One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [143]
Bakr fidgeted until he saw the owner flip the Cyrillic sign in the window of the café, signaling the start of business for the day. He threw some money on the table and rapidly crossed the street.
Two minutes later, Bakr leaned back in his chair, disappointed by the fact that Sayyidd hadn’t e-mailed him back. There was nothing to be done about it. He would just have to wait until tomorrow for the news.
He left the Internet café, walking toward his hotel at half the speed he had used to get there. Caught in his own thoughts, he failed to notice the Muslim woman from the coffee shop match his pace on the opposite side of the street.
JENNIFER LET THE TERRORIST get a hundred yards away before picking up surveillance behind him. Learning all the time, she now stayed on the other side of the street, knowing it gave her a better ability to keep him in sight without his suspecting he was being followed.
Pike had been wrong on the number of Internet cafés. There were, in fact, seven within the radius of the e-mail trace. They had driven by each one and had discarded several, one because it was located next to a police station, a few that catered solely to tourists, and those that had their interiors monitored by cameras.
The process of elimination left two cafés, although Jennifer knew they were wishing away alternatives that might, in fact, be used. Luckily, both she and Pike knew what this terrorist looked like, allowing them to split up. The window-jumper wasn’t the man that Jennifer had seen in the passport in Guatemala, which meant that she would recognize the remaining terrorist.
One location could be watched from a coffee shop situated across from the café. The other had no convenient location from which to view the entrance other than from a parked car on the same street. Not wanting to repeat what had happened in Oslo, with the terrorist recognizing him, Pike had given Jennifer the coffee shop location, buying her a quick disguise of a multicolored head scarf, a set of large, cheap sunglasses, and an ankle length peasant’s dress of the type that was ubiquitous in downtown Tuzla. She had dyed her hair black to complete the transformation, and now looked like one of a hundred Bosnian women roaming the city center.
Jennifer had been sitting in the coffee shop for only a few minutes, barely enough time to think through her surveillance plan, when a man resembling the passport photo came in. She wasn’t sure, since the guy in the passport had a beard, and this man didn’t. When he left the coffee shop and entered the Internet café, all doubt fled her mind. That’s him. She called Pike and told him. Before Pike could find her, she saw the terrorist leave. Showtime. You can do this. Not that hard. Jennifer started window-shopping across the street, keeping pace within a football field of him, all the while running through her mind what she was going to do next.
Her mission was simple: Figure out where he was staying, right down to the hotel room. And I need to be right behind him to do that. She started to close the distance before she realized her dilemma. What if he walks for the next four miles? I can’t stay right behind him. He’ll wonder what the hell I’m doing. The longer she walked, the more she wanted to close the gap. Fuck. This sounded easy on the airplane. He’s going to turn into a hotel and I’m going to lose him.
After three blocks, seeing the sidewalks beginning to swell with noontime shoppers that would give her some cover, she decided she’d pushed her luck for long enough. She crossed over, her fear of missing the opportunity now overpowering.
She picked up a position about thirty meters behind him, keeping him in sight through the crowds, but just barely. She called Pike and gave him an update, referring to the terrorist with the name she had seen in his American passport in Guatemala.
“Carlos has gone about four blocks from the café. I’m still on him. He appears to have a destination, but he’s not moving with a purpose.