and it was answered on the third ring by a man’s voice he didn’t recognize.
“Who’s calling?”
Boberg could hear something going on in the background, footsteps, other voices. Official-sounding voices. The cops, he realized, which meant McGarvey had been there.
He broke the connection and sat thinking. All of Admin’s phones, including everyone’s personal cell phone and the encrypted sat phones they used in the field, were untraceable, so he had no worry that his name would pop up on some computer screen. But with Remington out of the picture, if he were, the company had no future. No leadership. No contacts.
But the company was small, much smaller than most of the other contractor services, some of which had upwards of two thousand employes. Admin had eighty-eight on the payroll until Baghdad, and now probably four or possibly five or six less than that. And although the company no longer had the State Department Baghdad contract, it still had the Friday Club.
“Lean and mean, Cal,” Remington had preached when he offered him the job. “We can do things the bigger services can’t handle.”
“Mobility,” Boberg remembered saying.
“Spot on. First in, first to get the job done.”
In that respect nothing had changed except for the company’s leadership. And since he was senior now, the job of keeping Admin up and running had fallen on his shoulders. He let a small smile curl his lips. Lean and mean it was.
He wrote a note that he had car trouble and had gone for help, stuck it under the windshield wiper, and hefting the small shoulder-bag of extra ammuniton, a red-lensed flashlight, Steiner mil specs binoculars, and a few other things, headed through the woods up the hill parallel to the driveway and about ten yards away.
Before driving out he’d studied the sketch diagrams of the property’s security arrangements that Sandberger had entered in Admin’s files just after they’d signed on with Foster. What had surprised him was the relative lack of surveillance and warning systems. There were no razor wire–topped electric fences, no gate guards, no dogs patrolling the estate, just the long driveway with pressure pads that reacted when a vehicle drove over them, motion sensitive lights around the house and the helipad fifty yards to the east, and a few closed-circuit cameras.
Someone approaching on foot wouldn’t run into trouble until the last thirty yards across the clearing in which the house stood. And even then, darting from tree to tree, and keeping to the shadows of the Greek and Roman statues that dotted the lawn, it would be possible to get right up to the house without being spotted.
It was something that McGarvey was good at. Which was why Remington wanted someone out here just in case it happened.
“Why the hell haven’t we insisted on tighter security?” Boberg had asked a couple of months ago. “I mean, it’s our arses on the line if something goes down.”
“He doesn’t think something like that will ever happen,” Remington had told him.
“What, his connections, money, and reputation are going to protect him? Is that what he thinks?”
“That’s exactly what he thinks.”
“Christ,” Boberg had muttered, and here he was at the edge of the clearing, with a path up to the house through the shadows so easy that even an amateur second-story man would have no trouble.
As he settled down to wait to see what might happen, he studied the house, which was lit up as if a party was going on. But the driveway was empty, so if Foster were entertaining tonight, it was only himself and his staff, unless his guests’ cars were parked out of sight in the back.
In his early days as an SAS leftenant he and his surveillance unit of four men had been sent to the mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan to be on the lookout for Osama bin Laden. They and other British surveillance teams had worked in conjunction with the CIA on the top-secret mission, with orders to take the al-Quaida leader down, no questions asked, and no need for permission to go hot. They had never spotted bin Laden in the three months they’d been in the field, but they had learned patience.
Surveillance was something Boberg neither liked nor disliked. It was nothing more than a simple job. And all jobs came to an end sooner or later.
Waiting, he began to assess his feelings about losing Sandberger and Remington, and he found that he didn’t care. Just like his attitude toward surveillance, he was totally indifferent. It was