by Mark Greaney
Carmichael’s suite was at the end of the hallway. He was protected by DeRenzi and two more guards here, but when Mayes stepped into the office outside of Denny’s bedroom, D/NCS told the security officers to wait outside. DeRenzi and the others stepped out, and Carmichael shut the door and locked it.
Carmichael was just finishing up a phone call with Brewer, who was on her way to D.C., where she had been summoned to the JSOC safe house to speak with Dakota, so Mayes took a moment to look around. The windows to the outside were tempered glass; not bulletproof, but they did not need to be, because iron slats could fall into place at the touch of a button. One exit out of the office led to the bedroom, a second to the hallway that served as the spine of the south wing, and the third to a narrow inner hallway that led past a narrow staircase, which ascended one flight to a locked door. The other side of the door was the south wing attic, which itself was secured from the outside and shut off from the other parts of the building. Beyond the stairway in the narrow hall was a bathroom, and then a large conference room.
As soon as Denny finished his call he looked at his watch. “It’s ten p.m., Mayes. Trouble?”
“We have a problem.”
“Talk.”
“Catherine King. I gave Zack Hightower the day to recover after he watched her house all night long. I put four cars on her tail. She ran around doing press all morning, just what you’d expect to see from her. She’s all over the news with the story you fed her. But then, just after noon, she started running an SDR.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. A good one, too, from the sound of it. Our surveillance people stayed on her for the first half hour, but she slipped them. She was in the wind from about one fifteen p.m. till almost two forty-five, at which time she returned to her car parked at the CNN building. She took that back to her office at the Post, arriving at three fifteen p.m.”
Carmichael said, “From the look on your face, I assume there is something more.”
“There is. At four twenty p.m. today she bought a ticket on a six ten flight to Tel Aviv.”
Carmichael’s razor-tight face stretched tighter as he scowled. “Son of a bitch. It’s Gentry. He got to her somehow.”
Mayes said, “It’s possible.”
Carmichael just said, “Gentry told her about BACK BLAST. He’s sending her to Tel Aviv to find out details from people she knows in the Mossad.”
“What can they possibly tell her?”
“Details, obviously.”
“Details even I don’t know?”
“Don’t start, Mayes. We’ve been through this.” Mayes didn’t push it, and Carmichael thought a moment. “I want surveillance on her e-mail and phone within the hour.”
Mayes nodded.
“And the other reporter working with her. What was his name?”
“Shoal. He’s not an investigator, he’s just—”
“I don’t care what he is. I want a full surveillance package on him. Phone and e-mail as well.”
“I’m on it.”
Carmichael added, “And get some more assets to cover Gentry’s father in Florida. Catherine King might have passed on the fact we were looking for someone from Jacksonville. He will read that as a threat.”
Mayes said, “More assets? Who, Denny? We don’t have SAD men we can call up, remember. The JSOC forces are deployed here in the District, and contracted security have proven themselves unable to go up against him. Who are we going to send down there other than the case officers already watching him?”
Denny Carmichael thought it over, then a thought came to him. “Harvey Point.”
Mayes cocked his head. “What about Harvey Point?”
“There is a training evolution going on down there right now, isn’t there?”
“Yes. Twenty-five case officers from Europe are down at the Point taking a class in defensive driving. One of Suzanne Brewer’s initiatives to improve security at foreign postings.” He shrugged. “But . . . what about them? Those folks aren’t shooters. They are just case officers. None of them have fired a gun since the Farm. You want to send a bunch of cocktail circuit spooks out to capture the Gray Man?”
“They don’t have to capture him. Send them down there immediately, all of them. Get them to lean on his dad, to see if he’s been in contact. They will be able to detect deception in him. Put them on the street corners, in the grocery stores, flood the zone. If Gentry goes down there and they get wind of it, we can fly shooters in from Bragg in a couple of hours.”
Mayes said, “I’ll get them moving down.”
60
Suzanne Brewer pulled her BMW 535i into the garage of the JSOC safe house three blocks from the U.S. Capitol. She was annoyed to be here; she’d rather be either back at the TOC at Langley running down the latest leads, or else curled up in her bed at home in Springfield, desperately trying to catch one of her all too few three-hour cat naps. It was ten-thirty p.m., after all; she had been on her way home for a break when she diverted all the way into the District, and since the last spate of Violator sightings were eight hours old she doubted she’d be needed back at Langley until the morning.
But she was here because Dakota had called and demanded a meeting.
The JSOC team had done everything she’d asked of them as they’d been sent on one chase after another over the past few days, so she gave in to his demand without putting up much of a fight. She knew they’d be tired and angry for being spun up again and again, often getting to locations where facial recog hits were too old for them to do more than wander around with only faint hopes their target might just be loitering in the area reading a newspaper.
The most recent callout of the JSOC team had taken place near Union Station around two p.m. Brewer’s team at the TOC had caught the facial recog hit, and Brewer herself had double-checked it within five minutes of the image being captured.
The image was of a man, very possibly Violator, walking into the large parking garage just to the west of the massive train station in the center of the District.
Another image showing the same man was captured inside the garage just a minute later, and it had him walking up a ramp towards one of the higher levels. This photograph did not contain a good view of his face, but with the first image to go on, Suzanne decided to deploy Dakota and his men.
The full twelve-man JSOC team arrived, followed shortly behind by CIA assets, and they all searched the entire area.
But no sign of Violator was detected, and the analysts at the TOC were unable to find any images of him leaving the area. The interior of the train station was virtually enveloped by camera coverage, and the lack of any computer matches there led Brewer to the conclusion her target had simply vanished.
Suzanne then sat down at a monitor in the TOC and individually checked the image of each and every vehicle that left the parking garage from the moment Violator entered until four hours later, long past the time JSOC had ruled out Gentry still being in the area, because she worried they might have missed him. Early in this slow, laborious endeavor she thought she detected the problem. She noticed an issue with one of the cameras covering the garage. The angle at which the sun’s rays hit the windshields of the cars leaving the H Street NE exit from one forty-five to two fifteen p.m. caused a large flashing glare on each and every digital image, and even by going manually through all the images time-stamped during this period, Suzanne could barely make out the drivers of any of the cars and trucks. If Gentry had left by this exit, inside a vehicle, within a half hour of when he arrived, it would have been almost impossible to identify him.
For a brief moment Brewer wondered if her target could have possibly been so thorough in his skills to have known that the sun would hit windshields at that time, in that location, at that angle. But she dispelled this notion.
Sure, it was possible to be that lucky, but Court Gentry could not
possibly be that good.
Could he?
After the JSOC team got no joy at the garage, Dakota and his men raced around the station until nightfall, and then they spent another few hours widening their search area to include virtually all of central D.C., but now they were back in their safe house, waiting for the next sighting to be reported at the TOC and, Suzanne presumed by Dakota’s tone when he called her cell phone forty-five minutes earlier, they were angry with her for the goose chase.
Her plan was to throw some compliments their way, take any grief they wanted to give her about the lack of a target, and then go home.
Now she sat in the living room of the house. Dakota was alone with her while the other men either bunked out, ate, or relaxed in the other rooms.
Catherine had declined the JSOC officer’s offer of tea, but he poured a cup for himself and stirred a sugar cube into it slowly.
Impatient, Brewer started the conversation. “Look. I’m tired, and I know you are, too. But honestly, if you felt the need to browbeat me for not getting you a target after five days of hunting, you could have just done it over the phone.”
Dakota took a sip of hot tea. “No, ma’am, that’s not it at all. I’ve been in the army too damn long to get pissy when something doesn’t pan out. Bad intel is the rule, not the exception.”
“Then what am I doing here?”
Dakota wasn’t happy with the flavor of his drink, so he tossed another sugar cube in, but he didn’t bother with stirring this time. “Coming from the army, I always did have a pretty fair understanding of whose side I was on. I’m getting worried that something’s gotten lost in the shuffle on this op, so I’m hoping you can help me sort it out.”
“I’m not holding anything back from you. Just tell me what you want to know.”
“I want to know the identity of the other bozos we keep running into. The other team involved in the Violator hunt.”
Brewer furrowed her eyebrows. “I don’t know what you mean. It’s you guys, Agency support personnel, and contracted plainclothes security. I told you this already.”
“That’s not all the pieces on this checkerboard, Ms. Brewer.”
“Look, we’re doing our best to keep PD and DOJ out of this, but Gentry has stirred a hornet’s nest. Shooting up subway stations and convenience stores and taking down SWAT teams draws the attention of law enforcement, as you can imagine. Obviously local PD was in Columbia Heights yesterday morning, and I’m sure they’re looking as hard as they can for the same target we’re looking for, but we aren’t coordinating with them.”
Dakota drank more tea, looking over the rim of the cup at Brewer with a skeptical eye.
The CIA Programs and Plans officer leaned forward in her chair. “If you have something to say, just say it. Otherwise, I’m going home.”
“There’s another group out there. Foreigners. They are being sent where we’re being sent.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Foreigners? Bullshit.”
“No, ma’am. The only bullshit is that the Agency is farming out this job to some overseas actor. You folks can get yourselves thrown into prison for that, you know.”
“I don’t have a clue what you are talking about.”
“Maybe you don’t. Maybe you do. Maybe somebody is keeping you in the dark, same as us. But they are out there. We saw them yesterday morning when we got to Columbia Heights. A couple of unmarked cars, multiple individuals in each one. A couple of motorcycles that didn’t look like they belonged. We got close to them, and they bugged out.”
To Brewer this did not sound particularly conclusive.
Dakota continued, “And today at Union Station. Four more two-man tag teams wandering around inside the mall. I don’t mean contractors or Agency spooks, I mean foreign actors of some variety.”
“What variety?”
“They are Middle Easterners, that’s for sure. Otherwise I don’t know. It’s not my mission to unravel that mystery, I only kept an eye on them to make sure my guys stayed safe, and I only bring it up with you so you know that’s not the way we operate. I know there are one hundred thousand things you can’t tell me, and to be honest I don’t give a damn about any of them. But I demand to be told who else is going to be running around armed in my area of operations!”
Brewer was thoroughly confused, but she did not want to reveal that to the man who needed to follow her instructions. Instead she promised to speak with her higher-ups to see if they could clear her to reveal more information about the operation.
A few minutes later she was back in her car, but her plans to return home to Springfield had changed. Instead, she’d go back to the TOC. She told herself she’d sleep when this was all over, but until then, there were too many balls in the air for her to worry about her own needs.
61
By the time dawn broke over the tiny town of Glen St. Mary, Florida, the roosters on the farm just north of Claude Harvey Road had already been crowing for hours.
Court had known they would be. The ancestors of those roosters had been screwing with his sleep for as far back as he could remember.
To call this a farm at all was putting it charitably. It was fifty acres of mostly hard-packed sandy dirt, covered in trees and shrubs on the edges and flat as a pancake. There was a pond and a double-wide and a detached garage made of corrugated tin, and there were a few chickens in a coop and a few goats in a pen, but that looked like the full measure of the place if you were driving by on Claude Harvey, the only paved road in sight.
But a passing motorist wouldn’t be able to see the largest structure on the farm from the road. It was back behind the trees, two hundred yards off Claude Harvey, just this side of a fat man-made earthen berm that had long since become overgrown with thatchy privet and wild oak.
The structure was a two-story shoot house, a firearms training center, constructed like a fort out of railroad ties, old tires, plywood, Conex boxes, and other rusted metal. At over nine thousand square feet, it was massive, although it had never been fancy and had fallen into disrepair in the past fifteen years. Next to the old wooden structure, several firing ranges could still be detected in the underbrush, and old rusted steel man-shaped targets leaned haphazardly against the berm.
The owner of the farm and the shoot house was a sixty-eight-year-old native Floridian named James Ray Gentry. Gentry had served as a marine in Vietnam, a small-town cop, a large-city SWAT officer, and his department’s lead firearms instructor, and then, when he was still in his early thirties, he quit the force and opened his own private tactical training center for state and local law enforcement agencies. This was the early 1980s, when Florida’s cocaine wars put armed bad guys with automatic weapons on the streets, in the bars, and in the boats offshore. Cops and deputy sheriffs all over the state needed to learn how to transition from the days of six-shooters and minimal chance for danger to fighting protracted street battles with heavily armed men with little reluctance to kill or die to protect their millions in product.
And James Gentry taught most of the state’s SWAT teams right here on Claude Harvey Road. By the nineties he was training federal law enforcement and even some CIA units, as well, all of whom knew he had the abilities to show them how to clean and clear houses without subjecting large portions of their units to near-certain death.
James’s wife died back in the eighties, but not before she gave him two healthy boys. Courtland, and then two years later, Chancellor. Chance seemed destined to follow in his father’s footsteps from birth. He always wanted to wear his father’s police gear, or dress up like the Lone Ranger.
Court was night and day different from his little brother; he was obsessed with Indians as a child, he was more interested in horses than in police cars, and Court became the Indian outlaw to Chance’s U.S. Marshal. They chased each other all over the farm in character. Chance versus Court. Cowboy versus Indian. The good guy v
ersus the bad guy.
The father’s son, and the rebel.
Both boys assisted their dad in his business, first by helping to pick up spent brass around the ranges and shoot house, then by cleaning the training weapons each night while the SWAT teams sat in meeting rooms, going over the day’s actions.
Even as a small boy Court had been a mascot of the school. Though he didn’t have his brother’s obsession with guns, he’d been a natural with firearms, even better than his brother, and students from all over the country training at the school would bet handfuls of ammunition they could outshoot the ten-year-old son of the legendary James Gentry.
The older Gentry took all their bets, and invariably he’d end up with more loaded ammo to throw into his oil drum full of Court’s winnings.
By the time Court was fourteen, he and his brother had found themselves at the center of the family business. Their dad would let them play hooky from school so they could serve as opposition forces pitted against visiting SWAT teams, waiting in the dark for cops to come into the shoot house with guns loaded with paintballs.
Often the Gentry boys would take down full eight- or twelve-man units without so much as a single splatter on their own bodies.
And more often than not furious police captains screamed red-faced at James Gentry, insisting the training was rigged against his men, because no one could believe a couple of teenaged brothers, one short-haired and personable, the other long-haired and reserved, could wipe out well-trained tactical units of veteran cops.
James Gentry sometimes allowed the captains to make the rules in the next drill, to stack the deck in favor of their own men, and often the result was the same.
But Court’s rebellious nature grew exponentially in his late teens and he ran afoul of his taciturn father. Though Chance did his best to keep the peace between them, Court and James were two stubborn personalities, and conflict between them became the norm.