by Mark Greaney
The door behind Carmichael opened slightly and a young woman leaned in, obviously checking on the noise. “Sir?”
“Out,” he barked.
The woman disappeared.
Denny sat quietly for a moment. Ruth watched him carefully, trying to discern what he was thinking. She felt she could see a rekindling in his eyes of the excitement she had noticed before. Otherwise, she was about to be thrown out the door and deported back to Israel.
But his next words—“What do you want to know about him?”—told her she had won.
She softened her tone. She knew when to bludgeon, and she knew when to coax. Now was the time for the latter. “Everything you can give us would be greatly appreciated. Obviously there will be sources and methods you will want to protect, even from your friends, and I can understand that. But I’m not Menachem; I don’t care about any big picture in our relationship. All I am concerned with, in any way, is finding this man and stopping him in any way I can.”
Carmichael did not respond immediately, so she pressed gently. “For example, before Court Gentry became a hit man, what did he do for you?”
“He was a dynamic operations specialist.”
She wrote on her pad and spoke aloud. “He was a hit man, then.”
“I did not say that.”
Ruth nodded, but she did not strike through her note.
Carmichael asked, “What does your service know about him already?”
“Mossad’s dossier on Court Gentry’s time with the CIA is thin. We don’t make it a point of compiling a large amount of information about operatives at allied agencies; our enemies keep us busy enough.”
Denny raised his eyebrows, giving off the message that he did not believe that for a second. The Mossad was legendary for spying on their friends as well as their enemies. Ruth knew what she was saying was not true, but she also knew she had to say it. Moreover, she knew Carmichael would know it was a lie, but she also knew he would let the comment go.
Such was the nature of relationships between friendly intelligence agencies.
She continued, “We don’t have too much more on his days post-CIA, but from what we know, his assassinations have seemed to follow some sort of a moral code. He has killed for money, repeatedly, but all his targets have been personalities with large amounts of blood on their hands. When discounting all the Gray Man killings that are nothing more than rumor, we have never seen him target anyone like our prime minister in his past.”
She summed up her dilemma. “We understand why the Iranians want Kalb dead, but we do not understand why the Gray Man wants Kalb dead.”
Carmichael sipped water from his bottle. “He’s a snake.”
Ruth cocked her head. “Kalb, or Gentry?”
“Gentry. Court Gentry has built up a reputation for two things. First, that he is the best black operator in the world. That reputation is, quite possibly, valid. His performance evals in the field were stellar. But the second part of his reputation is a complete and utter fantasy. That he is some sort of Robin Hood with a sniper rifle. A virtuous paladin.”
“Not true?” Ruth asked with a tone of genuine surprise.
“Forgive my language, but that is bullshit. Since he left CIA he has been a cold-blooded killer. Nothing more.”
“Perhaps our intelligence is faulty. It is our understanding he is an assassin with a conscience. We know he has turned down many contracts, lucrative contracts, because of the nature of the target’s history. There seems to exist some moral code involved, even if it is hard for us to discern.”
Carmichael responded tersely. “Gentry has killed colleagues of mine, Ms. Ettinger. Men with families, futures. I will begin to take it very personally if you continue to talk about how he is one of the good guys.”
“Of course I am not saying he is a good guy. I am only trying to understand how his sense of morality would be satisfied by killing Ehud Kalb. This information is very much pertinent to hunting him—”
Ruth stopped speaking. She understood. There was something personal going on here that she had not detected until now. “You knew him. You actually knew him personally.”
He waved his hand in the air and sat back. “Not well. There are a lot of guys like him. Not like him in the sense . . . you know what I mean. A lot of tip-of-the-spear operations personnel. So, no, I did not know him well. But yes . . . I did know him.”
Ruth wrote something down. “Well then. You may be the best person to ask. The legend of him is quite remarkable. They say he could pass you on the street and you would not notice him.”
Now Denny smiled thinly. “Ms. Ettinger. He could pass you in your kitchen and you would not notice him.”
She stopped writing. Looked up. “He’s that good?”
He smiled. “Find him and you can see for yourself.”
Ruth smiled back now. “If you let me see his file, I will do just that.”
Denny drummed his fingers on the polished table for a moment. “There is a man I want you to meet.”
“Director Carmichael, unless this man is Courtland Gentry, I am already talking to the most important person in the equation.”
“That’s not exactly true.”
Ettinger cocked her head.
Denny said, “I’m talking about the director of the operation against Gentry.”
“Very well. Is he available?”
“If I tell him he is available, then he is available.”
She smiled. Fighting the urge to stand up. “Is he here at Liberty Crossing or over at Langley?”
“Neither.”
“He is posted to a foreign station?”
“He’s not with the agency.”
Now Ruth Ettinger was utterly confused. Denny saw this and said, “We have found it prudent to bring in private sector assistance to help us with the Court Gentry situation.”
“You’ve outsourced the hunt for your number one target?”
Denny nodded, picking lint off the collar of his suit. “Townsend Government Services.”
“I’ve never heard of them.”
“And I hope, when this is all over, you will forget that you ever did. They are based here in D.C. I can get you a meeting immediately with director Leland Babbitt.”
Ruth was still having trouble understanding. “A private company of manhunters?”
Now the American smiled. “That’s pulp fiction dramatics, Ms. Ettinger. The real world is rather more boring. Townsend is staffed with ex-military and intel folks, all cleared and vetted, all perfectly capable. They’ll get him, soon enough, but I will have them read you in on status of the investigation, and I will let Babbitt know that you will be joining his hunt.”
“That would be ideal, Director Carmichael. I’d like to meet this Mr. Babbitt this morning, if possible.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Back when he stood in front of the Quds Force operative who passed him the assassination target in the south Beirut hotel room, Whitlock had appeared relaxed and indifferent as to his target’s identity. But as soon as he returned to Rafic Hariri Airport he’d locked himself in a bathroom stall and ripped open the sealed folder, already counting down the hours remaining and hoping like hell he had some previous knowledge of the man he was being sent to kill.
Within seconds he saw the name of his target and his place of residence. The name was familiar to him, but he could not place it, and he didn’t take the time to investigate immediately. Instead, he looked at the location of the target, then rushed out of the bathroom and to the counter, where he bought a first-class one-way ticket to France. Within ninety minutes he was airborne on his way to Charles de Gaulle in Paris, and three hours after this he boarded his connecting flight to the Nice Côte d’Azur airport. He arrived at his final destination before ten P.M., less than eight hours after being handed the name of the man the Iranians wanted him to kill.
The name handed over by Quds was that of an Iranian-born French citizen, Amir Zarini. He was a fifty-six-year-old filmmaker who, if
the Iranians were to be believed, had blasphemed the prophet and insulted the Iranian government repeatedly during his high-profile career.
During the two flights from Beirut to Nice he researched his target on his laptop. Sitting in the first-class cabin Russ researched the man’s history, known associates, and living arrangements via open-source web searches. Zarini had made a number of successful feature films in France about the plight of women and Christians under oppressive Islamic regimes. He’d been nominated for two Palmes d’Or, but clearly not everyone saw the art in his work. Virtually every nation besmirched by the films had made threats against Zarini, and the director was well aware he was a target of the Iranians as well as other Muslim fanatics around the world.
Russ didn’t make it to many movies at all, much less mopey foreign films about women’s rights in the Middle East. He considered watching one of the movies on his computer to get a better picture of his target, then tabled the idea; he didn’t have time to spare, and he couldn’t really care less about the subject matter.
He found an article about Zarini on the online version of Le Monde, and Whitlock put his command of French to good use to read it. The piece went into helpful detail about the director’s living situation, even showing the interior of his seaside mansion. There was a mention in the article about two attempts on Zarini’s life, and this jogged Russ’s memory. He’d seen the news of an attack on a home in Nice a few months earlier, and he assumed that was where he’d first heard the name Amir Zarini.
Russ made a mental note to research the attempts on Zarini’s life further, in order to find out what not to do.
Whitlock knew Nice well; he’d spent years of his life across the Mediterranean in North Africa and the Middle East, and this made the city a particularly attractive R & R getaway for him. As a man accustomed to the danger and intrigue of the Arab world, he’d enjoyed escaping the dust and strife and sobriety of his work there, exchanging it for the casinos and nightlife and beaches of the French Riviera. More than once Russ had left behind a spartan safe house in Alexandria or Beirut or Damascus, from where he had just spent a month or more tracking an al Qaeda operative or holding surveillance on a Muslim Brotherhood terrorist, and checked into a deluxe room at the Palais de la Mediterranee. He figured since America owed him far more than what it could ever repay him for the work he did on its behalf, he might as well enjoy himself on America’s dime in his downtime.
Russ had a long list of favorite haunts here, but now he was in town under double cover, playing the role of Court Gentry masquerading as a Canadian businessman. He had to forgo his regular five-star accommodations and make other arrangements. He took a suite at Le Grimaldi, just a few blocks from the water; ordered room service; popped an Adderall to stay awake; and worked on building his target folder of Amir Zarini.
Once Russ was firmly ensconced in his hotel room, he took a half hour to clean his painful and seeping gunshot wound. That task completed, he opened his computer back up and pulled up a secure Townsend Government Services network that gave him back-door access to a classified U.S. intelligence database. The information stored here was considered secret in nature, not the most sensitive intelligence known to the U.S. intelligence community, but certainly information he would not be able to find in open sources. He punched in Amir Zarini’s name and within seconds he was reading detailed French National Police records of both assassination attempts.
The first attempt on the director’s life, just under a year prior, had been executed by a group of Islamist civilians, and, it came as no surprise to Russ, it failed miserably.
Zarini was in Nice, speaking at a film symposium at the Museum of Modern Art. He had just taken the stage when three young French nationals with Moroccan backgrounds rushed onto the stage, screaming and brandishing knives. Zarini himself knocked one of his attackers to the floor, suffering a gash on his wrist in the process. The young French Arab was then tackled and disarmed by spectators who charged up from the front row.
A second would-be assassin was waylaid by a security officer employed by the museum and knocked unconscious before he made it to within ten feet of Zarini.
The third member of the group of hapless attackers, a female, carried in her hands not only a fixed-blade knife but also a large banner she apparently had planned to unfurl on the stage after the assassination. Her plan went awry when the banner became caught on a railing in the crowd as she ran forward, and she accidentally unfurled it, then tripped, her knife skittering across the floor and out of reach as she was brought down by the unarmed low-risk security officers hired for the event.
Russ laughed aloud at the dim-witted attack, but he did not laugh long. The CIA reported that Zarini’s personal security was doubled as a result of the event, and the filmmaker severely curtailed his public appearances afterward.
The second attempt on Zarini’s life had been as professional as the first had been amateurish. Russ read pages of material, studied diagrams, pored through witness testimony, and viewed autopsy reports of an event that took place just a few months earlier.
The perpetrators of this assassination attempt were a force of five military-aged males. From the data on the Townsend Network, Russ learned that the CIA suspected them to be members of the Quds Force, though they held Syrian and Lebanese passports.
Russ marveled at their plan’s audacity. Late on a warm July evening the men hit the beach behind Zarini’s walled property in a rubber landing craft, climbed a gate, and continued up the rocky beach, spreading themselves wide. One of Zarini’s guard dogs was alerted to their presence and started barking. A security man on a second-floor balcony waved his flashlight over the rear of the property and immediately died in a hailstorm of bullets from three AK-74 rifles.
The Quds Force officers breached the villa, killed four security men and both guard dogs, and made their way to the director’s bedroom, only to find that their target had escaped into an adjacent panic room moments before.
Russ read it again.
Panic room.
Damn. His hopes for a nighttime infiltration were dashed in an instant. Whitlock felt he could breach the property. In fact, he was certain of it. But could he make his way to Zarini, past guards, guns, and gates, past dogs and motion lights, completely undetected? Russ assumed Zarini would need no more than a few seconds to get inside a panic room, and that complicated any attack on the home exponentially.
As it had complicated the attack for the Quds officers. When the Iranians realized they had failed in their objective, all five killed themselves as a French police tactical unit entered Zarini’s home. The Iranian director and his family escaped the attack without so much as a scratch.
The main takeaway from the two attacks was clear. This was going to be a tough op. Zarini made few public appearances, and he held all the advantages in his home.
So Russ had to take him on the move.
From his suite at Le Grimaldi, Russ next used the network to find the name of the private security company with the contract to protect Amir Zarini. At the opening of the business day the next morning he contacted Sécurité Exclusive de Paris directly and spoke with a company representative in Paris. He struck up a friendly conversation with the woman, using one of his Townsend Services identities and dropping the real names of real men in the security industry in the United States and France, ex-soldiers and spooks Russ knew from his years as a NOC. Though Russ remained cagey about the specific nature of the relationships, he said enough to convince the representative he was legit, and he told her he was looking for work. She politely passed him on for an immediate phone interview with a Sécurité Exclusive executive.
He spent an hour on the phone with the company’s personnel director in Paris, at first inquiring about employment, but within minutes the two men were deep in conversation about the equipment, training, and tactics used in the security field. Russ made the personnel director feel that he was the one benefiting from the conversation; Russ knew so much “inside base
ball” information about the high-risk security field that the personnel director found himself asking for information about hot spots where the company might solicit work in the near future.
Ultimately the executive and Russ mutually decided the American was overqualified for the positions available at the moment, but since Russ happened to be in Nice, the exec gave Russ the names and numbers of a couple of company men working in the area.
By late afternoon Russ Whitlock sat with a Sécurité Exclusive contractor enjoying a beer at Le Pirate, a restaurant-bar in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, just a few kilometers up the coast from Zarini’s multimillion-dollar mansion. The man was not on the Zarini detail himself, but he worked for another wealthy client in the same neighborhood. Soon enough the conversation turned comfortably to the attack on the director’s home several months earlier. Russ was pleased to learn that his new drinking buddy had all the intimate details of the operation, as one of his close friends had died in the attack.
He was also friends with a few men on the current detail, and he told Russ that while Zarini did not make many public appearances, he made a weekly trip to a friend’s villa twenty minutes away, just over the border in Monaco. The contractor revealed that the Zarini detail felt the outing was a dangerous habit, and they had warned their client of their fears, but the Iranian had dismissed them by saying the event was the one time each week when they actually had to work for their money.
Russ told his own lengthy made-up story about his issues dealing with a rich asshole client in Hong Kong and the man’s penchant for routines that made for clear security violations.
The Frenchman ordered another round of drinks and began recanting war stories about his own jackass protectee, but soon enough the conversation returned to Amir Zarini and every Saturday morning at noon, when he and his detail poured into two vehicles and headed up the coast for the twenty-minute drive into Monaco.
Within minutes Whitlock had everything he needed. He learned there were four men in Zarini’s mobile security detail; they were French, private contractors now but former members of RAID—Recherche Assistance Intervention Dissuasion, a tactical unit within the French National Police service. They were armed with HK UMP-9s, submachine guns that they kept folded and stored in the vehicles, and CZ pistols chambered in the potent .40-caliber Smith and Wesson.
