Sweat covered his brow and trickled down the back of his neck. He looked up to his dinner guests, halfway across the room. They spoke among themselves a little, but they looked back at Kaz as they did so.
A few seconds later Kaz heard a scuffing sound, possibly of the phone being picked up from the floor. Then a soft voice spoke into the device. It was almost nonchalant, but utterly convincing. “I’m coming for you now. I don’t know who you have protecting you, but you’d better hope they are a lot better than these guys here.” A pause. Then, “These guys were shit.”
Kaz said nothing, but he did not hang up.
The man on the other end said, “I know. I know everything. Trieste. Denny. Israel… You.”
Murquin al-Kazaz panicked. He hung up the phone and snapped his fingers, summoning his principal protection agent. With only the quickest and barest of explanations to the men at the table, the Saudi intelligence chief raced for the front door of the restaurant, his detail scrambling to form a diamond pattern around him.
The three Chinese businessmen sat at the table staring at one another, wondering who the fuck was going to pick up the check.
Court did not, in fact, know everything. He assumed the operative would have been speaking with his control officer, and his control officer would know what this was all about. For this man to so brazenly run operatives to do the bidding of the CIA told Court this man was deeply invested in the outcome.
The fact that Court had no idea who this man was, or why he was so involved, made his threats difficult to construct, but he’d done his best to act like he knew what the hell was going on.
He could only hope this would encourage the man and his cohorts to scatter like roaches in the light.
At which point, if it all went to plan, Court would stomp on them all.
Denny Carmichael had an eight p.m. meeting with the Violator Working Group here at the Alexandria safe house but for now he just listened in to Dakota’s JSOC team as it converged on the Ritz-Carlton Pentagon City. The TOC had lost camera coverage of Gentry after he left the lobby, but by checking the elevator he entered they knew he went to the fifth floor, and by pulling information from the hotel’s server they saw the only door to have a card key placed in it at the right time was 545.
Now JSOC moved through the lobby, Denny watched them on the feed, and they disappeared into the elevators and stairwell.
It was his fervent hope these men did not find their target. Or at least didn’t find him alive. Denny had sent Kaz’s men as soon as he’d received the report of Gentry in the mall, and since this location was only three or four minutes’ driving time from the Saudi safe house, he knew his foreign assets would arrive well before the army boys of JSOC.
While he waited he looked at the television monitor next to the Ritz feed. CNN was on and, he had to admit, their story about the death of Jordan Mayes was perfect. An artist rendering of “Jeff Duncan” appeared on the screen as they spoke of a lone motorcycle assassin who raced up next to a vehicle carrying two senior CIA officers and opened fire.
There were witnesses who appeared on camera claiming there was more than one shooter, but the surviving CIA official in the vehicle — CNN went to great lengths to point out she was female, as if that was surprising — verified to authorities and in an off-camera interview with the network that she only saw one attacker.
As usual, CNN was going virtually wall-to-wall with the story, and they were helpful with the “lone gunman” narrative, dismissing the other witnesses by devoting a segment to errors in witness memory, and even having a psychologist on set to explain how the PTSD the witnesses were experiencing from this traumatic event was, no doubt, causing them to misremember.
Denny had to admit it; Suzanne Brewer had come through.
He couldn’t have been happier about that, but what he heard from the JSOC radios a few seconds later caused his heart to drop.
“This is Dakota. I have bodies. Wait one.” A pause. Then, “Jesus Christ. I’ve got four dead in the stairwell. None are the target. These are armed men, fighting-age males. All dead. All head-shots.”
Another call came over the commo net. “Harley to Dakota. We’ve got four more up here on the fifth floor. All DOA, multiple gunshots. I do not see Violator among them. Suggest we get the fuck out of here, boss, local PD might already be en route.”
“Roger that. Everybody exfil.”
Denny sat alone at his desk. He remained still for a moment, until his phone rang, startling him. Looking down, he saw it was Kaz.
“Yes?”
“Gentry killed them. All of them. He’s coming for me now. He knows!”
Denny Carmichael breathed heavily into the phone now. Things had spun completely out of control. Kaz was the calmest intelligence official Denny had ever worked with. If he was losing his cool, Denny knew he was in trouble. “Calm down. He doesn’t know anything.”
“He knows! He told me he knew about Trieste.”
“You spoke to him?”
“Yes.”
“And what does that mean? Trieste. It means nothing. He’s flailing, Kaz. That’s all. He’s trying to get into your head. To get you to expose yourself. If you stay calm you will be—”
Kaz said, “I can’t help with this anymore. My exposure is too great.”
Carmichael shouted into the phone, “Listen to me, Kaz, you aren’t going anywhere till this is over!”
“Forget it! The local police will take control of the scene. My men are dead. The dead will be identified as Saudi, it will link my nation with the hunt for Court Gentry, and everyone will know. It is only a matter of time before they connect the pieces.” He paused. “I have to get out of the country.”
“No! We’ll come up with a story for the press. I’ll talk to them personally. We’ve manipulated it so far, we will control it.”
“What story?”
Carmichael said, “Come to me here. We can talk about this. I’ll put it on the books as an emergency liaison meeting between our offices. They won’t let you bring your detail to the safe house, but I can send an armored motorcade to pick you up and bring you to me.”
“I don’t know what you think we can accomplish.”
“Damage control, Kaz! We stop the bleeding on this op, and then we go back on offense.” Carmichael looked at his watch. “I have an emergency meeting with the Working Group at eight, but I’ll send the cars to pick you up now and you can wait in my office till I’m finished.”
There was a long pause. Then, “Send your very best men.”
Court and Zack exfiltrated the Ritz hotel and then began driving south, out of Arlington. The plan was to return to Court’s safe house, of sorts, in the woods an hour south of the District. Zack didn’t think much of the plan; he wanted to stop for celebratory pizza and beers, but Court insisted they lie low for the rest of the night.
They were most of the way down I-95 and nearing the turnoff to the little airport when Zack got a call from Matt Hanley. He put it on speaker so Court could hear.
Zack gave Hanley an after-action report on the events at the Ritz, and Hanley seemed pleased, but quickly it became clear he had something else he wanted to talk about.
“I just got some interesting news from a guy who used to be in Ground Branch. Now he is driving in the secure motor pool. I put out feelers with a few outside the division yesterday saying I was trying to find out where Denny was spending his nights, and this guy came through.”