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xp_logs2009-03-12 08:01 pm
x-maverick.livejournal.com) wrote in xp_logs2009-03-12 08:01 pm
Operation: Godhand - Team Bucharest
While Emma and Marie-Ange search for clues to Natasha's whereabouts, Morgan and David try and track down the hired assassins.
The cell phone was flipped shut with a sharp note and the warm brown of the borrowed eyes looked over at North. "No one has any clue who the employer is. They went through a third party who, I'm told, has fled the country, if not the continent. It's legit, though, so we've got the right thread. A few locals went out for the job, including Radu Eminescu and Lucian Sollomovici. Both are in town, but neither got the job. Figure they could tell us a thing or two about the job, the terms of it, what sorts may have been in contact about it? They may have even heard rumors about who got it." She spoke with the thick Southie accent that belonged only to Vanessa. It was the way she'd spoken to the various contacts on the phone and it had clearly stuck with her for now but it would inevitably fade into the heavy Romanian that went with Ilinca, the name she'd given to the body she was wearing.
"If Strucker's men didn't contract it out to locals, that means they're bringing in ringers," North surmised, poring over a street map and making notes from the dossier they'd been given about Natasha's operational parameters. "Which means the out-of-towners either brought in their own hardware, or acquired it here. Either way, if we go sniffing around the local suppliers, we might be able to turn up a name. These men - Radu and Lucian? Shouldn't be too hard to get a point in the right direction. And if that Russian cocksucker Vazhin is right, Natasha should be adapting her hide protocols. Depending on who Strucker's brought in, I'd say we have anywhere from sixteen to thirty-six hours before they've narrowed down her location and made the hit."
Vanessa nodded in agreement. "I've got hang outs and approximate locations for Radu and Lucian. They owe no loyalty to someone who didn't hire them so once we can find them it shouldn't be hard to get them to tell us what little they know. They're not on a job, so far as I can gather, so that means they shouldn't be hard to find either. Hit them up, then hit the suppliers? I'd rather take the easier one first and suppliers can be a bitch to get talking about anything important sometimes." And sometimes all you had to do was bribe them the right way. But that couldn't be depended upon so she'd rather get the hard one done with second just so they weren't held up in other matters because of it.
North just nodded as he stood up, holstering the small pistol in the back of his waistband. Looking over at the submachine gun slung over the back of Morgan's chair, he picked up the black cowboy hat he'd kept as a memento of one of his former teammates. Setting it on his head and adjusting the brim, he smiled at the younger woman. "Let's go look under some dark rocks, shall we?"
-----
A submachine gun was just not inconspicuous. Luckily, Vanessa had copied a woman and not a man so she could justify the purse big enough to fit the gun into it. A much smaller pistol was tucked into the back of the waistband of her jeans. Radu and Lucian had proved most helpful. The former had decided to be a bit more difficult than Vanessa had anticipated but it wasn't anything that couldn't be dealt with. Eight names had turned up in the course of their conversations. A phone call to Thom had verified that two of them were in the Congo again which left six. Word was there were either three or four of them after Natasha. "Why can't they just put out a bulletin saying who has what job so life can be easier for those of us tracking them down, more or less?" Vanessa's Southie accent had dropped once they had left the safehouse and instead she was speaking with an ever thickening Romanian accent.
"What, like some mercenary clearing house?" David asked, checking his reflection in a window as they walked down the street, looking for all the world like any other Eastern European couple out on an errand. "Put it online. Merc-i-pedia, something like that? From what Remy's network of information had on Strucker's organization, they're not established enough here to have a local fixer handling things for them, and both Radu and Lucian took great pains to make sure we knew the fellow who didn't hire them was an out-of-towner. Means that our hitters don't have a contact here locally."
He paused to let that sink in, then continued. "That means they got here either by rental car like we did, or by a taxi from the train station. And if you were a supplier to organized crime who wanted to sneak into a place like this without attracting notice, where would you work out of?"
"I like the idea of Merc-i-pedia, sadly I do not think the others would be quite so enthusiastic. Terrible thing, their noncooperation, but I suppose it will keep us busy. Nothing worse than getting bored on the job." She paused for a moment and then added, "Unless we're factoring in death. Death is most disagreeable."
As they strolled along Vanessa thought about what David was saying. "I'd work out of somewhere with such a rotation of faces no one would ever pay any attention to any single one that came through," she said with a small nod. Her nose wrinkled as she thought and then her eyes turned to the cars passing by them on the street. "Rental cars ask questions, want information. Taxi's, however, do not. How many taxi companies do you suppose are here in the city?"
"Bucharest?" David said with a pained grin. "Around forty. However, most of them belong to a union that mandates the use of security cameras. We can rule those out, which leaves us with a very small handful."
Producing a small Blackberry from his pocket, he waited for a while as the tiny device began searching what passed for a local online directory of taxi services. "Here we go. Three non-union taxi services that run to the train station. So much easier to put a puzzle together when you can eliminate all the unnecessary pieces, yes?"
Vanessa, of course, peered over to watch what he was doing on the screen of the small electronic device. It looked as natural as any girlfriend or wife being impatient for the information her significant other was looking up. "Only three?" Her eyes scanned the addresses of the three listings. It had been years since Vanessa had been in Bucharest and she'd only been once. "I think the first two are relatively close. The third is across town, I believe. I could be wrong, though. My geography of the city is shoddy at best." She'd been looking over maps of the city on the flight over but they were a little muddled in her head.
"Footwork-driven intel," North grumbled. "The joy of field work."
-----
Three hours later, David sipped his coffee in a small cafe, idly flipping through a cardboard file of photographs and telegrams. "Shame that poor fellow forgot to put a railing on his balcony. And left his files unlocked as well. Can't find a good fixer these days," he mused sarcastically between drinks of the thick black Turkish coffee, passing papers back and forth with Morgan. "Okay, so we're dealing with at least four of the names on our list. I'm thinking exactly four. Shit, it's a Barzhov Gambit."
Glancing over at Morgan, he explained. "Old Cold War term. When I was with the Stasi, our liaisons with the KGB worked with us to flush out dissidents and informers. Four men to an operation; two of us, two of them. One team does the eyes-on recon, the other watches their back because the first team's liable to expose themselves. It's a baited trap. First pair of hitmen makes an obvious recon, draws Natasha out to set up a counter-tail, second team makes the hit. It's a damn ironclad tactic. She's ex-KGB, though. If she suspects they've got two teams on her..." He flipped through the papers until he found a taxi map of one of the Bucharest districts.
"The operational profile that Vazhin - fucking cocksucker - gave us says she's liable to use a mobile hide in this area. If the hit teams have been on the move for more than a day, they'll already be in kill prep. If I were running the gambit, they'd be..." He scratched two ovals on the map with a grease pencil.
Vanessa listened raptly to everything North was saying. This was his territory now, not hers. Assassinations were rare work for her and she got to take the easy way out. Snatch someone who wasn't really a stellar human being in the first place, take on their mimic, pull off the job, drop the mimic immediately after and pick up a new one from some passerby, have one of the guys nearby with clothing options to change into, release the snatched person and let the cops pick them up from all the fingerprints of theirs she'd left behind.
"So do we go sniffing around the areas or call for a regroup and find out what the girls have found out and go from there? Hunting down mercs and finding out who got what job is easy for me, but this is beyond my experience so it's your call." One thing she definitely didn't have a problem with was deferring to the person with the most experience. North was it so his call she'd follow unless there were obvious flaws in his approach.
"We need to establish where Natasha is, and get to her before she wanders into the trap," North said, shuffling the papers together. "Hopefully Miss Frost and Miss Colbert have met with success. Otherwise, I get the feeling we're going to be expending a lot more ammunition than I am comfortable with in this rescue."
"I'm alright with ammunition expenditure. That's why they created silencers." She gave him a smile but it gave off much more warm and kindly than mischievous. It was the downfall of new faces she wasn't used to, Vanessa's facial expressions didn't tend to translate as well. "I suppose it's back to the cave to regroup, share information and come up with a fancy strategy that puts us firmly in the 'victory' category, yes?"
"Indeed, liebchen. Let us see what the other ladies have discovered." North stood up, leaving a few bills on the table for the coffee. "Welcome to the glorious world of fieldcraft. And this is the exciting part."
The cell phone was flipped shut with a sharp note and the warm brown of the borrowed eyes looked over at North. "No one has any clue who the employer is. They went through a third party who, I'm told, has fled the country, if not the continent. It's legit, though, so we've got the right thread. A few locals went out for the job, including Radu Eminescu and Lucian Sollomovici. Both are in town, but neither got the job. Figure they could tell us a thing or two about the job, the terms of it, what sorts may have been in contact about it? They may have even heard rumors about who got it." She spoke with the thick Southie accent that belonged only to Vanessa. It was the way she'd spoken to the various contacts on the phone and it had clearly stuck with her for now but it would inevitably fade into the heavy Romanian that went with Ilinca, the name she'd given to the body she was wearing.
"If Strucker's men didn't contract it out to locals, that means they're bringing in ringers," North surmised, poring over a street map and making notes from the dossier they'd been given about Natasha's operational parameters. "Which means the out-of-towners either brought in their own hardware, or acquired it here. Either way, if we go sniffing around the local suppliers, we might be able to turn up a name. These men - Radu and Lucian? Shouldn't be too hard to get a point in the right direction. And if that Russian cocksucker Vazhin is right, Natasha should be adapting her hide protocols. Depending on who Strucker's brought in, I'd say we have anywhere from sixteen to thirty-six hours before they've narrowed down her location and made the hit."
Vanessa nodded in agreement. "I've got hang outs and approximate locations for Radu and Lucian. They owe no loyalty to someone who didn't hire them so once we can find them it shouldn't be hard to get them to tell us what little they know. They're not on a job, so far as I can gather, so that means they shouldn't be hard to find either. Hit them up, then hit the suppliers? I'd rather take the easier one first and suppliers can be a bitch to get talking about anything important sometimes." And sometimes all you had to do was bribe them the right way. But that couldn't be depended upon so she'd rather get the hard one done with second just so they weren't held up in other matters because of it.
North just nodded as he stood up, holstering the small pistol in the back of his waistband. Looking over at the submachine gun slung over the back of Morgan's chair, he picked up the black cowboy hat he'd kept as a memento of one of his former teammates. Setting it on his head and adjusting the brim, he smiled at the younger woman. "Let's go look under some dark rocks, shall we?"
-----
A submachine gun was just not inconspicuous. Luckily, Vanessa had copied a woman and not a man so she could justify the purse big enough to fit the gun into it. A much smaller pistol was tucked into the back of the waistband of her jeans. Radu and Lucian had proved most helpful. The former had decided to be a bit more difficult than Vanessa had anticipated but it wasn't anything that couldn't be dealt with. Eight names had turned up in the course of their conversations. A phone call to Thom had verified that two of them were in the Congo again which left six. Word was there were either three or four of them after Natasha. "Why can't they just put out a bulletin saying who has what job so life can be easier for those of us tracking them down, more or less?" Vanessa's Southie accent had dropped once they had left the safehouse and instead she was speaking with an ever thickening Romanian accent.
"What, like some mercenary clearing house?" David asked, checking his reflection in a window as they walked down the street, looking for all the world like any other Eastern European couple out on an errand. "Put it online. Merc-i-pedia, something like that? From what Remy's network of information had on Strucker's organization, they're not established enough here to have a local fixer handling things for them, and both Radu and Lucian took great pains to make sure we knew the fellow who didn't hire them was an out-of-towner. Means that our hitters don't have a contact here locally."
He paused to let that sink in, then continued. "That means they got here either by rental car like we did, or by a taxi from the train station. And if you were a supplier to organized crime who wanted to sneak into a place like this without attracting notice, where would you work out of?"
"I like the idea of Merc-i-pedia, sadly I do not think the others would be quite so enthusiastic. Terrible thing, their noncooperation, but I suppose it will keep us busy. Nothing worse than getting bored on the job." She paused for a moment and then added, "Unless we're factoring in death. Death is most disagreeable."
As they strolled along Vanessa thought about what David was saying. "I'd work out of somewhere with such a rotation of faces no one would ever pay any attention to any single one that came through," she said with a small nod. Her nose wrinkled as she thought and then her eyes turned to the cars passing by them on the street. "Rental cars ask questions, want information. Taxi's, however, do not. How many taxi companies do you suppose are here in the city?"
"Bucharest?" David said with a pained grin. "Around forty. However, most of them belong to a union that mandates the use of security cameras. We can rule those out, which leaves us with a very small handful."
Producing a small Blackberry from his pocket, he waited for a while as the tiny device began searching what passed for a local online directory of taxi services. "Here we go. Three non-union taxi services that run to the train station. So much easier to put a puzzle together when you can eliminate all the unnecessary pieces, yes?"
Vanessa, of course, peered over to watch what he was doing on the screen of the small electronic device. It looked as natural as any girlfriend or wife being impatient for the information her significant other was looking up. "Only three?" Her eyes scanned the addresses of the three listings. It had been years since Vanessa had been in Bucharest and she'd only been once. "I think the first two are relatively close. The third is across town, I believe. I could be wrong, though. My geography of the city is shoddy at best." She'd been looking over maps of the city on the flight over but they were a little muddled in her head.
"Footwork-driven intel," North grumbled. "The joy of field work."
-----
Three hours later, David sipped his coffee in a small cafe, idly flipping through a cardboard file of photographs and telegrams. "Shame that poor fellow forgot to put a railing on his balcony. And left his files unlocked as well. Can't find a good fixer these days," he mused sarcastically between drinks of the thick black Turkish coffee, passing papers back and forth with Morgan. "Okay, so we're dealing with at least four of the names on our list. I'm thinking exactly four. Shit, it's a Barzhov Gambit."
Glancing over at Morgan, he explained. "Old Cold War term. When I was with the Stasi, our liaisons with the KGB worked with us to flush out dissidents and informers. Four men to an operation; two of us, two of them. One team does the eyes-on recon, the other watches their back because the first team's liable to expose themselves. It's a baited trap. First pair of hitmen makes an obvious recon, draws Natasha out to set up a counter-tail, second team makes the hit. It's a damn ironclad tactic. She's ex-KGB, though. If she suspects they've got two teams on her..." He flipped through the papers until he found a taxi map of one of the Bucharest districts.
"The operational profile that Vazhin - fucking cocksucker - gave us says she's liable to use a mobile hide in this area. If the hit teams have been on the move for more than a day, they'll already be in kill prep. If I were running the gambit, they'd be..." He scratched two ovals on the map with a grease pencil.
Vanessa listened raptly to everything North was saying. This was his territory now, not hers. Assassinations were rare work for her and she got to take the easy way out. Snatch someone who wasn't really a stellar human being in the first place, take on their mimic, pull off the job, drop the mimic immediately after and pick up a new one from some passerby, have one of the guys nearby with clothing options to change into, release the snatched person and let the cops pick them up from all the fingerprints of theirs she'd left behind.
"So do we go sniffing around the areas or call for a regroup and find out what the girls have found out and go from there? Hunting down mercs and finding out who got what job is easy for me, but this is beyond my experience so it's your call." One thing she definitely didn't have a problem with was deferring to the person with the most experience. North was it so his call she'd follow unless there were obvious flaws in his approach.
"We need to establish where Natasha is, and get to her before she wanders into the trap," North said, shuffling the papers together. "Hopefully Miss Frost and Miss Colbert have met with success. Otherwise, I get the feeling we're going to be expending a lot more ammunition than I am comfortable with in this rescue."
"I'm alright with ammunition expenditure. That's why they created silencers." She gave him a smile but it gave off much more warm and kindly than mischievous. It was the downfall of new faces she wasn't used to, Vanessa's facial expressions didn't tend to translate as well. "I suppose it's back to the cave to regroup, share information and come up with a fancy strategy that puts us firmly in the 'victory' category, yes?"
"Indeed, liebchen. Let us see what the other ladies have discovered." North stood up, leaving a few bills on the table for the coffee. "Welcome to the glorious world of fieldcraft. And this is the exciting part."