Denny said, “Be prepared to employ them. I want your head on a swivel.”
The copilot spoke up. Unsure. “We were rushed into this . . . uh . . . Anything you can tell us about what we’re up against would be helpful.”
Denny shrugged. He said, “The threat is an ex-asset, code name Violator. A former Agency paramilitary officer with one hell of a grudge.”
The pilot spun his head back around sixty degrees and stared through his visor at the much older man. “One guy? All this is about one guy?”
Denny’s leathery face turned even harder as he looked back into the pilot’s visor. “Son, do I look like I scare easily?”
“Not at all.”
“Well, this son of a bitch scares me to death. Turn around and fly this thing to Langley, and be ready for inbound missiles.”
“Sir,” he said with a slight nod, and then he focused fully on the flight.
Twenty seconds later Carmichael was back on the phone with his number two. “Get my family out of town. Have them taken to the ranch in Provo. If Violator is here for me I want them out of the way so I can do what I need to do.”
The helo began swaying to the left and right, not quite in jerking movements, but certainly nausea-inducing to those in back.
DeRenzi moved forward and sat down next to Carmichael. He had his own intercom-ready headset on. He tapped the pilot on his back, but the man did not turn around.
The security officer asked, “Why the hell are we flying like this?”
Carmichael answered for the pilot, who was fully occupied with his work. “We have to operate under the assumption that Gentry has a SAM, or at least an RPG. We’ll stay low to counter the SAM threat, but we need to fly like this over population centers to counter an RPG.”
DeRenzi then asked, “Why do you think Gentry has a SAM or an RPG?”
Carmichael looked out the window, focusing on the twinkling lights of the D.C. suburbs below him. “Because he’s the fucking Gray Man.”
2
A dimly lit street in the center of Washington Highlands was a hell of a place for a nighttime stroll.
The Highlands were in the southeastern corner of the District, over the Anacostia River in Ward Eight. Full of high-rise government housing, low-income apartment complexes, and derelict single-family homes on tiny lots strewn with garbage, Ward Eight had been the second most dangerous ward in the District behind Ward Seven, but it had recently retaken the lead thanks to a triple murder in the last week of the reporting period.
But despite the late hour and the area’s infamous reputation, a lone pedestrian ambled calmly through the misty evening, heading north on Atlantic Street SE as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He walked along a broken sidewalk, catching the glow of most all of the streetlamps that had not been shot out or burned out and left black by a city that didn’t give a damn about its poorest residents. He wore blue jeans and a wrinkled blue blazer, his dark brown hair was tousled and damp, and a clean-shaven face revealed him as white, which, around here, at this time of night, meant he was probably up to no good.
It was ten p.m., and the neighborhood appeared devoid of any life other than the solo pedestrian. But while the street itself was barren, several sets of eyes tracked the man’s movements. Astonished senior citizens looked out from behind their barred apartment windows. A single mother up with a sick kid watched through the bolted Plexiglas door of her duplex unit with a wince of regret, knowing good and well the damn fool in the street was going to get rolled at best and murdered at worst. And a teen with a cell phone on a darkened stoop of an apartment building watched the man carefully, reporting what he saw to an acquaintance at the other end of the connection with hopes of collecting a finder’s fee if his friend showed up with a crew and beat every last item of value off of the hapless outsider.
But the teen and his friend were out of luck, because another group of predators were closer, and they also had their eyes on this target of opportunity.
Three dark silhouettes watched the white man from where they stood in a driveway, in front of a fifty-five-gallon drum filled with burning trash.
Marvin was the oldest of the three, and at thirty-one he had eleven priors, most for B&E or armed robbery. Only two arrests had really stuck, the first one earning him eleven months, twenty-nine days in a city lockup. And then, on the inside, Marvin had bought himself a full dime at Hagerstown for manslaughter.
He did six years before being released on good behavior—a relative term in prison—and now he was back on the streets.