Full Black - Brad Thor [117]
He was also carrying a laptop with a filtered screen so it wouldn’t give off too much light in the darkened house. It was set up to stream the feeds back to Nicholas’s SCIF via cellular network or satellite. Harvath powered it up and was pleased to see the signal was quite good.
The home’s previous residents had destroyed everything except the window treatments. Though the ones in this room were old and soiled, Harvath was happy to have them. After turning on his monocular, he balanced it on the base of the window frame and pulled back the curtain partway.
He could see Sarhan’s home, but in addition to the privacy fence there was a tree, which blocked a significant portion of the sight line. The laser mic worked by being beamed through a window at something inside, such as a picture on a wall, that would vibrate as people spoke. Harvath could already tell they weren’t going to get any audio. And until he figured out whether it was worth the risk to get close enough to the house to plant his two remote cameras, he wasn’t going to be getting any decent video either. The only things he had a halfway decent view of were the street and Sarhan’s driveway.
Pulling back from the window, he turned off his monocular and assembled the equipment. After everything had been camouflaged and positioned in the window just the way he wanted it, he checked the image quality on his laptop and then began streaming the feeds back to Reston.
He had worked out a shift schedule with Nicholas so that there would always be a set of eyes on the house. In the morning, the little man would covertly reestablish the home’s power. They had decided to wait until daylight in case any of the lights had been left on. The last thing they wanted to do was advertise that the home was suddenly occupied.
Sliding a Cliff Bar from his pack, Harvath leaned back against the wall and tried to make himself comfortable. There was no telling how long he would be here.
CHAPTER 50
While it was Nicholas’s shift, Harvath closed his eyes and allowed himself to drift off. It was morning and he had been asleep for several hours when his cell phone began vibrating and woke him up.
He popped the earbud in, and his eyes were drawn to the laptop as he activated the call.
“Do you see what I see?” asked Nicholas from the SCIF back in Reston.
“I do now,” replied Harvath as he grabbed a pair of binoculars and crawled over to the window. A white passenger van had pulled up in front of Sarhan’s house. He read off the license plate number.
“I’m running it now.”
Harvath readjusted the laser mic and also activated a small parabolic he had pointed toward the driveway.
Nicholas had an update for him momentarily. “The van is registered to a cardboard box manufacturer in Torrance, California.”
“Throw it into the TIP program and see if it connects any dots.”
“Roger that.”
Harvath had moved to the still camera and was taking pictures of the van. It was hard to make out the driver from this angle. He appeared to be waiting for someone.
Two minutes later, the microphones picked up the sound of Sarhan’s door opening. Muted good-byes were exchanged in Arabic before two young Middle Eastern men appeared towing wheely bags.
Harvath snapped several wide shots and then got close-ups of their faces. “Let’s run these right away.”
“I’m already on it,” replied Nicholas.
They were dressed in casual business attire. It reminded him of the airport security footage of the 9/11 attacker Mohammed Atta. He suddenly had a very bad feeling about what he was seeing. “Where are you two girls going?”
The two men placed their heavy bags in the van’s cargo area and climbed inside. The driver then pulled away from the curb.
“Can you follow them in the traffic cam system?” asked Harvath.
“Yes.”
“You should ping the Old Man