“Yes. He had an Austrian passport and the ticket had been reserved ahead of time.”
The Vatican intelligence officer handed Harvath a copy of the reservation.
“Why would he want a ticket?” Argento asked. “He’s not going anywhere near St. Peter’s Square tomorrow.”
Harvath thought about it for a moment. “It could be a scalp. Just a sick souvenir. On the bin Laden raid, the SEALs allegedly found some 9/11 memorabilia in his house in Abbottabad.”
The answer seemed to satisfy Argento, and they watched the rest of the footage. It lasted right up until the man left Vatican City. Stepping out onto the Via della Conciliazione, he eventually disappeared into the throng of morning tourists.
“Rome has a billion CCTV cameras. You can’t follow him through those?” Harvath asked.
“My authority ends at the walls of Vatican City.”
Harvath looked at Argento, who was already dialing a number on his cell phone. “I’m on it,” he said.
As great as the ROS operators had been, Harvath had no idea who would be put in charge of sifting through the CCTV footage to try to locate their subject. For all he knew, it was some twenty-year-old kid, working for the City of Rome, who had been out all night partying and had showed up to work with a hangover and no sleep. Every second counted.
“Carl, could I get a copy of your footage?” Harvath asked.
“I don’t see why not. How do you want to receive it?”
Harvath scrolled through his phone and pulled up a DropBox account he used with Nicholas. The Vatican intelligence officer took the information down and went to have one of his IT people copy and upload the footage.
Picking up a mug, Harvath filled it with coffee, added a shot of espresso, and after asking Argento for the keycard back headed upstairs to make a few phone calls.
Stepping outside, he wandered into the garden, where he found a small, shaded bench. Setting his pack down next to him, he fished out his satellite phone, extended the antenna, and fired it up.
When Nicholas answered, he filled him in on everything that had transpired. After describing what their target was wearing, Nicholas agreed that there’d be lots of people dressed like that in Rome today. He also agreed that the Italians were going to have a tough time finding that needle in such a large haystack.
“That’s why I need you to hack into their CCTV system. There’s already footage from Vatican City being uploaded to my DropBox account. Use it as a baseline and then apply the gait algorithm to all the cameras in Rome.”
The gait algorithm was a program that could run concurrently with facial recognition software. But instead of studying faces, it studied how people walked. Your gait was unique, almost like a fingerprint. Once the program knew what it was looking for, it could race through footage until it located and identified its target.
“That could take a while,” the little man replied.
“I need it as soon as possible,” said Harvath, and before Nicholas could respond, he had already disconnected the call and was on to his next.
He called Staelin, who, along with Barton and Morrison, had stayed behind to help Vella continue his interrogation of Vottari. After bringing him up to speed, he asked for an update on their end. Staelin put Vella on the phone.
The doctor explained that he was coming to the end of what he could do in the field. He might be able to extract more back at the Solarium, but he doubted it. He was pretty confident they had wrung everything of value out of the Mafioso.
Harvath thanked him for the SITREP and told him he’d be back in touch as soon as he could.
Now came the hard part. Picking up his mug, he prepared to wait. Stretching out his legs, he was about to take a sip of coffee when something about the CCTV footage hit him.
Grabbing his pack, he ran back inside.
CHAPTER 90
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* * *
It wasn’t that they hadn’t been asking the right question about the CCTV cameras. It was that they had only been asking one—where was the man going? No one had thought to ask where had he been?
Focusing on the moment the man had arrived at Vatican City, Argento’s contact with the City’s cameras had been able to work backward. Even though the man had disappeared into a crowd as he left St. Peter’s, his arrival had been via quiet, uncrowded streets.
As soon as the City’s computer system had locked in on him and had begun piecing his route together, Argento and Harvath had hopped back in the Fiat sedan and had given the driver directions on where to go.
Over his cell phone, Argento’s contact continued to update him until the trail led to video of the man leaving a hotel near Rome’s Termini station. Once the ROS operator had that information, he called the tactical team back at Campo de’ Fiori and told them to get there as quickly as they could.
Stopping a block up, the Carabinieri officer pulled over and dropped Argento and Harvath off. With their backpacks slung over their shoulders, they walked down to the hotel and entered the lobby.
As Argento approached over to the front desk, Harvath kept an eye on the front door, along with everything else.
In under two minutes, the ROS operator had the man’s room number and a pass key. The young lady working the desk this morning had been working the desk when he checked in two nights ago. She prided herself on remembering guests.
At Argento’s request, she had called up to the room. There was no answer. They had beaten him back to the hotel.
Hustling up the stairs, they stepped out into the hallway and walked down to the room. The man, who had used an Austrian passport at the Vatican, had checked into the hotel under a Ukrainian passport.
Drawing their weapons, they took position on either side of the door as Argento knocked. There was no answer.
Identifying himself as hotel security, he knocked again, but there was still no answer. He dipped the card into the reader, the light flashed green, and he pushed open the door.
The room and its contents were unremarkable. There were clothes in the closet, a few things in the dresser, and toiletries in a shaving kit in the bathroom. The only thing that caught Harvath’s eye were the two different types of phone chargers on the desk. Other than that, there was nothing in the room that would give the man away as a terrorist.
They went through his clothes and his suitcase, looking for any hidden compartments or things that might have been sewn into the lining. They found nothing.
They then turned the room upside down, looking under drawers, in air vents, and behind draperies. Still nothing.
After putting the room back together, they had a decision to make. Stay and wait him out, or try to pick up his trail out in the city?