Chapter Thirty-Five
Thirty-Five
Michael Scardino and James Westwood sat in J.W.
’s third-floor office watching the midday national news.
The vast majority of the airtime was devoted to the spate of killings around the country, mostly in the D.C.
region. The media had also tied the death by a second lethal poisoning of an FBI agent in New York to the running death toll, bringing the number, when added to the six in and around the Carriage House Condominium, to a staggering fourteen in the past fourteen hours.
The press hunted for direct connections between the victims; they hunted for sound bites from lawmakers and gave airtime to talking head after talking head, each with less new information and more pointless pontification than the last.
As the two men in Dupont Circle had predicted, the president was careful not to blame a foreign power for the killings—not yet, anyway—but they both assumed Russia would be most everyone’s first guess.
Russian intelligence activities in the West had been in the news, and the death of the Belarusian assassin, while by no means part of J.W.
’s plan, did have the positive benefit of implicating the Kremlin in all of this.
Just as the two men in the office were about to mute the TV and reach out to the individual Gauntlet support teams in the field for updates, Fox broke in from yet another city on the Eastern Seaboard, where yet another murder had just been confirmed.
A man leaving his house for work in Baltimore had started his car in his carport, and then the car ignited into flames. The man staggered out, fully engulfed, and made it back into his home, but died of burns before emergency medical crews arrived to treat him.
It had been a car bomb, and though not a particularly efficient one, it had been successful in its task nonetheless.
Both the men knew Whetstone was the killer they’d assigned to the task of killing Allen Stepanski of the little-known Air Force’s National Air and Space Intelligence Center, and this meant two of the assets—Whetstone from Northern Ireland, and Masquerade from Italy—had each managed to kill two of the five targets on their lists within the first twelve hours of the operation.
Snare, a hit man from Jordan, had killed the husband-and-wife CIA officers in their car, then killed a third target, a DIA officer in Columbia Heights.
Lancer had only killed one so far, but he’d checked in within the past hour and was setting up for his second hit soon.
J.W. and Big Mike were cautiously optimistic about the way things had been going since last night. Eight killings out of nine attempts in the first twelve hours: it was an extraordinary success, only blunted by the death of Spiral and the Gauntlet men around him.
J.W. rose and told Scardino he was heading downstairs to order some lunch, but before he could leave, Scardino’s phone began to buzz on the coffee table in front of him.
Scardino looked down and said, “Signal number. Unknown.” J.W. moved closer as Scardino put the call on speaker. “Yeah?”
“It’s Whetstone. Checking in, as requested.”
The man’s voice was so identifiable, Scardino didn’t even ask for the agreed-upon code word. As J.W. looked on, Scardino said, “First, let me congratulate you. Hyattsville and Baltimore, within just hours of one another. We’re impressed.”
Whetstone replied, “I heard about what happened in Washington last night. You lost an entire team. I’m guessing you find yourself now with a lot more jobs that need doin’.”
“An unfortunate setback, and yes. But we will adapt.”
“You got any more intel for me on the Gray Man?”
Scardino looked at J.W. and rolled his eyes. “Not at this time, no.”
“Pity. No worries, though, chief, because I have some intelligence for you.”
Scardino and J.W. exchanged another look in the third-floor Dupont Circle office. “Okay,” Big Mike said. “What do you have?”
“This morning, I had a wee chat with him.”
“Him? Who?”
“The Gray Man.”
Another look between the two Americans. Scardino recovered, then said, “How…? Matt Hanley’s address? You were able to—”
“That’s right. I dropped in on Hanley, left a number and a note sayin’ I’d stop my killin’ spree in Washington if he’d call me.”
“You’d do what?” Scardino demanded.
“Don’t get your knickers in a twist, squire. I’m a sneaky bastard. It’s all talk. Plus, no matter what I do, I’ve got five men with me who can keep on killing for ya.”
“We hired you, not your support team.”
“I was in Virginia Beach when that bloke in Baltimore got sent to his maker this mornin’. You can check with the coroner to be sure, yeah, but I do believe he’s just about as dead as if I did it meself.”
Scardino waved a hand in the air, then said, “Okay. So…you said you actually talked to the Gray Man.”
“Yeah, and I thought you might like to know that he’s knee-deep against you, fightin’ on the other side of your mission. Dunno if he was involved in that shite in Washington or not, but he didn’t deny he was tryin’ to stop all that’s happenin’.”
J.W. just shrugged at Mike, as if he didn’t necessarily buy what Whetstone was saying, or if it even made any difference at all. “How do you even know it was him?”
“We had a professional understanding, he and I. I could hear it in his voice. He’s had a bit of my life, I’ve had a bit of his.”
“That sounds thin,” Scardino said. Then he added, “So…if you left this message at Hanley’s place, and the Gray Man called you back, at least we do know now that the Gray Man is involved with Hanley to some degree?”
“I’d say they are close. Here’s how I put it together.
Hanley wasn’t at his house at four in the mornin’, I can tell ya that, because I was.
And Hanley, with all that’s going on, managed to make it to his house after I left, get the number I put there for him, get that number to Violator, and have Violator ring me, all in the course of about two and a half hours.
Adding the fact that Hanley had to make sure I hadn’t filled his home with pipe bombs when I had the run of the place, that sounds like two men in close coordination, damn interested in stopping the killin’, wouldn’t you agree? ”
Scardino definitely did agree. “So, Hanley might be involved in this, and he does have some influence over Violator.”
Scardino thought a moment, then said, “That’s helpful information. But in the meantime, we need you focused on your next—”
Whetstone interrupted, “Look, chief, I’ll take out whoever you want, but right now, you need to be goin’ to your people inside the U.S.
government and finding me more intel about Violator and Hanley.
Where they are now, anyone they might be workin’ with.
These are the enemies to your whole bloody scheme, yeah, and if you’ve got any interest in self-preservation, I’d be thinking about that. ”
Big Mike said, “I’m gonna put you on hold.” He tapped the key, then looked to J.W.
“We gave Whetstone the Hanley address because we were trying to string him along, feed him something to keep him working on our targets. But we only tasked Shaw with getting some intel on Hanley. We can reach out to him now, tell him to get everything he can get on Hanley, Violator, their dealings, and all their associates. If we find it likely they are with a group working against us, then we give Whetstone what he came for in the first place. The Gray Man.”
J.W. wasn’t convinced. He said, “We were planning on eliminating Shaw last, so we had access to the information he’s getting us out of ODNI. But he’s a liability now. Ortega knows about him, and Ortega’s in the wind.”
Scardino said, “I agree, Shaw needs to die, and we don’t want to wait around till the end of the operation, because someone is going to know about him soon enough.
But we can’t kill him till we have an understanding about what happened last night in Washington Circle.
We definitely don’t want a repeat of that. ”
He added, “I’ve got a Gauntlet team following him wherever he goes. If anybody comes after Shaw, then we’ll get him out of there.” With confidence, he said, “Nobody is going to get anything out of him, even if we have to put a bullet in his brain from a distance while he’s getting arrested.”
J.W. nodded, and Mike unmuted the phone.
Scardino said, “Whetstone, I am going to appeal to my asset inside the intelligence community to get me everything possible on Violator and all his associates, as soon as possible. I will give you that information the second I obtain it. Stay low in the area until I get back with you.”
“Right. But don’t take too long. Your operation just gets tougher by the hour.”
“I’m well aware. I’ll call you back.”
The call ended, and Scardino and J.W. looked back and forth at one another for several seconds. J.W. said, “He could be playing us.”
Scardino nodded. “Thought of that. He could just want this intel on the Gray Man so bad he’s trying to make us think we need to obtain it and task Whetstone to him as a form of self-preservation.”
J.W. then said, “But whatever happened last night in Washington Circle…That was a few men causing an incredible amount of damage. So far, we’ve heard nothing from any of the agencies saying they were involved, and it definitely was not D.C.
Metro PD. If it was an unknown actor…it could be Hanley, the Gray Man, and maybe a few other assets. ”
J.W. thought a moment more, then said, “Keep your surveillance team right up Shaw’s ass. Do not lose access to him when he leaves ODNI. I will reach out to him now, tell him what we need him to find out.
“We’ve got a long way to go,” J.W. said. “Well over a dozen targets left.”
“If Hanley has some kind of a field team working against us, then we’ve got more than twelve targets to deal with.”
“Let me bask in our success a second, Mike.” After a moment he took a sip of coffee and sighed. “The Chinese better come through with their promises at the end of this.”