He spent an hour on the phone with the company’s personnel director in Paris, at first inquiring about employment, but within minutes the two men were deep in conversation about the equipment, training, and tactics used in the security field. Russ made the personnel director feel that he was the one benefiting from the conversation; Russ knew so much “inside baseball” information about the high-risk security field that the personnel director found himself asking for information about hot spots where the company might solicit work in the near future.
Ultimately the executive and Russ mutually decided the American was overqualified for the positions available at the moment, but since Russ happened to be in Nice, the exec gave Russ the names and numbers of a couple of company men working in the area.
By late afternoon Russ Whitlock sat with a Sécurité Exclusive contractor enjoying a beer at Le Pirate, a restaurant-bar in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, just a few kilometers up the coast from Zarini’s multimillion-dollar mansion. The man was not on the Zarini detail himself, but he worked for another wealthy client in the same neighborhood. Soon enough the conversation turned comfortably to the attack on the director’s home several months earlier. Russ was pleased to learn that his new drinking buddy had all the intimate details of the operation, as one of his close friends had died in the attack.
He was also friends with a few men on the current detail, and he told Russ that while Zarini did not make many public appearances, he made a weekly trip to a friend’s villa twenty minutes away, just over the border in Monaco. The contractor revealed that the Zarini detail felt the outing was a dangerous habit, and they had warned their client of their fears, but the Iranian had dismissed them by saying the event was the one time each week when they actually had to work for their money.
Russ told his own lengthy made-up story about his issues dealing with a rich asshole client in Hong Kong and the man’s penchant for routines that made for clear security violations.
The Frenchman ordered another round of drinks and began recanting war stories about his own jackass protectee, but soon enough the conversation returned to Amir Zarini and every Saturday morning at noon, when he and his detail poured into two vehicles and headed up the coast for the twenty-minute drive into Monaco.
Within minutes Whitlock had everything he needed. He learned there were four men in Zarini’s mobile security detail; they were French, private contractors now but former members of RAID — Recherche Assistance Intervention Dissuasion, a tactical unit within the French National Police service. They were armed with HK UMP-9s, submachine guns that they kept folded and stored in the vehicles, and CZ pistols chambered in the potent .40-caliber Smith and Wesson.
Additionally, Zarini traveled in an unarmored Mercedes SUV driven by an armed driver, and a second Mercedes SUV, also driven by an armed man, served as a chase car, ready to scoop Zarini up if his first vehicle became disabled.
The American remained in Le Pirate with his new friend for another round of drinks, then bid him adieu.
And just like that, within thirty hours of receiving Zarini’s name in Beirut, Russ Whitlock knew his target’s schedule; the disposition, tactics, and training of his security team; and the structural capabilities of his vehicles.
Next Russ drove the route from Zarini’s property to Monaco. He decided a powerful explosive placed along the road and detonated as Zarini’s Mercedes passed would be the easiest and smartest course of action, but he also knew this was not the MO of the Gray Man. No, Court would jeopardize his own life to eliminate the risk of collateral damage, and as stupid as Russ found that mind-set, he knew he had to make this look like a Gray Man op.
Russ went back to his suite, popped an Adderall, and drank coffee to stay awake through the night to work on his plan.
The best course of action, Russ decided after looking at the maps for hours, would be to position himself along the hillside high over the one road Zarini and his detail would have to pass, and then fire on his target’s vehicle with a long-range scoped rifle. There would be no collateral damage, and he could then slip away through the trees and get out of the area quickly and cleanly, unseen by the security forces and, hopefully, witnesses.
It would be a Gray Man — like hit all around.
Satisfied he had a workable plan, Whitlock ordered a chilled ’94 Dom Perignon from room service and drank it straight from the bottle when it arrived. He’d done all he could do this evening. Tomorrow he would work on obtaining the rifle he would need to make the shot. He knew who to contact, and he was near certain this next piece of the puzzle would fall nicely into place.
But as he downed the champagne, worry returned to the forefront of his mind. The one piece that was crucial, more crucial than anything else, was completely out of his hands.
He needed to hear from that bastard Court Gentry.
TWENTY-SIX
Ruth had spent nearly the entire day in conference rooms. After her morning at ODNI in McLean, she was taken by a CIA car to the Adams Morgan neighborhood of D.C., and up the long driveway to Townsend Government Services.
She was led by Jeff Parks through a building she found almost comically surreal. Seemingly every square inch of wall space was occupied by some homage to the Old West. Knowing what little she did about this company — that they were a glorified posse deputized by the CIA to bring back their man, dead or alive — she half wondered if Parks and the other men in the building wore ten-gallon hats and stirrups when they were not conducting meetings with outsiders such as herself.
Parks led her into a room and presented her with an accordion file full of papers about her target. He seemed unhappy about passing her the information, but he was clearly under orders by the CIA to do so and, like a good dog, he was doing as he was told. Still, he made her agree to certain ground rules. She promised to stay off her mobile phone and her laptop, and she was not allowed to make any written notes of the information. She agreed, Parks left her to her work, and she eagerly tore into the file.
Despite her requests to see everything the CIA could give her, she was immediately disappointed to find an incredible number of black strikethroughs on the paperwork — it appeared as if 75 percent of her target’s history had been redacted.
The file began with Gentry’s recruitment into the Agency, and Ruth was fascinated to learn that he had been headhunted by CIA after being convicted of a triple murder. The dossier had all the details of the crime. Gentry had been nineteen years old at the time, working as a bodyguard for a low-level drug smuggler working out of Opa-locka airport in south Florida.
From all the evidence available in the file, Gentry’s employer had been targeted for assassination by a group of Colombians, but young Court came to the rescue, killing the three hit men from Cartagena. The police showed up moments later; Gentry dropped his gun and was taken into custody.
He was convicted of murder and thrown into prison, but almost immediately the CIA scooped him up and put him through a two-year program to develop him into a nonofficial cover asset.
It was clear to Ruth the program was irregular, to say the least, because here the dossier became suspiciously vague. Mentions of the Balkans, a reference to St. Petersburg and Laos and Buenos Aires, but never an explanation of just what, exactly, the young man was doing in any of these far-flung locations.
In 2001, however, the paperwork picked back up when Gentry became a paramilitary operations officer for the CIA’s Special Activities Division, assigned to capture or kill al Qaeda personalities around the globe. She read details of operations conducted by CIA Task Force Golf Sierra, renditions and hits all over the world, and though the operations were well documented, there was nothing in the files to help her build a psychological profile on her target.