True Faith and Allegiance

The team spent the next several hours preparing their operation to come. Gavin and Midas set up a digital camera and a spotting scope in the overwatch, focusing both on the balcony of Dalca’s apartment, then attached the camera to a laptop that would record digital video. Next to this they erected a laser listening device on a small tripod on the desk, facing it toward the same window. This would fire an invisible, constant beam of laser light that would strike the window, and then bounce back to a photocell in the device that would record the intensity of the light. The cell was attached through a computer to an amplifier and a headset, which would translate the varying light intensities into audible sound.

Midas and Gavin understood what the others in The Campus knew, that while the laser listening device was ingenious and useful, it did have its limitations. They could point it only at one window in the apartment across the street, the one directly in front of their overwatch, because if the beam hit a window that caused it to reflect at any angle at all it would miss the photocell that needed to receive the light.

Gavin and Midas worked on the problem for a while, trying to come up with a technical solution, but then Midas decided he would just be ready with lock picks to break into the other closets on this side of the storage room in case they needed a straight shot to one of the other windows in Dalca’s penthouse.

It was a low-tech solution, but Chavez and Midas agreed it could be implemented effectively and relatively quickly if it turned out Dalca spent time in other rooms when he got home from work.

Once the overwatch was prepped, Ding went down to the street and positioned covert cameras near the entrance to Dalca’s building. The neighborhood was nearly empty at this time of the afternoon, and his magnetic-backed wireless cams were small enough to remain undetected when attached to drainpipes or other metal piping running down buildings, even just feet away from where pedestrians passed.

* * *

While Midas, Gavin, and Ding worked the area around Dalca’s apartment, Felix and Jack drove to the office of ARTD, a couple of miles south. They walked the neighborhood, looking for any security cameras they might be able to patch into, and Jack made notes of addresses and businesses that had cams close by. He looked for places he could position his devices and he almost planted one, but there was a lot of pedestrian traffic in the neighborhood, and the last thing he wanted to do was get compromised outside the building where America’s secrets were in the process of being sold off to the Islamic State.

Instead, the two men called an abort and returned to the safe house. As they drove, Jack made a secure call to Gavin, and asked him to work on finding a way into the networks supporting the security cameras already in the neighborhood.

It looked to all in the first couple of hours here in Bucharest like Gavin Biery was going to be the busiest man on the team.

* * *

Alexandru Dalca sat in his office and watched a CNN live broadcast from the USA. Four more suspects had been named in the so-called terror attacks, and their faces dominated all the coverage on the news.

To the layman it looked like the ISIS guys might not be around for much longer, but just this morning Dalca had received a request from his Middle Eastern — accented contact for another purchase. An additional $2.5 million for three more high-level targets. These jihadists seemed to be getting bolder after a day with no losses of their own. The three packages he was finalizing today were all tier-one individuals, so it was interesting to him his clients were already ordering up more. It was clear they wanted to up the pace of their attacks, either because they thought they were getting better at what they were doing or because they had new blood in the area to help them along.

Either way, it didn’t matter. Alexandru would not be sticking around here to provide them more intelligence. He’d have to settle for the millions he’d made, minus the millions he was forced to pay out to Luca Gabor, to get him out of here.

And to that end he worked hard this afternoon on his targets. He sat at his desk and looked over one of the personalities; he’d already identified him as a top-level American law enforcement officer involved with antiterrorism. Dalca’s work today would be the last piece of the puzzle of putting this particular man in a particular place on a particular date.

He’d gotten to where he could build these packages in his sleep by using SOCMINT, social media intelligence, and he lamented the fact all these potential earnings would be lost to him after he walked out the door.