by Mark Greaney
Of course she knew Jumper would not find Gentry there, although her concerns remained that noncombatants could be killed or injured during the hit. Twice while the Americans were en route to the target location she spoke into the microphone on the table, reminding Beaumont and his team that they were likely to encounter central Europeans wary of police or government officials, and they might try to run or resist, even though they had no relationship with or knowledge of the target.
The first time she made the point, Beaumont responded with, “This ain’t exactly my first rodeo, lady,” which the Brooklyn-born Ettinger translated to mean he was aware of the potential for noncombatants in the line of fire.
The second time she reminded Beaumont and his men to keep their fingers off their triggers until they were certain they had the Gray Man in their sights, the big American responded tersely. “Lucas, I want that woman off my commo net!”
Lucas pulled the microphone away from Ruth.
And then Jumper Actual initiated the raid.
The American contractor’s radio headset communications came through the speakers on the table. Ruth heard shouting men, then screaming women and children and what sounded like breaking doors or furniture.
Jumper team was not subtle in their tactics, but, Ruth did have to admit, they were mercifully speedy. Within five minutes Beaumont barked angrily into his mic. “Negative contact! His room is empty. Looks like he cleared out.”
Ruth pulled the microphone back from Lucas. “Did you ask the manager what time he left?”
“He didn’t know. Either he slipped past your team or he was never here to begin with.”
Lucas said, “He was there.”
“He might have sneaked onto the roof,” suggested Ruth. “We only had coverage from distance. Not a perfect sight line.” She wondered if she’d overbaked her explanation, but she did not detect any suspicion from either those around her or the American team leader at the target location.
“Are we going to assume he’s left town?” Carl asked. “I mean, why just reposition in the city when you don’t know anyone has a fix on you?”
Jumper replied, “He’s probably flown the coop, but we’ll stay here and keep looking till Townsend House gets a hit on facial recog. They have everything covered for a couple hundred miles; he’s not going to go far.”
“Roger that.”
“Fishing boats,” Ruth said over the mic.
“What about them?”
“It’s his MO. He likes to hire fishing boats to take him out to freighters. He’s worked with the Russian mob to get passage on Russian-flagged haulers.”
After a short hesitation Beaumont said, “Yeah. She’s right. I guess we’ll run down to the docks and sniff around.”
She did not feel bad about sending Jumper off on the wrong scent. She hoped they searched the waterways all day long.
Ruth and her team finished packing; she told Carl and Lucas that they would be in touch, but for now the Mossad would do their own recon. She hated to lose the intel from the UAV; she wouldn’t have found the Gray Man in less than a day in Stockholm without the work of Lucas and Carl and their Sky Shark. But she knew if the drone got another ping on the target they would just recall Beaumont and his cowboys, and they would be right back on the verge of another catastrophe, and Ruth did not want to be involved in that.
She decided she and her team would do it the old-fashioned way. They would head to where she last saw him, and then they would branch out and search until they found him.
She did not tell her team she had lied about seeing him leave the building earlier. She knew they would back her, but there was no need for them to be implicated if Yanis Alvey found out the truth and recalled or even fired her for her insubordination.
THIRTY-FOUR
At ten A.M. local time on Saturday morning, Russ Whitlock climbed off the train at the town of Èze-sur-Mer, hefting a large pack onto his back as he did so. He left the tiny station and began trudging up a steep road that wound its way into and through the hamlet of Èze. Behind him as he walked, the blue waters of the Mediterranean reached to the horizon line; in the near distance dozens of small pleasure craft sat still in the morning sun, from Monaco to the east to Nice to the west and beyond.
Russell Whitlock only occasionally looked back over his shoulder toward the water and the roads below him. He wasn’t worried about being followed today; he was certain no one knew he was here. He also wasn’t terribly concerned about witnesses to what he was about to do. This was the low season in the south of France; there was very little foot traffic, even in the more touristy areas. He was, however, worried about cameras, and for this reason he avoided the cobblestoned main streets of Èze with their shops and hotels and restaurants, all of which would have some form of Internet-based or CCTV cameras for security purposes, and instead he worked his way around the backs of buildings, ever climbing, away from the sea and toward low scrub brush and rocky outcroppings on the hill to the west of the hamlet.
His hip hurt, of course; it nagged him with every step.
Whichever fucking Trestle operative had shot him—Russ had no idea who’d made the lucky shot—Russ knew the odds were seven in eight that the man was now dead, and he took great pleasure in that.
He neared his destination, still ascending through the trees and brush. He’d climbed the route the afternoon before, searching for just the right spot, and determining the manner in which he could avoid others while ingressing to and egressing from his sniper’s hideout.
Of course, broad-daylight work like this was not his first choice, but this was the only chance to hit his target. Yes, Amir Zarini would pass by on the same road this evening on his return from Monaco, and then it would be past nightfall, but Russ would not be able to identify his vehicle in the dark, not even with the Leupold scope.
If he was to hit Zarini within his promised five-day window, he had to do it this way, and he had to do it now.
He found his spot fifty minutes after leaving the train station, and he took his time to secret himself in the low green brush. He lay in the dirt, his backpack next to him, but he did not open it yet to retrieve the rifle. He had a few minutes to kill now, and the last thing he wanted was for some hippie French hikers to happen by his hide and see him with a long black gun.
He was certain he would be seen by someone before this was all through, probably over in the medieval hamlet of Èze just a hundred meters off to his left, but that was no problem, because what would they see? A white male in his thirties, with an athletic build, brown hair, and a brown beard?
That sounded a hell of a lot like another guy to Russ, a more famous guy. And that was, of course, by design.
He pictured the action to come, and, just as when he’d planned every other part of this operation, he thought about the Gray Man. He wanted to do everything just the way Gentry would do it, if he were the man here to kill Amir Zarini.
Russ knew what that entailed. He’d read every scrap the CIA had on Gentry, and they all led inexorably to one conclusion.
Gentry would do it right.
After all, Russ thought, if you read the reports about him, Gentry was smooth. Gentry was clean. Gentry was the best.
“Well, fuck Gentry,” Whitlock said aloud.
Russ could do smooth and clean as well as the Gray Man, and he knew it. He’d smoked the number two al Qaeda commander in Baghdad in 2008, and again he’d taken out his successor, this time in Peshawar, in 2011. Both times he’d slipped into a no-go zone undetected, used an M40 rifle with a suppressor—not this foreign-made Blaser bullshit that the Gray Man fancied—and he’d made it out clean.
Yeah, Russ could do it just like Gentry.
Better, in fact, and today he would have a chance to prove it to himself. Of course, no one else would know that the Zarini hit had been the work of Russell Whitlock, and that was by design, although
Russ regretted the fact. The intelligence community in the United States would chalk this op up to the Gray Man; they would scratch their heads a bit because the target would look odd compared to a normal Gray Man contract, but they would attribute it to Gentry nonetheless.
Today Russ would kill two birds with one stone. He would convince the Iranians that he was the Gray Man, and he would set the table for the world’s intelligence agencies. They would see soon enough that the Gray Man was working for the Iranians.
Yes, he had promised the Iranian Quds Force man that there would be no comebacks to Iran on either this hit with Zarini or the assassination of Ehud Kalb. He’d actually said it with a straight face.
But the truth was quite different. The truth was, once Whitlock got paid for this operation, he would make sure the world knew the Gray Man had killed the PM and the Gray Man worked for Iran.
And by then, poor Court Gentry would not be in a position to defend himself.
Whitlock looked down to his watch.
It was time.
He unzipped his backpack and began assembling the Blaser R93. He put the entire weapon together in less than ninety seconds. Not his fastest time, but he was in no rush. Once he’d snapped the four-round magazine into place, he loaded a fifth round into the chamber and closed the bolt.
He did not expect to need five bullets. Just one. But it was always good to be prepared.
He took up his position behind his weapon and looked through the scope. He scanned the road far below him, the Avenue Raymond Poincaré, and found a suitable location to fire upon. He checked his range to target and saw that the distance was 335 meters. He set the elevation on his scope. He gauged the wind and determined the values to be negligible for a shot of this distance.
Now he waited, but he did not have to wait for long. Just four minutes after placing his eye behind the Leupold optic and beginning his scan for the vehicles, two Mercedes G-Class SUVs appeared on the road as they passed the train station.
They were a perfect match.
There were three people in the lead Mercedes, two in the front seats and one in the back. Through the scope Russ had difficulty identifying the man in the rear of the vehicle, and when a glint of sun off the windscreen of the lead SUV caused Russ to shut his eye into his scope for a moment, he lost another few seconds to make his identification.
As the time neared to fire, he realized he could not positively identify Zarini in the front car. He swung his scope quickly to the rear vehicle, scanned through the windshield of the Mercedes, and saw two men in the front seat and two in the back. None of the four looked like his target; they all appeared to be bodyguards.
With his window of opportunity rapidly closing, Whitlock pushed the stock of the rifle up, pointing the muzzle down a fraction, and centered his optics back on the lead SUV. As the vehicle neared the point directly below his position, he no longer had visibility of the man in the backseat since he was sitting on the other side of the Mercedes.
He could only see the driver now, and in another few seconds he would lose him as he passed around a bend.
Shit, Russ thought. No way to do this clean.
He lined up his scope, took in a breath, blew it halfway out and held it.
He fired the Blaser.
One third of a second later, the driver’s-side window of the lead Mercedes shattered; the driver’s head slumped to the side, and the vehicle veered dramatically to the right. At speed the SUV scraped along a low retaining wall that ran alongside the road and, with a dead driver behind the steering wheel, it jacked back to the left, into the opposing lane.
The SUV slammed headfirst into an oncoming Volkswagen Cabriolet; an explosion of metal and glass and steam and spraying fluids erupted into the air, instantly killing Amir Zarini, the two other men in the Mercedes, and three college students inside the Volkswagen.
The rear Mercedes swerved almost sideways on the road to avoid the carnage in front of it, coming to a stop just twenty-five feet from the accident. All four occupants of the rear vehicle poured out; one of them ran to the wreckage, but the other three drew their P90 submachine guns and pointed them at the hillside, reacting to the sound of the sniper rifle.
Russ pulled the bolt back and chambered another round, and he scanned the wreckage below him, looking for any signs of life. Although the Mercedes now lay on its side along a short scatter path of wreckage, there had been no massive fireball or other event that told Whitlock, definitively, that the wreck was unsurvivable. After deciding he needed to be absolutely certain his target was dead—the Gray Man would not leave a scene with a wounded target behind him, after all—Russ fired on the Mercedes quickly. Four equidistant holes in the roof; each round would strike a different portion of the backseat and, Russ was certain now, would kill anyone left alive after the crash.
Russ also knew exactly what four more gunshots, all from the same portion of the hillside, would do to the four armed men below. All the private security officers began firing bursts from their P90s. Gunfire echoed off the hills all around Whitlock while he calmly ejected the magazine and replaced it with a fresh one. The high-pitched screams of rounds ricocheting off rock around him only encouraged him to work more quickly. He added one more bullet in the chamber to make five, and then he aimed at the first security man on the Avenue Raymond Poincaré below and shot him through the chest. The man fell back to the street; his suit coat whipped up crazily as his arms flailed, and his weapon skittered to the asphalt.
A second security officer sprayed rounds toward Whitlock’s hide. The P90 was out of range at 335 yards, which meant only that accurate and effective fire was difficult, not that a round from the gun could not strike Russ dead. But Russ fired his long-range rifle and sent a big bullet into the forehead of the security officer, dropping him dead next to his colleague on the seaside roadway.
By now the last two security men had seen the futility of their predicament, and both turned and ran, leaping for the low retaining wall that ran along the road. Russ tracked the movement of one man and fired once more, striking him with a shot to the low back.
The fourth executive protection officer made it to cover and, Russ felt sure, he would keep his head down for some time to come.
Just as Russ took his eye out of the scope to begin the quick takedown of the gun, he heard shouting to his left. He looked across the hillside and saw several locals as well as a uniformed police officer, a member of the local police municipale, standing there, at the edge of the hamlet of Èze. The cop had some sort of pistol in his hand, and he fired it at a distance of 125 yards. He missed; dirt and dust kicked up ten feet from where Russ lay, but he quickly spun his rifle toward the cop and aimed at the top of the man’s head to allow for the fact that he’d adjusted the scope for the 335-yard shot. Russ fired just as the municipale fired; the cop missed again, but Whitlock’s .300 Winchester magnum round nailed the man between the eyes.
Russ fired one last round at the crowd of idiots standing there watching, missing the civilians by inches, and then he quickly and calmly disassembled his weapon, stuffed it in his backpack, and began running up the hill, limping through the pain in his hip.
It took him less than three minutes to make it to the Moyenne Corniche, a winding hillside road almost empty of traffic. He’d parked his BMW at a scenic lookout, and he leapt into it, throwing the rifle bag into the passenger seat, and then he sped off in a cloud of white dust, minutes before local authorities could respond en masse.
Four hours later Russ Whitlock stood in front of a full-length mirror in a three-star hotel room in Genoa, Italy. He had showered, shaved off his beard, and cut his hair short and neat. He had rebandaged the wound on his hip and then dressed in an Armani suit he’d had waiting on him here in the room.
He admired his look in the mirror, and he felt the pride in today’s accomplishment wash over him. No, it had not gone according to plan; there had
been some collateral damage. Killing the cop had been unavoidable and very much necessary to achieve his objective, in Whitlock’s opinion, and the dead civilians in the car had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He did not blame himself for any of the deaths, though he remained objective enough to know that this assassination did not look exactly like a Gray Man assassination.
But still, he told himself, it would suffice for his purposes.
After straightening his tie once more in the mirror, he zipped closed his Italian leather roller bag and headed out the door.
He went downstairs and rolled his luggage out onto the street. A taxi driver motioned to him, but Russ waved him away. Instead, Russ took out his phone and walked up the sidewalk, away from the entrance to the hotel, so he could have some privacy.
He dialed a number using the MobileCrypt app and waited for an answer on the other end.
“Yes?” It was Ali Hussein, the Quds Force operative he’d met earlier in the week in Beirut. Whitlock recognized the voice.
“It’s me. It’s done.”
“I know. It is all over the television. We had hoped for more . . . discretion.”
“You are not implicated in what happened.”
“That is not what I mean. My organization is highly uneased by today’s events. We are impressed you succeeded in your mission, but the collateral damage makes us very concerned you are not the man you say you are.”
Whitlock squeezed the cell phone tightly as he tensed with anger. He said, “The tactical realities of the event resulted in unanticipated loss of life.”
“What does that mean?”
Angrily Russ said, “It means ‘shit happens.’”
After a delay, Hussein said, “This, what transpired today, does not look like the work of the Gray Man.”
Russ tried to calm himself before continuing, taking two long, silent breaths and telling himself everything was riding on his powers of persuasion. “I understand your concerns. I do. I am disappointed in some aspects of the operation. But I am who I say I am, and you only have to ask yourself who else could have executed this operation on such a tight timeline to see that I am telling the truth.”