Stakeouts were, of course, an integral part of intelligence work, and even more so for counterintelligence, when you needed to keep tabs on the opposition. As a newbie, he’d polished just-learned skills dozens of times in training, practicing with senior intelligence officers as his targets. He’d been on plenty of the real thing since, throughout his career, in the streets of Kabul and Karachi, in Berlin once, and even in Washington, D.C., where he’d been keeping an eye on that SVR officer who’d wanted to defect. Of course, on that case he’d needed not only to watch the target but to watch for his real opposition from the Company, his nominal allies at the CIA. In eight years of intelligence work, he’d never been able to get past the mind-numbing boredom of a routine stakeout. Chavez and Teller had spent the night in the small bedroom on the third floor of Antonio Vicente’s house, taking turns sleeping and watching; de la Cruz had gone home for the night. Frank Procario had joined them for a time, then gone to a hotel back at the airport.
