Back Blast: A Gray Man Novel

by Mark Greaney

Denny’s concern, however, was that Kaz planned on doing just that. He worried Kaz would just shut down his operation and try to forget he’d ever been involved in the Violator hunt.

  Denny knew when to use a stick on Kaz to get him to work in the interest of the CIA, but right now it was time for the carrot. He said, “Look, I recognize this was a dangerous operation for you and your men, and your risk of compromise is real. I want you to know that if you will see this through to the end with me, I will be more amenable to your needs here in the U.S. than I have been of late.”

  The Saudi intelligence chief said nothing for a long time. When he did reply, it was clear he knew he held a temporary advantage in the relationship. “Specifics, Denny. I want to hear specifics before I subject my men to more jeopardy.”

  “All right,” Denny said. “I know of your interest in our export of fracking technology to other Gulf states. You have spent a lot of time and resources trying to get intelligence on this.”

  “I will not deny that. We find it troubling that your partnerships with less stable oil producers have injured your relationship with our oil-producing sector.”

  “Cut the crap, Kaz. I’m not a politician, and neither are you. I’m offering you primary intelligence on the oil-production capacities and forecasts of our allies. Not everything. That would compromise me as your source. But good, actionable intel. From me to you. That ought to help your profile back in Riyadh.”

  Murquin al-Kazaz seemed to think it all over for a minute. Finally he replied, “Very well. Despite this difficult day for my operation, we will continue to hunt your target for you. We’ll stay at it till the end.”

  “Excellent,” Denny said. “As soon as I have something for you I will let you know.” He hung up the phone, proud of his power to compel others to do his bidding.

  —

  In the Saudi Embassy on New Hampshire Avenue, Murquin al-Kazaz hung up his secure mobile and sat quietly, puffing his cigarette and drinking tea.

  Slowly his face grew into a wide smile.

  He’d not expected this. He’d suffered a flesh wound today with the death or disablement of four men, but he’d managed to avoid compromise, and he’d just been handed intelligence of the highest caliber on a silver platter.

  And in trade he had conceded nothing, and he would offer nothing.

  Murquin al-Kazaz and his men would not stop hunting Court Gentry until he was confirmed dead.

  Nothing else mattered.

  —

  Court made it back into his room just in time for the six p.m. news. He turned on CNN after resetting his booby traps, and while the show opened he gingerly peeled off his white dress shirt. He had a couple of new bruises, both of them purple-and-black and painful, but his main concern remained the GSW he caught three nights earlier. His bandages were black with dried blood, and a new rivulet of bright red blood had trickled down his rib cage, all the way to his underwear.

  He wasn’t bothered by the sight in the least, knowing just how close he’d come to real damage. He was lucky to have only sprung one small leak after what he’d just subjected himself to. He could clean this up and stop any more bleeding with little trouble, other than the searing, unrelenting pain.

  Just as he expected, CNN opened live with a shot from Washington, D.C., with a stand-up report outside the Dupont Circle metro station. Court exhaled in frustration when the correspondent announced the shooting death of three transit officers along with one civilian, and the injury of four more civilians. The names were not being released so that next of kin could be notified, so Court didn’t know if Ohlhauser had been among the dead.

  Within forty-five seconds of the show’s opening, the erudite and bearded anchor back in Atlanta asked the reporter a question Court had fully expected.

  “Andrea, have police been able to determine if this shooting had any relation to the assassination-style killing of Washington area businessman and security consultant Leland Babbitt two nights ago?”

  “So far police are not jumping to any conclusions, but they are speculating only that, due to the large number of victims in a public place, this looks like some sort of terrorist act.”

  Court closed his eyes. He was hoping against hope there would be something in this report about a group of Middle Eastern assholes dressed up like cops opening fire on Transit Police, but there was nothing of the sort. As the story progressed, he felt his heart sink, as it began to look as if the authorities were going to try to spin this as a lone attacker; the same lone attacker involved in Babbitt’s killing.

  Court kept listening for more details as he stripped down to his underwear and pulled a bottle of beer out of his little fridge. He headed back to the bed holding the cold bottle against the bruising just above the bandaged wound on his right side.

  As the anchorman was asking another question he stopped speaking suddenly. Apparently he was listening to a producer in his earpiece. After a few seconds he said, “Just a moment.” A pause. Then, “Is this confirmed? We need to be certain before we go live with this.”

  Court leaned towards the television. He feared what would come, but when it came, he found himself decidedly unsurprised.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve just received word that one of the victims is someone known very well to our viewers and the CNN family. Police now confirm, officially, that CNN contributor Maxwell Ohlhauser was killed today in what appears to be a terror attack in the nation’s capital. I’ve known Max personally for quite some time and . . . this is just an awful turn of events.

  “On Monday night, the death of Leland Babbitt, who was also in the security and intelligence field, and now this on Wednesday afternoon. We just had Max on this morning to discuss the inherent dangers of working in government intelligence services, even here in the United States.

  “We don’t want to get out in front of the investigation, of course, but this obviously leads one to the inescapable conclusion that someone is out there targeting U.S. intelligence officials, or, in the case of Max Ohlhauser, ex-officials. Terrorism here in the streets of Washington, D.C. I fail to see how you could possibly characterize it as anything else.”

  Court put his head in his hands, his mind spiraling down into depression. He had come to America to clear his name, but so far, despite his best-laid plans, his arrival had had the opposite effect. Now there were more dead bodies that would be pinned on him, and he had no new plan to get out of the hole he’d dug for himself.

  But through it all, one thing kept propelling him forward.

  The firm belief that he had been set up, and he’d done absolutely nothing wrong.

  45

  The Mossad officer looked out the window through the early evening’s haze to the twinkling lights of Tel Aviv and then beyond, into the vast blue of the Mediterranean Sea.

  The man retained the clarity of mind to know this view was probably very beautiful, but he was not able to enjoy it as he should. He was a captive here in this room, and the big city, so close it looked as if he could touch it, just drew a deeper contrast to his predicament.

  He understood his situation intellectually. The men and the guns and the orders to sit and wait made it clear he was a prisoner. But despite this difficult predicament, the Mossad officer did not understand what the hell he had done to find himself here in the first place.

  Yanis Alvey had served in Israeli intelligence for twenty-six years, most of these as a member of Metsada, a paramilitary and direct action arm of the Mossad. He had been a shooter, then when he reached the age where he could not keep up with the younger men in his unit any longer, he graduated from black Nomex and balaclavas to an Armani suit and a BlackBerry. He became a coordinator for Metsada operations, overseeing logistics and planning of the unit’s kill/capture missions all over the globe.

  Life in the Mossad had been good to Alvey, until very recently that was, when he was shot during
an in extremis operation in Hamburg, Germany. He spent most of the following month recovering at Tel HaShomer Hospital in Ramat Gan, a suburb east of Tel Aviv, before finally being released to go home for a lengthy convalescence.

  After several weeks his wound had all but healed, and he was nearly ready to return to work. Then, just five days ago, he was called in to a meeting at Mossad’s headquarters on the Coastal Highway north of Tel Aviv. Here he met with a superior officer who asked him a question that tipped Alvey off he was in serious trouble.

  “Yanis, yes or no. Did you, in any way, facilitate the escape of the Gray Man from Europe last month?”

  Yanis Alvey had done exactly that, and he’d done it without authorization. That his superiors suspected likely meant that his career in the Mossad was in jeopardy.

  But Alvey told the truth because he was a man of good character. “Yes. I alone helped the Gray Man leave Europe.”

  There were no more questions. He was told to stand and then he was handcuffed. It was done politely—no one thought the legendary Yanis Alvey was any sort of a threat—but he was restrained nevertheless. He was driven a kilometer east to Ramat HaSharon, a northern suburb of Tel Aviv, to a Mossad safe house on a gentle hillside. He’d visited here many times in his career, but this time, for the first time, it was clear he was a captive. He was uncuffed and led into a small apartment in the expansive home and told to remain inside. Security forces patrolled the garden and the driveway outside, and in the home outside Yanis’s door, bored Mossad officers half his age sat around and smoked and watched TV, keeping one eye on the older man locked in the apartment.

  They brought Alvey his food and a collection of daily newspapers, but he had no more contact with the outside world, and no information about what was going to happen to him.

  After the first day Alvey demanded to speak with Menachem Aurbach, director of the Mossad, but Alvey’s minders here had no way to make that happen, and to Yanis his handlers looked as if they had less of a clue about what was going on than he did.

  So he just sat there, waiting for answers. He knew this strategy, of course. Aurbach was keeping him prisoner, softening him up, taking his time to allow Alvey to spend some time realizing the severity of his predicament and coming to terms with the fact his career, and his freedom, could be so easily threatened.

  Late in the evening of his fifth full day here in the Ramat HaSharon safe house he sat looking out the window at the twinkling lights of Tel Aviv to the south and the water to the west. His near catatonic state was broken by some commotion outside of his room, and then the door opened.

  Menachem Aurbach, the swarthy old man who ran the Mossad, stood in the doorway, along with two younger officers. In his right hand Aurbach held a thin blue file folder. He entered with a tired little smile and a nod to Alvey, and then with a wave of the folder he bade Alvey to follow him over to a small sitting area with a table in the corner.

  Yanis did as his director asked, and soon the two men sat close to each other without a word, Aurbach calm and relaxed; Alvey tense and on edge.

  The director of the Mossad waved his hand in the air and the two other men left the room. Only when they were gone and the door was shut did Aurbach speak.

  “Shalom. Ma nishma, Yanis?” Hello. How are you, Yanis?

  “Tov, Menachem. Toda.” Fine, Menachem. Thank you.

  “The wound to your stomach has healed?”

  “The wound is better. But I do not understand why I am here. I do not deserve this treatment from the service I served loyally for so long.”

  Aurbach looked around the little apartment. “Five days of house arrest. You are still young, relative to me, anyway. I can see how a few days locked in a home, even a nice home like this, could be a nuisance for you. Me? I’d consider house arrest a wonderful holiday.” He laughed aloud and patted Yanis on the knee. “Why won’t someone sentence me to a little vacation?”

  Alvey did not smile. He leaned forward, feeling the pinch of tethered scar tissue in his midsection as he did so. The gunshot wound had healed, but the scar, like the memory of the pain, would remain with him forever. “I know why you put me here, but I don’t know what I did wrong. I helped the man who saved our prime minister from assassination. How can that be bad?”

  Aurbach put a cigarette in his mouth, lit it with a wooden match from a box he pulled from his pocket, then extinguished the match with a swirl of his wrist. As he blew out smoke he said, “You did it unilaterally, without telling your control. Without telling me. Why was that?”

  Alvey spoke plainly and honestly. “Because the Americans wanted this man dead, and I worried you would give him to them. Your good relationship with the USA is a great benefit to this service and to our nation, don’t misunderstand me. But your good relationship with them would have meant the death of Mr. Gentry, and I thought we owed him better after what he did for us.”

  Aurbach nodded. Clearly he couldn’t have been happy with the explanation his subordinate had just given. The man was, after all, confessing to going behind Aurbach’s back on an operation. But the old man did seem to appreciate the candor.

  The seventy-two-year-old gently placed the thin blue file folder on the table between the men, and then he laid his rough hand on it. Patting it gently, he said, “I am going to tell you a little story, but before I begin the story, I will tell you how the story will end. It will end with you covering your head with your hands and begging forgiveness.”

  “Forgiveness for what?”

  “Forgiveness for your complicity in allowing the Gray Man to live after what he has done.”

  Alvey just said, “Tell me.”

  “What do you know about a Mossad asset with the code name of Hawthorn?”

  Alvey shook his head. “Nothing. I’ve never heard the name.”

  “Well, believe me, you know the man’s work.” The statement hung in the air a long time. It was all the more curious to Alvey because he never knew the plainspoken Aurbach to speak with such melodrama.

  The younger man just replied, “Who is he?”

  Slowly Menachem leaned back in his chair and puffed on his cigarette. “He was Iraqi. Hawthorn’s father worked for us first. He was a pilot in Saddam’s air force. This was the eighties, mind you, shortly after Osirak. We recruited the father while he was on leave in Cyprus. It wasn’t an ideological recruitment; he was chasing money and girls, and we gave him a little taste, then offered him much more of both for helping us. He agreed. He wasn’t terribly useful at first, he didn’t provide us much in the way of intelligence about Saddam’s air power capabilities, so we cut him loose, not wanting to throw good money after bad.

  “We thought that was that, but after he left the military he became a pilot for Middle East Airlines, and we reached out again. MEA flew all over the region, so we thought he might be able to provide bits of intelligence for us here and there.”

  “Did he?”

  Aurbach waved a hand in the air. “Nothing relevant to our discussion tonight, Yanis. We will talk about his son.”

  Yanis Alvey shrugged. “Okay. The son. Code name Hawthorn. We got him through his dad?”

  Aurbach took another long drag from his cigarette. “The father relocated to MEA’s home office in Beirut in 1990, and his eighteen-year-old son came with him. He went to the university there, got caught up in a student movement against Shia dominance of the government, and was arrested by the police during a peaceful sit-in.

  “The police were controlled by Hezbollah, of course, so they threw him into a cell along with some of his friends. Beat them night and day. Hawthorn was the only student who survived the ordeal.

  “We learned all this from his father, and with his blessing we made a soft approach. He agreed to work for us in Lebanon against Hezbollah, but within a few years he was informing against the more radical Sunni groups, as well.”

  “Sounds like
a useful asset,” Alvey said. Yanis Alvey was a commando, so he didn’t run agents himself, but he certainly benefited from their intelligence product. He’d conducted countless operations in Lebanon, so he couldn’t help but wonder if Hawthorn’s product had served him and his various missions.

  Menachem agreed. “He was one of my best agents, and he was good at his work, but I knew he could be even more valuable if we left him alone. I gave him the code name Hawthorn because it is a plant that grows here in the Levant. If raised in the wild, on its own, it bears plentiful fruit. My philosophy was to let him stay in Lebanon as our inside man, for the next time our army traveled north to clean the country of terrorists.”

  “But why did he agree to help us?”

  “He hated Hezbollah, hated all the radical and jihadist groups, Sunni and Shia alike. He had no great love for Judaism or our state, but as Hezbollah took over Lebanon and al Qaeda began to grow in the Middle East, he saw the radical philosophies as insidious cancers, and he saw Israel as something of a surgeon, cutting away the bad.”

  Alvey understood. “I imagine as his case officer, you painted exactly that picture in his mind. You gave him a purpose. A reason.”

  “That is it, entirely.” The old man smiled sadly. “And then came 9/11. And then came Iraq.”

  Alvey said, “We didn’t share him with the Americans, did we?”

  Aurbach shook his head, still smiling. “No. He was ours alone.”

  Alvey was not surprised. The Mossad was notoriously stingy with its intelligence sources.

  “We sent him to the nation of his birth just after the invasion. He was on the ground during the insurgency. Doing enough to remain credible to the militias, but keeping us informed on developments.”

  Aurbach added, “This became a problem, though, when he was picked up by the U.S. Marines in Tikrit in 2006 and put in a prison camp. CIA sent his picture to us, along with hundreds of others, to see if we had any information about terrorist ties, or any interest in interviewing him ourselves. You can imagine how difficult it was when I saw the face of the man I had been running for over a decade, knowing he was rotting away in an American detainment facility, and was forced to tell the Americans I had no knowledge of or interest in the man.”