Back Blast: A Gray Man Novel

by Mark Greaney

  Detective Rauch was here and he confirmed three deaths, all young armed men, and all of whom, he said, were in the commission of a strong-armed robbery when a civilian shopper pulled his own gun and dropped them all. Rauch gave Andy the general description of the shooter.

  Thirties, white, clean-shaven, nondescript.

  Andy replied with a hopeful tone, “Sounds just like the perp on Brandywine street, and just like the Leland Babbitt assassin.”

  But Rauch, a man who’d not only seen a lot of crime, but had also seen a lot of reporters who were too quick to create a narrative that made a story more dramatic, threw cold water on Andy’s supposition. “And it sounds just like tens of thousands of guys in the greater D.C. metro area. Should I start sending out paddy wagons to pick them all up?”

  Andy put his hands up in surrender. “Fair enough. But what about the skill? Can tens of thousands of citizens do all this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “On Brandywine Street you mentioned the shooter knew what he was doing. Any initial impressions about this scene?”

  Rauch hesitated a moment. Finally he said, “I watched the security camera footage. It was beautiful.”

  Andy’s eyes rose. “A guy uses a gun in your jurisdiction and you say it’s beautiful?”

  “You put that in your paper and I’ll kick your ass, I’m not kidding. I don’t condone it. I’m just saying the shooter was fast, sure of himself, and clean. Between you and me . . . four armed assholes walk into a building and only one armed asshole walks out. Around here, that doesn’t sound like crime. That sounds like progress.”

  “Any chance I can watch the video?”

  “Evidence, Andy. You’ll have to wait for it.”

  Catherine King had remained to the side of this conversation, allowing Andy to work his magic with the police. But when Rauch headed back into the Easy Market to check on the progress of the crime lab technicians, she stepped up next to the young reporter. She said, “What do you think? Same guy as the others?”

  Andy nodded. “Sure seems like it could be. But what I don’t get is the fact that the CIA people aren’t here.”

  Catherine had an answer for this. “I bet we scared them off. They won’t be investigating the crime scenes in person anymore.”

  Andy nodded, and the two reporters started heading back to their cars. Andy said, “You know what’s bothering me?”

  “What?”

  “This highly trained killer knocks off a couple of Aryan Brotherhood drug dealers in a shoot-out, but lets the others live because they stopped fighting back. Then he encounters an armed robbery here, and kills these bad guys.”

  Catherine knew where Andy was going with this. “Good against evil,” she said.

  Andy said, “Right. But that Babbitt thing doesn’t seem to fit. Either Babbitt was a criminal and we don’t know it, or the guy who did this and Brandywine Street didn’t kill Babbitt.”

  Catherine said, “You are good at this, Andy. I think you are on to something.”

  “Enough to put into my article? I mean, I could just mention the difference in the victims.”

  “No. I’d leave Babbitt out of it for now. Mention the killing in the Highlands along with this event, maybe draw some parallels, but I think there are enough questions about Babbitt still to where you should not speculate.”

  Andy said, “You are working on your own piece about the CIA’s involvement, aren’t you?”

  Catherine shook her head. “I’m not. We are. Trust me, when I get something ready I’m going to involve you, both in the work and in the glory.”

  Andy said, “You keep promising me that, but when?”

  They were back at her car now. She fumbled for her keys in her purse, then pulled them out. “How ’bout I buy you breakfast and we get to work?”

  —

  Zack Hightower sat in front of a computer terminal in the fourth-floor Violator tactical operations center, his eyes fogged both from the early hour and from the steam pouring out of the coffee cup under his nose. The coffee had been placed in his hand a minute earlier by a young CIA analyst, and Zack had been put here—in front of the monitor in the TOC, that was—by Suzanne Brewer.

  A half hour ago Zack had been snoring away in his McLean hotel room when a call came from Brewer informing him of a possible Gentry sighting in the District. Before he’d even processed this information she told him she was sending a car, and to be ready in five minutes.

  Hightower shook himself awake and asked to be vectored to the location of the potential sighting instead of the office. Brewer wasn’t using Hightower as a hard asset, however, so she didn’t understand the request. No, she’d countered, he needed to come in and look at some video, to make a positive ID, and to let her know what he thought of the analysis.

  Zack grumbled to himself but agreed, and now he sat here in front of a black screen, with Brewer standing just behind him.

  When nothing happened on the monitor for several seconds Hightower took a sip of hot coffee and made a joke. “Inconclusive.”

  “It hasn’t started yet,” Brewer snapped back, and Zack realized his humor would fall flat on a bureaucratic automaton like Suzanne Brewer.

  Soon the video began playing. It was security camera footage from a convenience store. Zack saw the time stamp and realized it took place less than three hours earlier.

  “Where is this?”

  “Rhode Island Avenue. East of Logan Circle.”

  A man in a black baseball cap and a raincoat entered the store, but the camera did not have an unobstructed view of his face. It only showed the bottom of the man’s chin and the bill of his hat. He moved into the store, seemed to say something to the woman behind the counter, then headed to the back.

  Another camera angle picked him up there, but it revealed even less than the first one. Only his back and a brief view of a portion of his chin.

  Still, Hightower took another sip of his coffee and declared, “That’s him.”

  “How can you be certain? His face is obscured.”

  “Ma’am, I spent the majority of a decade looking at this dude’s ass as he ran point on my team. Most of the time his face was obscured then, too. Trust me, I know how he moves.”

  Brewer wasn’t convinced. She remained silent so Zack could focus on the screen. The first Hispanic male entered the convenience store, wearing a gray hoodie. He was soon followed by an African American couple. The man in the ball cap stood at the counter, facing just slightly away from the camera above him on his right, while the cashier bagged his groceries.

  A Monte Carlo parked out front in the rain. Two men climbed out.

  Hightower watched all this quietly. Slowly a little smile curled on his lips. “Hot damn, there’s gonna be some kind of a fracas, isn’t there?”

  “Just watch, please.”

  Zack did so. He saw the positioning of the three young men, the movement around the market of the African American couple, and the man in the cap at the magazine rack who could have just turned and walked out the door next to him, but instead squared off to the room.

  When the man in the gray hoodie pulled the shotgun and pointed it at Gentry, Hightower just mumbled, “Last mistake of your dumb, short life, ese.”

  The next few seconds of video chronicled the shoot-out, beginning with the shotgun blast and ending when Gentry fired his sixth round from his handgun, the two men at the counter crumpled into their own blood splatter on the floor, and the gray hoodie with the shotgun disappeared, falling backwards under the camera’s view.

  The screen froze just after Gentry left the convenience store, three dead bodies in his wake.

  Brewer sat on the edge of the desk next to Hightower and faced him. “Impressions?”

  Hightower shrugged. “Boarding house rules.”

  “Boarding house rules? What are you t
alking about?”

  “I’m talking about the shot sequence. Everybody gets a first helping before anybody gets seconds. It’s textbook. Only a topflight close-quarters guy can cycle his weapon around a room like that, hit three guys center mass, back-stopping each one, and then recycle and shoot them all again before they hit the ground.”

  Brewer frowned. “One of the Townsend operators reported that Gentry stole his handgun at the McDonald’s.” She looked through some notes on the iPad in her hand. “A Smith and Wesson model M&P. It’s hard to tell the weapon the man is using in the video due to the poor quality of the recording, but I had the analysts here look at the gun and they say it can’t be the same gun, because the Smith and Wesson has an external safety lever on the side, and Gentry doesn’t seem to take time to disengage a safety before he fires. What do you think of this analysis?”

  “Ma’am, I think that analysis blows.”

  Brewer reacted with obvious surprise, and an analyst in earshot looked back over his shoulder at the big man, a scowl on his face.

  Brewer asked, “And why is that?”

  “Gentry wouldn’t need to fan the safety off, because it would already be off.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Hightower snorted. “External safeties are for chickenshits and losers. I know that. Gentry knows that.” He nodded his head towards the video. “Can we watch the video again?”

  The recording played through a second time. Hightower viewed it with an unmistakable smile on his face.

  “Enjoying yourself?” asked Brewer coolly.

  “Professional respect. Gentry’s still got the touch. It’s obviously not the most impressive thing I’ve seen out of him, considering the low quality of the opposition. But he still possesses the speed and the marksmanship he did when he was in the Goon Squad.”

  “Why didn’t he just leave the store when he had the chance?”

  Hightower took a moment to select his words, so Brewer helped him out. “Let me guess. Because he thinks he’s a good guy?”

  Hightower countered, “He is a good guy. We’re targeting him because of orders. We aren’t vanquishing evil or any bullshit like that.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. You and me? We’re the assholes in the mix. If we left Gentry to his own devices he’d be fine, and the world would be better off.”

  “I wouldn’t let Denny hear you talk like this if I were you.”

  Zack shrugged. “I’m here to do a job. I don’t have to like the job and I don’t have to hate Court Gentry. I have my orders. I’ll keep the Agency safe from him, I’ll help you find him, and, if you let me, I’ll kill him for you.”

  He gave Suzanne Brewer a little wink and a smile. “I don’t mind being the bad guy. It’s more fun.”

  39

  Soft noises of the street leaked into the basement room from the outside as the city woke and began going about its day, but Court Gentry lay still in his tiny closet spider hole. His open eyes flitted about the darkness and his hand rested on his Smith and Wesson pistol on the floor by his side.

  There was no great mystery as to why Court could not fall asleep this morning. The pain on the right side of his midsection and the worry and frustration about his confrontation with Hanley and the implications of the in extremis gunfight at the Easy Market all beat down on his psyche like a timpani drum, and the analytical side of his brain couldn’t shut itself down before it evaluated and rehashed everything that had happened over and over till the point of utter confusion and mental overload.

  After a massive bout of second-guessing, he was finally able to convince himself he had done a reasonable job eliminating the compromise from the gunfight. He’d done the obvious thing, anyway: he dumped his vehicle before returning to his safe house. He hated to do it; he needed a car, but the Ford Escort was compromised, and that made it useless to him. Even though he knew it had not been picked up on a camera at the market itself, after the shoot-out he was certain the police would begin looking at area traffic cam footage. In no time they would identify a gray Escort driving out of the area, and the time stamp on the video would match the distance from the crime scene and then the cops would draw the obvious conclusion that the driver of the Escort had been involved.

  He didn’t dare drive the car back to his storage unit to hide it, because he knew anyone monitoring traffic camera feeds could simply follow the Escort’s route from where it was first seen all the way to the neighborhood around the storage facility. This would compromise the location, just as the car itself had been compromised. Instead, Court had driven the Ford to the east, obeying the speed limit and stopping at the necessary red lights, and then he parked the car in a dark lot on the edge of Howard University. He struggled to climb a rickety fence and then he dropped down on the other side. Once here, he was able to move out of the streetlights through residential backyards for a block.

  When he stepped back out onto the street he wore a different cap, no raincoat, and a brown oversize thermal shirt; his backpack was under his clothing and hanging on the front of his body, giving him the look of an overweight man.

  Twenty minutes later he sat on a bus alongside immigrant restaurant or factory workers either beginning or ending their workdays, and just before dawn he walked back up Arthur Mayberry’s driveway with his keys in one hand and his backpack in the other. As he headed to his basement apartment, he glanced up into the windows of the two-story brick home and nodded a greeting to the elderly African American, who stood there watching from the second floor.

  Arthur just eyed him suspiciously. He did not return the greeting.

  As soon as he entered his place Court reset his defensive measures and then he went straight to the closet behind the door, lay down on his blanket, and rested his head on his go bag. His sticky bandages needed changing but he wasn’t in the mood to play Florence Nightingale on himself this morning. He told himself when he woke up he’d clean up his wound, but it could wait a few hours more.

  He thought he’d fall right to sleep, but that had been nothing more than wishful thinking. Instead his conscious and his subconscious mind both fought for his attention, making him unable to relax. With practiced discipline he pushed the action of the Easy Market out of his mind. This was replaced by places and faces and acronyms and operations that drifted to the forefront of his thoughts.

  He tried to connect dots, to make the puzzle pieces fit into something that took shape. Hanley and Travers and Babbitt and AAP and Trieste. Carmichael and Ohlhauser and Golf Sierra.

  He teetered somewhere between lucid thought and ethereal stupor for two hours, but by nine a.m. a light doze gave way to real sleep. Still, he did not find true rest. The pressures of his dire predicament filtered into his dream state. He thought of Delta Force snipers, of convenience store shooters, and of omniscient traffic cameras that followed his every move, but more than anything, he thought about an operation that had not entered his mind, either while awake or asleep, in a very, very long time.

  Six Years Earlier

  The commercial building on Norfolk, Virginia’s Kincaid Avenue could not have looked more innocuous from the outside. A one-story red brick structure, it sprawled low and nondescript like an old factory, a few blocks from the airport and directly across the street from a small liquor distillery and a wooden pallet manufacturer. A Mexican fast-food restaurant was in walking distance, as well as a strip mall that offered both payday loans and Asian “foot” massages.

  The sign in front of the red brick building read TDI Industrial Suppliers, which meant nothing to anyone, not even to someone in the industrial supply field, but buildings need a sign out front to look legit, so this place had one.

  The looped razor wire rimming the high steel fence of TDI might have tipped off nosy neighbors that there was something inside worth protecting, but no one in a million years would imagine this to be the headquarters,
op center, and team room of one of CIA’s most utilized and proficient antiterror task forces.

  Heavy snow had fallen all morning and traffic on Kincaid was all but nonexistent, but that changed when a black Yukon appeared out of the white and stopped at the guard shack in front of TDI. After a show of IDs the vehicle continued up the stubby driveway and parked next to the sign, and three men climbed out onto crunchy snow. They stepped up to the front door of the facility, stood under a metal awning, and waited a moment while shaking off their wool coats. Soon the door buzzed and one of the men pushed it open.

  In the lobby their credentials were checked by a pair of security officers wearing plain gray uniforms. Once they were vetted they walked down a hall, passing empty offices and double doors leading to a warehouse full of Conex shipping containers, until they arrived at an elevator with a key card access lock. One of the men tapped his key on the reader and the doors opened.

  The car took them down, past B1 where a team of analysts and communications specialists worked, and past B2, which was divided into a large storage area and a larger underground firing range with six shooting lanes.

  They stopped at B3, and the door opened to a short, bright hallway. Two more security officers stood there waiting, as they had been alerted by the cameras that picked the men up when they were still out front in the driveway. The officers wore M4 carbines on their chests and Beretta pistols on their hips, but they were affable guys who recognized one of the three visitors and treated him as if he were a visiting head of state.

  “Good morning, Mr. Hanley,” the guard who looked over the IDs said.

  “Morning.” Matt Hanley did not introduce the two men with him or address the guards by name. Instead he handed over his badge and submitted to a wanding from the other guard. Seconds later all three visitors passed through a door. On the other side was a small room with a camera looking down on it, and yet another door, this one with a state-of-the art electromechanical locking system.