Chapter 34: Surveillance
Casey found Simon at three thirty, between the laptop display and the home networking aisle, and said four words.
"Tonight. Nine PM. Operation."
Simon looked at him. "What's the rate?"
"Surveillance and transport. You drive, we watch. Two hundred."
Simon considered this for approximately one second. Two hundred dollars to drive a car while other people did the complicated parts was the easiest money he'd made since the races.
"Back door at nine," Casey said, already walking away.
Simon clocked out at eight forty-five, walked to his car in the Buy More lot, and drove to the parking structure two blocks over where he'd started leaving the Supra on work nights. He changed out of his green polo in the car, walked the two blocks back, and arrived at the Buy More's rear loading dock at eight fifty-eight.
He scanned the service alley — four vehicles, two dumpsters, one security camera covering the wrong angle. One vehicle stood out: a black Chevy Suburban, full size, tinted windows, parked with its nose toward the exit in the way that wasn't a parking choice so much as a positioning decision.
He walked up and knocked on the passenger window.
The window went down.
Casey looked at him. Then at his watch. Then back at him. He said nothing.
In the back seat, Sarah was trying not to smile and losing.
"Driver's side," Casey said.
Simon went around, got in.
Before he could ask about the operation, Casey pulled a twenty from somewhere and handed it to Sarah without looking at her.
Simon looked at the transaction. "What did I miss?"
"I bet you'd walk to the Suburban without looking around first," Sarah said. "Casey bet you'd scan the alley and find us before you got within ten feet."
"Casey was right."
"Hence the twenty." She folded it away. "How did you know which vehicle?"
Simon adjusted the seat. "Surveillance operation, mobile not fixed, which means a large vehicle you can work from — but not so large it reads as commercial. Sedan's too small for three people plus equipment. Van reads as a tail. A full-size SUV in black is standard enough to be invisible and has the interior room you need." He checked the mirrors. "And you people have a consistent taste in cars."
"We prefer consistent operational vehicles," Sarah said.
"I'm sure you do." Simon found the ignition. "Where are we going?"
"Chuck's first," Casey said.
Simon pulled out of the alley.
Chuck was waiting on his front steps when the Suburban rolled up, which suggested Sarah had called ahead. He got in the back, looked at Simon behind the wheel, and stopped.
"Why is Simon—"
"Contracted driver," Casey said. "He knows what he needs to know and nothing else. If you don't want him involved, don't say anything he shouldn't hear."
Chuck processed this with the expression of a man who had a question about the ethics of the situation and was deciding whether this was the time to raise it.
"Are you doing this voluntarily?" Chuck asked Simon.
"Very voluntarily. I need the money."
"For—"
"College." Simon pulled onto the boulevard. "Where are we going?"
Casey gave him an address in the Little Tokyo district. Simon ran the route in his head — he knew it, drove it twice a week on the way to Sifu Yao's school.
He didn't say that.
The restaurant was on a side street two blocks from the dojo — a mid-size establishment Simon knew by sight, had eaten at twice, and had never looked at with the specific attention he was now applying to it.
He found a position on the opposite side of the street with a sightline to the entrance and the side alley, cut the engine, and they settled in.
Surveillance, Simon had learned from Veronica's various explanations over the years, was mostly patience. You established your position, you maintained your angle, you watched without drawing attention, and you waited for whatever you were waiting for to happen.
Chuck lasted forty minutes.
"I'm going to step out," he said. "Just for a minute."
"Don't go far," Casey said. "You're not here."
"I'm just getting some air."
"You're just going to the bathroom," Casey said, reading the situation accurately.
"I'll be right back."
Chuck got out. Walked around the corner. Was gone for four minutes.
When he came back, he was carrying a takeout bag.
Simon watched this happen in the side mirror and said nothing.
A man Simon didn't recognize approached the Suburban from the sidewalk — white, middle thirties, carrying a different bag.
Simon's hand went to the tranq pistol in his jacket. In the back, he heard the quiet sound of two other weapons being drawn.
The man knocked on Chuck's window.
Chuck rolled it down.
"Hey — did somebody order the shrimp?" The man squinted at the bag. "Looking for a Carmichael?"
"That's me," Chuck said. He produced cash from somewhere, took the bag, handed over the money. "Keep the change."
"Thanks, man." The delivery driver walked away.
Silence in the Suburban.
Simon released the tranq pistol. In the back, two other weapons went back to wherever they lived.
He looked at the rearview mirror. Casey's jaw was set in the specific way it set when he was choosing not to say everything he was thinking.
"Chuck," Simon said, very carefully, "did you order food to be delivered to the surveillance vehicle while we were running a surveillance operation."
"I ordered to a fake name," Chuck said. "I used a fake name."
"You used the name Carmichael."
"It's my cover name."
"Your cover name is on file with a delivery service."
"It's — I was hungry." A pause. "Also I got extra for everyone. There's shrimp and there's the sesame noodles."
Casey turned in his seat. Looked at Chuck for a long moment.
Then he turned back forward.
"Drive," he said to Simon.
"We're leaving?" Chuck said, reaching into the bag.
"We're repositioning before anyone who saw that delivery connects it to this vehicle." Casey's voice had the particular flatness of a man who had given up on certain battles. "And we're leaving because you just compromised the position."
Chuck started to respond, thought better of it, and offered Simon the noodles instead.
Simon took them.
"Don't tell Beckman," Casey said.
"Obviously," Sarah said.
They repositioned two blocks east with a different angle on the restaurant's side exit, which was where the real action was anyway — the front entrance for the visible part of the operation, the side for everything that wasn't meant to be visible.
At ten forty, a Lincoln Town Car pulled up to the side alley.
Four men in dark jackets got out and took positions while two others maneuvered a wheelchair from the vehicle's rear. The man in the wheelchair was elderly, compact, still — the specific stillness of someone who had learned that the appearance of stillness was its own form of authority.
Simon's brain processed the face before his mouth could form a question.
"Jerry Pan," he said. "He runs the east side of the district. Has for thirty years. Legitimate import business as a front, which everyone knows about, and which everyone pretends they don't know about because the alternative is unpleasant for everyone."
Casey looked at him. "How do you know that."
"I trained at a martial arts school two blocks from here for three years. You hear things." Simon kept his eyes on the alley. "He's connected to at least two of the district's organizations. The fact that he's using the side exit suggests this isn't a social call."
Sarah was already on her radio, relaying something in a clipped code Simon didn't know.
The motorcyclist appeared from the restaurant's rear door — the woman from the kitchen, the one the Intersect had flagged. She had a helmet on now, the kind with a full visor that obscured her face. She started her bike, waited until the Town Car moved, and pulled out after it.
"That's our target," Casey said.
Simon had the engine running before Casey finished the sentence.
He gave the motorcyclist a hundred-yard lead before he pulled into traffic — enough buffer to avoid her mirrors, not enough to lose her at a light.
"Thirty yards minimum for mobile surveillance," Sarah said to Chuck, who had been about to ask something. "You hang closer than that and you're in their peripheral vision on the next straight."
"But then what if they turn?" Chuck said.
"Then you know the turn because you've been watching their signals and body language for the last quarter-mile."
"And if they don't signal?"
"Then you anticipated the turn anyway because you've been reading the route," Sarah said patiently.
Chuck absorbed this. "Is there a manual for this?"
"Yes," Casey said. "You don't have clearance for it."
Chuck looked at Simon. "How do you know the thirty-yard rule?"
Simon watched the motorcyclist take a right onto the main boulevard, smooth and unhurried.
"My ex-girlfriend is a private detective," Simon said. "She explained surveillance technique to me once as a way of telling me I was bad at not being noticed."
"Was she right?"
"About that specifically? Yes."
He made the right turn, smooth and unhurried, thirty yards back.
In the rearview mirror, Chuck was nodding slowly with the expression of someone mentally cataloguing useful information.
Casey said nothing, which was the closest he got to approval.
The motorcyclist moved through the city with the practiced ease of someone who knew she was probably being followed and had decided not to care yet — which was either confidence or arrogance, and Simon was working on determining which.
He kept the distance. Kept the angle. Kept his eyes where they needed to be.
The city moved around them in the way it moved at night — orange and indifferent and enormous, doing its own thing.
Simon drove.
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