voice said.

‘Is that right,’ Hobart said and put the phone down. Everything about the Albanian annoyed Hobart at the best of times but having him ignore a call from the Bureau made the FBI man’s blood pressure rise.

He walked into the corridor, slamming the door of his office behind him. Five minutes later he was driving out of the car park, through the backstreets and towards Culver City. Traffic was heavy even on the smaller side streets but half an hour later Hobart arrived outside Skender’s new building. It was floodlit so that workers could carry on throughout the night. He walked past the sentry box, ignoring calls from the perplexed security guard to show him some ID, and strode across the marble concourse and in through the entrance.

Cano was in the lobby, talking with a couple of his apes, as Hobart walked in followed by the security guard.

‘Take me up to your boss,’ Hobart ordered Cano.

‘He just walked right on in, Mr Vleshek,’ the security guard whined. ‘Wouldn’t show me no ID or nothin’.’

‘Go back to your gate,’ Cano said to the security guard, his stare fixed contemptuously on Hobart. ‘Mr Skender expecting you?’