A hole in the middle of his white shirt, just to the left of center, from which redness grew, expanding.
Leland Babbitt dropped his phone on the floor, brought both hands to his wound, realizing only now that he’d been shot. He was in the industry, so he recognized within another second that the shooter must have employed a suppressed weapon. He looked up to his sliding glass door, just five feet in front of him, and he saw the hole in the glass at chest height, and he looked beyond the glass and saw movement in his garden on the far edge of the patio. A dark silhouette appeared from his rosebushes, turned, and began running towards his back fence.
“Gentry?” It came out in a hoarse whisper, and then Leland Babbitt dropped dead in a heap on the floor.
Leland Babbitt was the first person, but certainly not the last person, to believe with absolute conviction that he had been assassinated by the Gray Man.
—
Court was on the move before Babbitt’s face slammed down on the living room tile. He’d heard no gunshot, but the screaming bullet had zinged through the night air from behind him on his right, crackling by at high speed thirty or forty feet off his right shoulder, and then snapping through the window glass.
Gentry gave up stealth for speed in his race to leave the scene, because he needed to get the hell out of here as fast as possible. He had a litany of immediate concerns, and none of them would go away as long as he remained hiding in the garden bed.
He was worried about the sniper, of course—there was a guy out here with a gun and eyes on the back of the property, but he was several orders of magnitude more concerned about the armed assholes on the property. Court had closed to within twenty feet of the back door, and as soon as Babbitt’s body was discovered the estate would be locked down tight, lights would turn on, and Gentry would be way too close to avoid detection.
Two members of Babbitt’s security detail were somewhere walking the grounds. They carried HK submachine guns, and Court only had a tiny .380 to fight them off.
Court knew if they saw him it was going to be a fucking mess.
He ran to the iron fence, but he hesitated climbing over it, because he had no idea if the sniper was still watching. It occurred to him that since Babbitt’s body had not yet been discovered it might be better if he stayed here, at least for a minute or two, to give the shooter time to break down his position and leave his sniper’s hide, thus giving Court a better opportunity to—
Babbitt’s wife screamed in the house, her cry loud enough to be heard easily here forty yards away, and certainly loud enough to alert the security officers.
Fuck, Gentry thought, and then he climbed the fence, careful to avoid using his injured right arm for weight-bearing duty.
24
Zack Hightower took his eye out of the scope the instant he saw his target drop. He knew Babbitt wouldn’t be getting back up after taking a 168 grain, .308 caliber high performance boat tail round to his center mass, so Zack began his exfiltration process immediately after confirmation of his kill.
He had no need to scan around the property or to look for more targets. This wasn’t combat. This was a sanctioned termination.
His target was down, and it was time to go.
He unscrewed the silencer from the barrel of his Remington Defense CSR concealable sniper rifle, then he unscrewed the carbon fiber–wrapped barrel from the receiver and slipped it into the oversize gym bag next to him. He collapsed the stock against the receiver, placed the gun and the silencer in the bag and zipped it up, and then moved in a low run back to the staircase. Thirty seconds later he exited the fire escape door of the three-story office building, and he stepped out onto a dark street in an industrial park that had long since emptied out for the night.
Zack was proud of his shot, though he acknowledged to himself 435 yards into a man-sized target was nothing for a man of his skill set to write home about, really. Still, he’d removed a bad actor off the stage, an enemy of U.S. intelligence and a threat to his brothers and sisters in the Agency.
He knew this to be true because his leaders told him it was true. He did not question; he did not second-guess. He did not hesitate.
That was not Zack Hightower’s way.
As he began walking to the north he was surprised to hear gunfire behind him. But not surprised enough to go back and take a look. He assumed Babbitt’s men had discovered the body, they’d freaked out, and then they’d found something or someone in the neighborhood to shoot at.
Good, thought Zack. Nothing like a little fog of war back at the scene to help him get clear of the area.
—