Back Blast: A Gray Man Novel

by Mark Greaney

  Her thumb flipped up the security cap over the stun gun’s actuator. Thinking quickly, she said, “Bail? I’m fifty-four. I’m not sure I ever knew how to bail. But even if I did, those days are firmly behind me.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw the man chuckle at this, as if he was completely comfortable snatching an innocent woman off the street.

  A large black work truck rolled up to the intersection on the left of the old Civic.

  Catherine squeezed the handle of the stun gun so hard it hurt. Her thumb hovered over the red actuator.

  Six started to pull forward, but the work truck on the left began rolling out of turn, so he was forced to brake abruptly.

  Catherine took her opportunity. In one motion she lifted the device up, spun towards the man behind the wheel, and plunged the metal tips into the right side of his throat, which, due to the black hoodie, was the only exposed skin showing around her kidnapper’s neck.

  She pressed the button and an electric clicking sound filled the air. It seemed impossibly loud and violent here in the small cabin of the Honda Civic.

  The man behind the wheel cried out as six million volts coursed through his body.

  55

  Owwww!” His right arm swung up in a blur, and his forearm connected with the stun gun and knocked it hard, sending it flying into the backseat. It banged against the rear window and skittered to the floor.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” the man shouted now, his face a mask of pain.

  But he did not go down. He did not collapse, faint, or appear, in any way, incapacitated.

  Instead, he just seemed furious.

  Catherine covered her face in her hands, cowered into a ball by her car door, and she readied herself for the killer’s retaliation.

  “Jesus, lady! That hurt like hell!” The car began rolling forward. She heard him moving in his seat, and thought he was checking his neck in the rearview mirror.

  When she realized he wasn’t about to hit her, she spoke. Almost to herself she said, “That was supposed to disable you for a full minute.”

  The man behind the wheel yelled back at her. “Well, it didn’t!” he shouted, irritation strong in his voice. Then he said, “Those gadgets are overrated. Listen, lady, I’ve had a really shitty week. If you have any more dirty tricks I’d appreciate it if you’d just let me know.”

  “No, sir. Nothing else. I’m sorry. I’m just very frightened.”

  “You don’t need to be scared. Hell, I’m the one who just got zapped.” He seemed to take a moment to get control of his emotions, although he continued to cuss under his breath and feel at the spot on his throat where she’d shocked him. Finally he looked at her. “Sit up, please. I can’t talk to you like that.”

  Slowly she did so, straightening her outfit and returning to her fixed stare through the windshield. They drove in silence for another block, and then she said, “This isn’t my first time.”

  “First time for what?”

  “I’ve been kidnapped before. 2004. Quetta, Pakistan.”

  “I’m not kidnapping you.”

  “I’m free to go, then?”

  “In a little while.”

  “Not now?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I don’t want to get pedantic, but I think that means you are kidnapping me.”

  “I’m not. I’m offering you an exclusive interview. In exchange for me answering your questions, I’ll need you to answer some of mine. Deal?”

  Catherine said, “I must respectfully decline. Can I go now?”

  The man who called himself Six just exhaled slowly. “All right. You win. It’s a kidnapping.”

  “Glad we agree,” she said. Then, “I guess I’ll interview you then.”

  They arrived at Glenwood Cemetery and Six pulled through an entrance that led him to a series of winding roads through rolling hills dotted with trees and tombstones. They passed a mausoleum on the left. There were a few cars parked here and several people dressed in formal attire, some carrying flowers. Catherine wondered if she could just open her car door and roll out. This would alert the dozen or so by the mausoleum, but she didn’t know if the man driving the car would just hurt them along with her if she tried this.

  She stayed still, and soon they were driving around a quieter part of the cemetery grounds.

  Six said, “I can’t say I’ve ever given an interview. How do I start?”

  “I need you to prove you are who you say you are. How do I know you didn’t just read my article and snatch me like this as part of some delusional fantasy? You could be pretending to be involved in all this.”

  To Catherine’s surprise, the man reached to his waist and hefted both his hoodie and a long-sleeve thermal he wore under it. Lifting both up high enough to first expose the butt of a pistol on his right hip, and then a heavily bandaged area on the right side of his rib cage. Dried black and dark red stains covered the beige compression bandages.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a gunshot wound. I can unwrap it if you really want to see it.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. What happened?”

  “I got shot the other night. Up in Bethesda.”

  “Is it . . . serious?”

  “It’s not much fun.”

  Catherine nodded slowly. “That’s one way to prove your involvement.”

  “Are you satisfied?”

  “Yes.” She looked back at her purse behind her. “Is there any chance I can take notes for the interview?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  Catherine did not push it. “You said you have been running from someone. Who? The CIA?”

  “Yes. Among others.”

  “For how long?”

  “Five years.”

  “And before that?”

  “I was an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency for over a decade.”

  Catherine asked, “In what capacity?”

  “SAD. Deniable special missions.”

  “That’s a unit name?”

  “A job description. My group didn’t have an official name.”

  “It’s the government, Six. Everything gets a name.”

  A pause. “They called us Golf Sierra. It was a call sign. But that wasn’t exactly on the phone extension list at Langley.”

  “You were SAD black operators?”

  “There are black units, and then there are the guys who walk in the shadows cast by the black units. That was us, I guess.”

  Catherine wondered if this could all still be just what Denny Carmichael had asserted in his interview. A figment of the imagination of an insane person.

  “Do you have some proof?”

  “Proof of?”

  “What you did while working for the Agency.”

  “You think I walk around with a stack of Polaroids? I don’t have any proof. You’ll just have to determine for yourself if I’m a crackpot.”

  “That’s fair. Why are you doing this? Why now?”

  Six turned up a long, hilly road that undulated through hundreds of tombstones and crypts. He drove incredibly slow. He said, “I have been out of the country for five years. I found a way in, so I came back to end this.”

  She hesitated. “By killing people?”

  “Of course not. I didn’t come here to kill anybody.”

  “What about in Chevy Chase?”

  “That wasn’t me.”

  “You just said—”

  “I was there. I was shot. But I didn’t kill Babbitt.”

  “What about Dupont Circle?”

  “Not me. Again, I was present, but I didn’t kill Max Ohlhauser or the transit cops.”

  “What about Washington Highlands?”

  It was a long time before the reply came. “Those guys I did kill
.”

  “And the Easy Market shoot-out?”

  The man in the hoodie and the sunglasses exhaled. “I assume you saw the footage, so I assume you know I had to do it.”

  “I didn’t see any footage. Just bodies.”

  Six shrugged. “Yeah, I killed those guys. Believe me, they had it coming.”

  “So . . . you say you aren’t here to kill anyone. Yet by my count eleven people are dead in four incidents, and though you admit to being present at all four incidents you are copping to just five of the killings. In my business that calls you something of an unreliable witness.”

  He shrugged. “I only killed the bad ones. That’s kind of my thing.”

  “Who killed the rest, if not you?”

  “People following the orders of Denny Carmichael.”

  She let that statement hang in the air while they drove for a moment, then asked, “Why does the CIA want you dead?”

  “The CIA doesn’t want me dead. Carmichael wants me dead. I don’t know the real reason. I thought I did, but now that I’m here, I’m more confused than ever.”

  “What is his stated reason?”

  “Some operation that happened six years ago. Something that went off without a hitch.”

  “But if it went off without a hitch, why does Carmichael want you—”

  Six interrupted suddenly, as if something had just come to him. “Do you have contacts in Israeli intelligence?”

  Catherine nodded. “Yes. Of course. Well-placed ones, as a matter of fact.”

  With excitement in his voice, he said, “Six years ago, a Mossad penetration agent in al Qaeda in Iraq traveled to Trieste, Italy. He was compromised and burned to the opposition but didn’t know it. An al Qaeda assassin showed up to kill him. Before he could act, an operative arrived and rescued the Mossad agent.”

  King just said, “I’ve never heard of this incident.”

  “Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I was the operative. I termed the al Qaeda gunman and—”

  “You did what?”

  “Terminated him.”

  “Oh. Go on.”

  “And I got the Mossad agent to safety. Everything went off the way it was supposed to, but six years later I find out Carmichael is using this old operation as justification to term me.” Court stopped the car in the middle of the little tree-lined road and turned to her. “If you can go to the Israelis and confirm any part of this event in Trieste, make it public, then Denny will have no alternative but to rescind the shoot on sight.”

  “Shoot on sight? That sounds like something from a bad movie.” Slowly she looked up at him. This time he didn’t order her to turn away.

  He looked crestfallen suddenly. “You think I’m making this entire thing up, don’t you?”

  “People lie. Even the legitimate ones enhance their stories sometimes. In my work I see it every day.”

  Six rubbed his eyes under his sunglasses. She could see fatigue and frustration on his face, even if his eyes were obscured by the dark lenses.

  She softened a little. “I believe you are who you say you are. But some men . . . some women, live and die for their country, and never receive any recognition. They come to me with an exaggeration, an embellishment, something to boost what they’ve accomplished.”

  The man behind the wheel all but recoiled. “Seriously, lady, do you really think I want recognition? Do you think any of the boys in SAD are looking for shine time? If I had my way no one on earth would ever know I existed. What I’m doing here, with you, this isn’t about me. This is about finding the truth so I can expose Carmichael’s hunt as an illegal operation. I just want to come home without all this hanging over me.”

  Catherine looked hard at the man in front of her. She thought he might have been in his early thirties, but she could not be sure. He was of average height and she caught sight of wisps of brown sticking out of the hoodie. His skin was relatively fair; he had some stubble on his face, but it looked like he’d shaved in the past twenty-four hours.

  He was normal. Regular. Utterly nondescript. She wondered if she’d be able to pick this man out of a lineup an hour from now.

  That was, of course, if he planned on letting her go at all.

  Quickly she said, “You want me to contact someone in Israel?”

  “No. I want you to go to Israel. Talk to people you know, but also talk to someone I know.”

  “And who is that?”

  Six drove out of the cemetery and into the thickening afternoon traffic. “I don’t have a name. He used to be a commando, but now he is working as some kind of a coordinator for their paramilitary units. He helped me get here to the States. He might be able to help you.”

  “I’ll need more information than that if I am going to track him down.”

  Six thought it over. “He was in the hospital recently.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I shot him.”

  Catherine leaned back in her seat, rested her head against the door window. “And he’s helping you?”

  “We made up.”

  “Right. What else do you know about him?”

  —

  They spent a few more minutes, he giving her information about the Mossad officer who helped him escape Europe and get into the USA, and she doing her best to remember everything he said while simultaneously trying to regain her composure and understand her situation. After a while she forgot this had begun with a kidnapping. Six seemed to be no threat to her. Instead he presented himself as a man who felt like the world was against him, but nevertheless refused to turn and run away. Whether or not his assertions were true, she still had no idea, but she did not doubt for a minute that Six believed everything he was saying.

  Finally he said, “I guess I just have one question for you before I say good-bye. Is there anything else you can tell me about your conversation with Carmichael? Anything else he might have said that stands out?”

  Catherine thought a moment. “Maybe so. Were you, by chance, born in Jacksonville, Florida?” She saw no reaction on the man’s face, though she looked hard for one.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “It seemed to me that Carmichael wanted me to put that in the article. I don’t know what it means, but he said the man they were after was from Jacksonville.”

  “Why didn’t you use it?”

  “You say you are being played by forces bigger than you.” She sighed. “Sometimes I feel the same way. I don’t particularly like it, either.”

  Six drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “I don’t know what that means. I was born in Dayton, Ohio.” He looked to her. “Please don’t print that.”

  Catherine said, “Other than the fact that you kidnapped me, and the circumstances around that, there isn’t much here that I can print. I can’t talk about this Israeli connection without catching a lot of heat, and all I’ll get from the Agency will be denials.”

  As they pulled up to a red light, Six surprised her by smiling. “You don’t need to report it. Not till you have the proof you need. Carmichael has convinced everybody at Langley I need to die for a mistake I never made. You find out what happened in Trieste, you will see I am telling the truth. Then you’ll have your story.”

  Catherine took offense to the man’s insinuation. “The story isn’t the only thing I care about, you know. I’m American, just like you. I want what’s best for this country.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now it’s you who doesn’t believe me.”

  Six shrugged. “You are an investigative reporter.”

  “True, but I’m more than that.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Catherine King shook her head slowly. “You didn’t kidnap me to hear my sob story. Let’s just leave
it like this. If Denny Carmichael is doing what you say he’s doing, I want to put a stop to it.”

  “Then let’s work together. Look into Trieste. You can contact me through my RedPhone number.”

  And then, with a quick nod, he pulled the car over to the curb and opened his door. He stepped out and walked between two cars parked in the next lane, and she lost sight of him for a moment.

  By the time she climbed out of the passenger’s seat and looked around, he was gone.

  —

  Court walked for only a few minutes before arriving at his motorcycle locked to a rack outside of the Rhode Island Avenue Metro.

  He slipped on his helmet, revved the engine, and began heading west through the city.

  He was hopeful something would come from Catherine King’s investigation of Operation BACK BLAST, but he couldn’t allow himself to focus on that right now.

  No. Now he had a new problem. He had to go back to his hide site in the middle of the forest, grab as much of his and Zack’s gear as he could fit into a small backpack, and then go purchase another vehicle.

  It didn’t have to be anything fancy. It just had to get him to Florida.

  Despite what he’d told the Washington Post reporter, Court was not from Dayton. He was indeed from a small town on the highway between Tallahassee and Jacksonville, and the fact Carmichael had dropped that little tidbit into the conversation, Court knew, was either meant as bait or as a threat.

  If it was bait, then Court would be in real danger heading down to Florida.

  But if it was a threat, if there was any chance at all something might happen to his father, his only close living relative, then Court knew he had no real alternative but to get involved.

  He had to go.

  He wasn’t worried that the CIA was going to hurt his father. But the other group out there, this mysterious proxy force of Middle Easterners; what was to keep Carmichael from sending them down to Florida to hurt his dad, to punish him for the actions of his son in some way, or to hold him hostage?

  Court didn’t think much of his father. They hadn’t spoken in nearly twenty years. But his dad was his dad, and Court couldn’t let the same group of killers who murdered Max Ohlhauser get their hands on him.