Back Blast (16 page)

R
aphael and his brother Raul had no clue their customer was going to murder them, not even when two of the customer’s business associates entered their garage and pulled the bay doors down, cutting off any chance for their escape.

They had no real reason to be concerned. After all, the brothers had done quality work in the short time frame demanded by their customer, and he stood before them now, clearly more than pleased with the results.

Murquin al-Kazaz was the customer, and they had an inkling he was a dangerous man, but they couldn’t have known he was a Saudi intelligence operative. Not that they would have really cared. The brothers ran a small chop shop operation just outside of Baltimore, so they dealt with all sorts of shady characters on a daily basis. They’d never done work for a foreign spy, as far as they knew, but they had no aversion to such a customer, as long as he had cash.

Their specialty was high-speed paint- and bodywork that could make a stolen car unrecognizable, even to its owner, along with changing out VIN numbers and tags. They offered other services, as well, for a premium, of course, and it was one of these special orders that would hasten them on to the end of their lives.

But for the moment they just stood there, nodded at the two new men who’d entered and closed the bay doors. Before they could ask what was going on their customer told the brothers that he and his colleagues just wanted to make sure no one on the street saw the three vehicles parked in the garage. Raphael and Raul did not protest, chiefly because they thought they were seconds away from making a lot of money from the man who now praised them while kneeling down next to one of the cars and running
his hand back and forth over the blue decal that read Metropolitan Police, Washington, D.C.

—

K
az marveled at the work done by the two Puerto Rican brothers. It wasn’t just that they had turned three regular used Ford Tauruses into the spitting image of D.C. Metro police cruisers—it was that they had managed to accomplish this in only twelve hours.

Kaz had come up with this plan some time ago, long before he knew the Gray Man would show up in Washington, D.C. Two years earlier he envisioned a number of scenarios where he would need to move men, armed men in disguise, throughout the city on either direct action or counterintelligence missions. He had his agents travel to Ohio and purchase three lightly used late-model Ford Taurus sedans at auction, and then they brought the cars back to the D.C. area, where they stored them in a long-term garage just outside of Springfield.

The Ford Taurus was the same body style as the Ford Police Interceptor sold to the Metro Police Department, so Kaz purchased the cars with the intent to turn them into mock police cruisers.

After obtaining the vehicles, he searched the area via his deep back channels in the criminal underworld, looking for a person or business that had the high workmanship and low morals that he needed. He found these two brothers in Baltimore. Their chop shop had run below the radar of the local authorities, but one of the Saudi’s contacts knew about them, and he passed the info on to Kaz.

Al-Kazaz bought the lights off of old junked police cars and he had all the decals needed for each cruiser created by a company in China off of detailed digital images his men had made of real D.C. police vehicles. He then had the decals brought into the U.S. via the diplomatic pouch.

After this, he waited. Kaz knew the minute he converted the three normal Fords into police cruisers he would be committing a serious crime, and he did not need them for his work immediately, so he decided it would be prudent to keep everything under lock and key until he had use for the cars. He stored the decals and lights and sirens on embassy property, locked in a storage room accessible only to intelligence officers. The three Tauruses
remained in the underground lot, and the phone number of Raphael and Raul stood at the ready in his contact list.

Until yesterday afternoon.

Now Kaz rose up from his close inspection of the last cruiser with a smile on his face. “Gentlemen, I must congratulate you again on your incredible workmanship.”

Raphael did the talking, because Raul’s English wasn’t good enough to understand the foreign accent of the customer. “No problem. Like I said, the paint and glaze run eighteen hundred total. The labor is three grand for each car. That’s ten thousand, eight hundred.”

Kaz nodded again, and he looked at both men. They stood right next to the rear of the third white cruiser. “A fair price, I am sure,” he said. “Shall we all step into your office to complete the transaction?”

The office was above the garage, up a small set of stairs.

Raphael shook his head. “We don’t leave the garage when it’s open. Somebody could show up and steal something. You brought cash?”

Kaz said, “Yes. Of course.” He backed away from the pristine white car a few feet, hoping the two Puerto Rican brothers would follow. Instead Raphael said, “Where are you goin’?”

Kaz made to reach into his coat. “Just getting the money. I want to count it, maybe the light is better here closer to the door.”

Raphael looked up at the powerful lights illuminating the Ford Tauruses. “The light don’t get no better than this right here. Just count out the money on the hood so we can all see it.”

Kaz had been trying to get the men to step away from the car to avoid a mess, but now he just blew out a long sigh of frustration and looked to his two associates with a shrug.

Raphael said, “The money?”

“Oh, yes. Of course. I have it all right here.” His hand disappeared into his coat and then reemerged holding a suppressed Walther P99 semiautomatic pistol. Both brothers raised their hands in surprise, but the Saudi shot them where they stood, dropping Raphael straight down to the floor with a shot to the head, and then spinning Raul twice with two rounds to the chest. The heavyset Puerto Rican slammed into the right rear quarter panel of the closest Taurus, and he died with his body draped over the trunk of the vehicle.

“Waa faqri!”
Kaz shouted.
Dammit.

He jerked his head to the dead man on the car and one of his two operatives stepped over to the body, pulled it from the back of the Ford, and allowed it to slide down to the floor of the garage.

A large blood smear remained on the vehicle.

“Clean it up,” Kaz demanded.

Twenty minutes later three D.C. Metro Police Department cruisers left the chop shop hidden in a tractor-trailer the Saudis had had waiting outside. The big rig drove south to Virginia, where the Saudis dropped the trailer off in a leased parking lot in Rosslyn, a neighborhood of Arlington, just across the Potomac River from D.C.

A two-story gated home backed up to the lot, and this was owned by a shell company for Saudi intelligence. The property had been employed as a Saudi safe house for years, and the evening before, Kaz had moved his ten assets into the home to use it as a staging base for the duration of the Gentry operation.

Back when he’d bought the Tauruses and the decals for the vehicles, Kaz had also acquired a dozen police uniforms by having his agents purchase identical clothing and styles from uniform shops around the country. Shoes, utility belts, holsters, badges, buttons, and body armor were all purchased from various suppliers on the Internet.

The duty gun of the Metropolitan Police Force is the Glock 17, and at the same time he acquired the uniforms and accessories, Kaz also purchased a number of these handguns from a supplier in Riyadh who acquired them directly from the manufacturer in Austria, with one major change to the actual duty gun. These Glocks were outfitted with threaded barrels, which would allow a silencer to be attached at the end.

D.C. cops didn’t use silencers—no regular police force on the planet did—but these were no regular police. They were assassins. Kaz knew this group of assets might need to keep the sound of their gunfire to a minimum, so he purchased the threaded barrels and suppressors to fit them.

All these were brought in via the diplomatic pouch as well, and then locked in the care of Saudi intelligence in the embassy until this morning, when they’d been handed out to his ten operatives.

Ammunition was purchased in a gun shop in Roanoke, and even here Kaz and his men strived for accuracy. They bought Winchester Ranger full
metal jacket ammunition, similar to the duty ammo used by the MPD. While Kaz had been unable to obtain the exact Winchester rounds used by the police since it was only sold in bulk to law enforcement agencies, research into ballistics told him the civilian bullets he obtained would be virtually indistinguishable from the duty ammo when dug out of a body by a coroner or surgeon.

When Kaz and his men returned with the police cars, they stepped into the safe house and saw the seven other operatives already dressed in the full light-blue-on-dark-blue uniforms of the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia. It was an impressive sight, and Kaz knew they would look even more the part once they climbed into their cruisers.

Soon all ten men presented themselves for inspection in D.C. Metro uniforms. Kaz checked them over carefully, and he was pleased with what he saw. Some of these men spoke excellent English, and others struggled, but Kaz had no plans to have them interact with the public like real police officers. No, on the Gentry hunt they would be assassins, only moved into the target area when Denny Carmichael ordered them to a location to make the kill.

E
ven though Leland Babbitt didn’t make it into his office till after noon, he still worked a full nine hours before knocking off for the day and returning to his five-bedroom house on Cedar Parkway in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

His four-man home security detail already sat parked out front as Babbitt’s Lexus rolled into his driveway; the men worked a seven-to-seven shift, giving Babbitt’s property coverage through the hours of darkness. The men alternated patrols, with two in the vehicle at all times and two standing on the drive, walking around to the back from time to time, and sitting on the patio furniture, periodically casting an eye out to the Chevy Chase golf course that bordered his backyard in case any threats approached his property from the first fairway.

Babbitt’s wife didn’t much care for the security and she felt they were only there because Babbitt thought it made him look tough to the neighbors, but she didn’t fight her husband on it anymore, especially since one of their neighbors had her Porsche SUV stolen right out of her driveway several weeks back.

As he pulled into the driveway Babbitt acknowledged the two patrolling security officers there with a distracted wave. He closed his garage door a moment later, then climbed out of his car and stepped into his kitchen to find his wife waiting for him there.

“It’s eleven, Lee. Eleven!”

“Sorry I didn’t return your calls. Long day at work.”

He passed straight into the living room, with his wife close on his tail.

“I made dinner, you know.”

“I ate at the office.” He said it without looking up, because he’d pulled a bottle of fifteen-year-old Macallan from his bar and was now concentrating on a two-finger pour into a leaded crystal rocks glass.

He turned towards the floor-to-ceiling windows in his living room, which gave him a terrific view of the golf course just beyond his ample backyard and a six-foot-high ironwork fence.

While Babbitt faced the window, drink in hand, his wife stood behind him near the stairs. She stared him down, waiting for him to answer for himself or to notice her. Neither of which he did.

Babbitt’s two kids were in college, so they had the place to themselves, but since the kids had left for school they’d done little to take advantage of the privacy. Babbitt had been obsessed with Gentry since well before Brussels, but after returning from Europe, minus a huge contingent of his men and the Top Secret clearance that gave his company the access they needed to function, Babbitt had barely acknowledged the existence of his wife.

His wife, who was still behind him and still hoping for some reaction from her husband, just sighed and headed for the stairs.

—

C
ourt Gentry moved his binoculars back and forth between Babbitt and his wife. To himself he said, “She’s pissed, and he couldn’t care less.”

Neither could Gentry, actually; he was just trying to get an accurate accounting of who was inside the property.

By the time Babbitt arrived home Gentry had already been in place for hours. He’d climbed over the back fence just after eight p.m., after a one-hour reconnaissance spent up in an oak tree on the first fairway of the golf course, and now he lay flat on his cold and muddy belly in a thick corner flower garden that was not yet in full bloom, but nevertheless provided a fair amount of cover, as long as Court remained low.

He wore black Carhartt work pants, a black hoodie over a black thermal, and dark brown boots. His face was covered by his gaiter and his knit cap, and on his hands he wore black Mechanix gloves. His black backpack completed the theme to his ensemble. He wasn’t invisible, but he was damn close. It would take both a keen pair of eyes and a direct hit from a flashlight to notice him here.

Court had spent the last two hours carefully thinking over his ingress to the target location. He saw several motion sensor lights closer to Babbitt’s house, but he knew he could defeat them when he made his approach by simply moving slowly. All motion sensor equipment was calibrated to detect
objects traveling above a certain speed, and Court had spent nearly twenty years of his life in work that, more often than one might imagine, required him to outsmart the little computer chip in a motion detecting light.

He also took care to identify the lines of sight from the different windows of the property so he could avoid advancing in view of anyone inside.

It seemed to Court like Babbitt put the majority of his trust for his family’s safety in the hands of his goons in the SUV out front, and the foot patrol. The Babbitts didn’t have a dog; this became clear when Court scanned the perfectly green back lawn. The only disruption in the grass was on either side of a paving stone walkway that circled the house, and from the foot patrol that began once Babbitt came home, it was obvious the two men walking abreast were the culprits.

The security officers looked competent to Gentry, but he knew they wouldn’t be members of Townsend’s A-team. No, these were static guards, well trained, but not to the level of the Townsend operators he’d squared off against in Belgium. And they were well equipped, but not as well equipped as the men he’d fought before.

That said, Court looked at their gear longingly. Each guard carried an HK MP5 nine-millimeter submachine gun hanging from a two-point sling around his neck, and wore a black Kevlar bulletproof vest under a light chest rig that carried three more thirty-round magazines for the sub gun, as well as two mags for the Smith and Wesson M&P nine-millimeter pistols that jutted out of the holsters on their utility belts.

Court thought about how much he’d like to take one of these guys down, drag him back into the bushes, and liberate him of all that good gear.

But that wasn’t going to happen in any sort of low-profile way, so he pushed the fantasy away.

Now Court observed Lee Babbitt himself standing right in front of his huge back window, exposed to the world, and he noticed the relaxed nature of the man, as well as that of his protection detail. While Gentry scanned through his binos he thought about the lackadaisical attitude of the guard force, and he found it odd that the CIA had not told Babbitt to beef up his security profile yet. It made no sense to him whatsoever the man had not been informed that the person he’d chased all over the world was now on the loose in his own area code.

Court worried this could have been some sort of a trap, so he took a moment to lift his head and begin a 360-degree scan of the area. Behind him was the dark golf course—he could see it through the bars of the iron fence—and just beyond the grounds of the country club, the silhouettes of darkened office buildings rose three or four stories into the sky. To Court’s left and right were other homes, and he’d neither seen nor heard humans nor dogs at either residence. And dead ahead was Lee Babbitt, his wife, and four armed dudes who didn’t have a clue this evening was about to become the most interesting night of their careers as security guards.

Now Court just needed to sit here till Babbitt and his wife went to bed. Once that happened, Court would wait for the guards to pass on their lazy patrol, then he would move to the window. He had purchased a high-end glass-cutting tool at the hardware store that could get him through the sliding doors without triggering the home alarm, although Court knew it would take at least ten minutes to cut through both panes. He’d have to work a couple of minutes, then secrete himself from the strolling Townsend men behind some raised flower beds before returning to work as soon as they moved around to the front. Eventually he’d remove an eighteen-inch circle of the double-paned window, and he’d slip inside the home. As long as he didn’t open the door or shatter any glass, the security alarm would not be triggered, and he’d be free to move around inside the home.

Just then, the two patrolling security men made an ambling pass through the backyard; a flashlight waved in front of them but didn’t reach into the corners of the property. Within a minute they disappeared around the side of the house on their way back out front.

Court looked through the back window again, and he noticed Babbitt’s wife had moved to the staircase and Babbitt himself had stepped over to his bar, facing the other direction. Court rose to his knees and began crawling through the garden, wanting to take the opportunity to cover as much ground as possible while no one was looking his way. This flower bed continued down the side of the backyard, almost to the back patio, so Court felt confident he could come close to within steps of the back door without risking compromise.

“Here we go,” he said softly, and he began his slow progression through the garden.

—

W
hen are you coming to bed?” Babbitt’s wife asked. She stood at the top of the staircase, a halfhearted attempt at a come-hither look on her face, which was hard to generate, considering the person who generated it was tired and angry and the person it was directed to had shown not a shred of interest so far.

“Later,” Babbitt replied without looking up.

“What about now?” she asked again, hoping the cajoling would at least cause her husband to turn around.

“I’m on the scent of a new target, dear. Something big. You know it takes all my energy.”

“What energy?” She turned away. It was a rhetorical question. Before she disappeared on the landing to the second floor, she said, “This time, do try to go after someone you can handle.” There was a mocking tone to her voice, a small riposte to her husband’s rejection. “Not like that target in Belgium, I mean. All those funeral dresses I bought to wear last month went out of fashion on the first day of spring.”

—

B
abbitt growled into his glass as he wet his lips with the Macallan. “Bitch.”

He turned on the stereo, flipped to a classical station, and began pacing back and forth across the living room, backed by Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony in C Minor. His mind tuned out his wife’s barbs, and it went back to spinning with ideas and planning, logistics and tactics.

“Where the hell are you, Gentry?” he said softly, standing at the floor-to-ceiling window now, looking out over his back lawn and garden and the dark golf course beyond it.

Babbitt paced. Struggled with the mind-set of an assassin.

Gentry would have fled Belgium, for certain. The CIA thought he was in central Europe, but Babbitt disagreed. Fleeing the continent was Gentry’s usual MO after a big operation.

But where would he go?

Latin America? No. That had been his last distant refuge. He wouldn’t go back, not yet.

Africa was out; he’d gotten himself into quite a bit of trouble there a couple of years ago. Of course, it was a big continent, but Babbitt just didn’t see Gentry returning to Africa now.

Asia? Yeah, maybe.

Babbitt finished the last swig of his scotch, stepped back to his little bar, and made himself a third drink.

Returning to the window, he thought about Asia again.

“Asia. Yes,” Babbitt said. He felt confident he was in Gentry’s brain now. He knew where he’d go.

Immediately Babbitt pulled out his phone and began thumbing through contacts, looking for the number of his Hong Kong–based agent. It would be mid-morning there—he could reach his man and get him started on building an infrastructure for the hunt to come.

Absently, while he scrolled through his phone, he lifted his rocks glass to down a swig of Macallan. Just as he brought it up to chest height the glass cracked, broke apart, and fell from his hand, dousing his shirt and trousers with the tepid scotch.

Babbitt looked down at the mess, an expression of mild surprise on his face. He took a half step back, concerned he’d cut his hand on the lead crystal.

Then he saw the blood, and it wasn’t on his hand.

A hole in the middle of his white shirt, just to the left of center, from which redness grew, expanding.

Leland Babbitt dropped his phone on the floor, brought both hands to his wound, realizing only now that he’d been shot. He was in the industry, so he recognized within another second that the shooter must have employed a suppressed weapon. He looked up to his sliding glass door, just five feet in front of him, and he saw the hole in the glass at chest height, and he looked beyond the glass and saw movement in his garden on the far edge of the patio. A dark silhouette appeared from his rosebushes, turned, and began running towards his back fence.

“Gentry?” It came out in a hoarse whisper, and then Leland Babbitt dropped dead in a heap on the floor.

Leland Babbitt was the first person, but certainly not the last person, to believe with absolute conviction that he had been assassinated by the Gray Man.

—

C
ourt was on the move before Babbitt’s face slammed down on the living room tile. He’d heard no gunshot, but the screaming bullet had zinged through the night air from behind him on his right, crackling by at high speed thirty or forty feet off his right shoulder, and then snapping through the window glass.

Gentry gave up stealth for speed in his race to leave the scene, because he needed to get the hell out of here as fast as possible. He had a litany of immediate concerns, and none of them would go away as long as he remained hiding in the garden bed.

He was worried about the sniper, of course—there was a guy out here with a gun and eyes on the back of the property, but he was several orders of magnitude more concerned about the armed assholes
on
the property. Court had closed to within twenty feet of the back door, and as soon as Babbitt’s body was discovered the estate would be locked down tight, lights would turn on, and Gentry would be way too close to avoid detection.

Two members of Babbitt’s security detail were somewhere walking the grounds. They carried HK submachine guns, and Court only had a tiny .380 to fight them off.

Court knew if they saw him it was going to be a
fucking
mess.

He ran to the iron fence, but he hesitated climbing over it, because he had no idea if the sniper was still watching. It occurred to him that since Babbitt’s body had not yet been discovered it might be better if he stayed here, at least for a minute or two, to give the shooter time to break down his position and leave his sniper’s hide, thus giving Court a better opportunity to—