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  Coffee was poured and pastries were offered by Townsend canteen workers, but Denny Carmichael himself waved the Townsend staff out the door along with his close-protection detail.

  As everyone but the executives filed out of the conference room, Babbitt and Parks sat down across from their guest. Babbitt said, “Heard your daughter is expecting. Congratulations.”

  To this Carmichael replied, “This morning’s meeting will be brief, and it will stay on theme. What, in God’s name, happened in Estonia?”

  Babbitt kept his chin up and his voice strong as he spoke. “Resistance from the target. We expected him to mount a robust defense. He is, after all, the Gray Man. But our direct action team was, nevertheless, disabled. We lost a lot of good men.”

  Babbitt bowed his head over the shiny tabletop almost as if saying a short prayer to himself over his fallen men.

  Carmichael leaned forward, speaking with unmistakable anger. “You could not have possibly been more aware of the capabilities of Courtland Gentry.”

  “Certainly we were aware, and we remain so. We sent in eight of our best men, and then only after real-time intelligence from the singleton operative.”

  “And still, Gentry wiped out the strike team.”

  Babbitt nodded. “Seven dead. One wounded and arrested.”

  “Christ,” Carmichael groaned. “We didn’t need that!”

  “No,” agreed Babbitt.

  “And your solo asset survived?”

  “My intel about what happened came directly from Dead Eye, who was ordered to stand down before the raid. He reported hearing the target fire first. We don’t know if Gentry just got lucky, happened to see the strike team as they approached his location, or if he had some sort of warning or countermeasures in place that were missed by our men.”

  “And where is Dead Eye now?”

  “He was wounded, but he is still operational.”

  “If he stood down before the op, how was he wounded?”

  “On his own initiative he entered the engagement. He was unable to respond in time to save the direct action assets, but he caught a round from Gentry’s gun in the process.”

  Denny sighed, strumming his fingers on the table. “And collateral damage? We are told that two policemen were killed, along with a civilian.”

  Jeff Parks chimed in quickly. “All at the hands of Court Gentry.” He paused. Then said, “A CIA-trained asset who has gone rogue.” This was clearly an attempt to deflect a touch of responsibility for the disaster back on the CIA itself.

  Denny just gave Parks an eat shit look.

  Babbitt cleared his throat. “Look, I’m not going to tell you no mistakes were made last night. We’ll do an after-action hot wash with the surviving member of the direct action team as soon as we can, and we will make any improvements in our tactics and procedures that we need to make to reflect the data he can provide. But, Denny, you handed us a very difficult case here, and we will sort it out for you. We just hit a snag.”

  Carmichael looked off into space a moment. “None of this would have happened if you had warned Sidorenko about Gentry’s impending attack. I am told Sid had fifty men at his dacha. With the heads-up you had that Gentry was ingressing into the AO, you could have just picked up the phone and allowed Sidorenko to prepare a defense that Gentry would have walked right into.”

  Babbitt shook his head. “We did not see a high probability that Sidorenko’s security measures could have been employed to eliminate the target. Added to that, there was a chance that Sid or his people could have unwittingly tipped Gentry off about the advance warning, at which point he would know he was under aerial surveillance. We could not allow that to happen if we were going to track him in the future.”

  Denny’s steel-gray eyes narrowed. “That’s the biggest crock of shit I’ve ever heard, Lee. You were afraid you wouldn’t get paid if Gentry died at the hands of the St. Petersburg mob.”

  Babbitt rolled his hands over and opened them on the table, a palms-up gesture. “It would have been nice to have had the proper assurances from you that our contract bonus conditions would have been met without physical presence of our personnel at the point of elimination.”

  “I can terminate your contract right now,” Carmichael said angrily.

  Babbitt did not blink. “You can. But you won’t. We got guns in Gray Man’s face; Dead Eye says he might have even wounded him. That’s something CIA hasn’t managed to do in five years.”

  “We’ve had eyes on him,” Carmichael countered.

  “You had him in Russia, and you let him go. You had him in Sudan, and he got away. You had him in Mexico, and again, he escaped.”

  “Just as he escaped your net, Lee.”

  “We will pick him up again. Soon. If you have a minute, we’d like to take you down to the signal room to show you some new technology we are deploying in the hunt.”

  Carmichael shook his head. “Every minute you spend telling me how you are going to catch and kill Court Gentry is another minute you aren’t catching and killing Court Gentry.”

  The CIA’s top spy stood up from the table, indicating the end of the meeting.

  He said, “This isn’t fun anymore. Find him. Kill him.” He paused. “I will approve an update to your contract to stipulate that Townsend will be rewarded for Gentry’s termination.”

  “Regardless of the circumstances?”

  “Barring undue collateral damage, yes.”

  “Define undue,” Parks said with a raised eyebrow.

  Carmichael looked at him with cold eyes peering out of his tanned and deeply lined face. “No.”

  The silence in the room lasted several seconds. Finally Babbitt walked around the table. “Excellent, Denny.” The two men shook hands, but Babbitt was the only one who looked happy. “This will facilitate the hunt.”

  Denny started walking toward the door of the conference room. Babbitt walked along with him, and Parks trailed behind. “Lee . . . you have done good work for us in the past. We value our relationship with Townsend. It keeps my testimony to congressional hearings simple, and your people always get their man.”

  Lee put his hand on Denny’s back as they strode up the hallway to the foyer. “We’re patriots here at Townsend. We’re proud to serve. You know that.”

  Denny did not respond to this. Instead he said, “Court Gentry is a different animal. His very existence is creating a dangerous rift in the U.S. intelligence community. When he goes away, America will benefit greatly.”

  “How so?” asked Babbitt. “I’ve read every word of his file that’s not redacted, many times, and it leaves me with more questions than answers. I understand he killed other personnel on his task force. But . . .”

  “His termination has been approved by the Director of National Intelligence. If that’s not good enough for you, then you are in the wrong business.”

  Babbitt persisted. “There’s something more. Something not in the file. Isn’t there?”

  “It’s classified, Lee.”

  “It’s me, Denny.”

  Carmichael stopped walking. They were in the center of the foyer now. Denny’s security team had formed a diamond shape around him, ready to usher him outside and back into his Navigator, but Babbitt remained inside the coverage.

  Denny seemed to struggle with his next comment. Finally he said, “American national security vis-à-vis a crucial ally has been severely degraded by our inability to take Court Gentry off the playing field. You and your organization are our last best hope for nothing less than the future good relations with an important partner on the world stage.”

  He patted Babbitt on the shoulder. “Don’t fail me, Lee. You can expect more oversight on this. I will not allow another massacre like what happened last night in Tallinn.”

  Denny acknowledged Parks with a brisk nod, then turned and left with his security detail.

  Babbitt stood there on the marble floor of the hallway, thinking over what D/NCS Carmichael had just told him. Another cou
ntry wanted Gray Man dead, so the CIA was pulling out all the stops to make it so.

  What the hell?

  Parks stepped up to his boss. “That went swimmingly.” His sarcasm was clear.

  Babbitt was still weighing over Denny’s nonexplanation of the reasons behind the Gentry contract. He shook away his confusion and addressed Parks. “Additional oversight, my ass. He’s not going to move us to Langley, and he’s not going to send Langley personnel to us. The reason we have this job is so there are no comebacks on the Agency. Carmichael sees Townsend as his own private army. He won’t fuck that up by sending over official eyes and ears. He’s bluffing. We’ll be fine.” He held a finger up. “Correction. If we find Gentry in the next few days we’ll be fine.”

  Jeff Parks knew this was his cue to fill Lee in on the status of the hunt.

  “I’ve got our best hackers pulling feeds from every municipal and private security network in the area. The newest facial recog software is processing it all.”

  “How wide a net?”

  “All of the Baltic, of course. Part of Poland. We can pull in Germany and Ukraine if we need to, but the costs will skyrocket. Also, there is a daily ferry from Tallinn to Sweden that also stops in Norway, so I’ve added Oslo and Stockholm to the collection haul.”

  “Can the software keep up with all that data?”

  “It’s the best there is. Better than the newest stuff they are using at the Fort.” Babbitt knew “the Fort” was Fort Meade, home of the National Security Agency.

  “Good. You have the personnel you need?”

  “I have everyone working on it. It’s a matter of time before Gentry shows his face in front of a camera. When he does, we will be on him within a few hours.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  When they were still in the arrivals cab stand at Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport, the taxi driver asked his passenger if he was absolutely certain he had the correct address. The passenger was, after all, a Westerner, and the address he gave was, after all, in the Dahiyeh, the southern suburbs of Beirut. The Dahiyeh was the tough part of town, and the particular neighborhood that was the requested destination of the brown-haired man with the eyeglasses and the sport coat was populated predominately by poor Shias; crime was rampant there and kidnappings of Westerners was certainly not unheard of. The driver pictured this fare of his paying him and then stepping out of the taxi, only to be grabbed off the street, dragged to a basement, and chained to a radiator.

  Hence the cabbie’s plea that the man double-check the proffered address.

  But the foreigner’s Gulf Arabic was surprisingly fluid and his reply was confident; he explained with a comfortable smile that he had influential friends in the government here in the capital, as well as friends in that neighborhood in particular, and he was not concerned for his safety in the least.

  The taxi driver took that to mean this stranger—this Westerner—was tight with Hezbollah, and if true, that should get him out of most dangerous situations in the streets around their destination.

  After all, Hezbollah was the law around here.

  Russell Whitlock had not told the truth to the taxi driver. He had no associates here in the government whatsoever. He had worked in the Middle East during a large portion of his career with the CIA, and he had been in and out of Beirut enough times as a NOC operative and a member of the National Clandestine Service’s Autonomous Asset Program, but he wasn’t exactly drinking tea and smoking a hookah with the town council on those trips. No, here in Beirut he’d assassinated a Syrian general and a Hezbollah politician and an al Qaeda banker, but those operations did not come with the free time or the backstories to allow him to cavort with the local intelligentsia or glitterati.

  So he was going to have to bullshit his way through today.

  As they drove south they passed bombed-out buildings from Lebanon’s most recent war with Israel, and they passed armed men in military uniforms driving motorcycles and standing on street corners eyeing every vehicle they passed. They drove by posters glorifying suicide bombers, men and, in many cases, women who had “martyred” themselves over the border in Israel. It seemed to Russ that on every block there was another picture of a bearded young man or a woman with her arms and head covered, always in front of a flag and always holding a Kalashnikov. All these young men and women were dead now, and Russ muttered “Good riddance” under his breath while he looked out the window, careful to keep his head low and his eyes unfixed on anything that looked like it might have been official military business, lest he cause his taxi to get pulled over and his papers to get scrutinized.

  Finally the cab arrived at the address. Russ paid the driver and climbed out, taking his small leather tote bag with him. He stood in the street as the taxi drove off, then looked up at the building in front of him.

  It was a mid-rise apartment building, maybe a dozen stories high, with antennae and satellite dishes bolted onto every horizontal or vertical surface. At street level, older boys and young men sat smoking and standing around in front of a souk that spilled out of an alley just up the sidewalk, and Russ had not even shaken his collar down and straightened out his slacks from the cab ride before a malevolent-looking group of young toughs began walking his way. He ignored them, acted oblivious to the danger, and strolled toward the sliding wire mesh gate in front of the building.

  A security guard stood inside the locked gate, staring back blankly. Russ told him he had a meeting with two men inside. The guard asked which two guys he was talking about, and this was Russ Whitlock’s first indication that he would have to bypass whatever flunkies were here in order to speak to someone with actual authority.

  A call was made from the guard to Russ’s hosts, and after a perfunctory search, he was let into the building.

  A few minutes later Russ knocked on the door to an apartment on the fifth floor. Behind him stood two security men who had just searched him. They seemed competent enough with the frisk, although they let their guard down to do it. As one man stood behind him, patting down his arms, the American knew he could ram back an elbow into the guard’s throat, spin him around, and stomp on the inside of his leg to break it. Then he could draw the man’s pistol from his waistband as he fell and with it shoot his partner.

  But none of this happened; Russ just war-gamed scenarios in his mind like this in order to stay prepared for days when such moves might be necessary.

  The door opened, and Russ found himself in a room with two dark-skinned and clean-shaven men in shirtsleeves. The men shook his hand while eyeing him warily. One looked to be over fifty, and the other might have been thirty-five.

  There was a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini on the wall; otherwise the apartment was all but barren. A teakettle whistled on the stove in the kitchen to Whitlock’s left, but the men ignored it. They asked to see Russ’s passport and his visa. He produced both from the inside breast pocket of his sport coat. His documentation was passed back and forth between the two men; it claimed his name was Michael Harkin and he was a Canadian citizen, an import/export consultant from Toronto.

  They handed him back his documentation, and all three sat down on threadbare sofas. Russ smiled at them, and they smiled back, but their body language read uncertainty.

  The men were with VEVAK—the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. They did not know who Russ was, really; they’d only been ordered to meet with the Westerner by bosses who themselves did not know Russ’s true identity.

  Russ knew this meeting would have happened somewhere else if the men he was coming to meet had had even an inkling of what he was about to offer them. Instead, Russ had contacted a man he knew to be an Iranian intelligence officer in Iraq posing as, of all things, a travel agent. Russ gave the man the Michael Harkin backstory and told him he had information to offer Iran regarding Iranian dissidents in Montreal who were operating in a computer hacking club that had created problems for the Iranian government.

  The computer hackers did exist; Russ had learned abou
t them in an article on the Internet. When the VEVAK man in Iraq asked how this Canadian man knew his identity, Harkin demurred, said he would make everything clear in a face-to-face meeting. He offered to come to Iraq, but instead he was given a counterproposal.

  When it was proposed that the persistent Westerner who knew the right people would have to journey to Beirut to meet with Iranian intelligence, Russ knew he could have balked. He could have asked for other arrangements, safer arrangements, to be made. Perhaps he could have gone to a third-party embassy or consulate in Denmark or Lithuania or Ukraine, maybe met agents there who would have then passed his message up the chain. Certainly, if his goal was to stay in character as Michael Harkin, there was no way in hell he would have come to Beirut.

  But Russ thought a few moves ahead on the chessboard—he’d studied from a master, after all—so he agreed to the meeting. He was not Michael Harkin. In order for his “true” identity to be believed, he had to display confidence in his ability to travel anywhere in the world.

  So here he was, sitting in front of Iranian intelligence in the center of the most dangerous part of Hezbollah-controlled Beirut.

  With a relaxed smile on his face.

  They offered him tea and he accepted; he’d spent enough time as a guest of Arabs and Persians to know how to behave.

  They spoke in English. A little small talk began as he told them about his flight and the traffic from the airport; the conversation was completely driven by Russ and not the two wary men who wondered who the fuck this guy was and what the fuck this guy wanted.

  Finally the older man said, “We were told by our colleagues in Tehran that a man who knew the right people and said the right things would be coming today. But we were warned that you have not given a credible reason as to why you chose to fly around the world and come here to talk to us. Something about computers, I understand?”

  “I was vague, yes,” Russ acknowledged.

  The younger of the two men—neither had offered his name—asked, “How can we be of service to an import/export consultant from Canada?”