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  The consulate building had four floors with parking at the front. Taking into account the building blueprints, he could imagine pipes and wires running through the concrete walls. The streets were packed with vehicles, but the consulate’s entry space was deserted. The building to the right of the consulate housed an Asian spa and the one on the left had an AVK shopping store along with a software company called VIATEC. Wick had an interview scheduled in a day’s time at VIATEC’s office. In all probability he would not attend it, but it provided a great cover.

  Playing the part of a tourist, Wick took a few photographs of the Belvedere greens. It was five in the evening, and no one gave him a second look. He strolled leisurely down the adjacent streets and thirty minutes later he ambled towards the Viktor Frankl Institute for Logotherapy and Existential Analysis from where he hitched a ride back to the same location four blocks away from the safe house, from where he had taken the earlier cab. He had some pointers that he wanted Mac to run through the system.

  CHAPTER 11

  SAFEHOUSE, VIENNA

  At eight that night, five people stood around the large table in the hall— Jessica, Mac, Stan, Jakob, and Wick. On the table, were pictures of sixteen people that Mac had identified as possible targets.

  Wick picked up the photograph of the man with the scar. He was the one commanding these men tomorrow. Despite being in this field for a long time, he was a relatively unknown figure to the U.S. agencies. There wasn’t much known about him and that worried Wick. If nothing else went his way, and if he killed only one man tomorrow, then it had to be him.

  “This is your entry point.” Jessica tapped the blueprint with her index finger. “Stan and Wick will replace these two from the morning cleaning crew .” She pointed to two photos. “I will replace him in the security team.” She held up the third picture. “Mac has just injected a tiny virus into Vienna transport authority’s master server that manages the traffic light system. Once we get out of the consulate, Mac will help Jakob to navigate the traffic by creating diversions for any trailing cars.” She gestured at Wick to continue.

  “They are not expecting anything surprising to go down tomorrow. Use silencers. Hand-to-hand combat is preferable to guns wherever possible. Our bags will be in the first floor janitorial room in the consulate.” He looked at Jakob who nodded. It was his job. “Our priority is to find the target’s location, his condition—dead or alive—and how fast we can extract him. I will lead. Stan will back me up.” Wick paused for any questions. There were a couple.

  “What about the exit plan?” Stan asked first.

  “Wick has given me some pointers. I'm working on them.” Mac responded this time. He was talking about Wick’s visit to the consulate as a tourist.

  “What about the civilians?” Stan asked.

  “Avoid it but if not then go for a flesh wound,” Jessica said.

  “The shift changes at seven in the morning and then every eight hours,” Wick said, referring to the working shifts in the consulate. “We will leave at five-thirty in the morning, so we need to be up at three-thirty. Get some sleep and be ready. Jakob, you will stay with us here tonight.”

  Jakob, Stan, and Jessica nodded. Mac looked at his laptop. The program was still running. The timer hovered at two hours and forty-two minutes. He still needed time to get into the consulate server. He decided to stay put.

  CHAPTER 12

  Carlos disconnected the call and looked at Karina, who was waiting for him near the fireplace. A portable wrought iron fire kettle hung over it. Outside, the sky was draped in bright stars. The temperature had been falling for the last three or four days, but the cabin was snug and comfortable.

  He was dressed casually in a pair of jeans and a beat-up sweatshirt. His old leather jacket hung on the armchair. He smiled at his fiancée but got nothing in return. She had just finished reading the final draft of his latest article which again lambasted the Venezuela government policies and the exasperation was visible on her face.

  “When?” she asked about the publishing date, putting the papers on the table.

  “Saturday,” Carlos said.

  “This Saturday?”

  “Yes.”

  “On our wedding day?”

  Carlos, with an impish grin and a beer in each hand, moved closer to her. Karina had to smile at his childish behavior. He kissed her on the lips.

  “Can’t it wait till the next week?” she asked.

  “I thought you liked me for my tenacity,” he replied.

  Karina straightened up and took the beer from him. “Fine.” She turned to the nearest chair. “Thanks for this.” She signaled at the bottle.

  Carlos smiled. That was easy, he thought. “You should relax and think about how we should celebrate tomorrow once we have the signed papers in our hands.”

  “Do you think it’s wise to go into the consulate alone?” Karina asked, her tone laced with concern.

  “Sweetie, this is Vienna, not Venezuela. Everything will be fine tomorrow. Just like the last time,” Carlos assured her for the hundredth time in the same tone he had always used for this subject. This was probably the last time he was going to visit a place that was under the jurisdiction of his home country. Inside, he was equally worried about his appointment. All he wanted was that signed paper legalizing his status as a free man. A minor bit to begin his new life.

  “I know,” Karina said and rested her head on his chest.

  “Good.” Carlos gave her a long kiss on her forehead. He was head over heels in love with this woman. After a while, he worked his way to her ear and asked suggestively, “Shall we go upstairs now?”

  “This place is as good as any,” Karina whispered, seductively. He smiled and lifted her in his arms and lay her gently on the carpet near the fire. A fleeting thought about the coming day crossed his mind, but he discarded it. It was just a trivial signature.

  CHAPTER 13

  The floor was hard and cold, yet the man rested peacefully on it. Through his naked back, the cold seeped into his body. Still only in his mid-thirties, his life had been incredibly hard. The abundance of scars on his body made him resemble a sculpture shaped by an angry creator. Every scar had a story, and at the end of those stories there were dead bodies. He could hide them all, except the one on his face. It had been given to him by an American, and he had hated them ever since.

  The man was a Moroccan by birth, but he no longer claimed that part of his ancestry. He had taken to Christianity when he was fifteen because his own God had given him nothing but poverty and oppression. So, he sacked him and found a new one. The men who had introduced him to this new God also gave him a new name—Joaquin Thomas. They gave him food to eat and money to spend and a new nation to call his home—Venezuela. What he didn’t know was that the food and that small change would cost him his innocence. Joaquin was in fact picked by a team of specialists. His life was now theirs and they could steer him any direction they wanted and steer they did. He joined the Venezuela Army at the age of eighteen and then moved up the ranks until he found himself in a team that reported directly to the director of the Venezuela’s national intelligence agency.

  His first assignment was to get Oscar Luis Cartaya out from the Volkel Air Base, a military base in the Netherlands. Oscar had been imprisoned twice by the government of Netherlands on the order of a Dutch court. According to Venezuela, Oscar was a retired Venezuelan general and former head of military intelligence, but the Dutch court believed he was one of the original members of La Fraternidad, a fringe group responsible for multiple homicides in the Netherlands, according to a report by the General Intelligence and Security Service, the Netherlands’ secret service.

  Once the court’s decision came out, it provoked massive outrage in Venezuela, which responded aggressively to the arrest by calling the detention a "kidnapping" and sending its naval vessels. Instead of bowing before the pressure, the Netherlands went to the United Nations. To end the ensuing stalemate, Venezuela’s national intell
igence agency decided to send a team to free Oscar, but the mission bombed. In the attempt to free Oscar, Joaquin and the other men were captured and implicated on multiple charges. Joaquin, along with the others, was tortured for a year. They all broke eventually. Some were willing to say anything to be free of the pain, yet succumbed to it eventually. Others spoke the truth and still perished. The lucky few were those who died the earliest and were thus spared the extended agony and humiliation. Joaquin saw everything and survived everything, and it brought him closer to his God.

  Finally, he was among the few survivors who managed to return to Venezuela as part of a prisoner exchange program. By not telling his captors about his bosses, he gained a reputation in Venezuela’s secret service group. The torture, the hardship, the suffering—it was all worth it. For once he got hold of a rope of his own, he rose quickly within the organization.

  Soon he became the de facto asset for anything that needed to be done precisely and quietly. Henrique had told him in private that this would be his last mission in the field. They were planning to swear him in as the second-in-command in the Venezuela Intelligence Service.

  It was a position he had been eyeing for a long time, and in less than twelve hours, it would be within his grasp.

  CHAPTER 14

  0525 HOURS, Safehouse

  Jakob switched on the ignition of the minivan at 0520. He didn’t have to wait long. At exactly 0530 the gate of the safe house opened, and four silhouettes walked towards the vehicle in the pre-dawn gloom.

  “Good morning,” Jakob greeted the team.

  “Morning, Jakob,” Jessica responded, getting into the front passenger seat beside him, as Stan and Mac took the middle row, leaving the third row to Wick.

  Jakob hit the accelerator, and the tires whirred on the road. Wick sat in silence, his eyes closed. It was a ritual he followed before every mission, visualizing the location and the faces of the people he would encounter on the mission.

  The consulate was more than an hour away in normal city traffic. So early in the morning, though, they were able to make good time. Jakob’s familiarity with secluded alleyways and insider knowledge of the streets was unbeatable. Despite not taking the straight route to the consulate, they were standing at their first designated stop, at the Viktor Frankl Institute on the Prinz Eugen-Straße at seven past six. Wick and Stan got out of the minivan and started to walk towards the consulate building. Jakob drove on with Jessica and Mac. He dropped Jessica at the second stop- Wist Walter GesmbH, which was a shoe repair shop four blocks away from the consulate. Then he and Mac proceeded to the Cafe Goldegg that was two blocks away from the embassy.

  All this while Mac was drinking a Red Bull. He had not slept at all and this was the only way to keep him awake. He had been able to crack the system only a couple of hours ago. They now had a backdoor bypassing the server encryption. The malware was now in the system waiting for the reboot. Based on the daily security protocol of the consulate, the security admin would start the reboot of the mainframe server at six-thirty every morning. Once the system restarted, the malware would be uploaded giving Mac parallel control of the security system for the whole building —the closed-circuit TV cameras, fire alarms and everything else connected to it.

  He checked the signal and was comforted to see that their proximity was good enough for him to be ready when the system rebooted. As soon as he got the access, his first job would be to get Wick’s, Stan’s, and Jessica’s the identification data plugged into the embassy’s system. The only thing he had to do now was wait.

  CHAPTER 15

  0700 HOURS, VENEZUELA CONSULATE, VIENNA

  At the back door entry where the embassy crew entered, Wick swiped his card. The man sitting behind the system looked at his face and then back to the screen. He waited a couple of seconds and then signaled him to move forward. Stan was seventh in line. The same routine was followed, and he was in the building. At the front door, Jessica checked in with her ID card. The process went smoothly for her too. At Mac's computer screens, he saw them moving along with the others and heaved a sigh of relief. The first hurdle was crossed without anyone raising any alarm.

  Stan and Wick walked with the rest of the crowd, following the building supervisor towards the janitorial room. Stan was right behind the supervisor, while Wick was at the back, keeping a suitable distance from Stan and letting others fill the gap between them. From the corner of his eye, Wick perused the CCTV cameras to his right while Stan took care of those on the left. They needed to protect their covers more than anything else. Not making eye contact with the others was the most basic thing they could do apart from a confident gait. The longer that illusion remained, the higher the chances of their plans working.

  Once inside the janitor’s room, the supervisor mechanically read the locations from a sheet of paper, specifying where each of his men would be for the next eight hours. Stan was assigned to the third-floor bathroom while Wick got the guest lounge on the first floor.

  Once he finished, everyone began to put on their uniforms. Wick and Stan followed suit, but a trifle slow. Standing at the opposite corners and away from the entry door, they were observing everything with neutral expressions. The manager glanced at the two new recruits. He had received their details in the morning roster. The temp agency filled in the positions whenever anyone was on leave or dropped off the grid. He didn’t need to call them. It was the agency’s job to get their verification and get their records fed into the Consulate’s database. He was pleased as long as the overall count remained the same. What he didn’t know was that today was different. Stan and Wick’s records were entered into the system by Mac and the temps on leave would still be getting their wages for the day. The agency would not have had any information about two of its temps not reporting for work. It was a complex web of redirected email communication regulated by Mac’s computer.

  Before leaving the room, the supervisor walked to Wick, “Any questions?”

  “No, sir,” Wick replied, with brief eye contact.

  The supervisor then asked Stan the same question. He shook his head and he seemed satisfied.

  “Don’t forget your walkies,” the supervisor said to everyone in general as he was leaving the room. Wick checked the device, switched it on. Listened momentarily to the sound of static, then turned it off. It was a rudimentary Motorola device and he didn’t intend to use it, but he clipped it to his belt as instructed. Gradually the crowd started thinning. The supervisor was gone, and no one looked back to check on the others in the room. It was a tedious job and they all were going to be at their places until they were told otherwise.

  A few minutes later, Stan and Wick were the only ones in the room. The door clicked shut, and their relaxed bodies immediately stiffened. Stan turned and moved a big cardboard box at his left, revealing the same bag that Wick had in the safe house. He grabbed it and put it on the floor. Wick crouched and unzipped the bag, grabbing two Berettas from the top. The magazines and K-Bar knife followed. Stan took out his SIG Sauer P320, three magazines, and a military grade knife. They left rest of the ammo in the bag and put it back to its place. Once they were both ready with the weapons concealed underneath their loose uniforms, they picked up military-grade Bluetooth earpieces and inserted them in their ears.

  “Sam Wick checking in. Over.”

  “Stan checking in. Over.”

  “Jessica checking in. Over.”

  “Mac checking in. Over.”

  CHAPTER 16

  0905 HOURS, VENEZUELA CONSULATE, VIENNA

  Stan proceeded to the third-floor bathroom. Memorizing the building plans helped him to create a mental layout of the floor. While taking the elevator, he saw Jessica manning the entry gate as part of the security.

  Wick remained on the first floor, ambling towards the guest lounge. He identified a vantage point to keep an eye at the main entrance. The footfall in the lobby had begun to grow. People were beginning to trickle through the security gate on their way to w
ork. Wick roughly counted the number of personnel on his floor.

  The Ambassador was not in yet. The wooden door of his office was being guarded by two officers to prevent any unauthorized entry.

  “Hi, I need an air freshener in my office.” It was a female voice behind him. He turned around and saw a tall brunette standing outside an office. She was looking straight at him. “Excuse me, can you bring an air freshener?” she repeated.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Wick walked back towards the janitor room and found the air freshener bottle at the top of the second shelf from the door. Minutes later he was standing outside the woman’s office, checking the nameplate on the door: Ana Sofía, Minister-Counselor.