And even if he drove slowly, the address numbers weren’t always clear from the street. Bushes and trees often blocked the view, or the numbers were located in the oddest places. Not right next to the door as you’d expect. By the time he’d finally spotted a number on one of the houses, it was gone—leaving him unable to read the digits. On top of that, some of the houses were too far from the street for the naked eye. He’d need binoculars or some kind of scope to read the numbers. The FBI would probably intercept him before he got out of the neighborhood if he started studying houses with binoculars.
Rudd needed to be particularly careful during this quick reconnaissance. He’d even swapped cars with Rick Gentry on the off chance that Devin Gray had warned Marnie Young to watch out for a gray SUV—or that he’d surreptitiously installed a camera to watch the street. They couldn’t be too cautious with this guy. CONTROL clearly didn’t have much to work with if they were putting most of their surveillance eggs in this basket.
When the phone’s map indicated he was about to pass the Youngs’ address, he glanced to the right and took in the scene. Marnie Young’s childhood home was an unassuming redbrick Cape Cod–style house with a stepped, brick walkway leading up the gentle slope of their well-kept front lawn from the foot of a well-worn asphalt driveway. A black four-door Jeep Wrangler with a United States Marine Corps spare tire cover and a gold naval aviator bumper sticker sat on the driveway about midway between the street and the garage. Easy peasy.
Credit card data put her in one of two area coffee shops almost every day for a few hours, and now they knew what to look for. According to CONTROL, Marnie Young, a combat-decorated Marine Corps helicopter pilot, had recently left active duty to pursue a civilian career, presumably in the DC area. She’d been one of only two people to attend Helen Gray’s wake here in Falls Church—Karl Berg had been the other—which put her at the top of the likely Devin Gray contacts list. CONTROL assumed they had some kind of ongoing connection.
They’d slap a few trackers on her Jeep and hope for the best. Same with the car belonging to Devin’s father, who lived in a very similar Falls Church neighborhood. Hope for the best pretty much described the overall surveillance strategy at this point, since it was in no way feasible for his team to physically stake out either of the houses.
Harvey and his wife, whom he’d just dropped at a nearby Enterprise Rent-A-Car office to acquire a new surveillance vehicle, would work with Rick Gentry to follow Marnie Young. They’d most likely take rooms at the Hampton Inn less than a half mile away and wait for her tracker to start moving. That way they wouldn’t run the risk of unknowingly parking in front of an FBI agent’s house and land them all in an interrogation room at the J. Edgar Hoover Building on the other side of the Potomac River.
Logan Walsh and Nathan Clark would take up residence in the Hilton Garden Inn a few miles north of here and follow the same procedure. Mason Gray lived a quarter of a mile from that hotel, on the other side of Falls Church. It was the best they could do with the limited resources and personnel available. The biggest flaw in the plan was the inability to watch either of these target locations. Devin Gray could drive right into Falls Church and hang out with Marnie or his dad at their houses, and there was nothing Rudd could do about it. It was a huge flaw, mitigated by the assumption that Devin Gray wouldn’t risk visiting either location now that he knew he was the target of an active surveillance effort. He wouldn’t know how thinly they were spread. In fact, he’d likely assume that the effort had been expanded since he’d so easily spoofed their first attempt to follow him.
Rudd felt so sure about this that he’d almost pushed back against CONTROL’s insistence that he keep Sandy Jones and Leo Ward at the stakeout across the street from Devin’s apartment. He was glad he hadn’t, because after thinking about it for a while, Rudd realized he would have made a fool out of himself. The decision to keep Sandy and Ward in place was a hedged bet by CONTROL against the assumption that Devin Gray would stay away from any obvious surveillance traps.
What if the discovery of the trackers hadn’t triggered some kind of deep conspiracy fears? What if he’d concluded that he was being ridiculous after a day or two of hiding from the deep state and returned to his apartment? Or that it had been the FBI that had tagged his vehicle? It wasn’t unreasonable to assume that the FBI might want to track his movements for a while. His mother had recently kidnapped an elderly man for no apparent reason and shot a sheriff’s deputy in cold blood.