During the two flights from Beirut to Nice he researched his target on his laptop. Sitting in the first-class cabin Russ researched the man’s history, known associates, and living arrangements via open-source web searches. Zarini had made a number of successful feature films in France about the plight of women and Christians under oppressive Islamic regimes. He’d been nominated for two Palmes d’Or, but clearly not everyone saw the art in his work. Virtually every nation besmirched by the films had made threats against Zarini, and the director was well aware he was a target of the Iranians as well as other Muslim fanatics around the world.
Russ didn’t make it to many movies at all, much less mopey foreign films about women’s rights in the Middle East. He considered watching one of the movies on his computer to get a better picture of his target, then tabled the idea; he didn’t have time to spare, and he couldn’t really care less about the subject matter.
He found an article about Zarini on the online version of Le Monde, and Whitlock put his command of French to good use to read it. The piece went into helpful detail about the director’s living situation, even showing the interior of his seaside mansion. There was a mention in the article about two attempts on Zarini’s life, and this jogged Russ’s memory. He’d seen the news of an attack on a home in Nice a few months earlier, and he assumed that was where he’d first heard the name Amir Zarini.
Russ made a mental note to research the attempts on Zarini’s life further, in order to find out what not to do.
Whitlock knew Nice well; he’d spent years of his life across the Mediterranean in North Africa and the Middle East, and this made the city a particularly attractive R & R getaway for him. As a man accustomed to the danger and intrigue of the Arab world, he’d enjoyed escaping the dust and strife and sobriety of his work there, exchanging it for the casinos and nightlife and beaches of the French Riviera. More than once Russ had left behind a spartan safe house in Alexandria or Beirut or Damascus, from where he had just spent a month or more tracking an al Qaeda operative or holding surveillance on a Muslim Brotherhood terrorist, and checked into a deluxe room at the Palais de la Mediterranee. He figured since America owed him far more than what it could ever repay him for the work he did on its behalf, he might as well enjoy himself on America’s dime in his downtime.
Russ had a long list of favorite haunts here, but now he was in town under double cover, playing the role of Court Gentry masquerading as a Canadian businessman. He had to forgo his regular five-star accommodations and make other arrangements. He took a suite at Le Grimaldi, just a few blocks from the water; ordered room service; popped an Adderall to stay awake; and worked on building his target folder of Amir Zarini.
Once Russ was firmly ensconced in his hotel room, he took a half hour to clean his painful and seeping gunshot wound. That task completed, he opened his computer back up and pulled up a secure Townsend Government Services network that gave him back-door access to a classified U.S. intelligence database. The information stored here was considered secret in nature, not the most sensitive intelligence known to the U.S. intelligence community, but certainly information he would not be able to find in open sources. He punched in Amir Zarini’s name and within seconds he was reading detailed French National Police records of both assassination attempts.
The first attempt on the director’s life, just under a year prior, had been executed by a group of Islamist civilians, and, it came as no surprise to Russ, it failed miserably.
Zarini was in Nice, speaking at a film symposium at the Museum of Modern Art. He had just taken the stage when three young French nationals with Moroccan backgrounds rushed onto the stage, screaming and brandishing knives. Zarini himself knocked one of his attackers to the floor, suffering a gash on his wrist in the process. The young French Arab was then tackled and disarmed by spectators who charged up from the front row.
A second would-be assassin was waylaid by a security officer employed by the museum and knocked unconscious before he made it to within ten feet of Zarini.
The third member of the group of hapless attackers, a female, carried in her hands not only a fixed-blade knife but also a large banner she apparently had planned to unfurl on the stage after the assassination. Her plan went awry when the banner became caught on a railing in the crowd as she ran forward, and she accidentally unfurled it, then tripped, her knife skittering across the floor and out of reach as she was brought down by the unarmed low-risk security officers hired for the event.
Russ laughed aloud at the dim-witted attack, but he did not laugh long. The CIA reported that Zarini’s personal security was doubled as a result of the event, and the filmmaker severely curtailed his public appearances afterward.
The second attempt on Zarini’s life had been as professional as the first had been amateurish. Russ read pages of material, studied diagrams, pored through witness testimony, and viewed autopsy reports of an event that took place just a few months earlier.
The perpetrators of this assassination attempt were a force of five military-aged males. From the data on the Townsend Network, Russ learned that the CIA suspected them to be members of the Quds Force, though they held Syrian and Lebanese passports.
Russ marveled at their plan’s audacity. Late on a warm July evening the men hit the beach behind Zarini’s walled property in a rubber landing craft, climbed a gate, and continued up the rocky beach, spreading themselves wide. One of Zarini’s guard dogs was alerted to their presence and started barking. A security man on a second-floor balcony waved his flashlight over the rear of the property and immediately died in a hailstorm of bullets from three AK-74 rifles.
The Quds Force officers breached the villa, killed four security men and both guard dogs, and made their way to the director’s bedroom, only to find that their target had escaped into an adjacent panic room moments before.
Russ read it again.
Panic room.
Damn. His hopes for a nighttime infiltration were dashed in an instant. Whitlock felt he could breach the property. In fact, he was certain of it. But could he make his way to Zarini, past guards, guns, and gates, past dogs and motion lights, completely undetected? Russ assumed Zarini would need no more than a few seconds to get inside a panic room, and that complicated any attack on the home exponentially.
As it had complicated the attack for the Quds officers. When the Iranians realized they had failed in their objective, all five killed themselves as a French police tactical unit entered Zarini’s home. The Iranian director and his family escaped the attack without so much as a scratch.
The main takeaway from the two attacks was clear. This was going to be a tough op. Zarini made few public appearances, and he held all the advantages in his home.
So Russ had to take him on the move.
From his suite at Le Grimaldi, Russ next used the network to find the name of the private security company with the contract to protect Amir Zarini. At the opening of the business day the next morning he contacted Sécurité Exclusive de Paris directly and spoke with a company representative in Paris. He struck up a friendly conversation with the woman, using one of his Townsend Services identities and dropping the real names of real men in the security industry in the United States and France, ex-soldiers and spooks Russ knew from his years as a NOC. Though Russ remained cagey about the specific nature of the relationships, he said enough to convince the representative he was legit, and he told her he was looking for work. She politely passed him on for an immediate phone interview with a Sécurité Exclusive executive.