Chapter Twenty-Six
Twenty-Six
The Belarusian held the latex mask in his hand, looked it over carefully, and then gave a little smile.
The quality of the article was good; he’d tried it on here in the hotel an hour earlier and then stood in front of a mirror.
In full light, with his full attention, carefully looking, he could tell it wasn’t real.
But he was sure that outside, in the night, to a passerby or to a distant security camera, it made him look real enough, if a little ugly.
But he didn’t put it on now. He had time, still, and he had other things to do.
He racked the slide, ejected the magazine, then put one more bullet in the mag before reseating it in the grip, bringing the weapon to its fully loaded capacity of thirteen.
There were other magazines on the glass coffee table in front of him, and two more boxes of ammunition, along with his phone, wallet, and passport.
And two lines of coke.
He’d arrange his equipment first, then he would go dress, and only then would he snort the coke. He’d been doing this long enough to know the correct process for optimal performance.
Alexi Kravchuk was forty-three years old, and he’d spent fifteen years of his life as an officer in the State Security Committee of the Republic of Belarus, the nation’s version of the KGB.
He now plied his trade in the contract world, working mostly for Russian interests in Europe, but he’d recently taken a private job from a concern in the United States, and now he was here, in Washington, preparing for his first operation.
The passport on the coffee table was legal, given to him by the Slovenian government, and his visa to America affixed inside it was legit.
They both named him as Johan Fras, a Slovenian tourist, but in the halls at the FSB, the Russians knew him as Spiral, their word for “helix.” Spiral had not used his passport to fly into America; he’d instead been picked up by a private jet in Slovenia and flown in, somehow bypassing customs and border control.
Once he got here, his American handler, a man who called himself Mike, had told him he’d be targeting five different individuals, all in the Washington, D.C., area, over a period of no more than four or five days.
He’d been told that other assassins were in America, and their killings would fall in the same time frame, and the time frame was crucial.
Spiral’s first target was to be a forty-seven-year-old woman named Irene Ortega who lived in a condo near Washington Circle.
All he knew about her was that she worked for the American government, and someone with money and a crew of support personnel wanted her dead, and she was not thought to have any tradecraft experience or concerns about her safety.
One of the five Americans he had following Ortega called him earlier in the afternoon and told him she’d gone to a museum, the support team had followed her, and though she hadn’t detected their presence, she certainly seemed nervous and on alert.
But an interesting thing had happened at the museum.
Spiral’s support team had bumped into some of their colleagues working a similar surveillance job, because while the Belarusian’s team was following Irene Ortega, the other team was following another target who was in the same museum at the same time.
Apparently, there was some confusion between the two teams, and Spiral couldn’t help but wonder what the fuck was going on in D.C.
that there would be so many assassinations in the works that hit men’s support personnel were literally stumbling over one another while trying to keep eyes on their targets.
Now that he’d been given a weapon and a disguise, it had been Spiral’s initial preference to wait until tomorrow morning and stab Irene Ortega on the street on her commute to work.
He’d planned on room service and a quiet night watching TV, but his handler had contacted him an hour earlier and told him the job had to be done tonight, sometime after ten thirty p.m.
Surveillance had followed her to her condo; she was there now, and this meant Spiral had to go into the building, enter her home, and kill her there.
He did not want to enter a building. Much better to eliminate her on the street or, even better, in a parking garage.
But according to his contact, some of the other jobs going down needed to happen this evening, and they worried about Ortega being harder to reach if they waited till morning, because she had shown some suspicion to the team surrounding her.
Spiral asked for and was granted an extra one hundred thousand U.S. dollars for doing the job tonight in her residence, and then he asked for and was delivered a few extra items that would make the job easier.
Small C-4 charges that he could put on locked doors if he found himself unable to quickly pick a lock.
Spiral didn’t love the idea of the hit in the building, but he wasn’t overly concerned about this change to his plan.
Compared to where he’d been in Central Europe, the police presence here in the District was minimal, and he had been outfitted with this 9-millimeter CZ P-09 pistol with a Rugged Obsidian9 suppressor.
This silencer could be used in a full or partial configuration, and right now he had it pared down to its shortened length to make it easier to conceal.
With the subsonic ammunition in the gun’s magazine, he knew that firing a pair of shots into Miss Ortega’s head inside her condo would go unnoticed throughout the rest of the building.
He looked at the two lines of coke, just waiting for him, and then he looked away. He’d shower now, eliminate some of his loose DNA, and then he would change, put on his gear, and wait for ten thirty.
He’d do the coke, put on his coat, cram the mask into his pocket, and begin walking the four blocks from his safe house to Ortega’s condo.
If all went well, he’d be taken by his team straight to target number two, across the river in Pentagon City. There, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army always took the Metro to his job at the Pentagon, and Spiral would stab him on the train, for reasons that had not been given to him.
These Americans were just like the Russians.
Do the job, don’t ask questions.
It didn’t matter to Spiral. By eight a.m. tomorrow, before the effects of the cocaine even wore off, he could be $2.1 million richer, and then he would rest a bit before the third, fourth, and fifth killings.
These Americans paid more than the Russians, the work seemed easier, the support he got in the field was superior, and America was a weak place, full of the unsuspecting.
What’s not to like about this job? he thought as he rose to go take his shower.
—
Campbell Coyle hadn’t told the American he’d be meeting with tonight that he was bringing five body men to watch over him, so there was no small amount of confusion in the parking garage of the Wegmans grocery store in Tysons Corner.
Coyle had been on foot; he came out of the store carrying two bags of groceries and walked through the garage waiting for the meet, giving no tip-off to the fact that two vehicles here in close proximity had Kearney men in them watching his every move.
And when a white Lincoln Navigator entered and pulled into an open space one level below the street, the three vehicles containing Bostonian gangsters were all close enough to notice.
The Navigator’s doors opened, three men exited, and they were just steps from Coyle. Two of the three were security men; Coyle knew these guys didn’t look like decision-makers, and they took his bags from him, then pushed him a little roughly next to the Navigator for a pat-down.
When they shoved him against the side of the SUV, two vehicles parked close by fired up and raced forward.
A Volkswagen sedan with two men and a Jeep Cherokee truck with three men screeched tires as they closed on the scene.
All three American men within arm’s reach of Campbell Coyle pulled guns, but the Northern Irishman told them to calm down, then waved off his own security team, telling them to idle nearby but remain in their vehicles.
Then Coyle turned to the one man who hadn’t been involved with the frisk. He said, “My mates apparently thought things were getting a wee bit rough. Maybe tell your mates that we’re all on the same side here, and we won’t have any problems.”
The man in the middle was big, as formidable-looking as his two goons, although he appeared older and more in charge.
He regarded the two vehicles idling close, the five sets of hard eyes watching the situation carefully, and then he reholstered his gun and indicated to his men to do the same.
After this, he said, “Would have helped if we’d known about your men. ”
“Would have helped you, I suppose you mean to say,” Coyle said.
The two younger Americans finished the frisk, more politely now that they knew they might get riddled with bullets if they misbehaved, then stepped back.
The five Kearney men looked on: the two Donnelly brothers in one vehicle, and the three Walsh brothers in the other.
They didn’t show their weapons, but Coyle assumed their guns were drawn, resting in their laps and out of sight.
Coyle turned away from them and back towards the American who’d been speaking.
Extending a hand, the American said, “I’m Mike. Sorry about that, my boys are a little amped up.”
Coyle took it. “Whetstone. No harm done.”
“You’re something of a legend. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“If it’s a pleasure to meet someone like me, chief, then you’ve taken a bit of a wrong turn in your life.”
Mike said, “I’m comfortable with what we’re doing and why.”
“Fair enough.”
“Thank you for getting here so quickly. As I briefed you on your way over, our operation has to start immediately. I need you acting by tomorrow at the latest.”
“I believe you said you needed me acting by dawn, yeah?”
“That would be ideal.”
Coyle nodded. “I can manage.”