Al-Kazaz yelled now. “This is an outrageous lie! I know nothing of this!” He turned to Carmichael. “Denny, tell them this is not true. Don’t join their lie to save yourself. You need me!”
Court lifted the HK assault weapon off the table and pointed it at al-Kazaz’s head. “Well, I sure as shit don’t need you.”
Kaz shut his eyes.
Catherine King screamed, “No, Six! Don’t do it!”
Court held the gun there, the laser sight painted on the man’s forehead. Finally he lowered it. With his eyes still on Kaz, he said, “Denny, your only chance at surviving the next fifteen minutes hinges on you coming clean on all this. Right fucking now.”
Catherine King did what she could to defuse the situation. “Denny, anything you say will be considered off the record. You have my word.”
Denny Carmichael spoke in a defeated voice now. “You have to understand the opportunity that I had. It was one of the most successful intelligence operations of the past half century, and it was all me. No one knew I had a highly placed man in al Qaeda, and a highly placed man in Saudi intelligence.”
He paused for a moment, then turned to Kaz. “It was the same man.
“It’s true. Kaz had been feeding me al Qaeda intel for two years, but he knew he was burned. AQ discovered he was a Saudi intelligence officer. He’d been tipped off that the trip to Italy was cover to get him out of Pakistan so he could be assassinated without causing a rift between al Qaeda and their Saudi benefactors. He asked me to save him. I needed to keep Kaz secure, but I couldn’t pull him out by going through normal channels, because the relationship was not approved. I sent you, Six, gave you an old image of Kaz he’d taken in Tel Aviv, and told you he was an Israeli asset.”
Carmichael continued, “I swear to Christ, Court, I had no idea the assassin was an Israeli asset. Kaz didn’t know, either.
“I made a quick decision, the only rational decision I could have made. I had to save him.” Carmichael leaned forward, straining against his bindings. “And lo and behold, it worked.”
Court was still looking at Kaz, but he spoke to Carmichael. “The only problem was the man I killed was the best penetration agent any service had in the enemy’s command structure. Higher than Kaz. He was core AQ.”
Carmichael lowered his head. “A few days after BACK BLAST I got a call from Manny Aurbach at Mossad. He said he had a man go dark in Trieste. He told me he was undercover as AQ. Manny asked me if we’d heard any chatter. Immediately I suspected, but I asked for a picture. I sent it to Kaz and he confirmed it was the man you shot. I had to cover it up from the Israelis, not to protect you”—Carmichael shrugged when he said it—“but to protect Kaz. By this time he was back in Saudi Arabia, but if I told Manny the truth, that it was an honest mistake, he would know I’d been trading intel with the Saudis at an unapproved level, and he would have gone to others here in the U.S. to have me derailed.
“So I lied to Manny. That should have been that.”
“But?” Catherine asked.
Denny continued, “But a full year later a Serbian who was at the villa in Trieste gave the Mossad a picture of you standing over Hawthorn’s body.”
Court cocked his head. “How the hell did he happen to get a picture of that?”
“It was a covert camera set up in Kaz’s room. It’s a picture of you standing in front of a window, silenced pistol. Hawthorn is in the doorway falling to the floor after you shot him. God knows why the Serbian gangsters set the camera up, or why they sent it to the Mossad, but they did. At that point Manny knew his man had been assassinated, and he knew the only force that could pull it off was the Americans.” He paused. “I couldn’t deny. I told them you must have gone rogue, done the job for money. I had to terminate you so the Israelis couldn’t talk to you. If they did, they could just show you a picture of Hawthorn and you would know that wasn’t the man you were sent to rescue. If you told the Israelis then they would know BACK BLAST was a lie.”
Court looked down at the floor for a minute, saying nothing.
Finally Catherine called out to him. “Six, are you okay?”
Softly he said, “The Serbians did not have a camera in that room.”
“They must have. How else did they get the image?”
“They didn’t.” Court turned to al-Kazaz. “You took the picture. I remember.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“The pen. The pen in your hand. I remember it now. All your other items in that room, papers, luggage, your computer. Everything else could stay, but you had to put that pen in your pocket. I thought it was strange at the time, but I had too much going on to worry about it.”
“What does a stupid pen have to do with any of this?”
Denny Carmichael’s face reddened with fury. “I gave you that pen. It contained a pinhole camera. You son of a bitch!”