Free Consent to Kill by Vince Flynn Page B

Turk stepped out under the wrought-iron-and-glass canopy of the hotel and the doorman handed him an umbrella. Pleasantries were exchanged, the Turk lit a cigarette, and he was on his way. The assassin had thought about this part very carefully. He was already positioned in front of his subject. If the police ever got around to reviewing the tapes, they would be looking for someone who had followed the Turk to the park and would in all likelihood not bother to see if someone had been in front of him every step of the way.
    The assassin had also found a hole in the way the security cameras were set up. He would take a slightly different path to the park and avoid having his movements recorded. The park itself was a bit of a problem. There was usually a bobby or two loitering about, a fair amount of state workers, and one particularly pesky camera pod that was in close proximity to the spot where the hit would take place. He was disguised enough that the cameras would never get a clear shot of his face, but they could begin to build a profile. In addition to that he would prefer the act itself not to be recorded. Such footage had a way of galvanizing those who were in charge of solving violent crimes. The assassin had been struggling with this problem the day before when a solution popped into his mind.
    He reached up and touched the side of a tiny wireless Motorola headset affixed to his right ear. A second later he could hear her phone ringing.
    “Amanda Poole speaking.” The voice had a crisp British accent.
    “Amanda, I’m going to take a walk. Would you swing by and see if our friend is going to join me?”
    “I’d love to, Harry.”
    The assassin rounded the corner, careful to keep his chin down. There was a tendency in his line of work to overthink things. Much of this stemmed from the fact that most of the people were either former intelligence operatives or military. In Harry’s case it was the latter. When you worked for a big government the resources were vast. Field equipment was tested and retested under every conceivable condition, billions of dollars worldwide was put into the development of new ways to communicate and better ways to encrypt. The problem as Harry saw it, though, was that as much—or more—money, was spent on new eavesdropping technology and vastly powerful and complex decryption systems. The National Security Agency of America alone had dozens of satellites circling the planet that were designed to do one thing—record people’s conversations. They had the world’s most powerful computers ensconced in football-field-size subterranean chambers under their headquarters in Maryland.
    These Cray supercomputers churned away day after day, night after night, sifting through e-mails, radio transmissions, and phone intercepts. Highly specialized programs were written so the computers could home in on the key words bomb, gun, kill, and assassinate in every foreign language of interest. Certain types of transmissions were prioritized. For America, anything coming out of Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan, for example, was kicked to the top of the queue. Anything intercepted in those countries via secure and encrypted modes was further kicked up the queue. And so it went, with the programs designed to focus on the methods used by people who were trying to keep secrets.
    All of this left Harry with a simple question. If superpowers, with nearly unlimited financial resources and brainpower, could not keep secrets from each other, what hopes did a two-person operation have to stay up on the technology and out in front of those spending billions? The answer was easy. He couldn’t, so the only solution was to go in the opposite direction. The spy agencies around the world didn’t care about inane conversations by business associates or lovers. The trick was to stay with the herd. Use the same mode of communication everyone else used and stay away from any discussion of the real