THE ZONE

Paris

Tom Keeler had his eye to the Leupold Mark 4 spotting scope, observing Charlie Schmitt at his desk, typing furiously on a laptop. Keeler was across the street from Schmitt, the distance between them populated by cars, bikes, pedestrians, street hawkers, and all of the other noisy activity that can be found in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, France.

Of course, neither of them were paying any attention to the street life. Keeler was focused on his target, while Schmitt was doing what he did, being a troublemaker with a laptop.

Schmitt was in his mid-forties, a good looking guy with hair but the body of a nerd, slack and un-muscled, but not fat. The surveillance gig was basically a favor to Barbie, a friend from back in the day, whom he’d coincidentally run into a few weeks earlier. Which didn’t change the fact that after all this time, Keeler was once again working for the CIA.

So far, Schmitt had not moved from the apartment. Keeler had started surveillance the day before, and Barbie’s freelancers had watched over him during the night. The optical lens was clear as the eye of a freshly born lamb, and Keeler watched Schmitt’s face, clean shaven and youthful, despite the middle age. The surveillance post was a third floor apartment on the other side of Rue de Chantonnay from Schmitt’s, making the configuration a little weird, the target seemingly right in Keeler’s lap, when in fact the guy was about 12 yards away.

Keeler got up and walked back to the kitchen. Barbie was across the river in another apartment with two of her people and a wall of screens. She called it the FOC. Keeler didn’t know which arrondissement and didn’t need to. The separation was doctrine. If the post burned, the FOC was clean. If Barbie burned, the post was clean.

In addition to that, somewhere else in Paris, Barbie had three GRS shooters in a third flat with the kit and the cars. Keeler had not met them and probably wouldn’t unless it went loud.

He took an apple from the bowl in the kitchen and crushed his teeth through the skin, piercing into the firm flesh, receiving the acid-sweet drip of fruit flesh onto his tongue. Keeler kept a grip on the apple with his teeth and adjusted the scope to standing height. He tightened the vice grip, looked through it, and saw that something new had occurred.

Schmitt had come to the window and was now leaning out, looking down to the street below. Keeler walked to the window and pulled the translucent voile a few inches to the side, noticing a faint mist of autumn rain; the sky above was grey steel. Below, standing in a puddle on the sidewalk, was a woman in a yellow raincoat, her long dirty blonde hair damp, looking unhappy and stabbing repeatedly at a buzzer on the intercom.

She looked up sharply and Keeler saw that Schmitt was shouting something down, after which the woman took a large step back from the buzzer, looked up, said something, and then looked down again. Meanwhile, Schmitt had turned away from the window and was putting his shirt on. A blue oxford that he plucked from the sofa.

Keeler keyed the comms for the first time in half an hour. The press-to-talk was a hard, quarter-sized button under the cuff of his jacket. The Invisio in his ear came alive with the soft tone that meant the FOC was holding the channel.

Keeler said, “I think he’s finally going out.”

A man’s voice came back first. American. The watch officer at the FOC. “Stand by. Patching Barbie.”

Then Barbie, a few seconds later. “Okay. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to go with them. There’s a woman here, it’s likely he’ll come down for her. I’ll get a photo and send it to you.”

“Roger that. Standing by.”

This was significant because the job was simple: watch Schmitt and see what he did, and who he saw. So far he hadn’t seen anyone, but now here she was, buzzing at his door.

Charlie Schmitt ran an outfit called MirrorTrace that he branded a form of journalism. It was some unholy cross breed of AI and open source data gathering that was supposed to be a first of its kind, and supposedly a threat to the rich and powerful. None of this was really Keeler’s domain, but he’d done a little homework. The AI part was all about figuring out what secret was being kept behind a firewall, and clearly it wasn’t all just hype, since the nerds at NSA and CIA had their panties in a twist, and now menacing types like Barbie and Keeler were involved.

Besides the opportunity to identify a Schmitt contact, Keeler had been waiting for him to leave the apartment so he could get in there and install a few devices that could help them understand exactly what the man was getting up to, and with whom. So far he was just a half naked middle aged semi-celebrity troublemaker who seemed to live in a state of chronic disorder, moving between kitchen, desk, and bedroom, and not necessarily in any kind of organized order that a person could call routine. For example, he didn’t seem to sleep at night in any kind of rhythmic way. Now Schmitt was putting on a raincoat, leveraging his shoe onto an un-socked foot and opening the apartment door all at the same time. A minute later he had joined the woman down below and was hustling her away.

Keeler had the kit bag ready by the door, and only had to grab it, shove the keys in his pocket, get out of the apartment, come down the stairs to the internal courtyard, go out the back way and emerge onto the street four doors down, pretending to be a normal person while walking fast in order to catch up with the target. Schmitt seemed to be in a hurry to get the woman off the street, ushering her into a corner cafe.

Keeler crossed, strolling by the large floor-to-ceiling cafe window, snapping pictures with the phone he’d been issued, trying to get a shot of Schmitt’s friend. He turned a corner and leaned back against the wall to examine what he’d captured, pinching and spreading fingers to crop a relatively decent photo and upload it to the agency’s system. A few moments later Barbie was back in his ear. There was a second voice behind her saying something he couldn’t catch.

“Lady’s name is Lindqvist. Journalist for Dagens Nyheter.”

“Dagens who? Is that a flavor of ice cream?”

“Swedish newspaper yes.”

Keeler said, “Spurned lover would be my guess.”

“Is she crying?”

“Looks stressed. He didn’t invite her up. Actually he looked more stressed than her.”

“So maybe that’ll give you enough time, if she’s a troublemaker Schmitt’s going to need to manage her.”

Keeler made a quick calculation. Schmitt and his lady friend would take maybe five to ten minutes ordering coffee, drinking coffee, engaging in whatever it was that the woman wanted to discuss, and potentially consuming a croissant or two, or even a cigarette break outside if their discussion got tense.

All of that was plenty of time for Keeler to get up to the apartment and plant two or three devices that could tell him a lot more than he was getting from simply looking through Schmitt’s window.

“I’m going up there now.”

Barbie said, “It’s raining?”

“Not really raining, just generally wet.”

“What are you going to do about your shoes if they’re all wet?”

“Great question, Barbie. I’ll tell you when I figure out the answer.”

She laughed at that. “Please do.”