That included myself. Glass knew me. I was going to have to stay on the fringes of this surveillance for the time being.
By four o’clock that afternoon, I was back in the city, and we had three cars positioned strategically around the school neighborhood, just as Glass was leaving for the day.
All of my team were carrying GPS locators so I could use a single laptop to track them from a distance in my own car. We had radio communication set up on an alternate, nonrecorded channel, which was as private as we were going to get on short notice. I parked several blocks away and listened in.
“This is Tango. He’s out the south gate. Green Subaru Forester, turning north on Wisconsin.”
“Go ahead, Tango. This is X Ray. I’ll cut around and get you somewhere after Thirty-seventh Street.”
“No problem. Bravo, hang back if you can.”
“Copy that.”
We had just enough units to run a floating box, with one car following for a while, then dropping off while another came in to take its place. I gave them some time to get ahead of me, then pulled around and brought up the rear from about half a mile back.
“Who’s got eyes on him?” I asked, once I was headed up Wisconsin the way they’d gone. “What’s he doing?”
“This is Bravo. He’s just driving. Listening to music, it looks like, tapping his hands on the wheel. Guy doesn’t seem like he’s got a care in the world.”
“Yeah, well, I think maybe he does.”
Glass stayed on Wisconsin for a couple of miles. It seemed like he might be headed into Maryland, but then I got word he was stopping in the Friendship Heights shopping mall. He parked in the lot outside Bloomingdale’s and walked over to the Mazza Gallerie mall.
I sent two guys inside after him and kept one circling the block, then parked myself just past the lot, where I could see Glass’s empty car.
For the next forty-five minutes, it was the usual kind of boring minutiae you get on ninety-nine percent of surveillance details. I sat and listened while Glass went to McDonald’s. Got a burger. Sat at one of the tables, reading a paperback copy of Sebastian Junger’s War, which I’d read myself. He didn’t seem to be in any kind of hurry. Nothing special about the day.
When he finally got up again, they followed him into Neiman Marcus, leapfrogging around the store while he looked at shoes and men’s shirts. It almost seemed like he was deliberately killing time for some reason.
And then suddenly he was gone.
“Tango, you got him?” I heard.
“Negative. Hang on a second. Hold on. I think he went into the bathroom.”
Another fifteen seconds ticked by. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!
“What’s going on there?” I said.
“This is Tango. It’s not him in the bathroom. I think we might have lost him.”
“Lost him?” I said, trying not to rip anyone’s head off — yet. “Or he gave you the slip?”
“I really don’t know,” he said. “But we’re going to want some more eyes in here.”
I resisted the urge to run inside myself. I didn’t want to lose my head and blow this thing. But I sure as hell didn’t want to lose Rodney Glass, either.
THIS WAS PURE misery. A disaster — and I’d been in charge. I was so angry at myself, even if I couldn’t have done anything differently now.
I was going crazy, watching Glass’s Subaru from the confines of my own car, and listening to nothing but radio silence while my guys scoured the neighborhood.
Both malls.
The parking lots.
Side streets.
Then, just after seven o’clock, I spotted Glass.