Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [162]
Embling found a parking space near Lady Reading Hospital, and they got out and walked west into the Old City. The streets of the cantonment buzzed with activity: bodies, moving elbow to elbow, darted in and out of alleys and beneath canvas awnings; on overhanging balconies, children peeked curiously through wrought-iron bars. The scent of roasted meat and strong tobacco filled the air, along with an overlapping babble of voices speaking in Urdu, Punjabi, and Pashto.
After a few minutes walking, they entered a large square. “Chowk Yadgaar,” Embling announced. “All the drop-offs are within a half-mile of the square.”
“Probably chose it for the crowds,” Chavez said. “Hard to be seen, easy to get lost.”
“Another astute observation, young Domingo,” Embling said.
“I have my days.”
Clark said, “Let’s split up and check ’em out. Meet back here in an hour.” They decided who would take which, then parted company.
They regrouped and compared notes. Two of the spots—one in a small courtyard between the jeweler’s bazaar and the Mahabbat Khan mosque, and one in an alley near the site of the Kohati Gate—showed the faintest traces of a single chalk mark, the gold standard for dead-drop pickup signals since the Cold War. Chalk weathered well and was easily dismissed as a child’s doodling. Clark got out his map, and Embling checked the two locations. “Kohati Gate,” he said. “Easiest to surveil, and closest exit out of the cantonment.”
“Done,” Clark said.
“It’s early yet,” Embling said. “How do you chaps feel about cricket?”
46
NOT WANTING TO RISK being seen placing the pickup mark, Clark and Chavez woke well before sunrise the next morning to find Embling already up, making coffee and putting together a cooler of rations for the day. So armed, they set out for the cantonment, this time in Embling’s other car, a shabby blue 2002 Honda City, and arrived at Chowk Yadgaar fifteen minutes later, where they split up in the predawn gloom—Clark and Chavez taking a walk to refamiliarize themselves with the area and to test the new earpiece/mic/push-to-talk portable radios with which Gavin Biery had equipped them; Embling surveying the Kohati Gate location and placing their mark. Forty minutes later, they met back at Chowk Yadgaar.
“Bear in mind,” Embling said, “there’s a police station a couple hundred yards down the square. If you’re stopped—” He paused and laughed. “Listen to me prattling on. I imagine you two have done this sort of thing before.”
“Once or twice,” Clark said. Or a hundred. Working dead drops wasn’t all that common a task, but the universal surveillance/ countersurveillance methods still applied. As they were waiting for their quarry rather than already tailing him, boredom would be their most potent enemy. Get bored, lose focus, miss something. In the back of Clark’s mind was a ticking clock; how long did they stay in Peshawar waiting for someone to service the drops before deciding the network was dead?
“Right, then,” Nigel said. “I’m going to move the car closer to Kohati Gate. I’ll be about with my mobile.”
As the day’s first vendors arrived to lift their awnings and put out their kiosks and carts, Chavez took up the first shift. “In position,” he radioed.
“Roger,” Clark replied into his collar mic. “Let me know when you see Nigel pass by.”
Ten minutes passed. “Got him. Just passed Kohati Gate. Parking now.”
Now we wait, Clark thought.
As the Old City came to life and the tourists and locals began streaming in, Clark, Chavez, and Embling rotated through the Kohati Gate area, smoothly and without so much as a glance, transferring surveillance to the next man, who did his best to loiter without making it obvious: stopping at nearby kiosks to haggle with the owners over a bead necklace or carved wooden camel, taking pictures of the architecture, and chatting with the occasional local who was interested in where he was from and what had brought him to