Chapter Thirty-Two
Thirty-Two
An unadorned gray Chevy Suburban sat in front of the Raymond C. Carter Center for Trends in Peace on Church Street in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., and inside sat five plainclothed security officers from Gauntlet Group, each armed with a carbine rifle they kept down low.
The street itself was quiet, but the Gauntlet men watched the flashing lights from nearby Connecticut Avenue, police and medical vehicles heading south, and the Suburban was in radio contact with the security officers inside the row house building it was parked next to.
It was midnight; this crew was due to remain on duty till six, when they would likely be swapped out for another vehicle full of men, but for now they just kept their eyes peeled on Church Street, unaware of any specific danger to their charge, but well aware that something was going on in the area.
Inside, in the third-floor office of James Westwood, there was a lot more information available. J.W. had CNN on mute on the TV on the wall across from him, and the four monitors of his desktop computer were open to various other news and social media sources.
J.W. hadn’t been able to hear any gunfire or action at this distance, but D.C. Metro PD was out in force, and sirens filtered through the glass behind him, no doubt keeping everyone in this part of the District awake and annoyed.
Westwood didn’t know all the reasons the Chinese had ordered the elimination of all the targets on the list they’d given him, the list he’d handed over to Scardino to pass out to the five assassins they had working in America right now, but J.W.
did know the reason the Chinese needed the woman who lived in nearby Washington Circle to die.
Irene Ortega hadn’t made the news yet, but she would soon, of this he was certain.
CNN was already covering the murders in Hyattsville, in Tysons Corner, in New York, and in Miami, and one of their talking heads had just opined that it was still too early to connect the killings, which J.W. found laughable.
Irene Ortega, like the man in Maryland who’d been killed, was on the lower end of the spectrum, not a big player in the community, but they both held secrets about the operation Gauntlet was part of, and for that reason, they were placed high on the kill list. And even though they weren’t big players, it was unavoidable that they would be tied to the bigger picture soon enough.
One worked for NSA and the other for ODNI, and they were targeted on the same night as several others in the same general profession.
The man Lancer had killed in Miami was a Gauntlet employee. A man Scardino had trusted with information about his company’s clandestine work with China.
A man who then told Scardino he was going to report Gauntlet to the FBI for illegally acting as an agent for a foreign power.
Scardino had told J.W. this, J.W. had told Gracie Wu, and then the Gauntlet employee in Miami had been assassinated by the American assassin Lancer before revealing anything to anybody.
A knock at J.W.’s office door came at twelve twenty in the morning, and he did not hear it at first with all the sirens from the police cars still racing through Dupont Circle.
When he did hear, however, he wasn’t worried about who it would be.
He kept a pistol in a drawer in his desk, but there was enough security in this row house to where he had little worry of being surprised by someone making it all the way from the street up to the third floor without him at least hearing about it.
“Come in.”
Big Mike stepped in. J.W. expected a smile on the man’s face; he knew that five of the twenty-one targets had been successfully taken out in the first two hours of the operation, and it sounded like the police heading to Washington Circle meant he was about to learn about the sixth successful job now.
But Mike’s eyes were wide, a little unfixed.
This did not look good.
“What’s happened?”
Scardino crossed the office, sat at a chair in front of the desk, and leaned forward, his forearms on the desk’s edge.
“It’s Spiral.”
“What about him?”
Scardino seemed confused. Slowly, he said, “Apparently…our professional assassin was professionally assassinated.”
“What?”
“Spiral’s dead. His entire fucking team is dead.”
J.W.’s ebullient mood of five seconds earlier went up in smoke.
“What…the…fuck? Your guys, too?”
“All five.”
“They weren’t supposed to be involved with the hit.”
“They were standing watch outside Ortega’s building.
They were in two vehicles; one was a couple blocks away.
Witnesses report a single person stepped up to each vehicle.
Two gunfights broke out. This was while Spiral was upstairs.
Something happened up there, Spiral blew his way into the condo, then was riddled with gunfire. ”
“By Ortega?” J.W. asked.
“It wasn’t Ortega,” Scardino muttered softly. “No…there’s a professional outfit out there. And they’re onto us somehow.
“Any way you slice it, J.W., this was a fucking shit show.”
“You have a way of tying off the compromise of losing the Gauntlet men?”
Scardino shrugged his shoulders and nodded. “Yeah. American heroes. Came across a bad actor about to assassinate someone. They tried to help. Fell in the line of duty, or some bullshit like that. We can sell it.”
Westwood said, “What if it happens again?”
“Gauntlet is everywhere. It stands to reason that they would be near the scene of another hit around here. We need Gauntlet in this fight. Gracie and the Chinese don’t have the assets to support our five hit men.” Quickly he corrected himself. “Four hit men.”
J.W. said, “Any idea who protected Ortega tonight?”
“No, but we’re going to be looking at cameras in the area.
We didn’t feel the need to bug Ortega’s condo…
she was considered a low-threat target, which obviously was a mistake.
But there are other cams in the area, and even a team that good will leave some footprints.
Whoever rescued her tonight, whether they were government agents or private forces… we’ll find them.”
J.W. did not hide his concern. “If they have Ortega now, and she’s talking, what does she know?”
“She knows that Lewis Shaw used her credentials to obtain intelligence regarding the operation in Nicaragua, and then someone used that intelligence to affect the outcome in Nicaragua. She suspects Shaw used her credentials on the other breaches.”
J.W. rose from behind his desk. “He passed that intelligence to me, Mike. I’m the one who passed that intel to the Chinese!”
“Ortega can’t possibly know that. She doesn’t know who he disseminated it to, that’s why she was trying to spy on Shaw herself.”
“What’s going on with the other four assets?” J.W. then asked.
“Lancer is on his way up here now; his job in Miami was clean. Snare did Tysons, has more to do in Virginia. Masquerade did New York. Whetstone did Hyattsville already.” Scardino smiled for the first time since he came into the office.
“I just hired the son of a bitch five hours ago, and he’s already crossed one name off his list. He’s on his way to Baltimore, then he’s off to Chicago after that, I believe. ”
“You believe?”
“Yeah, well, he also has a side quest here in the States. I’m trusting him that he finishes my work before he goes off and does that.”
“What’s a side quest?”
“Part of his agreement to do the hits was he wanted to know the location of Matthew Hanley.”
J.W. cocked his head at this. Of course, he knew Hanley was a former DDO. He’d met him many times when he was in Congress and Hanley was a midlevel CIA exec. “What does he want with Hanley?”
“Beats me. He wouldn’t say. Sounded like a personal beef.”
“A personal beef?”
“First, he wanted intelligence about the Gray Man. I had Shaw do some digging at ODNI. Did you know Gray Man is a former CIA paramilitary asset code-named Violator?”
“I did not, but I don’t see how that’s relevant to our operation.”
“It’s not, but Whetstone wanted Hanley’s info, because he seems to think Hanley knows how he can find the Gray Man. Lancer wanted intel on the Gray Man, as well.”
“So half the assassins in our stable are more interested in finding the Gray Man than they are in doing their jobs.”
Scardino shook his head. “Lancer, for sure, is more interested in the money. I guess there is a lot of rivalry and jealousy in the contract killer field.” Scardino added, “Whetstone’s still got four ops to do for us; after that, I don’t care about Hanley. He’s yesterday’s news, anyway.”
Westwood said, “I’m most concerned about whoever wiped your team out tonight. Aren’t you?”
Big Mike said, “We’ll figure it out.”
Changing the subject, J.W. said, “Spiral had four other missions. Who will do them?”
“I’ll talk to Lancer. He seemed very eager. I’ll have him do one. Snare is close by, I’ll have him do another. I’ll get Whetstone and Masquerade to do the others.”
James Westwood’s phone chirped on his desk.
It was a Signal call, and it would be Gracie.
She would have heard by now about the five successful operations, but she would have also heard about the shambolic unsuccessful one, and J.W.
had no illusions at all about which one this call would be concerning.
Scardino turned and left the room as the older man answered.
—
Campbell Coyle sat alone in his Volkswagen Passat, parked equidistant from light poles on Timber Ridge Drive so that he was in as much darkness as possible on this residential street.
He’d been here awhile watching a property across the street, and if he’d been shooed away by a passing security vehicle or a nosy neighbor, he’d come back here tomorrow night without a car and use a bit more stealth.
But it seemed he hadn’t been noticed by the residents, and no neighborhood rent-a-cop had happened by, so he’d been here most of an hour, examining his target, using binoculars to evaluate access points and security issues at the purported residence of Matthew Hanley.
He had sent all five of his support team to Silver Spring to kill a man.
They didn’t know why, and they didn’t ask, but if they had asked, Coyle’s only response would have been that they would make a million dollars for the hit, and if they needed more prompting than that, then they’d found themselves in the wrong line of work.
The Kearney team—the Walsh and Donnelly brothers—weren’t assassins by trade, but they knew how to kill, and they’d certainly done it in the past for a lot less than a million.
Building a car bomb from parts bought from a Home Depot and then stashing it under an unsuspecting man’s car didn’t sound like it would be too much trouble.
Coyle wasn’t worried about them right now; he was worried about the home on the other side of a quiet intersection from him.
And so far, he liked what he saw.
Campbell Coyle had worked for the past eight years installing and maintaining security systems all over Northern Ireland, and he knew the inner workings of both commercial and private systems. He could defeat locks, alarms, cameras, and motion sensors through means both mechanical and high-tech.
He used bolt cutters and iPads, screwdrivers and computer code.
Eyeballing Hanley’s home down the street on Meeting House Road, he’d determined that no one was present on the property, and though there was a security system, it was an off-the-shelf variety that Coyle could easily disable.
He was armed with a pistol; zip ties; a wrapped set of tools for picking locks, disassembling cameras, and other purposes; and computer equipment with various peripherals, all stowed in an oiled leather backpack he’d brought all the way from Northern Ireland.
In the bag he also had a burner phone with one number programmed into it, and a handwritten note folded in an outside pocket.
His laptop had been open for most of the last hour, but now he closed the device, then climbed out of the car.
His hoodie covered his head and the Irish watch cap he wore on it; he slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked out into the street.
Security cameras on people’s property were virtually always set to dismiss movement in the road itself, otherwise motion detectors would alert to every passing vehicle, so Coyle began walking down the middle of the street in the direction of Matthew Hanley’s house with a gait so calm he likely wouldn’t raise suspicion even if someone saw him at this time of night.
The excitement he felt from the action was blunted by the purpose of this mission.
He’d killed dozens of times for money, and there had been something of a thrill in that, at least in the very olden days.
But now Coyle’s actions were for a cause both so solemn and so righteous that he derived no pleasure from them; only his commitment drove him forward, toward the home and, eventually, toward his inevitable meeting with the man who had killed his son.