“I did it to help protect you,” Huff replied. “If Driscoll’s out there, she saw me arrive. It’s important she knows I’m here.”
“Why is that?” Edward Langton asked.
“Because she knows me and I know her. I know how she thinks. Right now, she’ll be dumping her original plan because she knows I have it covered. She’ll be forced to come up with something more daring, and that comes with higher risk.”
Langton jumped out of his seat. “I don’t want her to have second thoughts. I want her to think I’m an easy target so that she waltzes in here and gets her ass blown to hell!”
Huff remained calm in the face of the outburst. “That was never going to happen,” he said. “Let me guess, you beefed up security in the last twenty-four hours.”
“I did,” Langton replied, “but it was done discreetly. We just had another forty men arrive in the last couple of hours.”
“You brought men in while she was watching?”
“Obviously, they were hidden.”
“Hidden how? Under a blanket?”
Langton stiffened. “Remember who you’re talking to.”
“With respect,” Huff said, “when she puts a gun to your head and pulls the trigger, the bullet will have the same effect as it would on a street urchin in Mumbai. You’re powerful, but not immortal. Don’t forget that.”
Langton took out his phone and scrolled through the contacts. “I told Sanders this was a bad idea. I should have refused his offer.”
“You can get rid of me if you want.” Huff shrugged. “But if you do, I’ll give you a week alive at the most. You need me more than you’ll ever know.”
Langton looked up from his phone. “I’ll have over a hundred men here soon. I don’t need you at all.”
Huff raised his hands in mock surrender. “Hey, you want me gone, I’m gone. If you change your mind, I’ll be at the Four Seasons in town until nine tomorrow morning.” He turned and took a few steps toward the door, then stopped and turned back. “When did you say the reinforcements arrived?”
“A couple of hours ago, if it’s any of your business.”
“Two hours? Then she’s already gone. Send a couple of men to check out the hills out front. Exit the house, at their one o’clock. She was probably between a mile and two miles away. When they report back in, you know where to find me.”
Huff walked back to his car unescorted. As he drove past the front of the house, he looked once more at the hills in the distance. Driscoll would be gone, but where to? Hitting the house was pointless now, so she’d look to get to Langton in some other way.
He performed a mental calculation: Langton’s men would need two hours to find traces of Driscoll, then add another hour for the spoiled asshole to swallow his pride. That meant Huff had three hours to scope out the only road leading to the house, plus possibly grab a bite to eat, before one of the richest men on the planet began begging him to come back.
CHAPTER 37
Carl Huff woke to the familiar smells of body odor, nocturnal farts, and gun oil. Gray Rock boasted numerous bedrooms, but none had been allocated to the men guarding Edward Langton. Instead, the second-floor hallways in the east and south wings had been turned into vast dormitories, with seventy-five men sleeping in each at any given time.
Langton’s personal army had grown to three hundred in the three days since Huff had arrived. Thankfully, a hundred of these were now camped out in the surrounding woods, rotating every twelve hours. Huff dreaded to think what the sleeping conditions would be like if they were all still stationed in the house. As it was, he’d set up a perimeter a shade over half a mile from the house in all directions, with the men located sixty yards apart. Each one reported in every twenty minutes and any delayed acknowledgments would result in a rapid response team heading to their location to investigate. So far, everyone had reported in on time.
Huff stood, stretched, then went to the toilet he shared with the rest of the south wing crew. He’d had the foresight to bring along a few changes of clothes, so he freshened up before going to see the client.
Edward Langton’s foul mood had not improved since Huff’s arrival. His latest grievance was his wife’s decision to take her leave until the crisis was over. While she was sunning herself in the Caribbean, Edward was stuck at home waiting for a highly skilled assassin to strike. Their two children had been due to return from their Swiss boarding school a few days earlier, but they had joined their mother instead.
“How long am I going to remain a prisoner in my own home?”
“Preparations to draw her out are almost complete,” Huff assured him. “In the meantime, the security measures I put in place are keeping you safe.”
“I may be safe, but I have work to do, and most of the conversations I need to have are too sensitive to discuss over the phone or via video calls.”
“I appreciate that. If all goes well, you should be able to go about your business tomorrow.”
“Well, what about a helicopter?” Langton asked. “If you’re right that she wants me alive, she’s hardly likely to blow me out of the sky.”
“No, you need to stick to your normal habits and take the limo. We need to make her think she has an opportunity to get to you.”
“That’s the part I’m not comfortable with,” Langton said. “What if she actually does get to me?”
“She won’t.”
The new limo Huff had selected was so heavily armored, Eva would need a tank just to scratch the paintwork. Plus, her ambush points were severely limited. She wouldn’t try to attack on the freeway or in D.C., so her only option would be to strike on the road between Gray Rock and I-66, a distance of just over two miles. A small section of it passed through a wooded area, but the rest was open road with nowhere to hide.
“Are you sure she’ll strike as we drive through the woods?”
“I’m counting on it. The replacement limo will be here first thing in the morning, and the choppers with the rapid response teams are set to go. They’ll be in the air, holding position two miles away. The moment she attacks, we’ll call them in. Flight time is about thirty seconds.”
“That sounds like a long time to be under fire.” Langton was clearly unhappy with the arrangement, and Huff noticed the slight hint of fear in his voice.
“It will seem a lot at the time, I’m not going to lie to you. However, the new limo is state of the art. It can withstand multiple RPG hits, and the glass in the windows can take over a thousand rounds of automatic fire from a range of six feet. Driscoll and her friends won’t fire half that before the cavalry arrives to mop up.”
Langton still looked skeptical, and Huff thought it ironic that a man who was responsible for the deaths of millions of people in the wars he’d helped create should now be worried about his own well-being. Langton had lived an insulated life, never knowing hunger or fear, and he wasn’t coping well, faced with the prospect of being in the crosshairs. He was still barking orders as if his biggest concern was deciding which thousand-dollar bottle of wine to have with his lunch, but Huff could see past the facade. Langton was scared, and because it was Driscoll gunning for him, he had every right to be.
“I’m in no particular hurry to die,” Huff said, “so if I were the slightest bit uncertain, I wouldn’t ride along with you. If she does attack—and I’m sure she will—we’ll be sitting comfortably in the limo, drinking expensive champagne, while she spends the last minute of her life wasting ammo.”
His words seemed to hit the mark. Langton’s posture relaxed a little, and he took a seat before waving a hand to indicate that the meeting was over.
Huff took his leave, walking to one of three kitchens in the house. This one had been assigned to the security personnel, and breakfast was well underway. A dozen men were sitting at a huge dining table, tucking into bacon, eggs, hash browns, and pancakes. Huff decided to forgo the saturated fat and loaded a bowl with granola and banana.
He stood by the window and ate, trying to
put himself in Driscoll’s shoes. Despite what he’d told Langton, there was no way she would attack at such an obvious ambush point. A desperate amateur might, but not Eva Driscoll.
Having taken on the role of Langton’s head of security three days earlier, Huff had told his principal only what he needed to know. He’d kept certain arrangements to himself, such as the spotters that would be stationed near the on-ramp for I-66. If any suspicious vehicles were waiting to tail the limo once it got on the freeway, Huff would know.
The original plan—to draw Driscoll out—hadn’t changed, but he planned to go about it a different way.
CHAPTER 38
Eva stared out the window of the two-bed apartment and willed Edward Langton to make his move. She’d booked the place on Airbnb with a prepaid credit card supplied by DeBron. Given the alerts that the authorities would have sent to all major hotel chains, booking via Airbnb made for a much safer option.
Farooq was cleaning the breakfast dishes while Colback had his eyes glued to the laptop screen. The ex-soldier hadn’t shaved since the day he’d been jumped in New York, and his new beard helped disguise his features.
It had been four days since they’d abandoned the observation post overlooking Gray Rock, and the waiting had begun to grate on her nerves. The only time Eva had been out of the apartment had been two days earlier with Len Smart, shopping for a few select items. One was a motion sensor and the other was a discreet video camera. Eva had taken them to the woods a mile from Gray Rock that night, placing the motion sensor by the side of the only road leading into and out of Langton’s estate, and the camera three hundred yards back.
Over the next couple of days, there’d been a few alerts from the sensor, but when they’d checked the live camera feed, none had been Edward Langton leaving his mansion.
Eva took out her phone, one of a handful Smart had picked up on another shopping expedition. It was an unregistered, prepaid cell, and as with the others, she’d installed WhatsApp and set up fake accounts. As long as they chatted between themselves in code, it would be impossible to link back to them.
She banged out a quick message:
HOW’S SALLY? [STATUS REPORT.]
The reply was almost instantaneous:
SAME OLD, SAME OLD. [SITUATION NORMAL.]
Any other reply would signal that Smart was compromised, and Eva would abandon him to his own fate. Both had accepted this arrangement up front and, to their credit, done so without complaint.
Eva fired off a similar message to Sonny, who also reported back in the affirmative. He was the lucky one, sitting in a hotel room overlooking the road where 522, the road leading from Gray Rock, crossed I-66, the freeway that Edward Langton would have to take to get to D.C.
Smart, on the other hand, had drawn the short straw today. He was sitting in a newly purchased, well-used Toyota Camry in the parking lot of a mall twelve miles closer to the capital and near an on-ramp for I-66.
“Maybe he’ll never leave his house again,” Colback said, sitting back in his chair and stretching.
“He will,” Eva replied, without turning around. “People like Edward Langton are all about power. He’ll want to demonstrate his control of the situation sooner rather than later. The fact that we haven’t tried to get to him will just add to his confidence.”
“Well, he’d better make a move soon. Otherwise I’m likely to die of boredom before he shows his face.”
Twenty minutes later, Colback got his wish. The app on Eva’s phone beeped twice to indicate a hit on the motion sensor, and she rushed to the laptop to see which vehicle had triggered it.
The vehicle looked familiar.
“If I never see another black Jeep Cherokee with tinted windows—”
The app beeped twice more, then again as two other vehicles passed the sensor. They waited for them to come into view, and it wasn’t long before they saw the stretch limo that had arrived on a flatbed that morning, followed by another Jeep. The windows on all three vehicles were tinted black, but it seemed clear who rode in the middle car.
Eva opened WhatsApp and composed a quick message for Sonny:
SENT YOU AN EMAIL. CONFIRM RECEIPT. [HE’S ON HIS WAY. CONFIRM WHEN HE JOINS I-66.]
“It’s now or never,” Huff said as the limo reached the stretch of road where a thick belt of trees lined the asphalt. He glanced over and saw Edward Langton tense up, his jaw taut.
“Alpha One, Alpha Two, report status.”
Both chopper pilots declared themselves airborne and ready to rock and roll.
Huff checked his seatbelt once more and turned to comfort his nervous client. “If she’s got any sense, she’ll have given up and taken a boat to China by now.”
Langton ignored the comment, edging slightly away from his door as the first of the trees flashed past.
Huff stared out the window as they reached the densest part of the woods. They were traveling at sixty miles an hour, which meant they’d be out of the gauntlet in another fifteen seconds.
The trees began to thin out, eventually giving way to a vast sea of green.
“I told you,” Huff said, watching Langton let out a breath he’d been holding for the last half-minute. “She knows she can’t get to you, so she’s given up.”
“I still want the men at the house until further notice,” Langton said.
“Of course.” The cost of the security operation ran to almost half a million dollars a day, but that was nothing to a man who earned as much by the minute.
Huff radioed the helicopters and told them to stand down, then informed the spotter near I-66 to keep an eye out.
The limousine arrived a minute later, halted by a red stop light, then took the turn that led onto the freeway. Two minutes later, the lookout reported that no suspicious vehicles had begun to tail them.
Huff hadn’t really expected Eva to make such a foolish move, but he had to demonstrate to Langton that he was doing his utmost to keep the man alive. He took a bottle of water from the cooler and broke the seal, then settled back for the journey to D.C.
Len Smart picked up the cell and tapped the WhatsApp notification at the top of the screen.
SENT YOU A PACKAGE. SHOULD BE WITH YOU SHORTLY. TRACKING CODE T11 3CE. [Langton’s heading your way. License plate T11 3CE.]
Smart knew he had about ten minutes from the moment he received Sonny’s message. He finished the coffee he’d been nursing, then got out of the car and took the empty cup to a trash can, glad to stretch his legs. He got back in the Camry and drove out of the parking lot, following the signs for I-66 East. He joined the freeway a minute later and settled into the slow lane.
The plan was simple: let the limo containing Langton cruise by, then tuck in behind and see where it went. Their overall objective, Eva had explained, was to discover the identities of the other members of the ESO. She’d originally wanted to get that information from Edward Langton, but as he’d surrounded himself with a small army, they’d have to do it another way.
Smart had asked whether the ESO conducted any of their meetings electronically but, according to Eva, the group’s discussions were so sensitive that anything besides face-to-face communication posed too great a security risk.
Eva’s new goal was to identify the group’s meeting place and see who attended.
Smart gradually let his speed decrease, spending the next fifteen minutes ignoring the flashing headlights and blaring horns behind him. When Langton’s three-car convoy appeared in his side mirror, he increased his speed from forty-five to fifty-five, still slower than the vehicles in the middle lane, but fast enough to stop drawing attention to himself. As the SUVs and limo passed in the fast lane, he compared the plate with the code Sonny had sent.
Bingo!
Smart pulled into the middle lane, his car one of hundreds in the nondescript, metal stream flowing toward the capital. He waited until the rear SUV got two hundred yards ahead, then eased into the fast lane. That left seven cars between the target and him, but the tal
l profile of the second SUV was easy to spot.
Twenty minutes later, they crossed the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, then drove past the White House before taking a left. Smart was only four cars behind them at this point, but he saw nothing to suggest they’d picked up his tail.
A few blocks farther on, the three black cars turned onto M St. NW. Smart had his phone on his lap as he made the turn, and he saw the limo and its escorts pull up outside a brick building that looked out of place among the modern structures that surrounded it. He clicked Record on the camera, then held the phone to his ear as he slowly drove past the entrance. Two people had exited the limousine and were heading to the door that was being held open by a liveried doorman.
One of them was Edward Langton. Smart recognized him from the picture Eva had shown him. The other man’s identity would have to be determined later, once they had a chance to study the footage.
His task completed, Smart turned at the next corner. He pulled over and composed a cryptic message to Eva, then tapped the address of the hotel he shared with Sonny into the vehicle’s satnav system.
Apart from the skirmish on his first day in-country, the mission had been a lot less exciting than he’d anticipated. Not that he was complaining. Three grand a day for surveillance work was easy money, and now that they’d identified one of Edward Langton’s haunts, it looked as if he could expect more of the same. Smart was under no illusion though: at some point the action would come thick and fast. Once they’d identified the members of the ESO, Eva would have Sonny and him doing a lot more than conducting surveillance.
As yet, she hadn’t shared her endgame with the rest of the team, as was her prerogative. The decisions she’d made so far had been sound, so Smart didn’t expect she’d be asking them to undertake a suicide mission.
He pulled into a gap in the traffic and followed the directions of the electronic voice, wondering how this was going to play out.
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