Raphael said, “The money?”
“Oh, yes. Of course. I have it all right here.” His hand disappeared into his coat and then reemerged holding a suppressed Walther P99 semiautomatic pistol. Both brothers raised their hands in surprise, but the Saudi shot them where they stood, dropping Raphael straight down to the floor with a shot to the head, and then spinning Raul twice with two rounds to the chest. The heavyset Puerto Rican slammed into the right rear quarter panel of the closest Taurus, and he died with his body draped over the trunk of the vehicle.
“Waa faqri!” Kaz shouted. Dammit.
He jerked his head to the dead man on the car and one of his two operatives stepped over to the body, pulled it from the back of the Ford, and allowed it to slide down to the floor of the garage.
A large blood smear remained on the vehicle.
“Clean it up,” Kaz demanded.
Twenty minutes later three D.C. Metro Police Department cruisers left the chop shop hidden in a tractor-trailer the Saudis had had waiting outside. The big rig drove south to Virginia, where the Saudis dropped the trailer off in a leased parking lot in Rosslyn, a neighborhood of Arlington, just across the Potomac River from D.C.
A two-story gated home backed up to the lot, and this was owned by a shell company for Saudi intelligence. The property had been employed as a Saudi safe house for years, and the evening before, Kaz had moved his ten assets into the home to use it as a staging base for the duration of the Gentry operation.
Back when he’d bought the Tauruses and the decals for the vehicles, Kaz had also acquired a dozen police uniforms by having his agents purchase identical clothing and styles from uniform shops around the country. Shoes, utility belts, holsters, badges, buttons, and body armor were all purchased from various suppliers on the Internet.
The duty gun of the Metropolitan Police Force is the Glock 17, and at the same time he acquired the uniforms and accessories, Kaz also purchased a number of these handguns from a supplier in Riyadh who acquired them directly from the manufacturer in Austria, with one major change to the actual duty gun. These Glocks were outfitted with threaded barrels, which would allow a silencer to be attached at the end.
D.C. cops didn’t use silencers — no regular police force on the planet did — but these were no regular police. They were assassins. Kaz knew this group of assets might need to keep the sound of their gunfire to a minimum, so he purchased the threaded barrels and suppressors to fit them.
All these were brought in via the diplomatic pouch as well, and then locked in the care of Saudi intelligence in the embassy until this morning, when they’d been handed out to his ten operatives.
Ammunition was purchased in a gun shop in Roanoke, and even here Kaz and his men strived for accuracy. They bought Winchester Ranger full metal jacket ammunition, similar to the duty ammo used by the MPD. While Kaz had been unable to obtain the exact Winchester rounds used by the police since it was only sold in bulk to law enforcement agencies, research into ballistics told him the civilian bullets he obtained would be virtually indistinguishable from the duty ammo when dug out of a body by a coroner or surgeon.
When Kaz and his men returned with the police cars, they stepped into the safe house and saw the seven other operatives already dressed in the full light-blue-on-dark-blue uniforms of the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia. It was an impressive sight, and Kaz knew they would look even more the part once they climbed into their cruisers.
Soon all ten men presented themselves for inspection in D.C. Metro uniforms. Kaz checked them over carefully, and he was pleased with what he saw. Some of these men spoke excellent English, and others struggled, but Kaz had no plans to have them interact with the public like real police officers. No, on the Gentry hunt they would be assassins, only moved into the target area when Denny Carmichael ordered them to a location to make the kill.
23
Even though Leland Babbitt didn’t make it into his office till after noon, he still worked a full nine hours before knocking off for the day and returning to his five-bedroom house on Cedar Parkway in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
His four-man home security detail already sat parked out front as Babbitt’s Lexus rolled into his driveway; the men worked a seven-to-seven shift, giving Babbitt’s property coverage through the hours of darkness. The men alternated patrols, with two in the vehicle at all times and two standing on the drive, walking around to the back from time to time, and sitting on the patio furniture, periodically casting an eye out to the Chevy Chase golf course that bordered his backyard in case any threats approached his property from the first fairway.
Babbitt’s wife didn’t much care for the security and she felt they were only there because Babbitt thought it made him look tough to the neighbors, but she didn’t fight her husband on it anymore, especially since one of their neighbors had her Porsche SUV stolen right out of her driveway several weeks back.
As he pulled into the driveway Babbitt acknowledged the two patrolling security officers there with a distracted wave. He closed his garage door a moment later, then climbed out of his car and stepped into his kitchen to find his wife waiting for him there.
“It’s eleven, Lee. Eleven!”
“Sorry I didn’t return your calls. Long day at work.”
He passed straight into the living room, with his wife close on his tail.
“I made dinner, you know.”
“I ate at the office.” He said it without looking up, because he’d pulled a bottle of fifteen-year-old Macallan from his bar and was now concentrating on a two-finger pour into a leaded crystal rocks glass.
He turned towards the floor-to-ceiling windows in his living room, which gave him a terrific view of the golf course just beyond his ample backyard and a six-foot-high ironwork fence.
While Babbitt faced the window, drink in hand, his wife stood behind him near the stairs. She stared him down, waiting for him to answer for himself or to notice her. Neither of which he did.
Babbitt’s two kids were in college, so they had the place to themselves, but since the kids had left for school they’d done little to take advantage of the privacy. Babbitt had been obsessed with Gentry since well before Brussels, but after returning from Europe, minus a huge contingent of his men and the Top Secret clearance that gave his company the access they needed to function, Babbitt had barely acknowledged the existence of his wife.
His wife, who was still behind him and still hoping for some reaction from her husband, just sighed and headed for the stairs.
Court Gentry moved his binoculars back and forth between Babbitt and his wife. To himself he said, “She’s pissed, and he couldn’t care less.”
Neither could Gentry, actually; he was just trying to get an accurate accounting of who was inside the property.
By the time Babbitt arrived home Gentry had already been in place for hours. He’d climbed over the back fence just after eight p.m., after a one-hour reconnaissance spent up in an oak tree on the first fairway of the golf course, and now he lay flat on his cold and muddy belly in a thick corner flower garden that was not yet in full bloom, but nevertheless provided a fair amount of cover, as long as Court remained low.
He wore black Carhartt work pants, a black hoodie over a black thermal, and dark brown boots. His face was covered by his gaiter and his knit cap, and on his hands he wore black Mechanix gloves. His black backpack completed the theme to his ensemble. He wasn’t invisible, but he was damn close. It would take both a keen pair of eyes and a direct hit from a flashlight to notice him here.