At six p.m., video monitors at the TOC came alive with images and facial recognition hits. While the men and women working in the TOC struggled frantically to pin down the location on a map of the building, they saw shot after shot of Court Gentry’s face, totally exposed without a hat or sunglasses. He entered the north entrance of the mall at the ground floor, walked south through the food court, stood in line for a minute to buy a cup of coffee at a kiosk in the center of the large crowded space, and then took his drink to the escalator.
By now the TOC had him fixed and they had live feeds from the Fashion Centre camera network, so they were able to track him in real time. While one analyst contacted the JSOC operatives, who were twenty minutes away in the center of D.C., a second analyst ordered all CIA contract officers in the area into the location.
A third analyst, under orders to do so, contacted the head of the National Clandestine Service. Due to the death of Jordan Mayes, and Suzanne Brewer’s hospitalization with a broken leg, Denny Carmichael had taken over operational control of the Violator TOC. Denny had the live video feed patched through to his Alexandria safe house, and he immediately disconnected the call.
—
Court Gentry took the escalator up to the second floor of the mall, and then he walked directly to a rear entrance of the adjoining Ritz-Carlton Pentagon City. He wove through the back of the hotel until he came to the front lobby, and here he stepped up to the elevator bank.
He took the elevator to the fifth floor, where he walked down the hall to a corner suite and entered with a key card.
—
All eight operational Saudi assets arrived at the Ritz-Carlton just ten minutes later, which was only possible because the hotel was less than a half mile from their safe house. The men wore suits and ties, they came through the two entrances in groups of four, and they looked calm and casual, like businessmen returning from a day at a conference, as they split into four groups in the lobby.
Two men took the main stairs, two men took an elevator to a floor above Gentry’s hotel room, two men entered the Employees Only door and made their way to the service stairs, and two more men waited in the hall.
They all had suppressed Glock 17 pistols and combat knives, and they were all trained killers. At first their earbuds connected them to the director of their service, who had given them the kill order and the room number, but then he had to disconnect for a meeting, so now they just communicated softly to one another.
The team leader, a man named Cha, remained in the lobby with an asset named Jawad. He had the three ascending teams give a final “go check” and then he unleashed them on room 545.
—
Hani and Kimal moved up the stairs, climbing quickly with their weapons behind their backs. Up on the fourth floor of the stairwell they heard movement, so they raised their weapons, then spun around from the landing just below. There, a hunched-over middle-aged janitor with gray-blond hair mopped the floor, softly rapping along to the Kid Rock song in his headphones. He faced the opposite direction, so the two assets hid their pistols inside their coats and kept going up.
They stepped around the housekeeping cart and passed the hunched-over man without a glance as he continued his rap, and they ignored the words, concentrating on listening for sounds higher up, nearer to their target area.
Until then they both heard the man behind them speak in a loud, low voice. “I know you didn’t just track across my clean floor.”
The assets stood on the stairs above the janitor now. They spun back, looked down, and found themselves facing a large handgun with a larger silencer. Behind the weapon, where the janitor had been, now stood a surprisingly large man holding a mop in one hand and the pistol in the other.
—
Zack Hightower stood up fully now, adding six inches to his height. He said, “Nighty-night, bitches,” and his Heckler & Koch pistol barked twice in the stairwell. He stepped back on the landing and moved his mop out of the way, and two bodies slid down into the space he had just occupied. Both men were on their backs, their eyes open, holes in their foreheads.
He shot both men once more in the head, just to make sure.
Hightower held a small microphone in his left hand, hidden behind the mop handle. He quickly brought it to his mouth as his slipped the pistol back in the housekeeping cart. “Two down. South stairwell clear.”
—
Four Saudi operators closed on room 545 at the end of the hall, their suppressed pistols trained on the door. They all wanted to know where their two partners from the stairs were, but they were operating in radio silence now, so they could only listen in while Cha downstairs called over and over for Kimal and Hani to check in.
One of the assets kept his eye on the stairwell, far behind him, worried something must have gone very wrong, but the other three stayed focused on the mission. They moved all the way to the door, and one man raised his foot to kick it in.
—