Court Gentry took the escalator up to the second floor of the mall, and then he walked directly to a rear entrance of the adjoining Ritz-Carlton Pentagon City. He wove through the back of the hotel until he came to the front lobby, and here he stepped up to the elevator bank.
He took the elevator to the fifth floor, where he walked down the hall to a corner suite and entered with a key card.
All eight operational Saudi assets arrived at the Ritz-Carlton just ten minutes later, which was only possible because the hotel was less than a half mile from their safe house. The men wore suits and ties, they came through the two entrances in groups of four, and they looked calm and casual, like businessmen returning from a day at a conference, as they split into four groups in the lobby.
Two men took the main stairs, two men took an elevator to a floor above Gentry’s hotel room, two men entered the Employees Only door and made their way to the service stairs, and two more men waited in the hall.
They all had suppressed Glock 17 pistols and combat knives, and they were all trained killers. At first their earbuds connected them to the director of their service, who had given them the kill order and the room number, but then he had to disconnect for a meeting, so now they just communicated softly to one another.
The team leader, a man named Cha, remained in the lobby with an asset named Jawad. He had the three ascending teams give a final “go check” and then he unleashed them on room 545.
Hani and Kimal moved up the stairs, climbing quickly with their weapons behind their backs. Up on the fourth floor of the stairwell they heard movement, so they raised their weapons, then spun around from the landing just below. There, a hunched-over middle-aged janitor with gray-blond hair mopped the floor, softly rapping along to the Kid Rock song in his headphones. He faced the opposite direction, so the two assets hid their pistols inside their coats and kept going up.
They stepped around the housekeeping cart and passed the hunched-over man without a glance as he continued his rap, and they ignored the words, concentrating on listening for sounds higher up, nearer to their target area.
Until then they both heard the man behind them speak in a loud, low voice. “I know you didn’t just track across my clean floor.”
The assets stood on the stairs above the janitor now. They spun back, looked down, and found themselves facing a large handgun with a larger silencer. Behind the weapon, where the janitor had been, now stood a surprisingly large man holding a mop in one hand and the pistol in the other.
Zack Hightower stood up fully now, adding six inches to his height. He said, “Nighty-night, bitches,” and his Heckler & Koch pistol barked twice in the stairwell. He stepped back on the landing and moved his mop out of the way, and two bodies slid down into the space he had just occupied. Both men were on their backs, their eyes open, holes in their foreheads.
He shot both men once more in the head, just to make sure.
Hightower held a small microphone in his left hand, hidden behind the mop handle. He quickly brought it to his mouth as his slipped the pistol back in the housekeeping cart. “Two down. South stairwell clear.”
Four Saudi operators closed on room 545 at the end of the hall, their suppressed pistols trained on the door. They all wanted to know where their two partners from the stairs were, but they were operating in radio silence now, so they could only listen in while Cha downstairs called over and over for Kimal and Hani to check in.
One of the assets kept his eye on the stairwell, far behind him, worried something must have gone very wrong, but the other three stayed focused on the mission. They moved all the way to the door, and one man raised his foot to kick it in.
Court lifted his head from the peephole quickly, took several steps back, and raised his pistol. At a distance of ten feet from the door he calmly fired the gun at waist height, raised it slightly and fired again, cycled a few inches to the left and fired, then to the right. Over and over and over.
His Glock 17 carried eighteen rounds and he emptied the entire weapon, dropped the magazine, and expertly reloaded it with a fresh one. He moved back to the door, now riddled with holes, and he stepped to the side. Reaching carefully for the latch he opened it, then he lowered into a squat and leaned around, his pistol leading him.
Three of the men here were dead, their bloody bodies draped haphazardly over one another and their blood draining out on the beautiful hall carpet. A fourth had been shot in the lower back; he writhed in pain and tried to roll around to get his pistol aimed in Court’s direction.
Court fired once more into the back of the man’s head, sending a spray of blood and gray matter across the hall carpet.
He then hefted his backpack off the floor next to the door and spoke into the microphone in his hand. “Four men up here. They are all down. I’m clear. We’re missing two.”
The reply from Zack came back quickly. “Not for long, bro. Movement below my poz.”
“I’m coming to you.”
A soft reply now. “Better hurry up, or you’ll miss the festivities.”
71
Murquin al-Kazaz sat in a private room in the back of Marcel’s restaurant in Washington Circle. In front of him was a seventy-dollar filet mignon, and just beyond that were three members of a visiting Chinese trade delegation, here in D.C. for a meeting with American energy officials.
Kaz had wanted to cancel tonight’s meet but these three were potential intelligence sources. China was a nation where Saudi needed a better intelligence presence, and these men were only in town for a day. He decided to go ahead, although he pushed the meeting from the reasonable dining time of eight p.m. to six, which meant the restaurant was mostly empty.
But not totally. He was surrounded by security here, ten men in all, with two more drivers in the lot outside with the vehicles. The three Chinese men had asked about the entourage of obvious security officers, but Kaz had passed it off as his standard operating procedure here in America, where crime was, unfortunately, so much worse than it was in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia or the People’s Republic of China, two places where governments knew what to do with their criminals.
That won him some agreement from his potential sources.
During dinner the Saudi’s mind bounced back and forth between the past week’s hunt here in the area and the conversation with the Chinese businessmen, but just when he’d managed to push most of his worries away about all the compromises in Carmichael’s campaign to kill his ex-assassin, Kaz’s phone rang with a distinctive ring.
He excused himself, stood up and walked towards the back wall of the restaurant, and held the phone to his ear.
“Yes?”
“We are under attack!”
Kaz walked all the way into the corner of the room now and leaned into the phone. It was Cha, the team leader of the assets, and his voice echoed as if he was in a stairwell.
“What?”
“Kimal and Hani are dead, Mohammed and the others are not reporting. I think they are—”
“Where are you?”
Kaz heard the man scream. “Jawad! Jawad! Cover—”
“Listen to me, Cha. Listen carefully. Do you have anything on you that relates back to the embassy? Anything at all?”
“What? I… I don’t know. You have to send another team.”
“It’s up to you, Cha.”
“Jawad? Jawad, are you still with me? Jawad is not answering! I have to—”
Kaz heard the soft pop of a suppressed gunshot, then he heard the phone fall to the ground, bouncing several times. The line stayed open, and the Saudi Arabian standing in the restaurant dining room just pressed the phone tighter to his ear.