I drummed my fingers on the table in front of me, pulled between the horns of a dilemma. Knuckles had finished his reconnaissance and had started briefing me on a potential assault plan when Aaron and Shoshana had returned, and their news wasn’t inspiring confidence.
I said, “So you guys never picked up the Ghost again?”
Shoshana said, “No. He disappeared into the mosque and never came back out. We stayed as long as we could—even entered the grounds on a group tour—but we never got eyes on the targets again.”
“What about the SUV that dropped them off?”
“We let him go, sticking with the principal target.”
“So he could be coming for them after sundown?”
Aaron said, “He could, and that’s what I bet will happen, but we had to pull off before we could see it. Once the mosque and the shops started to close, there was nowhere we could maintain surveillance and remain undetected.”
I tapped my fingers again, thinking, and Shoshana said, “Pike, there was no way for us to stay on target. Our heat state was getting red as it was. We had no cover for action after the tour and wasting time browsing in every store nearby.”
She thought I was questioning their judgment in pulling off, but that was far from the case. If Shoshana said she couldn’t maintain eyes on the mosque, then nobody could.
I said, “I know, I know. I don’t doubt you. I’m now just wondering if we should proceed.”
She said, “Of course we should. We have positive identification of the Unit 840 commander, and he’s checked into a hotel next door, along with your Ghost and two others, who are more than likely Iranians too.”
While Knuckles was doing advanced force operations in the hotel, I’d had the Taskforce do a deep dive on the passport information of the man from Qatar who had rented the rooms—and had asked the Israelis to search for him too.
The Taskforce had come up with exactly zero, but the Israelis hit the jackpot. Apparently, the guy with the Qatari passport was the commander of the unit that did all covert external operations for Iran. According to the Israelis, he was directly responsible for all nefarious activities Iran executed in Western countries. If he was the point person on the ground, the target set was important indeed. But that was a very bigif.
I’d quizzed the Taskforce intel cell on the generics of Unit 840—without sharing the Israeli information—and they’d come up with a different face and name for the commander, which is why our data hadn’t pinged in Taskforce systems. Now I had a he said/she said. Whose intel was correct?
On the one hand, the Ghost being in the same hotel as a likely Iranian covert action cell certainly lent itself to probable cause for an attack, but on the other, my own intelligence cell was saying the man in the passport wasn’t Unit 840. Truthfully, at the end of the day, the argument was irrelevant. My target was the Ghost, not any Iranians. My authority ended with him.
I said, “Shoshana, I hear you. I’d love nothing more than to smack an Iranian out to cause harm, but I don’t have the execute authority for that. I’m here for the Ghost, period. If the Qatar passport is for who you say he is, I’d suggest getting someone on your side over here to execute.”
“We don’t have time for that. I can’t magic a team here. I have you and a bed-down location. If we wait, they might be in the wind and we’ll be starting from scratch.”
Everything she said was true, and she knew I wanted to help, but I’d already tested the Oversight Council’s patience with my stunt in Arizona. Reporting back to them, asking to expand my target deck, was going to be a nonstarter. I’d either disobey a direct order, or go home. I was hoping for a third way.
Aaron knew what I was thinking. He gently pushed, saying, “It doesn’t hurt to continue planning. Forget about Unit 840 and focus on the Ghost. He’ll be coming back, and getting him will break all of this up.”
I rubbed my eyes and said, “Knuckles, continue with what you were showing me on the mission planning.”
He pulled up a floor plan he’d made of the hotel, showing the northern wing. He said, “The rooms are all on the same floor and isolated at the far end, but they aren’t together, which helps for a clean hit.”
He looked up and said, “The problem is we needed to isolate the room the Ghost is using, and we didn’t. All three rooms had luggage in them, but only one had anything resembling a real occupant.”
I said, “What’s that mean?”
“One room had some receipts for tourist stuff in the trash, along with water bottles and candy wrappers, but the other rooms had nothing. They looked like they’d been scrubbed.”
“You mean they’re empty?”
“No. They both had some luggage with minimal clothing, but nothing else. No trash, no used coffee cups, no nothing. The beds were still unmade, but it looked like someone had gone through them and cleaned them up. There weren’t even any used bars of soap. Why they would do that to two rooms and not the third is a mystery.”
Jennifer said, “Maybe they’re just clean freaks.”
Knuckles answered, “Yeah, maybe so, but the main problem is there was nothing to identify which room was being used by the Ghost. There wasn’t anything there to identify ownership.”
He turned to me and said, “I know how you feel about cameras, but I’d recommend putting at least one in the hallway for PID.”
I said, “Did you get the Pit Viper emplaced?”
