—
Kaz marveled at the work done by the two Puerto Rican brothers. It wasn’t just that they had turned three regular used Ford Tauruses into the spitting image of D.C. Metro police cruisers—it was that they had managed to accomplish this in only twelve hours.
Kaz had come up with this plan some time ago, long before he knew the Gray Man would show up in Washington, D.C. Two years earlier he envisioned a number of scenarios where he would need to move men, armed men in disguise, throughout the city on either direct action or counterintelligence missions. He had his agents travel to Ohio and purchase three lightly used late-model Ford Taurus sedans at auction, and then they brought the cars back to the D.C. area, where they stored them in a long-term garage just outside of Springfield.
The Ford Taurus was the same body style as the Ford Police Interceptor sold to the Metro Police Department, so Kaz purchased the cars with the intent to turn them into mock police cruisers.
After obtaining the vehicles, he searched the area via his deep back channels in the criminal underworld, looking for a person or business that had the high workmanship and low morals that he needed. He found these two brothers in Baltimore. Their chop shop had run below the radar of the local authorities, but one of the Saudi’s contacts knew about them, and he passed the info on to Kaz.
Al-Kazaz bought the lights off of old junked police cars and he had all the decals needed for each cruiser created by a company in China off of detailed digital images his men had made of real D.C. police vehicles. He then had the decals brought into the U.S. via the diplomatic pouch.
After this, he waited. Kaz knew the minute he converted the three normal Fords into police cruisers he would be committing a serious crime, and he did not need them for his work immediately, so he decided it would be prudent to keep everything under lock and key until he had use for the cars. He stored the decals and lights and sirens on embassy property, locked in a storage room accessible only to intelligence officers. The three Tauruses remained in the underground lot, and the phone number of Raphael and Raul stood at the ready in his contact list.
Until yesterday afternoon.
Now Kaz rose up from his close inspection of the last cruiser with a smile on his face. “Gentlemen, I must congratulate you again on your incredible workmanship.”
Raphael did the talking, because Raul’s English wasn’t good enough to understand the foreign accent of the customer. “No problem. Like I said, the paint and glaze run eighteen hundred total. The labor is three grand for each car. That’s ten thousand, eight hundred.”
Kaz nodded again, and he looked at both men. They stood right next to the rear of the third white cruiser. “A fair price, I am sure,” he said. “Shall we all step into your office to complete the transaction?”
The office was above the garage, up a small set of stairs.
Raphael shook his head. “We don’t leave the garage when it’s open. Somebody could show up and steal something. You brought cash?”
Kaz said, “Yes. Of course.” He backed away from the pristine white car a few feet, hoping the two Puerto Rican brothers would follow. Instead Raphael said, “Where are you goin’?”
Kaz made to reach into his coat. “Just getting the money. I want to count it, maybe the light is better here closer to the door.”
Raphael looked up at the powerful lights illuminating the Ford Tauruses. “The light don’t get no better than this right here. Just count out the money on the hood so we can all see it.”
Kaz had been trying to get the men to step away from the car to avoid a mess, but now he just blew out a long sigh of frustration and looked to his two associates with a shrug.
Raphael said, “The money?”
“Oh, yes. Of course. I have it all right here.” His hand disappeared into his coat and then reemerged holding a suppressed Walther P99 semiautomatic pistol. Both brothers raised their hands in surprise, but the Saudi shot them where they stood, dropping Raphael straight down to the floor with a shot to the head, and then spinning Raul twice with two rounds to the chest. The heavyset Puerto Rican slammed into the right rear quarter panel of the closest Taurus, and he died with his body draped over the trunk of the vehicle.
“Waa faqri!” Kaz shouted. Dammit.
He jerked his head to the dead man on the car and one of his two operatives stepped over to the body, pulled it from the back of the Ford, and allowed it to slide down to the floor of the garage.
A large blood smear remained on the vehicle.
“Clean it up,” Kaz demanded.