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“That’s the Gray Man, dude.”
“You don’t know if—”
“The fucking Gray Man!” the man in back shouted this time, and they rolled on, back to their Suburban in the clubhouse lot, as the man in back spoke to the 911 operator.
The driver stayed vigilant now, concentrating on his and his partner’s own survival, because they’d failed at the task of keeping their principal alive.
•••
The assassination of Richard Watt had not, in fact, been carried out by the Gray Man.
Seven hundred twelve meters away, forty-seven-year-old Scott Patrick Kincaid folded the stock on his Ruger Precision Rifle and slipped it into a white laundry bag half filled with towels that he shouldered as he ran in a low crouch back towards the door to the emergency stairwell of the hospital.
Dressed in the uniform of Environmental Services—hospital-speak for sanitation—he wore a badge and key cards around his neck, a blue uniform, and an N95 mask over his face, all following the protocol of the facility.
He’d killed a man this morning to obtain the disguise, a worker in the hospital who, Kincaid had been told by the person controlling him, looked the most like him from internal hospital records.
Not that the person running the assassin knew what Kincaid looked like. His controller was a French woman who worked at an operations center, he did not know where, and she did not know his name. She called him Lancer and he had provided her with a general description, trusting himself to make any changes to his person necessary to resemble the face and build of the man behind the identity he would steal.
Once he had an address, he’d simply rung the Environmental Services employee’s front door, dealt with the person who answered it, and then found the orderly taking a shower. A bullet in the forehead, fired from a massive and suppressed 10-millimeter pistol, dispatched the hospital employee quickly and cleanly.
He’d dressed in the work clothes he found in the closet, and then, on his way through the apartment, he grabbed the dead man’s keys off the kitchen peninsula and headed for the door. Just before leaving, he stepped carefully over the body of a dead woman, herself dressed in hospital attire.
The orderly had a girlfriend; Kincaid had not been briefed on that, but she’d not put up a fight, and collateral damage was just one of those things that happened in Kincaid’s line of work.
•••
Now, just two hours after the double homicide in Cupertino and ten minutes after the homicide in Palo Alto, Kincaid tossed his bag containing the rifle in the back of the stolen Nissan Murano parked in the covered hospital parking lot, climbed behind the wheel, and left the area.
Kincaid had to be on a private plane in forty-five minutes, and then he would have a few hours to clean up in flight and prepare for another time-sensitive operation, this time in Mexico City.
Kincaid was never late, and he never made mistakes. This he told himself with the utter unwaveringness employed by all true narcissists.
He’d been in the military, in an elite special operations force, and there he’d learned skills, yes, but more importantly, he’d learned the discipline he needed to do what he did, and to do it as well as he did it.
Scott Kincaid, known the world over as Lancer, one of the most infamous killers for hire on the planet, felt supreme satisfaction as he sipped a Diet Coke behind the wheel of the Murano. He’d had a tough few years, back when he got out of the military, dealing with the bullshit and the accusations and the backstabbing that was just the price a true American patriot had to pay for doing the right thing.
But since his trial ended, since his acquittal, and since he’d slipped out of the public eye and into the dark shadows of the contract killer lifestyle, everything, every thing, had been going his way.
He had no idea who he’d killed that morning on the golf course. He’d been given the GPS coordinates for a particular tee box in Palo Alto along with a description of the target and a general time of arrival, and disambiguation information—pictures of the others who would be in his foursome so that he didn’t accidentally put a .308 round through the chest of the wrong man.
It had all worked to plan. He was proud of and cocky about his success, and then he thought a moment as he pulled up to a light just before merging onto the highway.
All to plan, except for that dumb bitch who opened the orderly’s door.
Her fault, not mine, he told himself.
Lancer gave a little smile as the light turned red; he lowered his N95 again for another sip of Diet Coke, wholly unaware that a traffic camera caught a reasonable image of his face in the process.
THREE
Court Gentry and Zoya Zakharova stepped off the bustling Guatemalan lakeside street and into the quiet courtyard restaurant at eleven fifteen a.m., took a table facing the open entrance of the restaurant, and put their backs to a wall covered in red bougainvillea, surrounded by other colorful plants spilling out of pots and garden beds throughout the space.
They had a view to the entrance of the building, beyond which was the street and then beyond that the lake, placid and crystalline in the midday sun.
After they ordered coffee and juice, Court looked at the rooftops of the two buildings in sight over the courtyard walls, then up at the sky. Softly, almost to himself, he said, “The rains won’t start till midafternoon today.”
Zoya perused the menu as she spoke, a little giggle in her voice. “There’s my Central American meteorologist. I’ve been anxiously awaiting for your daily weather report.”
