Back Blast: A Gray Man Novel

by Mark Greaney

  “You might say, for purposes of the Violator operation . . . these are my men.”

  Jordan Mayes started to sit down in a chair at the table, but it was as if his knees gave out suddenly near the end of the movement. He dropped roughly into the chair.

  “Mother of God.”

  —

  Over the next thirty minutes, Denny Carmichael told Jordan Mayes everything about Gentry and the Saudi relationship to him.

  Not just their service in the Violator hunt—but everything.

  When Carmichael finished, his second-in-command looked out the window to the southwest. A thick bank of clouds grew low, gray, and ominous, approaching like a wall closing in on Washington, D.C. After a moment Mayes just said, “Jesus Christ, Denny.”

  Carmichael kept his eyes on Mayes’s face. “Of course, you see the problem here.”

  Mayes nodded distractedly. Then, “Of course I do. Why didn’t you—”

  Carmichael interrupted. “Anything I did or did not do is all water under the bridge now, isn’t it? Could I have managed this better from the beginning? Absolutely. I acknowledge that. But you see I had to make a series of on-the-fly critical decisions. Some I got right. A great many, as a matter of fact, but they have been eclipsed in importance by the very few decisions I got wrong.”

  He shrugged. “And here we are today. You are now in the fold, and I need to know that I can count on you for the good of the future of this Agency.”

  Mayes finally looked away from the window and towards his superior. “You just told me all this so I would know the stakes.”

  “I just told you because you asked me to tell you.”

  “Bullshit. If I turn and walk away, you’ll send Hightower or someone else to term me.”

  Carmichael’s face was impassive. “Of course not. Jordan. That’s ludicrous. We’ve been together for twenty-five years.”

  “We have . . . and that’s the first time you’ve ever called me Jordan.” He stood and headed for the door on shaky legs.

  Carmichael followed him. “You walk out on this and you know what this will do to the Clandestine Service. You have to see this through now. Court Gentry must die, because if he reveals what he knows, our human intelligence operations will be set back a generation.”

  Mayes thought about everything Carmichael had just told him. It was true. Right or wrong—and right now this all seemed so fucking wrong—Gentry had to be terminated. If not, Carmichael’s assertion that CIA covert HUMINT would suffer for a generation seemed, if anything, like an understatement.

  He said, “This is a lot to take in, Denny. I just need to go home. I just need to think.”

  Carmichael’s severe face hardened even more. Mayes had never seen colder eyes in his life.

  Carmichael said, “Think all you want, Mayes. But do your thinking alone, and in silence.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, and he left through the door to the narrow hallway, passing DeRenzi and his men without a word.

  64

  The café on Tel Aviv’s King George Street offered outdoor seating that afforded a nice view of Meir Garden, but Mossad officer Yanis Alvey wasn’t taking in the view. He sipped his espresso at a small table outside, but mostly he just sat there, looking at nothing and no one. A smoky bus thumped by, and other patrons at the tables around recoiled or covered their noses.

  Alvey just ignored it, lost in his melancholy.

  The sun had set an hour earlier, and the evening air cooled more and more each minute. Alvey wore a short-sleeve shirt with a light cashmere vest over it, not enough to ward off the April breeze, but he wasn’t thinking about the cool air, either.

  He sensed movement in front of him and he looked up in time to see a middle-aged brunette with a small backpack hanging off her shoulder standing at the foot of his little bistro table. For an instant he thought she looked familiar, but he could not place her. She looked down at him, though, like she knew him well.

  An uncomfortable feeling for an intelligence officer, to be sure, especially when he recognized the person, but he did not know from where.

  “Mr. Alvey?” she asked.

  English. That caused him to refine his hunt to put a name to the face. A name was on the tip of his tongue for an instant, and then it melted off. No.

  “Who are you?” he asked. Refusing to confirm his ID before getting more information.

  “My name is Catherine King. I am with the Washington Post.”

  Instantly he knew exactly who she was; he’d seen her on television, and he’d read hundreds of columns she’d written over the years. He began to stand to leave. His eyes flickered all around, hunting for a suitable escape route.

  “Please wait. Sit down with me a moment. I’m not going to ask you anything. Not yet, anyway. I need to tell you something. After I tell you, if you like, you can get up and walk away, and I promise I will not pursue you.”

  Alvey kept the nervous furtive eyes, but he lowered back to his seat.

  The waiter came and she ordered an espresso. Alvey declined her offer to buy him another.

  Soon she said, “A mutual acquaintance of ours told me this story. It’s a good one. I speak to liars with depressing regularity, but I believe this man believes what he is saying. That doesn’t make it true, mind you. I’m just letting you know I am normally quite skeptical of tall tales.”

  “Who is the acquaintance?”

  “He wouldn’t give me his name, but you know who he is.”

  Alvey smiled. Bemused. “Without his name, I highly doubt that. I know a lot of men.”

  “Yes, but how many of them shot you in the stomach in a Hamburg stairwell?”

  Alvey measured his breathing carefully. Intent on not giving any of his emotions away. “Not so many.”

  “I presumed as much. Well, this man is in serious trouble. He thinks just maybe you might be able to help him.”

  The muscles in Yanis Alvey’s neck twitched. “Help him, Ms. King? Help him? If he were sitting where you are sitting right now, I would dive across this table with this butter knife and stab it through his heart. I don’t want to help him. I want to kill him.”

  Catherine King had not expected this at all. “But why?”

  “Because he is a bad and dangerous individual. Dangerous to my nation, the nation I have sworn to protect with my life. Yes, I helped this man in the past, but that was before I knew the truth.”

  “He tells me he is innocent,” she said, her voice unsure now. Then she said, “Why would he send me all the way over here to prove he was innocent if he wasn’t?”

  Alvey seemed to think this over for a moment. Finally he nodded. Said, “The reason is obvious. He has no idea what he has done.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  “Why should I talk to a reporter?”

  “Because I have information, too, Mr. Alvey. Perhaps you are curious. And perhaps . . . the both of us can piece some things together that might be interesting.”

  Alvey looked away. “I’m not curious at all.”

  King persisted. “You have seen the news from Washington. Our mutual friend is the one at the center of this. The one being blamed for everything. Perhaps you think he’s done something wrong, and that’s why you would wring his neck if you got the chance, but can you really say you believe he is crisscrossing D.C. on a mass murder spree?”

  Alvey looked back to the woman from the Post. “No. I don’t believe he would do that.”

  “Then the CIA is after the wrong man. If you can help them with your information, wouldn’t you? Together maybe we can figure this out.”

  Slowly Alvey stood from the table. Catherine thought he was going to walk away without another word, but instead he surprised her. “We can take my car. We will talk while we drive. A running meet, we call it. A café like this is not safe for such stories. Not even stor
ies from long ago.”

  Catherine stood and followed.

  —

  Andy Shoal had spent all of Saturday afternoon in his apartment in Arlington, sitting on his couch with his notebook computer on his lap.

  He’d begun working on a new story without telling anyone what he had, for one simple reason. He needed to know what he had, and he was confused by how today’s evidence fit in with everything else he and Catherine had learned in the past week.

  On his notebook computer in front of him he had a hundred or so data points—all the reporting that had been done in the past full week. Beginning with his first conversation with Detective Rauch, just after midnight on Sunday morning in Washington Highlands, and ending with the discovery that a group of armed men dressed as cops and riding around in fake squad cars had been wounded in the shoot-out in the Metro that killed former CIA chief council Max Ohlhauser.

  He thought back to all the blood on the ground in Bethesda. He and Catherine had decided it couldn’t have come from someone who had already been bleeding for hours. He also thought about the vigilante nature of the shooting on Rhode Island Avenue, and about how much it contrasted with the other attacks of the past week.

  It was as if there were different groups operating at the same time, in the same places, and now he had evidence that proved this to be true. These ten men in the video from Dupont Circle—Andy counted four wounded and six others—were some sort of hit team.

  He was so worried that these men might be American spies that he didn’t want to contact the CIA to ask for a statement, and he was too early in this even to contact Catherine. If he was going to make it into the ranks of King’s investigative team, he would need to show he could do more than pound pavement and get people to talk. He needed to put puzzles together himself.

  He closed his laptop and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. Leaning his head back against the back of his sofa for a moment, he realized he needed some caffeine to keep going.

  At six p.m. he went downstairs to the tiny convenience store in his building, planning on buying some protein and a Red Bull to help him power through for just a few hours more.

  He was the only customer in the shop; the nice Indian lady who nearly always worked the two p.m. to ten p.m. shift was the only other person in sight. He gave her a tired smile as he passed her stacking cartons of yogurt in the front cooler.

  In the back he snatched up a cold Red Bull, then he grabbed a roast beef sandwich nearly the size of a football that was wrapped in microwave-safe plastic. Heading back to the front he heard a noise and looked up. Three men in black raincoats filed into the market, moving purposefully.

  The Indian clerk said, “Can I help—”

  And then she stopped talking. She backed up into the stacked crates of yogurt, knocking them all to the floor, and then she tumbled over on top of them.

  Andy thought she had just been clumsy, so he rushed to help her up, but only for a few steps, because now he saw the guns. Two of the three men in raincoats had pulled silenced pistols, and they raised them out in front of their bodies.

  Andy dropped his sandwich and his can of Red Bull and he stood there. A deer in the headlights as he stared down the barrel of a long black gun.

  —

  While one of the Saudi assets raised his Glock and fired at the primary target, a second asset eliminated the bystander by firing several suppressed rounds into her head.

  The third asset did not even draw a weapon. Instead, he walked directly to the counter, stepped behind it, and located the security camera Blu-ray recorder. He popped out the disk running in the machine, and he slipped it into his pocket. He then turned the Blu-ray player off, giving the impression it had not been running today at all.

  By the time he finished he heard the last cries for mercy from the man on the floor. The asset behind the counter did not even pause to look at the target. Instead he just went to the front door and held it open for his two colleagues, who both slipped their weapons into their raincoats before calmly walking out into the late afternoon.

  The third asset followed.

  After only thirty seconds inside the convenience store the three Saudis were back on the street. An old van with stolen plates pulled up to the curb, and the three men climbed in, barely breaking stride.

  65

  Court slept four full hours at a rest stop just south of Savannah, Georgia, then he woke up as refreshed as he’d been in weeks and pulled back onto the highway. His meeting with his father—actually, he knew he couldn’t really call it that, considering there was no conversation between them—had left him feeling settled in a positive way that felt foreign to him, but it was a good feeling, and it had helped him push through the miles heading back north.

  Music had propelled him on, as well. On the radio he’d found a station here in North Carolina that played a good mix of Southern rock, the stuff he and his brother grew up loving.

  An old Tom Petty tune was playing now and Court had the volume up as loud as it would go. He was enjoying the rock and the old Ford Bronco. He was still tired, the wound in his ribs still hurt, and his future was still very much in doubt, but all things considered, he wasn’t having a bad day at all.

  He realized he’d been driving along for the past few hours without checking his phone, so he lifted it from the center console and looked at it.

  His RedPhone app showed four missed connections. He’d also received a text.

  Driving along at seventy miles an hour, he opened the text.

  Crucial that I reach you. Call me, no matter the time. —Cathy

  The text and the calls that preceded it had been received about an hour earlier, and it was now nine p.m., and this disappointed Court greatly. Not because he’d missed the calls, but rather because, due to the seven-hour time difference between the East Coast and Israel, the calls and text had begun around four a.m. in Tel Aviv. Court doubted Catherine would be calling him in the middle of the night her time, which meant she probably had not gone to Israel, after all.

  He assumed she was still in D.C.

  Still, he punched his code into the RedPhone app, then he typed in her number.

  The phone rang twenty times before he gave up and disconnected the call.

  He listened to the last few bars of Tom Petty’s “Rebels,” and then he turned off on Highway 64, heading east.

  Court stopped at a twenty-four-hour Walmart in Rocky Mount, and he bought everything he needed to conduct the operation he had planned for this evening, but he also bought a lot of things he didn’t need, so as better to obfuscate his plan. It wasn’t as if he thought the cashier was going to turn him in to the CIA thinking he was about to perform a solo frogman raid on a secure military and intelligence installation, but Court knew there was a possibility the cameras in the store would pick up a usable image of his face, and if this happened, he wanted to minimize any chance Agency analysts would be able to determine just how, in fact, he planned on going about his operation.

  He hoped the camera feeds this far away from the District weren’t being pulled into the dragnet for evaluation by the NSA’s facial recog computers. If they were, he had to just pray no one would expect him to go to Harvey Point, or if they did, that they didn’t expect him to get the materiel necessary for such a high-risk clandestine operation at a twenty-four-hour Walmart.

  After he loaded up his purchases he drove east for most of an hour, until he could see water on both sides of the road. He made a left on Osprey Drive and took it till the road ended, and here he turned south onto an unmarked road. Of course he would be significantly stealthier if he went lights out on this drive, but Court understood enough about his opposition on this mission to know that it didn’t really matter. The entire guard force at the Point operated with night observation devices, so they would see him anyway, and if they saw a truck rolling down the road with its lights extinguished, t
hey would presume the occupant of that truck was up to no good.

  Court knew it would be much better if he just operated like he belonged right where he was.

  He stopped when he ran out of asphalt; right in front of him he saw water. He stood on Drummond Point, still a few miles to the southwest of Harvey Point, which lay on the opposite shore of the Yeopim River.

  Court climbed out of the Bronco, ran around to the back, and opened the swing-out tailgate. He retrieved his newly purchased gear, then he changed clothes, going head-to-toe in dark brown, with a black watch cap on his head. He then donned a black rain suit, covering his body in lightweight waterproof lining. He cinched short lengths of bungee cord around his waist, his ankles, and his wrists, to further waterproof his outfit, and he used black silicone waterproof tape down the middle of the rain jacket to seal it more, even wrapping a long strip around his neck.

  Court had no scuba gear, nor did he have a boat, but he had spent literally hundreds of hours in the waters of the Albemarle Sound, an estuary that led to the Atlantic, and the Yeopim River, which flowed into the sound. And he knew how the currents moved here. All he would need to do to get where he was going was to stay relatively buoyant and to float out into the river, let the water take him east, and then work his way across to the other shore.

  The rain suit wouldn’t remain perfectly watertight, but the air pockets created by it would increase his buoyancy markedly.

  He only needed to float past the security fence that cut Harvey Point off from the mainland, avoid the Coast Guard and base security patrol boats, and make his way to land. From there it would be a long walk through cypress swamp woods to the road that led to the CIA’s Special Activities Division Autonomous Asset facility.

  Court loaded his suppressed pistol into a small waterproof backpack, along with his cash, wallet, phone, a flashlight, and other small odds and ends. After he sealed the bag up, he slung it around on his chest, and then he walked down to the water’s edge at the tip of Drummond Point. Looking at his watch, he saw it was eleven p.m.