At noon Brewer had a lunch of Chinese food brought in to the tactical operations center, and Zack was seated at a desk picking through his shrimp lo mein when Jordan Mayes stepped into the room and hurried over. “I need to speak with you.”
Zack put down his cardboard carton and his chopsticks, stood smartly, and stepped into the hallway. Mayes looked back to Brewer as he headed out himself. “I’ll have him for the rest of the day. Maybe tomorrow, as well.”
Hightower fought a smile. “It’s party time!” he told himself.
The two men went upstairs to Mayes’s office. Once there, Mayes closed the door and walked over to a small sitting area. When he and Hightower were seated close together, he leaned closer still and said, “I have a problem.”
Hightower always sat ramrod-straight, but he tightened his posterior chain muscles even more. “Not for long. I’ll take care of it.”
“You know a man named Leland Babbitt?”
“No, sir. I do not.”
“He runs Townsend Government Services.”
Zack nodded. “I know those assholes.”
Mayes sighed, adopting a worried look on his face. “Babbitt has made himself a clear and present danger to our operation at the Agency. We have tried to dissuade him from this, but he persists. He has threatened to go public detailing some classified intelligence programs that, if revealed, would be devastating for our mission here.” He shook his head, an expression of disbelief. “There is no question but that these revelations will put good men and women in the field at great personal risk. Frankly, Zack, at this point, we have exhausted all of our options.”
Zack Hightower grasped instantly that he was being asked to assassinate an American citizen in the United States. He blinked hard at this realization.
But only once. “I’ll take care of it.”
“I need you to do this alone.”
“Of course you do. Don’t worry. I’ll get it done.”
“Denny and I are more than confident that you will. Of course I can help you with any equipment you might need.”
Zack smiled now. “Mr. Mayes, this might come as a shock to you, but I’ve already got a couple of tools that should be suitable for the task at hand.”
Mayes just said, “I had a feeling you might.”
22
Raphael and his brother Raul had no clue their customer was going to murder them, not even when two of the customer’s business associates entered their garage and pulled the bay doors down, cutting off any chance for their escape.
They had no real reason to be concerned. After all, the brothers had done quality work in the short time frame demanded by their customer, and he stood before them now, clearly more than pleased with the results.
Murquin al-Kazaz was the customer, and they had an inkling he was a dangerous man, but they couldn’t have known he was a Saudi intelligence operative. Not that they would have really cared. The brothers ran a small chop shop operation just outside of Baltimore, so they dealt with all sorts of shady characters on a daily basis. They’d never done work for a foreign spy, as far as they knew, but they had no aversion to such a customer, as long as he had cash.
Their specialty was high-speed paint- and bodywork that could make a stolen car unrecognizable, even to its owner, along with changing out VIN numbers and tags. They offered other services, as well, for a premium, of course, and it was one of these special orders that would hasten them on to the end of their lives.
But for the moment they just stood there, nodded at the two new men who’d entered and closed the bay doors. Before they could ask what was going on their customer told the brothers that he and his colleagues just wanted to make sure no one on the street saw the three vehicles parked in the garage. Raphael and Raul did not protest, chiefly because they thought they were seconds away from making a lot of money from the man who now praised them while kneeling down next to one of the cars and running his hand back and forth over the blue decal that read Metropolitan Police, Washington, D.C.
Kaz marveled at the work done by the two Puerto Rican brothers. It wasn’t just that they had turned three regular used Ford Tauruses into the spitting image of D.C. Metro police cruisers — it was that they had managed to accomplish this in only twelve hours.
Kaz had come up with this plan some time ago, long before he knew the Gray Man would show up in Washington, D.C. Two years earlier he envisioned a number of scenarios where he would need to move men, armed men in disguise, throughout the city on either direct action or counterintelligence missions. He had his agents travel to Ohio and purchase three lightly used late-model Ford Taurus sedans at auction, and then they brought the cars back to the D.C. area, where they stored them in a long-term garage just outside of Springfield.
The Ford Taurus was the same body style as the Ford Police Interceptor sold to the Metro Police Department, so Kaz purchased the cars with the intent to turn them into mock police cruisers.
After obtaining the vehicles, he searched the area via his deep back channels in the criminal underworld, looking for a person or business that had the high workmanship and low morals that he needed. He found these two brothers in Baltimore. Their chop shop had run below the radar of the local authorities, but one of the Saudi’s contacts knew about them, and he passed the info on to Kaz.
Al-Kazaz bought the lights off of old junked police cars and he had all the decals needed for each cruiser created by a company in China off of detailed digital images his men had made of real D.C. police vehicles. He then had the decals brought into the U.S. via the diplomatic pouch.
After this, he waited. Kaz knew the minute he converted the three normal Fords into police cruisers he would be committing a serious crime, and he did not need them for his work immediately, so he decided it would be prudent to keep everything under lock and key until he had use for the cars. He stored the decals and lights and sirens on embassy property, locked in a storage room accessible only to intelligence officers. The three Tauruses remained in the underground lot, and the phone number of Raphael and Raul stood at the ready in his contact list.
Until yesterday afternoon.
Now Kaz rose up from his close inspection of the last cruiser with a smile on his face. “Gentlemen, I must congratulate you again on your incredible workmanship.”
Raphael did the talking, because Raul’s English wasn’t good enough to understand the foreign accent of the customer. “No problem. Like I said, the paint and glaze run eighteen hundred total. The labor is three grand for each car. That’s ten thousand, eight hundred.”
Kaz nodded again, and he looked at both men. They stood right next to the rear of the third white cruiser. “A fair price, I am sure,” he said. “Shall we all step into your office to complete the transaction?”
The office was above the garage, up a small set of stairs.
Raphael shook his head. “We don’t leave the garage when it’s open. Somebody could show up and steal something. You brought cash?”
Kaz said, “Yes. Of course.” He backed away from the pristine white car a few feet, hoping the two Puerto Rican brothers would follow. Instead Raphael said, “Where are you goin’?”
Kaz made to reach into his coat. “Just getting the money. I want to count it, maybe the light is better here closer to the door.”
Raphael looked up at the powerful lights illuminating the Ford Tauruses. “The light don’t get no better than this right here. Just count out the money on the hood so we can all see it.”
Kaz had been trying to get the men to step away from the car to avoid a mess, but now he just blew out a long sigh of frustration and looked to his two associates with a shrug.