Full Black - Brad Thor [116]
Parking around the corner from the house he was going to occupy, he popped his trunk and removed a heavy backpack. Closing the lid, he locked the car and got ready for the hardest part of his entry. He was going to approach the foreclosed property from behind, but to do so he was going to have to cut through four backyards. He prayed none of the homes had dogs.
Slinging the pack over his shoulders, he stepped onto the sidewalk and cut across the lawn of the first house.
There were motion lights near the garage, so he chose to go around the other side. At the gate to the backyard, he stopped and readied his Taser. The last thing he wanted to do was to Tase some poor dog that was just doing its job and protecting its territory, but there was no other way for him to get where he needed to go undetected.
After looking over the fence for any telltale signs of animals, he quietly rattled the gate and waited. Nothing happened. Lifting the latch, he pushed the gate partway open and slipped into the yard. He stayed away from the house, hugging the property line, and moved quickly.
In the far corner, he crouched low, scratched at the fence, and waited. When no dog came to investigate, he boosted himself up and over. He repeated the process two more times until he reached the final fence separating him from the foreclosed property. Fortunately, he hadn’t encountered any dogs.
Leaping the final fence, he landed in a backyard untended and overgrown with weeds. He moved rapidly to the rear of the house and peered through a kitchen window. All of the appliances were gone and there was garbage strewn across the floor. At the back door, he removed a lock-pick gun and a thin, spring steel tensioning wrench.
Sliding the tensioning wrench into the lock, he applied pressure and then inserted the pick gun. As he clicked the gun, the pick struck the pins inside the lock and knocked them upward. With each click, he applied a little more pressure to the wrench, causing the plug to catch the top pins. Seconds later, the door was unlocked and Harvath slipped inside.
He did a quick sweep of the first floor. Unoccupied homes that had gone into foreclosure had become frequent targets of squatters.
Looking around, he saw that the house had been absolutely trashed. There were large holes punched through the walls, most of the fixtures had been stripped out, and it looked as if even the copper pipes had been taken.
Once he was confident that the first floor was clean, he retraced his steps and set up a battery-powered MSensor wireless perimeter security system. If anyone else entered the house, he’d be alerted instantly.
Moving back to the stairs, he headed up to the second floor. There was a small room above the garage that promised to provide the best view of Sarhan’s.
The upstairs was in an even worse state of disrepair than the first floor. As Harvath quickly checked out each room to make sure it was unoccupied, he marveled at the damage. He couldn’t begin to understand the mind of someone who would strip a house bare and vandalize it so totally on his way out. It was just something he could never picture himself doing.
At the end of the hall, he found the room he was looking for and stepped inside. It wasn’t any better than the other rooms on that floor, but it wasn’t any worse, and compared to a lot of the hides he had holed up in around the world to do surveillance, this one was pretty nice. It wasn’t the Ritz, but there were no bugs and no snakes. Plus, he had a roof over his head. All things considered, he had it pretty good.
Removing the clean cell phone he had brought with him, he texted a quick message back to Nicholas and the Old Man: I’m in.
He then took a small headlamp from his pack, affixed a red filter, and slipped it on. The lamp provided just enough light to see by, but not enough to be noticed by anyone from outside.
Unpacking his equipment, he laid it all out methodically on the floor. He had brought everything he thought he might need that would fit in his pack. In addition to the perimeter