Chapter Thirty-Nine #2
Five Gauntlet men were dead. Two more were injured.
Snare’s shattered body would be identified by authorities soon enough, and the media would learn that a Jordanian assassin active for years in Europe had been killed by unknown parties in the heart of one of the most exclusive portions of Washington, D.C. , on a sunny morning.
The gunfight in Georgetown had happened four hours earlier, and only now were Mike and J.W. about to get the answers they’d demanded the day before from Lewis Shaw.
The young man had insisted on coming into the Carter Center.
He had been picked up by a Gauntlet team in Tysons Corner, near his office at Liberty Crossing, and driven here.
Security on Church Street out in front of the Center was heavy as he was shuffled out of a van with a hat and a hood on, holding a backpack with an iPad inside, and then he’d come up here, set up in the war room, demanded coffee, and drunk a full cup before he was ready to talk to the two older men.
Shaw looked like shit, as always, J.W. noted, but the young man retained his air of superiority, less towards J.W. and more towards Big Mike, whom he still only knew as a bodyguard.
Now, the thirty-year-old cracked his knuckles, made eye contact with J.W., then nodded towards Scardino. “We talkin’ in front of the help?”
Westwood did not break eye contact with the young man. “No time for your cute shit today, Shaw. We need you to tell us both everything you’ve got. Now.”
Shaw looked back and forth between the two men. Finally, he glanced down and unlocked his iPad, then said, “You told me you wanted everything on Hanley and his associates. This shit was damn tough to get; let me start with that. I’m going to want more money from our friends; they—”
Westwood all but yelled now. “Fucking talk, Lewis!”
“Jesus, dude. Okay. First…Matt Hanley left his employment with CIA seven weeks ago; he has no official job, but he’s been handed access to Agency black fund accounts totaling well over twenty million dollars.”
Scardino looked to J.W. “Just what I suspected. He’s running an off-book program. I assume with the knowledge of Phillips or Watkins at CIA, maybe Olivia Anthony at DNI. Maybe all three.”
Shaw made a face at the Gauntlet man, a look of surprise, as if he couldn’t believe the dumb bodyguard could figure something out on his own.
But he shook his head. “It’s gotta be one of the CIA guys.
Olivia Anthony is my boss. If she were involved with Hanley, I’d know about it, because I know everything that’s going on over there.
” He then looked back down to his iPad. “Anyway, seen with Hanley recently is this joker.” He held up the screen, which was completely taken up with a full-page image of Zack Hightower’s official U.S. Navy photo.
J.W. said, “A sailor?”
Shaw shook his head. “He was a Navy SEAL. One of their Team Six guys, way back. An officer. He then joined the CIA and worked in Ground Branch. Snake-eater stuff.
“His name is Zachary Paul Hightower. He was in Kharkiv with Hanley in November. He was wounded in Russia. Treated at a hospital in Germany. Doctors there thought he was a JSOC operative, but in actuality, he was a…well…he was a nothing. A private civilian. Obviously, he was working sub rosa with Hanley at that time, and it stands to reason he is still doing so. That makes him part of this outfit.”
Shaw moved some pages around on the device, then held up a new picture.
A man on a street, crouching behind a van, a pistol in his hand.
His neck gaiter covered his face below the eyes.
He said, “In this image, the computer matches the eyes, the separation of the eyes, the bridge of the nose with Zack Hightower.”
“Where is this?”
“This was the other night in Washington Circle. He killed three Gauntlet men in close-quarters battle, right there on New Hampshire Avenue.”
Scardino sat back in his chair, a smile widening on his face. “That’s one of the assets, then. Is it the Gray Man?”
“No,” Shaw said. He scrolled to another page, then held it up.
A high-up view down into the windshield of a black Yukon.
Looking down, it was the image of a man with a neck gaiter pulled up to his nose.
“This was four hours ago, on Reservoir Road, very near the disarray in Georgetown. The facial recognition algorithm says it’s the same guy.
Hightower. This very Yukon was left at the scene.
Shot to shit. Dead Gauntlet men lying around it.
” He glanced at Big Mike, who only stared back at him.
J.W. said, “This is one of Hanley’s operators, obviously. But how do you know it’s not the Gray Man?”
“Because…this is the Gray Man.” Shaw found another photo on his iPad, held it up. It was a picture of a man walking down a hallway in a building with a woman.
“That woman is Irene Ortega, and that man is Courtland Gentry.”
“Who is…?” J.W. prompted.
“Who is the Gray Man.”
Both men leaned in, looked more carefully. “How do you know?”
“There was an ad hoc team set up at CIA a few years ago—the Violator Working Group—and its sole mission was to find and kill a CIA asset code-named Violator, who had turned into a freelance assassin and was referred to as the Gray Man.
The group was disbanded a couple years ago.
No one knows why, but I found some scuttlebutt that said Violator did a job for the Agency in Germany and the sanction on him was removed as a thank-you.
Not sure how true that is, but the dates work out.
“Anyway, this picture.” He showed yet another photo of a man with dark hair in wire-rimmed glasses, seated and facing the camera in a sport coat.
It looked like a slightly wider view of a regular passport photo, “This is Courtland Gentry, and this is, according to the Violator Working Group, the Gray Man.”
He swiped a couple of times back to his left. “Here is the same guy rescuing Irene Ortega in the same incident where Zack Hightower was outside shooting up a team of Gauntlet dudes.” He looked to Scardino.
Big Mike said, “The Navy guy…he looks like an operator. But this guy…he looks like—nothing.”
Shaw agreed. “That passport photo looks like a bus stop ad for a real estate broker. Of course, that was several years ago; he probably has changed in some ways.”
J.W. said, “Okay, this is all fine. But where are they now?”
Shaw smiled. “Hightower has no known next of kin. No wife, kids, nothing. But we do know where he is at the moment.”
“Where?”
“Hightower is on a Delta flight to Boulder, Colorado. He’s flying under the name Lyle Hart, but the facial recog there at Reagan shows him to be the same man.
“Lyle Hart has a return flight from Boulder tomorrow evening.”
Scardino rose quickly and headed out of the room, pulling out his phone as he went.
Shaw watched this, and J.W. spoke up. “What’s he doing in Boulder?”
The younger man shrugged his narrow shoulders. “That I don’t know. You got any killers working in Boulder?”
“That’s not your concern. Just dig, find out if there are connections between Hightower or Hart and Boulder, Colorado.”
Shaw said, “I guess I can see if he’s been there before, get into credit cards and whatnot. That’s not really what I do, that’s more like PI work. I’m sure somebody at Gauntlet can—”
J.W. interrupted. “Events have escalated, Lewis. We need everything you can get us right now. All your efforts. I want to put a Gauntlet team on Hightower while he’s in Boulder.
If he has a vehicle there, either a rental car waiting for him or his own vehicle, like if he lives there, I want a Gauntlet operator in that city to put a tracker on it before the plane lands, so work fast.”
Shaw nodded. “I’ll get on that.”
“What about Gentry?” J.W. asked.
“For Gentry, he had a brother who died several years ago. His name was Chancellor, went by Chance; he was a cop in Jacksonville, Florida. Shot while making a traffic stop. But Gentry does have a father, still there in northern Florida, outside of Jacksonville. I have no idea if there is any communication between them. Apparently, Court Gentry lives like a ghost. CIA blames a couple dozen hits around the world on him, and that was before the working group disbanded. Who knows what that fucker has been up to since.”
Westwood said, “He’s working with Hanley, obviously.”
Shaw nodded. “Yeah…there is some evidence he was on the ground in Russia a couple months back, and that was definitely Hanley’s op.”
Westwood looked at the image. “So he’s a ghost, but he’s taking part in gunfights in D.C.”
“Against your buddy’s company,” Shaw said, referring to Gauntlet Group.
Scardino reentered the room and immediately addressed Shaw. “I’ve got a Gauntlet man in Boulder ready to run surveillance. I’m sending Lancer there, too. He says he can get a team of locals, non-Gauntlet guys, to support him there.”
“What locals?” J.W. asked.
Scardino flashed a look to Shaw. “We talking in front of the help?”
To this, Westwood chuckled, then said, “Let’s discuss details after young Lewis leaves.”
“Right,” Scardino agreed.
J.W. looked back to Shaw. “Where’s Hanley working out of?”
“I don’t know. What I just gave you is all I have for now, but I’m still digging. Once I got the ID of the Gray Man, I figured I needed to come to you ASAP.”
Scardino said, “Good. Go back to Liberty Crossing. Keep at it. We need physical locations for these people. Vehicle information. License plates. It does us no good if we can’t find—”
Shaw interrupted. “I don’t take orders from you.”
Big Mike turned to J.W., who then looked directly at Shaw. “All that.”
“Fair enough, boss.” Shaw packed up his things and headed for the stairs.
—
When he was gone, Westwood said, “We’ll give Whetstone the information about the father down in Florida.
It will probably lead to nothing, but at least we can keep the trickle of information going to the Northern Irishman.
He has a lot of work to do yet. He’s in Chicago now; supposed to be, anyway. ”
Scardino said, “Two of five hitters are off the playing field. We still have a long way to go.”
“Yeah. We have to assume that Hanley’s people will show up at all our targets now, and plan accordingly.”
Scardino said, “I’ve lost ten men already. I have the men to lose, and we have help in the government so that we can spin their deaths, make it look like they were trying to stop the hitters, but this can’t keep happening.”
J.W. nodded. “Hanley is fucking everything up. As soon as we have location intel from Shaw, you need to send a full strike package down on him.”
“Agreed,” Scardino said, and then he left the room again to check in with his forces in the field.