by Mark Greaney
“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 baseball” 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.
Additionally, Zarini traveled in an unarmored Mercedes SUV driven by an armed driver, and a second Mercedes SUV, also driven by an armed man, served as a chase car, ready to scoop Zarini up if his first vehicle became disabled.
The American remained in Le Pirate with his new friend for another round of drinks, then bid him adieu.
And just like that, within thirty hours of receiving Zarini’s name in Beirut, Russ Whitlock knew his target’s schedule; the disposition, tactics, and training of his security team; and the structural capabilities of his vehicles.
Next Russ drove the route from Zarini’s property to Monaco. He decided a powerful explosive placed along the road and detonated as Zarini’s Mercedes passed would be the easiest and smartest course of action, but he also knew this was not the MO of the Gray Man. No, Court would jeopardize his own life to eliminate the risk of collateral damage, and as stupid as Russ found that mind-set, he knew he had to make this look like a Gray Man op.
Russ went back to his suite, popped an Adderall, and drank coffee to stay awake through the night to work on his plan.
The best course of action, Russ decided after looking at the maps for hours, would be to position himself along the hillside high over the one road Zarini and his detail would have to pass, and then fire on his target’s vehicle with a long-range scoped rifle. There would be no collateral damage, and he could then slip away through the trees and get out of the area quickly and cleanly, unseen by the security forces and, hopefully, witnesses.
It would be a Gray Man–like hit all around.
Satisfied he had a workable plan, Whitlock ordered a chilled ’94 Dom Perignon from room service and drank it straight from the bottle when it arrived. He’d done all he could do this evening. Tomorrow he would work on obtaining the rifle he would need to make the shot. He knew who to contact, and he was near certain this next piece of the puzzle would fall nicely into place.
But as he downed the champagne, worry returned to the forefront of his mind. The one piece that was crucial, more crucial than anything else, was completely out of his hands.
He needed to hear from that bastard Court Gentry.
TWENTY-SIX
Ruth had spent nearly the entire day in conference rooms. After her morning at ODNI in McLean, she was taken by a CIA car to the Adams Morgan neighborhood of D.C., and up the long driveway to Townsend Government Services.
She was led by Jeff Parks through a building she found almost comically surreal. Seemingly every square inch of wall space was occupied by some homage to the Old West. Knowing what little she did about this company—that they were a glorified posse deputized by the CIA to bring back their man, dead or alive—she half wondered if Parks and the other men in the building wore ten-gallon hats and stirrups when they were not conducting meetings with outsiders such as herself.
Parks led her into a room and presented her with an accordion file full of papers about her target. He seemed unhappy about passing her the information, but he was clearly under orders by the CIA to do so and, like a good dog, he was doing as he was told. Still, he made her agree to certain ground rules. She promised to stay off her mobile phone and her laptop, and she was not allowed to make any written notes of the information. She agreed, Parks left her to her work, and she eagerly tore into the file.
Despite her requests to see everything the CIA could give her, she was immediately disappointed to find an incredible number of black strikethroughs on the paperwork—it appeared as if 75 percent of her target’s history had been redacted.
The
file began with Gentry’s recruitment into the Agency, and Ruth was fascinated to learn that he had been headhunted by CIA after being convicted of a triple murder. The dossier had all the details of the crime. Gentry had been nineteen years old at the time, working as a bodyguard for a low-level drug smuggler working out of Opa-locka airport in south Florida.
From all the evidence available in the file, Gentry’s employer had been targeted for assassination by a group of Colombians, but young Court came to the rescue, killing the three hit men from Cartagena. The police showed up moments later; Gentry dropped his gun and was taken into custody.
He was convicted of murder and thrown into prison, but almost immediately the CIA scooped him up and put him through a two-year program to develop him into a nonofficial cover asset.
It was clear to Ruth the program was irregular, to say the least, because here the dossier became suspiciously vague. Mentions of the Balkans, a reference to St. Petersburg and Laos and Buenos Aires, but never an explanation of just what, exactly, the young man was doing in any of these far-flung locations.
In 2001, however, the paperwork picked back up when Gentry became a paramilitary operations officer for the CIA’s Special Activities Division, assigned to capture or kill al Qaeda personalities around the globe. She read details of operations conducted by CIA Task Force Golf Sierra, renditions and hits all over the world, and though the operations were well documented, there was nothing in the files to help her build a psychological profile on her target.
He was a member of the team, call sign Sierra Six. Nothing more.
Then came details of the events that led to what the file described as the kill/capture order on Gentry.
Ruth read it twice, the first time with rapt fascination, the second time with growing skepticism.
According to the report, Gentry had been home in his apartment in Virginia Beach when the rest of his field team came over for a visit. And then, with apparently no warning, Gentry murdered the entire team.
