“I see you don’t lack confidence,” Denny said with another surprised chuckle. He sipped water from his bottle, then smiled at Ruth once more. “I come from a different age, Ms. Ettinger, so you will have to forgive me if you find this out of line. But I just have to say it. The Mossad has always possessed the best-looking female officers.”
Ettinger did not miss a beat. “And the CIA has always possessed the most impertinent executives.”
Carmichael’s eyebrows rose at the young woman’s comment. She’d seen this before, many times. That moment when the man in front of her realizes she is not just a pretty face. He shuffled a little in his chair, and she liked this, liked making lecherous men uncomfortable with her intelligence and willingness to confront them. He laughed finally, finding her candor refreshing. “Your statement is true, but so is mine.”
Ruth only smiled politely.
“Tell me about the problem that brings you here today.”
She got right to it. “We have a source in Beirut. Not a joint source. One of ours exclusively.”
“Any good?”
“He has been reliable in the past.”
“And you want to share him with us?” He said it as a joke, and she obliged him with a smile before shaking her head. He moved on. “What is your source telling you that you, in turn, would like to tell me?”
“He is telling me — he is telling his case officer in Beirut, I should say — that Iranian agents met just yesterday with an American. A man whom they have hired to assassinate my prime minister. A contract killer who was, if rumors are to be believed, trained by your agency.”
“Who is this killer?”
“The Gray Man,” she said, her eyes locked on his, searching for hints of what this news meant to him.
Carmichael did not react. Instead he sat quietly for a moment before saying, “That particular nom de guerre comes up more often than you could possibly imagine, Ms. Ettinger.”
“As I said, we deem our source reliable. The Iranians, from what we understand, have a file on Courtland Gentry, and they compared their knowledge of him with information he was able to provide, and they determined they were dealing with the authentic Gray Man.”
“What information did he provide?”
“Our informant was peripheral to the meeting. He is passing on secondhand intelligence, admittedly, but his information in the past has been proven reliable enough to where we take this new threat very seriously, and we will be acting on it.”
She read something in his eyes now, and it surprised her for two reasons. For one, she was surprised he could not keep his craggy old face impassive. He’d been a case officer himself for decades, after all; he’d surely heard many things over his career that left him startled but nevertheless required him to hide any show of alarm or excitement.
And second, his reaction seemed to be less what she expected, which was Oh shit! and more of what she did not expect, which was Hell yes! It was an open secret that the CIA was hunting their former assassin turned rogue hit man, but it did surprise her to see that Carmichael was pleased to know the man had turned up mentioned in a plot to kill the head of a friendly nation.
Denny said, “Okay. He’s out there. We know that, so I’ll have to entertain the possibility your man in Beirut is credible. What is it that I can do for you?”
“I would like you to provide me everything you have on the Gray Man. He is… was, your man. You have been unable, despite what I am sure are your agency’s best efforts, to rein him in for a number of years. We would like to look for him ourselves. To take care of him ourselves.”
“The Gray Man is our problem, Ms. Ettinger.”
She shook her head. “With due respect, once he took the contract on our prime minister, he became our problem. I have hunted down many individuals in the past several years. If Menachem alluded to my abilities and competence in your conversation last night, this is exactly what he was talking about. I am certain, with your help, I will be able to track him and stop him before he is able to do any more harm.”
“And by ‘stop him’ you mean…?”
Ruth leaned forward over the table. “Kill or capture.”
Denny smiled and leaned back, then scooted his chair out and crossed his legs. Ruth was offended by the gesture, but she did not let on; she surmised that the man’s intentions were to insult her, and she would not play into his intentions. He said, “Ms. Ettinger, my service is not without its own resources. I’m not sure what you know about the Gray Man, but certainly your organization is dialed in enough to be aware there has been a five-year manhunt by us, not just CIA but also members of our Joint Special Operations Forces, to effect the capture of him.”
“But our prime minister is now in—”
He waved his hand dismissively. “Your asset in Lebanon says your PM is under threat. I get it. But what I don’t get is why Menachem Aurbach sends a young woman such as yourself to talk to me about this. I see you are all piss and vinegar and energized about your mission, but this building, the building next door, the CIA campus, hell, a dozen other buildings across D.C. are all chock-full of bright young people who have been working hard to locate and terminate this man, and yet he continues to create a swath of death and destruction around the world.”
“I’ll find him, Director Carmichael. I always do.”
“Ms. Ettinger, you come from a small agency in a small country. You fill yourself with delusions of your importance. You aren’t half as special as you think you are.”
He started to stand up, to end the meeting. “I mean you no offense, of course.”
Ruth stood herself, leaning over the table now with both hands gripping the edge. “Obviously, Director Carmichael, you don’t know a thing about me or my capabilities. I have personally effected the arrest or elimination of thirteen direct threats on Israel’s national leadership. Believe me, if you had office buildings full of people”—she lifted her hands, making sarcastic quotes with her fingers—“‘just like me,’ you would have already killed Gentry, ended the war on terror, and liberated both Cuba and North Korea. But you haven’t, have you?”
She slowed down a little, but the intensity in her voice did not lessen.
“You don’t know me, obviously, so you can’t be sure if I am as capable as I claim, but I have to think if CIA doesn’t know about me or my record by now, then that says more about your people and their abilities than it does about me and my abilities.
“If our prime minister is threatened by a CIA project gone haywire, a supersecret asset who went rogue to knock off some mafia dons and third-world despots but has now graduated to decapitating first-world democracies allied with the United States, then this five-year-long dull headache of yours is going to turn into an immediate bullet-to-the-brain head wound and it will come back to harm your agency in a very real and very public way.
“But starting today, your situation will improve, because I am here and I will find your little fuckup named Court Gentry, and I will call in my own set of killers, Metsada men who make your Joint Special Operations Forces look like pimple-faced pubescent Boy Scouts, and together we will kill your man because obviously you and your people can’t manage it yourselves.”
She sat back down slowly and finished with, “I mean you no offense. Of course.”
The door behind Carmichael opened slightly and a young woman leaned in, obviously checking on the noise. “Sir?”
“Out,” he barked.
The woman disappeared.
Denny sat quietly for a moment. Ruth watched him carefully, trying to discern what he was thinking. She felt she could see a rekindling in his eyes of the excitement she had noticed before. Otherwise, she was about to be thrown out the door and deported back to Israel.