One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [15]
“Roger. Break—break. Knuckles, this is Pike. Hedgehog’s headed home. You have execute authority.”
“Roger all. About time.”
Muslim names are always long, drawn-out, impossible-to-say things. Being the Ugly Americans, we usually gave a nickname to whoever we were tracking just to clean things up. Sometimes it’s simply his initials, as in UBL for Usama bin Laden, or AMZ for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Other times, it’s because the guy reminds us of someone. We had taken to calling Azzam the “Hedgehog” due to his remarkable resemblance to the porn star Ron Jeremy.
Azzam was currently conducting a complicated Internet dance of challenge and counterchallenge with the Chechen who was providing the radiological material to ensure that each was who he said he was, and that neither was the enemy. The Chechen himself had entered Georgia through the contested Pankisi Gorge, with onward travel into Tbilisi. Intelligence indicators showed they were planning on conducting the transaction no earlier than a week from now, which ordinarily would have given me plenty of time to plan a detailed operation.
Unfortunately, the Georgian interior police, with the help of a few choice pieces of intelligence from the United States, were set to arrest the Chechen tonight. This forced us to take down Azzam as well, as he would flee once he got word that the Chechen had been captured. You’d think we could just tell the Georgians to hold off, but the truth was that, while Georgia was a staunch ally of the United States, my team was inside the country without their knowledge. The Georgians had no idea about Azzam, and I’d just as soon keep it that way. Let them have the Chechen. Azzam would lead to much bigger fish.
The patio I was on sat at an intersection, giving me a commanding view down three of the four streets in front of it. Azzam should be walking toward my café, moving straight at me. It was still fairly early in the night, but the streets were already starting to pick up with partygoers hitting the bars and nightlife.
A rowdy group exited the Irish pub down the block, obviously already drunk. As soon as they cleared the sidewalk and crossed the street, I saw Azzam. I looked away. Call me superstitious, but from past experience, I’m positive that staring at someone somehow causes them to know you’re there.
“Knuckles. I’ve got him. He’s on schedule. No deviation.”
“Roger.”
Over the past four days we had developed a pattern of life on Azzam, and determined that the best time to snatch him was after his dinner meal, before he got back to his hotel. Each night, Azzam had eaten in the same restaurant, then walked the half mile back to the small, local inn he had found. He stayed on main thoroughfares through most of his route but took one shortcut down a narrow, one-lane road in order to avoid walking the extra four hundred meters the main road would have forced on him. This was where we intended to take him down.
I continued to sip my coffee like all the folks around me, without staring at the pedestrians to my front. I caught a flash of light out of the corner of my eye. Looking back to Rustaveli Street, the main four-lane thoroughfare that ran through Tbilisi, I saw a police car pull up on the opposite side, lights flashing.
Shit. That’s going to cause a deviation.
10
It had been two days since the phone call with the robotic-sounding man telling Heather that Pike would be unavailable to come home this weekend. He had been unfailingly