To Watch
Joe
It was our first day to get to do some actual surveillance. We'd found out by a CIA message that Dominic's flight plans were delayed; he wasn't going to be coming until after Christmas. But, Mr. Irving had "suggested" that we check out his warehouses and try to see what the hours for his crew were. We were supposed to get an idea of the guard rotations and the breaks and that sort of thing. And maybe try to find a good angle for Cayden to shoot from. Try to find a window that Dominic would pass by or something.
"Where would you prefer to shoot from?" I asked her that morning as we ate oatmeal together.
She shrugged and waited until she'd swallowed her mouthful before she said, "Anywhere is fine with me. I think my thing will be wind."
"So the location might have to change?"
She nodded her head as she stirred the liquidy oatmeal around in her bowl. Another fact that I had learned about her (besides the fact that she could sing like no other): She liked her oatmeal to be soupy. "I mean, it will all depend on where Dominic will be, anyway. Do we have a layout of the building?"
"Yes," I replied. "But they think that it's been modified since then and no one has been able to get their hands on a newer blueprint. So we'll just have to look for windows."
"Or maybe not," she mused. "If the walls are thin enough, I can use a body heat detector and fire a bullet through the wall."
"There are body heat detectors that you can attach to a gun?" I asked, surprised.
She smiled and nodded. "It's like a scope, except it shows body heat."
"But if there are multiple people in the room, how would you be able to tell which one is Dominic?"
She got this strange look on her face, as if she didn't want to say what came out of her mouth next. "Then I would just have to shoot them all."
I nodded slowly and wondered for the first time if something inside of her didn't like killing people. I mean, she was good at it, but that didn't mean that it had to be her favorite thing in the whole world. Maybe she secretly hated killing people but didn't know what else to do with her life. "Well, we'll just have to hope that Dominic likes to look out of his windows often."
She gave a small smile and tipped the bowl up to her mouth to drink the rest of her breakfast. Then, she carried her bowl to the sink and I finished the rest of my oatmeal before moving to do the same. "We'd better get dressed so that we can get going."
She nodded and moved for the stairs. In my own room, I shaved quickly and then traded my pajama pants for jeans and my T-shirt for a white long sleeved shirt and a blue sweater vest that probably would have looked dorky on anyone else, but that I thought I could kind of pull off. And, besides, I knew that men in this part of the world wore sweater vests regularly. And the whole point was to fit in.
Cayden wasn't down yet when I went back into the kitchen, so I got myself a glass of water and drank it slowly, thinking about everything that we had to get done today (which really wasn't all that much). We had to map the building the best that we could from an outside view and we had to survey the area for escape routes and Cayden had to test all kinds of different places to see where she would prefer to shoot from. That was going to be the hard part, I knew, because she had no idea of the subject's pattern and what time he would be where and what the weather would be like. But, it's not like we had to do the killing on a certain day. We had a span with which to act and Cayden would be able to pick the day with the best weather for her shooting.
I heard her coming down the stairs and I put the glass away, grabbing the car keys from a hook. She entered the kitchen and when I turned and saw her, I tried to figure out why my heart began to beat so much faster. Her hair was half up half down, straightened, and she wore jeans and a green sweater with a black North Face jacket over it. And then I realized that she was wearing makeup to accent her blue eyes, which seemed to make them shine like stars.
She was absolutely beautiful.
I cleared my throat. "I figure one of us can drive there and the other can drive back."
She nodded. "Sounds fair. Who is driving first?"
"I will, if you want me to."
She nodded and we headed for the door.
The car turned out to be some foreign model that I had never driven before, but I didn't figure it would be too big of a problem. The problem was going to be maneuvering through all of the trees until we could reach a road. But, there was a path just big enough for the car that was kind of hidden, so we made it out without too much trouble.
"Do you mind if I turn on music?" I asked after a few moments of silence on an actual road.
Cayden shook her head, so I reached for the radio. The first and second stations were just static, so I moved on to the third. It was a symphony playing a song that I had heard before, but couldn't quite place. And then I realized that it was a song by Beethoven, but I couldn't remember the name.
Cayden hummed along.
Another fact: She liked (or at least knew) Beethoven's compositions.
Cayden
We parked a mile and a half from the main warehouse, the headquarters. There was no way that we were going to park any closer and risk the car being caught on any cameras that Dominic might have installed on the outside of his warehouses. After all, we had read right there in his file that Dominic was a very careful man. You couldn't become the world's leading crime boss unless you were very clever and extremely careful. Oh, and evil; don't forget evil. And inhumane and cruel and mean; just plain mean. I guess it's not hard to tell how I feel about people like that, huh?
I guess that's part of the reason that I got into this business in the first place. Because I wanted to be on the good side of things. When I was younger, I had loved watching Batman and Superman because they always won; good always triumphed over evil. And even though that wasn't always the case in the real world, I wanted to be part of the good that would win. I wanted to be like Superman and Batman in my own way. I wanted to feel like I was helping the world, in however small a way.
Thinking about that made me wonder how Joe had gotten into the whole CIA thing. I knew that he had gone to a school that trained him for that, but surely he could have gone to college and became something else if he didn't like it? Had he watched Batman and Superman when he was a little kid? Did he feel like he was saving the world when he was on missions? Or did he just do it because it's what he was used to? I really had no idea.
But I kind of wanted to know, as strange as it sounds. I hadn't wanted to connect with someone in a very long time. But, for some reason that I hadn't even begun to fathom myself, I kind of wanted a connection with Joe. A friendship, maybe. I wanted to know the simple things about him, aside from the things I already knew like how much butter he put on his muffin and the fact that he shaved every morning and how he liked to make his oatmeal. I wanted to know more, and this sudden craving for knowledge about someone kind of scared me. It was just weird for me. Especially after everything that had happened last timeā¦
We started with the layout of the building. We added on to the original blueprints where we saw that we needed to and tried to look through windows the best we could with binoculars. We both strolled by the front of the warehouse, each time making sure that we were well hidden in a crowd of people so that the cameras wouldn't be able to catch our faces. Finally, Joe looked over the final blueprint one more time. "It looks good," he pronounced. "Come on; let's go in here."
We went into the coffee shop that he had suggested and we both bought coffee, him a latte and me a mocha. Then, we sat down at a table and Joe spoke first. "I'll need to make a quick copy of this so that we can send it back to headquarters."
I nodded. "I'm still going to need to scout rooftops. Do you need me here for the copying?"
He shook his head. "You can go if you want. Are you gonna be okay by yourself?"
I took a long drink of my mocha. "You're forgetting, I normally don't have a partner on my missions. I'm used to scouting alone."
He nodded and smiled. "Then go for it. I'll catch up with you after I've copied this and gone to the post office to mail it."
I nodded and took another long drink before tossing the cup in the trash can and heading out the door. Finding the right place to shoot from was slow going. Especially in a crowded area. And getting to some of the rooftops was a mess. And sometimes, I got frustrated because I would go through the trouble of getting to a rooftop, only to find that it wasn't the place that I wanted to shoot from.
Finally, though, I was able to find the perfect place to shoot from. The shot would go right through the window of the room that Joe and I had been pretty confident had to be Dominic's office. And, surely, Dominic would spend time in his office. Smiling, I got down from the rooftop and found my way back to the street.
"Hey," Joe said as he fell into step beside me. We both turned and headed for the car. "Did you find a place to shoot from?"
"Yeah; I did." I briefly described where it was and where the shot would go, and he nodded. "Sounds perfect."
"Should be," I agreed.
We approached the car and he tossed me the keys, making me remember that it was my turn to drive. Luckily, though, I had driven a car just like the model we had not too long ago, and I remembered how it worked.
As we drove, Joe said, "Can I ask you a question?"
"You mean, besides the one that you just asked me?"
He smiled. "Yeah."
I shrugged and secretly hoped that it wouldn't be a question that I couldn't answer. I didn't want to put up any more walls between us. "Sure; go for it." Please don't be too personal. Please don't be too personal.
He took a breath. "Do you like classical music?"
"What?" I glanced over at him, surprised at his question.
"Do you like classical music?" he repeated. "You seemed familiar with that Beethoven song earlier."
I nodded slowly. "Yeah; I love classical music, actually. It relaxes me when I need to wind down after a mission."
"Okay," he said simply and we were quiet for the rest of the drive.
(The songs from the last chapter were "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" and "Baby, It's Cold Outside")