the time. He didn’t have a clue how to kill someone to make it look like they’d died of natural causes. No, the best thing he could pull off, maybe, would be something that looked like an accident.
They’d followed him into his school the day before, where he’d spent several hours, before leaving to go to a mosque, and then home. He’d stayed in all night, and Hades had seen no opportunity to go after him inside his residence, considering the cameras placed everywhere around the school.
His plan today was to do another follow, to maybe come up with some sort of idea of how to take him without being seen, and then to kill him by kidnapping and throwing him off a building, in the hopes it would look like suicide.
Hades and his team weren’t real assassins or surveillance experts. No, they were ex–special operations soldiers and mercenaries. They’d had some tradecraft training, and they’d followed targets in the Middle East a few times, when the intel provided to them had not been actionable without further reconnoitering. But still, he and his men were not a team of spooks. This was going to be new to them, tough for them, but for what Tarik was paying, Keith Hulett told himself he’d figure out how to make this work.
This morning their target revealed himself to be a creature of habit. He’d left his flat at the same time and walked the same route, more or less. Hulett had sent two men ahead to walk the path he’d taken yesterday, looking for cameras and dead areas where cameras couldn’t reach. A further pair were in a chase car, moving slowly through traffic a few blocks to the south.
And the last two men on the team were also on foot, also looking for cameras, but on nearby streets, in case Hades and Atlas had to make a quick getaway. These men had a car of their own, parked in a garage near the old, East German, spire-like TV tower.
Fifty feet in front of Hades and Atlas, their target passed a tram stop on Alexanderplatz, and a long yellow streetcar heading in the opposite direction pulled up to a stop next to him. He did not board, he only kept walking, and soon enough the streetcar rumbled off.
Atlas leaned a little closer to Hades and said, “We could knock his ass in front of one of those?”
“Maybe,” Hades replied softly. They closed on him, then held back to about twenty feet.
His route took him right alongside the tramway, and another big yellow streetcar approached in the distance. Thor said, “Say the word, boss. I’ll do it.”
But Hades replied softly. “No way to do this here without cameras catching it.”
“Probably right about that. Do we abort?”
“Let’s just keep following him, see what we see.”
They continued on another ten minutes, crossing a bridge over the Spree River, remaining behind their quarry while he talked on his phone, listened to his headphones, and seemed to be in no special hurry.
Soon they began trailing their man through the urban maze of Humboldt University, down Kronenstrasse. There wasn’t much foot traffic here, but a lot of cars and trucks and buses rumbled by at speed.
A large double-decker bus appeared ahead, moving towards them, and both Atlas and Hades picked up the pace to close on Iravani.
As they moved forward, Hades spoke softly for his ear mic. “Hades for Thor, how copy?”
“Five by five.”
Thor was on the advance team looking for cameras; he should have been just a block or two ahead. “You have five seconds to tell me if I’m clear to execute on the corner of Kronen and Charlotten.”
“South side has a cam at the Avis, but it doesn’t look like it’s hitting the street. North side has multiple angles of the sidewalk covered. Middle of the street is clear.”
They were on the north side; Hades muttered “shit,” but then, just twenty feet in front of him, Iravani turned to his left, moved between a pair of parked cars, and then stopped to let the bus pass before continuing across the street.
Hades saw a Starbucks a half block ahead on the other side, and wondered if the young Iranian sleeper agent had decided to get a cup of coffee before class.
Atlas and Hades picked up the pace and moved between the parked cars behind their target.
Thor came over both men’s headsets. “That bus will cover the Avis camera, and the cams on the north side of the