| |
The next morning Kara was up early. As the sun was rising, she was in place for surveillance, dressed in desert camo and with her powerful binoculars screwed into their nimble tripod pan head. She observed little activity at the Pakistani banker’s home. A black SUV and two luxury cars were parked on the circular driveway. Kara directed the binoculars at the front gate and the lenses autofocused on the small guard shack. A guard dressed in a three-piece suit and tie was making coffee. She scanned the remainder of the mansion’s grounds and saw no activity.
Less than an hour later, a guard appeared from a small guesthouse in the backyard. Kara didn’t know if he had stayed there overnight or had gotten there prior to her arrival.
The guard was big and broad shouldered. His suit and tie looked like the Pakistani version of Men in Black. He didn’t walk through the house; instead, he walked down an outdoor path alongside the home. The guard made his way to the front driveway and approached the driver’s door of the SUV. He held up the key fob, clicked the button and climbed into the vehicle. Kara heard the engine fire up and watched the guard drive a full 360° around the driveway, stopping immediately next to the home’s front door. The SUV was so close to the jutting porch Kara couldn’t see the front door from her vantage point. Kara guessed that was the guard’s intention. If someone (like her) wanted to assassinate Zain Shallah this maneuver would thwart the plan. Kara was concerned that if his security at home was this tight, it would be just as tight at his work. Maybe even more intense. At the bank, the SUV probably drove into a secured underground garage. It also meant the home’s clear windows were most likely bulletproof as would be the banker’s vehicles.
The multiple layers of security shouldn’t have surprised Kara but it had. For some reason she thought the security at the banker’s home would be less than that surrounding him when he left the house. As a rule, people tended to let their guard down at home. But not Zain Shallah. He was a paranoid man and probably for good reason. According to Kornev, he and his bank laundered money for just about any Muslim terrorist sect requiring such services, and the banker was very good at his job. Neither he nor his bank had ever popped up on the CIA’s radar; considering how interconnected paper trails of funds led to terrorist organizations, that was no longer an easy feat.
Kara watched the gate slide open and the arm rise. At the end of the driveway, the SUV turned right and was soon lost to sight. The aluminum gate remained open but the wood arm descended. She noted prior to Zain leaving, the aluminum gates had been closed. After he departed, the gates remained open throughout the day.
The CIA agent was hungry and took a granola bar from her backpack. She had brought the car today instead of the bike. If she encountered an opportunity, she might need some tools that she’d previously loaded in the trunk.
After another hour of surveillance such an opportunity drove up to the front gate. It was the housekeeper’s car. Same car and woman dressed in a black burqa from head to toe. Only her eyes could be seen. Kara concluded she must be a regular employee. The guard barely batted an eye when she pulled up to the gate. He pressed a button and the bar rose, allowing the housekeeper to drive in. The Pakistani woman gave the guard a little wave as she passed by his shack.
Kara’s gears were turning. Even before the woman had parked her car on the expensive brick driveway, Kara was already formulating a plan. Her plan required the motorcycle, a shovel, and a little luck. Prior to the housecleaner leaving for the day, she would be needing that motorcycle and a place to dig. Kara watched the housekeeper walk up to the mansion’s front door and enter some numbers on a keypad. After turning the door handle, she entered the home.
Kara unscrewed the binoculars from its tripod and placed the items in her backpack. She collected the blanket and walked back to the car.
She drove back down the little dirt road toward the main road that led toward the mansion. Her mind swam with one competing idea after another, battling for supremacy inside her head with each idea vital to the mission’s success.
She took a right turn away from the banker’s home. As she drove she inspected each break in the foliage alongside the road. Kara needed to find a road or turnoff with several specific requirements and topographical features. One requirement was that the turnoff had to be isolated. It couldn’t be a formal driveway to a home or a road with occupied homes. An empty field would be perfect. A field with an entrance and a separate exit would be better still. The area worked in Kara’s favor because there existed many temporarily-abandoned houses in some stage of construction. A few were almost complete, and several others already had the driveways either poured or paved. Kara needed to find a home that was in the embryonic stage of construction. Maybe a property where a bulldozer had scoured the area of brush and had left a rudimentary dirt driveway that looped the lot.
If someone had been driving behind Kara they would have already used up their horn honking quota for the day. Repeatedly, Kara almost came to a dead stop to inspect a potential location. Up ahead, on the left, was yet another break in vegetation. She slowed, saw it was a gated drive, and dismissed it. She increased her speed, but not as fast, knowing she would have to check out every opportunity from here to wherever the city overtook the available acreage. Twice more she was discouraged by a gate or a formal driveway that led to a well-manicured residence. Half a mile further down the road, she approached what looked like an empty lot. Most of the low-growing bushes had been removed from the side of the road and the site already looked promising. The turnoff led down a gentle hill to a large lot freshly cleared with the business end of a bulldozer. Yet, there was still some age to the meandering hard-packed dirt road. Small weeds grew on the surface and it was apparent the site had seen no substantial traffic on the site for quite some time. At the end of the little road was a barren clearing and nothing else.
Kara smiled as she drove into the clearing. This was where the new home would be built, whenever the hell that happened, but she was smiling because as the long driveway continued it made a gradual right turn and headed back up the hill toward a second entrance to the road above. It was a long U-shaped driveway that went down and came back up. It was perfect. Kara put the car in reverse and began to back up the way she had come. About thirty yards from the top of the dirt road, she stopped, put the car in park and killed the engine. She popped the trunk and took out a shovel. Taking a moment to calculate distances, she walked ten yards closer to the main road and scanned the terrain on either side of the dirt road. Both sides had hard-packed dirt covered with a thick layer of brown and green weeds. Perfect again.
Standing exactly in the center of the road, Kara took two giant steps to her right. She placed the tip of the shovel in an area where her car’s left tire had left a track. She stomped on the shovel and began digging. The soil beneath her shovel was rocky and unforgiving. But she didn’t have to dig deep. The hole she created had a depth of a dinner plate and a width of a turkey serving platter.
Almost an hour later, she had dug three more holes. It wasn’t particularly hot outside, but by the time she was done perfecting her holes, she was damp with perspiration. Kara tossed the shovel into the trunk. She opened the back door, fished around in her pack and withdrew a couple bottles of water. She chugged down an entire bottle and threw the empty in the car.
She looked in all directions to see if she was being observed. Seeing no one, she gave the back seat a hard tug. She felt the frame give way as she pulled the seat loose of its clips. Kara set the back seat on the floorboard. Under the seat sat four pressure-triggered land mines. She removed one at a time until she had transported all four land mines to a tree less than twenty yards away. The tree had a natural crook near its base where leaves and deadfall had collected. Kara tunneled through the foliage with her hands and placed the four land mines so they sat snuggly against the tree. Using her hands, Kara covered the metal objects with the leaves and twigs. She stood back to inspect her work.
The holes she had dug in the road looked a little suspicious, but not strange enough for someone to think, “Hey, I wonder if someone was burying land mines around here? I better go looking for them. Maybe that tree would be a good place to start?”
She had needed to hide the land mines because they were excessively heavy to tote around in her backpack while riding the motorcycle. She could have placed them in her bike’s saddlebags, but the thought of having explosives strapped to the side of her motorcycle while driving the crazy streets of Peshawar didn’t really float her boat.
Having done all she could do, Kara got back into the car, backed all the way up to the main road and re-exited the vehicle. She now held a red rag she’d found in Kornev’s barn. Taking a knife from a side pocket of her leather pants, she cut the rag into long strips and tied them to bushes on both sides of the road. Remaining vigilant to oncoming traffic, she saw a single truck before the driver spotted her. She hid in the bushes until it passed and then completed tying the rags to the foliage.
Kara checked the time on her phone and hoped the housekeeper left at the same time each day. Kara had to go get the motorcycle and continue her surveillance of the banker’s mansion.