The Old Man(97)
“Right.” Julian walked down the concrete hallway past the electronic circuit room, and then through the visiting team locker room, and out another steel door that locked behind him when he closed it. Now he was behind the stadium, walking toward the parking lot.
The old man had a military career a lot like his, he thought. They both got sent to fight wars that were lost before they got there.
37
It was after midnight. Alan Spencer leaned against the slope of the hill above the dry wash north of the town and looked up at the stars. The sky was black, but there were enough stars to make an explosion of light, maybe twice the number he could see on the clearest nights in Toronto. He saw a meteor streak across his vision and disappear, and decided to take it as a sign.
He sat up and shifted the burden of the .45 pistol, its suppressor, and the extra magazines in his belt. He stood and stared at the road and let his eyes follow it to the town. He could see the buildings, looking like a pile of boxes. Most of them were low rectangles, but there were a few now that had three or four stories, and even two he could spot far off on the south side that looked like office buildings.
It was late enough now so he could take a look at Faris Hamzah’s compound. He walked toward the paved road into town. As he went, he found a stick about four feet long and used it as a walking stick, guessing that it would help make him look from a distance like a harmless old man.
When two sets of headlights approached behind him on the road from the north, he sat and waited for them to pass. They were probably trucks on their way in from Benghazi, but they both had closed-in cargo bays, so he couldn’t tell what they carried. Neither driver seemed to see him, and the trucks rumbled past without a change in speed.
Spencer walked into the village without seeing anybody else. He made his way to the street where Faris Hamzah’s compound was. He stood still for a time and searched for people, but nobody was out on foot tonight, so he began to walk. He stayed far from the compound as he walked up nearby streets, studying it from all sides. While he made his circuit, he searched for guards, and for any monitoring equipment that might have been installed to protect the place. In the thirty-five years since his last visit, the age of cheap alarm systems, surveillance cameras, and other devices had come, and Faris Hamzah would be the ideal customer.
Spencer found cameras. They were all installed at the corners of the buildings, aimed outward at the wall that circled the compound. He looked for glowing lights along the walls that would be the two ends of an electric eye beam six or eight inches above the tops of the walls, and he found those too.
Since he had last seen the place, the gate into the compound had been widened to about twelve feet to accommodate cars and trucks. It was now a set of iron bars with what looked like steel plates welded in behind them to give the gate armor. He stepped close and looked in through the half-inch space between the two sides of the gate. There was an electric motor to open and close the two sides. He supposed that in an emergency the gate could be barred.
The house was grander than he had anticipated. Whatever Faris Hamzah had done since the fall of Gaddafi, he must also have been doing something lucrative earlier, during the regime. The building reminded Spencer of the palaces in Iraq where Saddam Hussein had hidden from assassins and air strikes. The entry had fifteen-foot marble columns, and the walls were stone for the first eight feet from the ground and stucco above. The building missed being luxurious only by the omission of windows on the ground floor. The ones above were small and high, like the gun ports on a fort.
Spencer walked to the dark space between two buildings about 150 feet away across the road, and sat down in the shadows to watch. After a moment he realized the fa?ade of the one beside him was a bricked-in rectangle that had once been open, and then recognized it as the old mechanic’s shop where he had watched the compound thirty-five years ago.
He sat there staring at the gate of Hamzah’s compound, and then he realized that he knew the way in. The walls were too high and smooth to climb and there were electric eyes along the top. But the gate wasn’t smooth, and there were no beams of light running along the top. He had been close enough to study the house through the space between the two sides, and the space between the door and the wall. There had been no wiring, no beams of light.
Spencer ran his eyes over the buildings in the compound. There were no lights on in the second floor of the house, or the other two buildings. There was only a dim light that seeped under the front door of the main house. The occupants, other than the night watch, if there was one, seemed to be asleep.
Spencer thought about his situation. If he didn’t do this tonight before the town woke up, he would be giving Hamzah’s friends and relatives a chance to notice him and report that a suspicious character had appeared. But if he tried to accomplish his purpose tonight, he was probably going to fail. He would get one chance.
He looked at his watch in the moonlight. It was nearly 3:00 a.m. If he was going to make his attempt, this would be the best time to begin. He stood and walked across the street outside of the wall and reached the iron gate. He grasped two of the vertical bars and used the horizontal bars of the frame as footholds, crouched near the top, pulled himself over the gate, and dropped to the ground. He stayed on his belly and crawled into the garden beneath the olive trees. In seconds he was in the center, where the tiled fountain, the big potted plants, and the low, thick canopy of the trees hid him from the cameras.