Act of War by Brad Thor Page A

her resources were worth their weight in gold.
    In addition to leaving a man with the BMW, she placed a couple of spotters outside the hotel on Al Fahidi Street to watch for Hanjour. Once they saw him, their job was to figure out whether he was alone. Levy alsoput a man and a woman in the restaurant to have a long, leisurely dinner at a table where they could observe everyone who came and went.
    It wasn’t exactly the light footprint Harvath had envisioned, but it was the right thing to do and Levy more than knew her stuff.
    Their biggest challenge was where and how to actually grab Hanjour. Bur Dubai was a lot like being in the French Quarter in New Orleans, but with three times the people. It was going to be impossible to pull up, stuff him in the trunk, and take off without anyone noticing. Even if they could slip him a drug like Rohypnol, it would be a tightrope act getting him out of the restaurant and through the hotel without attracting attention.
    What they needed was for Hanjour to do their work for them. He needed to walk right into their arms, and that gave Harvath an idea.
    When he presented it to Levy, the first thing she said was, “What’s Plan B?” It wasn’t exactly a vote of confidence.
    But as Harvath explained how it could play out, Levy came around to his way of thinking. That didn’t mean they didn’t need a Plan B. Harvath and Levy assembled one, as well as Plans C, D, and E. If all else failed, they’d go to Plan F—universally known as Fuck it, we’ll do it live. Sometimes, no matter how hard you tried to anticipate and plan for all eventualities, things just went south. When that happened, it usually happened fast. At that point, you relied upon your training and did everything possible to secure the objective. A lot of times it got messy. Very messy. Harvath was hoping this wouldn’t be one of those times.
    •  •  •
    At seven minutes to six, the call came in that a man fitting Khuram Hanjour’s description had just pulled up in front of the hotel. He valet-parked his white Mercedes and walked inside. There was no one else with him.
    As the spotter relayed what the man was wearing, Anne Levy told the rest of her team, particularly the couple she had sitting in the restaurant, that the target had arrived.
    Turning to Harvath she said, “Now what?”
    “Now we wait,” he replied.
    The Arabian Courtyard Hotel was built around a grand atrium with glass elevators you could watch ascend. That allowed Cowles, who was seated in the ground-floor lounge, to watch Hanjour cross the marble lobby, get into one of the elevators, and take it up to the Silk Route level. After relaying the target’s movements, he sat back and pretended to enjoy a coffee as he continued to scan the lobby and the front door for any unwanted guests.
    “We’ve got him,” the female CIA operative said over her Bluetooth earpiece when Hanjour entered the restaurant. She watched him speak with the hostess and then be shown to a table near the windows.
    Hanjour was a balding man of medium height with a thin build. He wore an obviously dyed, tightly cropped black beard and a pair of stylish, frameless glasses. He had paired his khaki trousers with a white, short-sleeved silk dress shirt and a pair of soft leather driving shoes. On his right wrist was a large gold Rolex and on his left pinky finger was a gold signet ring. He wore no other jewelry and carried nothing in his hands that they could see.
    He ordered a gin and tonic and surveyed the room as he sipped, waiting for his companion to arrive. The young CIA couple kept him in their peripheral vision, pretending to be more into each other than anything else. The last thing they needed was for him to know he was under surveillance.
    When the clock on his phone read two minutes past six o’clock, Harvath texted Hanjour a picture. It showed a pillow on a turned-down bed. Propped up against the pillow were two small plastic bags. One was filled with what looked like