Chapter Thirty-Six #2
“For every minute I’m operational, there’s about a thousand minutes when I’m sitting on a plane, on a bus, in a hide, in a safe house. You have to do all the thinking, boss; I get to decompress once in a while.”
“Right.”
“What do you listen to in your downtime?” Court asked.
“Podcasts about geopolitics, mostly.”
“Nerd.” Court took a swig.
“I am your superior, or have you forgotten?”
Court shrugged. “Superior nerd.”
Matt let it go. “You talked to Fitzroy? Did he have any insight?”
“A lot, actually, just as I suspected. It turns out the guy who called me is a second-generation shithead.
His dad was Provisional IRA, a straight-up terrorist, killing cops in London, then working as an enforcer, assassinating Irish Catholics who had worked for the British.
Then the Brits killed him but put the blame on some splinter IRA faction.
A few years later, the son, the guy who called me, was activated by the British to go on kill missions in Ulster, taking out enemies of England because Fitzroy and his minions tricked him.
After the Brits were done with him, he went into private practice, working as a hitter all over the world, and then he retired.
“I guess he would have stayed that way if I hadn’t killed his kid.”
“Unbelievable,” Hanley said.
Court said, “The guy’s code name is Whetstone.”
Hanley thought a moment. “I guess the Brits did a good job hiding that story from us. I’ve never heard of an Irish Republican asset called Whetstone.”
Court took another sip. “Ideally, I think that’s how assassins are supposed to operate. Quietly.”
“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t know, would you?”
“I would not,” Court admitted. The legend of the Gray Man had grown in the intelligence and security world to a degree that only made Court’s life more dangerous.
Hanley finally took a sip of his beer. “I need you to remain focused on my op, Six. In case you’ve lost count, I am currently an asset down.”
“One asset down? Didn’t Zack go back to Colorado today?”
“He was on his way to the airport, but something’s come up, and I turned him around. I need him here till tomorrow afternoon.”
Court put down the beer. “What’s going on?”
“Jim Pace has gotten us another lead. From Spiral’s mobile phone, he found the names of four other people he planned on killing.
The document had an order to delete it once he read it, but Spiral never did.
We’re hoping the enemy, whoever sent him the document, doesn’t know that we know his intended victims.”
“Who are his intended victims?”
“One of them, next on his list, is a current Gauntlet employee. A business jet pilot named David Rudder.”
“Has Gumdrop located him?”
“Not physically. He supposedly lives in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, but cameras there don’t show his vehicle in the parking lot of his building. He works at a Gauntlet office nearby when he’s not flying, but the dossier Spiral was given says he hasn’t shown up to work in the past two days.”
“Maybe he knows what Gauntlet is up to, doesn’t like it, and that’s why he’s on the kill list.”
“That’s my assumption. He’s been pilot in command on a pair of flights from Europe into the U.S.
over the past two weeks. We can assume that if he’s involved with this mess with Gauntlet, then he’s been utilized to help bring foreign assets into the U.S.
He stopped showing up to work suddenly, Gauntlet realized they had a dangerous situation on their hands, so they’re deleting him from the equation. ”
“But if we can’t find him, what do we do?”
“We don’t know where he is, but we know where he’s going to be. He has a meeting tomorrow in Georgetown, eleven thirty a.m. That’s where Spiral was going to hit him.”
Court said, “He won’t show.”
“He might. His meeting is with Catherine King.”
Court was astonished. “The national security reporter for the Washington Post?”
“Washington Post? No, she got laid off from the Post last summer. Where the hell have you been?”
“Russia, mostly.”
“Yeah, right. Touché. Anyway, she’s writing a book about U.S. national security. She’s got sources all over town. She even reached out to me, multiple times, but of course I never got back with her.
“Rudder is meeting with her tomorrow, in public. I’m thinking he’s passing her information about those flights. We need to assume the enemy will task someone else, and they’ll be there at that time.”
“Wait,” Court said. “You want to use Cathy King as bait?”
Hanley shook his head. “She’s not a target, Six. If she were, then she would be there on Spiral’s dossier, right along with Rudder. She’ll be fine. We’ll go there, we’ll wrap up all the Gauntlet men following Rudder, and we’ll kill whatever assassin they send.”
“Who is we? Zack with his bum leg, Travers with a neck wound. You going to give Jill a rocket launcher?”
“You have a fair point. Zack will be there; he did one hell of a job in Washington Circle, even with the leg. It’s just you and Zack as armed assets.” He hesitated. Said, “Unless you think Anthem could be utilized to—”
“Out of the question,” Court said. “I just saw her. Trust me. Her heart would be in the fight, but she’s weak, slow still. Six months in a fucking work gulag will deplete even the strongest—”
Hanley said, “Say no more. We’ll give Anthem more time to recover. You and Zack will be the only shooters, but Jill will be your overwatch, accessing cameras in the area.”
Court thought a moment. “If they send a single asset, like they’ve done on the other hits we know about, then they will probably employ interdiction and isolation crews again.
We know they did that in Washington Circle; Gauntlet has thousands of gunslingers, so it’s likely their MO for the other ops. ”
Hanley said, “So we need to identify whoever shows up for the Rudder meeting with Catherine King. Preferably before Rudder gets there.” He made a note of it on his phone.
“I’ll move Jill into the area as soon as we get to D.C.
Put her in a rental house there in Georgetown nearby; she can access camera feeds in the restaurant, on the street.
I’ll have Arnold put a micro drone in the air with a camera. ”
Court said, “Not good enough. Catherine is a friend; if I’m going to expose her like that, I want to know who’s there, ready to do her harm.”
“We don’t have resources to blanket the whole neighborhood.”
The younger man looked up. “You told me Arnold could get me just about anything I want.”
“Yeah, I did. I don’t know how he does it, but whenever I need something, he just—”
“I need a tow truck,” Court blurted out.
“A tow truck? Like—”
“Like a real commercial tow truck. From a towing company, not something all stripped and beat up for sale online. I need a legit wrecker from a legit company that’s working the streets of D.C. regularly.”
“What are you going to do with—”
Court ignored him. “The truck needs to be parked in Georgetown by nine a.m. tomorrow with the keys in it. Have him put a disguise for me in there. Plus, a short-barreled rifle, but something very compact. Pistol caliber is fine, just make sure it’s small…
and suppressed. An MPX, a Scorpion, something like that.
I want an Aimpoint optic, no magnification.
I want the weapon loaded with a mag that will fit in the backpack, but I also need two extra magazines, subsonic ammunition. ”
Hanley took notes.
“You need to get Zack armed and behind the wheel of a getaway car. Something big and heavy but fast, just in case. Jill can monitor all the cams in the area with her facial recognition software. We do all that, and we might be able to pull this off.”
“Jesus, Six. It’s Georgetown, not Mogadishu. You’re not getting in a shoot-out over a lunch date.”
“You keep telling yourself everything’s going to go smoothly. I’ll keep preparing for reality.”
Hanley nodded. “I’ll call Arnold; if anyone can make that happen, he can. We’re wheels up at five a.m. tomorrow. I want you at the airport at four thirty. By noon tomorrow, with a little luck, we will have taken another enemy hitter off the playing field.”
Court looked away a moment.
“You’re hoping it’s this Whetstone guy.”
“That would kill two birds with one stone.”
“Whoever it is, the assassin who shows up tomorrow is your objective. We clear?”
“Of course, any dead asshole will be a win. But getting Catherine out of this alive is my objective, as well.”
He didn’t get any pushback from Hanley on that. Instead, the older man said, “Right now, Six, you need to sleep. You look like absolute shit. Don’t worry. Tomorrow’s going to be fine.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“It is easy. I’ve got you.” Court noted the sarcasm in Matt’s voice.
Five minutes later Hanley had made it back to the Suburban with his security team, and Court had locked the wooden door over the companionway that led down below deck.
His cameras were up, on the app on his phone and on the monitor of his laptop, and they would alert him to any movement above or below the water.
He situated himself in a fiberglass hold along a wall of the main cabin that stored sofa cushions, just across from his bed.
It was, essentially, a long low box, slightly curved, and the lid of the hold had cushions on it, serving as a small sofa, as well.
The space was cramped, especially because his shotgun and his mobile phone were nestled beside him, but Court was accustomed to discomfort, and he rarely slept in beds or on couches, so paranoid was he that he was always minutes away from someone sneaking up on him in his sleep.
It had happened in the past, often enough that he felt justified in ignoring his bed and making other arrangements. This fiberglass hold wasn’t the most comfortable bed he’d ever found, but with the gentle rocking of the sixty-three-foot boat, in minutes he was sound asleep.