Back Blast: A Gray Man Novel

by Mark Greaney

  He waded out until he felt the current, then he knelt down and began swimming along with the natural flow of the estuary, drifting him eastward, as the brackish water attempted to return to the sea, carrying along with it broken branches, trash, and a lone man with a vague mission to find out why his past was trying to kill him.

  —

  Suzanne Brewer left the exit of the Old Headquarters Building at eleven p.m., rushing through the south lot to her car.

  It had been a long day that was, ultimately, just the most recent in a string of long days, but a new lead had presented itself, and she decided to go check it out personally.

  She hadn’t planned on going alone, but she was having trouble getting in touch with Jordan Mayes. Carmichael was at his safe house in Alexandria, of course, and Brewer had just called looking for Mayes, but Carmichael said he wasn’t returning his calls to him, either, and a security team had been dispatched both to his house and to check the route from Alexandria to Langley.

  She arrived at her BMW and put her hand on the door latch, unlocking the doors because her Bluetooth key fob sent an unlocking code to the vehicle letting it know it was in the possession of the person at the driver’s door.

  “Suzanne?” She jumped when she heard her name called. She turned around to find Jordan Mayes walking towards her in the parking lot. He was alone, which was odd, because this was the first time she’d seen him without the security men since Violator had arrived in the States.

  Brewer said, “I’ve been calling you for the past hour. So has Denny.” His tie was loose and his eyes were wide and rimmed with red. Everyone in the Violator Working Group was utterly exhausted, but Suzanne got the impression Jordan Mayes was more than tired; it appeared as if he had been drinking. “What’s wrong?”

  He walked around to the passenger’s side of her BMW. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  Brewer looked around in confusion. “Where are we going?”

  “Nowhere specific. I need to talk to you.”

  “If it’s confidential, why can’t we just go back in the office?”

  Mayes just shook his head.

  After a moment Brewer understood he did not want to talk inside the building. She did not understand, but she climbed behind the wheel nevertheless.

  Mayes reached into his coat and pulled out a case just larger than a cell phone. Suzanne recognized it immediately. It was a Faraday cage, a protective case that blocked radio frequency waves. Placing a phone or other device that emitted radio signal inside would make the device untraceable. The CIA used Faraday cages for smartphones, primarily, which had difficult-to-remove batteries.

  He handed her the small case. “Put your phone in this.”

  “Come on. Really?”

  “Really.”

  She took the case, locked her phone inside, then placed the case in the storage compartment under the armrest between the front seats. Mayes questioned whether she had an iPad or other device with GPS enabled in the vehicle. She knew her BMW itself surely transmitted location info through its computer, but she didn’t mention this.

  With a hint of sarcasm she said, “We’re off the grid, Jordan. What’s up?”

  “Just drive.”

  No words were exchanged while they left the lot, because Suzanne’s focus was on evaluating Mayes’s condition, but as soon as the BMW began heading east on Dolley Madison Boulevard, she knew she needed to hear what he had to say, because she had other things to deal with. “I am heading into the District. One of Dakota’s men is sitting on a house where a possible sighting was called in. I was trying to find you because I wanted you to come along, anyway. What is it you need to tell me?”

  When he didn’t answer immediately, she looked at him. His head lolled a little to one side, then popped back up. Catherine was sure now that the number two man in the National Clandestine Service was drunk.

  Mayes spoke softly. “He’s using a foreign kill squad.”

  “What? Who is?”

  “Carmichael.”

  Suzanne Brewer did not speak for a moment. She realized she didn’t want to hear any more, but she also realized there was no way she could shut Mayes down. She asked, “What makes you think this?”

  Mayes’s head lolled over in her direction now, and he said, “Because he told me!”

  “Christ,” she whispered. “Who are they?”

  “They are Saudis. Working for Murquin al-Kazaz.” Now he looked up at Brewer with suspicion. “You knew! Did you know?”

  “Of course not. The JSOC team leader asked me who else was involved. He had some suspicions, so that made me wonder. But I knew better than to bring it up with Denny.” She shrugged. “Or you, for that matter.”

  Jordan Mayes shrugged. “Good for you. I didn’t know better. I confronted him when I saw the video.”

  “What video?”

  “Saudi gunmen in D.C. police uniforms at the Dupont Metro.”

  Suzanne knew nothing about such a recording. “Where is this video now?”

  “Morvay in SIGINT has it. He showed me. He took it off of Andy Shoal’s e-mail account.”

  Brewer’s stomach turned. She grabbed onto the wheel as hard as she could. She closed her eyes slowly for a moment while she drove, then she opened them again. “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?”

  “Andy Shoal was murdered two hours ago.”

  Jordan Mayes looked at her, then he dropped his head into his hands, doubling over in the seat. “He’ll kill me, too.”

  “Carmichael? Don’t be ridiculous. Odds are it was Violator who killed Shoal. He was out looking for more evidence in the assassinations.”

  “Bullshit. I doubt Gentry has killed anybody this week. Sure, Brandywine Street and the Easy Market, those were him. The rest were either Hightower or the Saudis.” He looked at Suzanne, terror in his eyes. “It’s all a big wall of fun-house mirrors, Suzanne. Denny is controlling it all, but it’s gotten too big for him to manage. He’ll have to kill me to protect himself now.”

  Suzanne still didn’t believe there was any chance Denny Carmichael would kill Jordan Mayes, and she told him so.

  “You don’t know everything I know, Suzanne.”

  “You just told me. Or have you forgotten?”

  “What I just told you barely scratches the surface of what’s been going on.”

  Suzanne Brewer slowed her BMW, and then she pulled into a convenience store right before the on-ramp onto the George Washington Parkway. Here she bought Mayes a large black coffee.

  Five minutes later the two of them sat parked under a streetlight in the parking lot at Fort Marcy Park, just off the parkway. There wasn’t a single other vehicle in sight.

  “I want you to tell me everything, Jordan.”

  “You aren’t cleared for everything.”

  “If you really feel Carmichael might come after you, does it scare you that you are the only one who knows?”

  This sank in a moment. Mayes took a gulp of molten coffee. “Okay. I’ll tell you. But then we go to Justice with this. I’m not going down on a sinking ship.”

  Suzanne said, “And neither am I. If what you tell me warrants it, you’re damn right we’re going to DOJ.”

  Mayes nodded, relaxed markedly, and said, “Do you know anything about Operation BACK BLAST?”

  Suzanne Brewer shook her head. “Never heard of it.”

  So Jordan Mayes told her.

  66

  Suzanne Brewer looked at her hands folded in her lap, and she realized they were shaking. Perspiration formed on her temples, and her mouth was dry.

  She and Mayes were still sitting in her BMW in Fort Marcy Park. Blustery rain pelted the side of her car now, and the light from the streetlamp above them was at times blotted out with the movement of the tree branches. Mayes had been talking for most of the pa
st hour, but not all of it had been productive. On the contrary, eighty percent of what Mayes said had been, as far as Brewer was concerned, the ramblings of an inebriated man who, for the first time in his life, felt free to let years of suspicion flow about his superior. He’d produced a flask filled with scotch, and it loosened his lips even more. He needed to talk, so she let him, but after she learned about Operation BACK BLAST and Denny’s involvement with the Saudis here in the U.S., she had stopped listening, and she had begun thinking about what she would do next.

  The information she possessed could certainly put Denny Carmichael in prison, and it could conceivably destroy CIA clandestine ops. But it was even bigger than that, as far as she was concerned. Once she got over the shock of it all, she realized this was a watershed moment in her career, in her life. The decision she made now, right this minute, would set the course for her future.

  Mayes looked her up and down through eyes at half mast. “Right now you are at the point I found myself in this afternoon. I’d asked for an answer, and when I got it, I really wished I didn’t know. Now we both know, so now we have to end this. I am friends with Juan Ferreria, the deputy director of the FBI, we can go to his place in Tysons right now, wake him up, and get the ball rolling with DOJ.”

  Suzanne hesitated. “I think we need to think carefully about our next move.”

  “What do you mean? We said we’d take this to Justice.”

  But Suzanne wasn’t thinking about justice, duty, or even right and wrong. She was thinking about leverage. In her meteoric career she would never have more power than she had at this moment. She didn’t want to dispel that power by telling the FBI what she knew.

  She didn’t want to destroy the CIA.

  She wanted to run the CIA.

  Suzanne started her car and pulled back out onto the George Washington Parkway, heading in the direction of Tysons Corner. There was some traffic out at midnight, but she was able to move along at the speed limit. She would play along with Jordan, just to buy some time, but she would spend the fifteen-minute-long drive trying to talk him out of revealing anything to the Department of Justice until they knew exactly what they were doing.

  She said, “You and I need to make sure we won’t get caught up in the fallout of all this.”

  “We are the ones going to the feds. I’m not worried about getting indicted. I’m worried about getting killed!”

  Suzanne said, “In light of this information, I agree Denny is compromised, and I agree he might become desperate. But I don’t think you have any reason to worry.”

  “Yeah?” Mayes said, clearly not buying what she was selling. “Why is that?”

  She pulled into the right lane. Her BMW hummed along at sixty miles an hour without any effort at all. On her left a motorcycle with a passenger riding behind the driver kept pace with her. It was an unusual sight in the heavy rain, but she was focused on the road ahead and on the man sitting to her right.

  She said, “Think about it, Jordan. You two have worked together forever. Say what you want about Denny Carmichael, but he’s a pragmatist. He knows he needs friends in that building right now, and you have shown yourself to be a faithful—”

  Suzanne Brewer noticed new movement on her left now, out her driver-side window. Through the rainfall she saw the motorcycle encroaching into her lane. At first she thought he’d just drifted over to the right accidentally, but it took less than a second for her to realize that the passenger’s arm was outstretched, towards her window.

  In his hand was a gun, pointed nearly at contact distance with the glass inches from her head.

  She only had time to tap her brake pedal, barely slowing the vehicle, before the flash of light assaulted her eyes and the pound of a gunshot rocked her eardrums. Her windshield exploded in her face, and to her right she heard the passenger-side window shatter.

  She felt the glass in her hair, blood at her hairline and on her left cheek. Somehow she kept her BMW on the road, so she stomped on the gas now, and the six-cylinder engine accelerated.

  She had the wherewithal to drop her right hand from the wheel and punch a button on the center console of the vehicle, shifting the BMW into Sport Mode. Her head slammed back into the headrest as the car launched forward, her suspension stiffened and improved markedly. Her luxury sedan was now a sports car, racing ahead and surprising the assassins on the motorcycle with its power.

  She centered her car on the white dashes on the road and weaved right between a pair of vehicles taking up the two lanes in front of her, and then she jacked back to the left, pulling in front of the motorcycle as it went left around the car in the left lane. The bike was forced to brake to avoid rear-ending her, but when she looked in her rearview she saw two more bikes race past the first. Both of them had riders on back as well, and she knew this was far from over.

  The sound of their engines came through the shattered window by her face, along with the cool rain.

  For the first time since the gunshot she looked over to Jordan Mayes. He hadn’t made a noise, so she expected to find him slumped over in his seat dead, but instead he just held his hand against the lower part of his face. Blood dripped through his fingers.

  “How bad is it?” she asked.

  “I . . . I don’t know.” He took his hand away. The bullet had cut across his chin; a flap of skin hung open and blood gushed. From the location of the wound Suzanne knew it wasn’t life-threatening, but it was certainly messy. Mayes leaned towards the rearview to get a look for himself, but when he looked in the mirror he shouted, “They are still coming!” He covered the wound again with his hand.

  Another pop from a pistol behind them, then the sound of tearing metal in the trunk of the 535i.

  “It’s Carmichael!” Mayes said.

  Suzanne Brewer knew he meant it was Carmichael’s Saudi Arabian proxy force, but she did not correct him. Obviously this was Carmichael’s doing. The Gray Man was capable of many things, but she had seen no intelligence claiming he also ran a team of motorcycle hit men.

  Another crack of gunfire. This round must have missed the car completely because she heard no impact. She shifted lanes again, then raced forward.

  Suzanne didn’t want to take her eyes off the road to check her navigation screen so she called to Mayes. “How far to the next turnoff?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “Well look, dammit!”

  Mayes did so, still holding his bleeding chin. He looked to the navigation map on the console display. “In about a mile we come to a T intersection. Jesus Christ! We’ll have to stop! They’ll kill us! Even if we make the turn without them overtaking us, we’ll be on the 495. There’s nowhere to go!”

  Suzanne Brewer put the pedal all the way to the floor, but she knew Mayes was right. She could not hold the motorcycles back in this traffic for that long.

  She squinted rainwater from her eyes as she weaved between two semis, pushing her speed to ninety miles an hour now, but soon she had to brake again to avoid rear-ending a van.

  Another crack of a pistol behind them. The nearest bike was less than twenty-five yards back and closing.

  Suzanne knew Jordan Mayes was right. There was no way she could outrun the six assassins on her tail. It was only a matter of seconds before she was either hit by gunfire or miscalculated and crashed her vehicle.

  The BMW shot under the Turkey Run Road overpass and began a half-mile-long curve to the left. On the right side was a long gradual drop-off that went down a hill covered in trees and shrubs.

  Suzanne looked at the drop-off, then in the rearview again. A plan formulated in her mind quickly, and she knew what she needed to do now. “Get Denny on the phone!”

  “What?”

  “Tell him to call it off.”

  “Are you insane? He won’t answer a call from me!”

  “I’ll talk to him. Get my phone.”
>
  He looked around the center console. “Where is it?”

  Another crack of gunfire, and the back window shattered high by the roofline. Brewer and Mayes both tucked their heads low.

  “In my purse in the backseat.”

  Mayes reached back, grabbed her purse, and dug through it. “It’s not here!”

  “Then it fell out back there! You have to find it! It’s our only chance!”

  Mayes reached back and felt around, but he couldn’t locate it. “Forget it!”

  “Hurry!” she screamed at him. Another pop from behind shattered her driver-side mirror. On her right an SUV slammed on its brakes as a two-door compact in the next lane veered in front of it, trying to get out of the way of the car chase overtaking it. “We have to do something! Get back there and find it!”

  Mayes unfastened his seat belt so he could look for the phone. As he turned around to reach between the seats he said, “This is crazy! Calling Denny isn’t going to work!”

  Suzanne Brewer looked to Mayes, saw him out of his seat and up on his left knee, his upper torso twisted and turned, leaning halfway into the back.

  She gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles went white. “Not for you, it won’t.”

  And with that Suzanne Brewer closed her eyes, jacked the wheel hard to the right, and sent her BMW across a lane of screeching traffic and off the road, crashing through a thicket of brush along the shoulder and then hurtling down the hill at nearly seventy miles an hour.

  67

  The 535i went airborne, careered nose-first down the decline, and then crashed into a copse of saplings, flipping it onto its right side. Brewer’s arms and head whipped in all directions, but Jordan Mayes, who was out of his seat, flew completely into the back of the sedan, his body hurtling from one side to the other like a rag doll as the BMW began tumbling. The air bags deployed like cannon fire, restraining Suzanne’s movement for a moment, but Mayes’s body slammed into the rear windshield, and then his head dropped straight to the left side of the car when it bounced hard once more, snapping his neck on impact.