“I had a feeling you might be. Hightower terminates Babbitt, we float the intel in-house it was Gentry.”
“If nothing else it will light a fire under Suzanne Brewer and the targeting officers. Show them just how dangerous their target is.” Denny picked up his paperwork and reached for his glasses. “Talk to Hightower.”
—
Zack Hightower had spent the first part of the morning on the fourth floor of the Old HQ building, working with Suzanne Brewer on possible staging locations Violator might use here in D.C. Former haunts in the area, suitable locations to train and store materiel. They also discussed his knowledge of current and former SAD weapon caches on the East Coast, thinking it possible Gentry would try to raid a stockpile somewhere to acquire more equipment.
Zack had enjoyed this work for about half an hour, but since then he’d been bored. This was analytical shit, not his forte. He wanted to be out in the field, in the city, man-hunting.
At noon Brewer had a lunch of Chinese food brought in to the tactical operations center, and Zack was seated at a desk picking through his shrimp lo mein when Jordan Mayes stepped into the room and hurried over. “I need to speak with you.”
Zack put down his cardboard carton and his chopsticks, stood smartly, and stepped into the hallway. Mayes looked back to Brewer as he headed out himself. “I’ll have him for the rest of the day. Maybe tomorrow, as well.”
Hightower fought a smile. “It’s party time!” he told himself.
The two men went upstairs to Mayes’s office. Once there, Mayes closed the door and walked over to a small sitting area. When he and Hightower were seated close together, he leaned closer still and said, “I have a problem.”
Hightower always sat ramrod-straight, but he tightened his posterior chain muscles even more. “Not for long. I’ll take care of it.”
“You know a man named Leland Babbitt?”
“No, sir. I do not.”
“He runs Townsend Government Services.”
Zack nodded. “I know those assholes.”
Mayes sighed, adopting a worried look on his face. “Babbitt has made himself a clear and present danger to our operation at the Agency. We have tried to dissuade him from this, but he persists. He has threatened to go public detailing some classified intelligence programs that, if revealed, would be devastating for our mission here.” He shook his head, an expression of disbelief. “There is no question but that these revelations will put good men and women in the field at great personal risk. Frankly, Zack, at this point, we have exhausted all of our options.”
Zack Hightower grasped instantly that he was being asked to assassinate an American citizen in the United States. He blinked hard at this realization.
But only once. “I’ll take care of it.”
“I need you to do this alone.”
“Of course you do. Don’t worry. I’ll get it done.”
“Denny and I are more than confident that you will. Of course I can help you with any equipment you might need.”
Zack smiled now. “Mr. Mayes, this might come as a shock to you, but I’ve already got a couple of tools that should be suitable for the task at hand.”
Mayes just said, “I had a feeling you might.”
22
Raphael 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.