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Hanley hadn’t known if Pace was aware that the international assassin known as the Gray Man was actually a former CIA Ground Branch paramilitary officer and Pace’s former teammate Court Gentry, call sign Sierra Six. But clearly he did know.
Hanley nodded. “Our boy’s been busy.”
“He’s working for this Cyrus?”
Hanley shook his head adamantly. “Very much the opposite. Sierra Six tells me he got drawn into all this when Cyrus tried to kill him to stop him from protecting that engineer Arsenov, the Russian who got smoked in Mexico City. Court’s not doing Gray Man shit this time, he’s just trying to keep his ass alive.”
“Why do I find that hard to believe?”
“Because you don’t know him like I do.”
“I know that about a year after I left Golf Sierra he killed almost every other member of Golf Sierra. I know that if I had been there, he would have tried to kill me, too.”
“That is true,” Hanley allowed, but then said, “The whole op we ran against Gentry in Golf Sierra was bullshit. He didn’t earn the sanction that was put on him by the Agency. The kid was just defending himself from people who he thought were his friends when they tried to kill him.”
To Hanley’s surprise, Jim Pace did not give off a strong reaction to this. After a few seconds, he said, “I’ve always wondered about that. I mean, sure, Gentry was a weird dude, but I never took him for a traitor.”
Hanley shook his head. “He did nothing wrong, and more than that, he’s been incredibly helpful to the Agency over the years, despite the fact that the Agency is targeting him.”
“Yeah, well, the Agency’s going to come after you when you kill Suzanne Brewer.”
Word had gotten around in the halls at Langley that senior Programs and Plans officer Suzanne Brewer had been murdered by Court Gentry four months earlier in New Jersey.
Hanley shrugged at this. “God’s honest truth is, I don’t know if he did that or not. But I did know Brewer.”
“And?”
“And if he killed her, it was another act of self-defense.”
Wide-eyed, Jim Pace looked back over his shoulder to Travers and Takahashi.
Chris Travers retained a bored countenance, as if he hadn’t been listening to all of this, but after a few seconds he said, “I always liked Court.”
Takahashi had the same bored appearance, but now he shrugged. “I don’t even know what the hell you old guys are talking about.”
Pace turned back to Hanley. “Where is Six now? I’d like to talk to him.”
With a laugh the bigger man said, “He’s understandably a little skittish, Jim. After giving me this intel, he thinks he might be done with this operation. He’s in the area, or so he tells me, waiting to hear if we need his help for anything else, but I don’t see us all getting together for beers. He doesn’t know that you aren’t going to sic a paramilitary team on him and drag him back to a supermax in the States.”
“Would help my career,” Pace joked without smiling.
Hanley said, “So will all this. Just use the info he gave me, the info I gave you, however you see fit. If you need to ascribe that info to someone, then say it was the Mexican Federales.”
Jim Pace scratched his bearded chin. “I might like to play things a little more by the book than you do, Matt. No offense.”
Hanley said, “None taken. Shit, man, look around you. I was Deputy Director for Operations of the CIA a year and a half ago. Now I’m CIA’s second banana in a South American developing nation, and I feel pretty damn lucky considering the potential alternatives. ‘By the book’ might just be the right course of action. Wish I’d thought of that, actually.”
Pace and Hanley kept eye contact for fifteen seconds before the younger man said, “Fuck it. I’m not going to throw you under the bus to keep my nose clean. You and Gentry both could have kept this shit away from me so that you didn’t get implicated.”
Before Hanley could say anything, Jim said, “I’ll have the code word Cyrus and the name Martina Sommer back at Langley within the next fifteen minutes. I’ll get the circuit board hand-couriered up there by the end of the day, see what our people can get out of it.”
“Hand-couriered? You’re off somewhere else?”
“Yeah. Twenty minutes before we rolled through the gate here I got word about another assassination attempt, just outside Havana.”
“Who was the target?”
“Anton Hinton.”
