“Lucky,” Hanley replied. “He’ll need stitches, fresh bandaging, and antibiotics, but he’ll fly back with us tonight.”
“Roger that,” Hightower said. “We’ll need to dump this vic first, grab something else. We’ll be at Reagan by two a.m. at the latest.”
Arnold spoke up on the net for one of the first times of the night, directing Hightower to a rental unit over the Potomac in Arlington where a vehicle owned by a Ghost Town shell was stored in a small garage. They decided they’d dump the Expedition several blocks away from there and then make their way to the cache on foot.
Jill had been watching Pilgrim treat Teddy’s wound for the past couple of minutes, and only now did she chance a look down at her phone. She read a text, then opened a link. After a few seconds, she looked up at the three men with her in the vehicle. “There’s been another death of an IC official. The FBI supervisory special agent in charge of the New York field office was taken to the hospital after eating in a restaurant in Soho tonight. He died a half hour later.”
Arnold called from the front of the truck. “Poison?”
“I wouldn’t bet against it,” Hanley said. “Was it Doug Holmes?”
Jill looked back down, “Agent Douglas Holmes. Yes.”
“Dammit!” Hanley exclaimed. “Doug was a good dude. I knew him what…fifteen years?”
Travers winced with pain now as Hanley checked to make sure his dressing was on tight enough to compress the wound. While doing so he asked, “You think it was the Russians?”
“Doug’s a rock star,” Hanley said. “I mean…hewas, anyway. He ran all counterespionage ops in New York City. That makes for a lot of enemies. Could have been Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran. Could have been anybody.” Hanley thought for a few moments, then said, “Night Train, you reading me?”
“Yeah, Pilgrim.”
“I don’t want you and Six talking to Ortega until we get on the plane together. I want to be there for the interrogation. You tracking me?”
“Tracking you one hundred percent, boss.”
“I’ve been working in this town for decades. I’ll get the best read onher. If she tries talking, tape her mouth shut; I don’t want her crafting a story till I’m the one questioning her.”
“Got it, boss,” Hightower said.
The black Expedition and the burgundy Chrysler minivan rolled out of the District of Columbia, leaving half a dozen dead bodies in their wake.
Thirty-Two
An unadorned gray Chevy Suburban sat in front of the Raymond C. Carter Center for Trends in Peace on Church Street in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., and inside sat five plainclothed security officers from Gauntlet Group, each armed with a carbine rifle they kept down low.
The street itself was quiet, but the Gauntlet men watched the flashing lights from nearby Connecticut Avenue, police and medical vehicles heading south, and the Suburban was in radio contact with the security officers inside the row house building it was parked next to.
It was midnight; this crew was due to remain on duty till six, when they would likely be swapped out for another vehicle full of men, but for now they just kept their eyes peeled on Church Street, unaware of any specific danger to their charge, but well aware that something was going on in the area.
Inside, in the third-floor office of James Westwood, there was a lot more information available. J.W. had CNN on mute on the TV on the wall across from him, and the four monitors of his desktop computer were open to various other news and social media sources.
J.W. hadn’t been able to hear any gunfire or action at this distance, but D.C. Metro PD was out in force, and sirens filtered through the glassbehind him, no doubt keeping everyone in this part of the District awake and annoyed.
Westwood didn’t know all the reasons the Chinese had ordered the elimination of all the targets on the list they’d given him, the list he’d handed over to Scardino to pass out to the five assassins they had working in America right now, but J.W.didknow the reason the Chinese needed the woman who lived in nearby Washington Circle to die.
Irene Ortega hadn’t made the news yet, but she would soon, of this he was certain. CNN was already covering the murders in Hyattsville, in Tysons Corner, in New York, and in Miami, and one of their talking heads had just opined that it was still too early to connect the killings, which J.W. found laughable.
Irene Ortega, like the man in Maryland who’d been killed, was on the lower end of the spectrum, not a big player in the community, but they both held secrets about the operation Gauntlet was part of, and for that reason, they were placed high on the kill list. And even though they weren’t big players, it was unavoidable that they would be tied to the bigger picture soon enough. One worked for NSA and the other for ODNI, and they were targeted on the same night as several others in the same general profession.
The man Lancer had killed in Miami was a Gauntlet employee. A man Scardino had trusted with information about his company’s clandestine work with China.
A man who then told Scardino he was going to report Gauntlet to the FBI for illegally acting as an agent for a foreign power.
Scardino had told J.W. this, J.W. had told Gracie Wu, and then the Gauntlet employee in Miami had been assassinated by the American assassin Lancer before revealing anything to anybody.
A knock at J.W.’s office door came at twelve twenty in the morning, and he did not hear it at first with all the sirens from the police cars still racing through Dupont Circle.
When he did hear, however, he wasn’t worried about who it would be.
