He was armed with a pistol; zip ties; a wrapped set of tools for picking locks, disassembling cameras, and other purposes; and computer equipment with various peripherals, all stowed in an oiled leather backpack he’d brought all the way from Northern Ireland.
In the bag he also had a burner phone with one number programmed into it, and a handwritten note folded in an outside pocket.
His laptop had been open for most of the last hour, but now he closed the device, then climbed out of the car. His hoodie covered his head and the Irish watch cap he wore on it; he slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked out into the street. Security cameras on people’s property were virtually always set to dismiss movement in the road itself, otherwise motion detectors would alert to every passing vehicle, so Coyle began walking down the middle of the street in the direction of Matthew Hanley’s house with a gait so calm he likely wouldn’t raise suspicion even if someone saw him at this time of night.
The excitement he felt from the action was blunted by the purpose of this mission. He’d killed dozens of times for money, and there had been something of a thrill in that, at least in the very olden days. But now Coyle’s actions were for a cause both so solemn and so righteous that he derived no pleasure from them; only his commitment drove him forward, toward the home and, eventually, toward his inevitable meeting with the man who had killed his son.
Thirty-Three
In the twelve-seat cabin of the Hawker 800XP jet flying twenty thousand feet over Richmond, Virginia, Matthew Hanley sat in a comfortable leather chair just behind the copilot, and he looked down at a pair of text messages that just came through on his phone. They notified him that both his home alarm and security camera system had gone down because of a power outage.
Hanley wasn’t worried about the power outage at home. He didn’t have much food in his refrigerator, and he doubted he’d be back to his house for at least another sixteen hours or so, plus he had much bigger fish to fry, so he dismissed the texts.
The flight was already forty minutes old, and the interrogation of the woman on board who’d found herself at the center of the action tonight had not yet begun. Hanley had been on the phone while Jill Mori sat next to him, completely engrossed with her laptop, and the two had not spoken once during the flight, so focused were they on their own jobs.
Court Gentry and Zack Hightower sat with Irene Ortega on a sofa in the rear of the spacious cabin. A sheet had been rigged to the ceiling of the cabin that blocked off Irene’s view of the others, and though Zack and Court were back with her, they wore neck gaiters that hid their faces, so she was pretty much in the dark as to what was going on apart from the fact that she’d been rescued from an assassination by men who themselvesappeared rather terrifying. She’d tried to talk to them a couple of times, but both times Court had told her she needed to wait for a debriefing, and it would come soon enough, and for now she needed to just be glad she wasn’t lying dead in her bathtub.
Behind Hanley and Jill, Arnold Reyes sat in the center of the cabin next to Chris Travers, whose seatback had been lowered flat. Travers was sedated and he slept soundly, his neck freshly bandaged and stitched. The doctor Hanley had taken him to in the middle of the night had done the job at his kitchen table, then handed over a supply of painkillers and antibiotics. As Jill and Arnold helped take Chris back out to their vehicle, the doctor whispered to Hanley that the bullet had been within an inch of severing the asset’s carotid artery, and a severed carotid was a guaranteed one-way ticket to dead.
Hanley knew he needed to get started with the debriefing of Ortega, but he was trying to get as much information as possible about what had happened first, and to that end Lacy had already been very helpful. She’d confirmed that all five men killed at street level had been Gauntlet operatives, and Gauntlet had said this particular team was running a previously scheduled security sweep in the area, and must have just happened to come upon a team of killers.
Both Lacy and Hanley agreed it sounded like bullshit.
Hanley had also learned that the assassin found on the bathroom floor of the condo with four more holes in him than God intended had been identified as forty-three-year-old Alexi Kravchuk, known as Deep Space by the Americans. He had been performing lethal operations exclusively for Russia for the past three years under the alias Spiral, so the inference already running around the intelligence community was that Deep Space was after Ortega on Russia’s orders.
This also lent credence to the fact that Russia had been involved in all the other killings of intelligence community personnel tonight, but Hanley had been around long enough to know it was too early to make such inferences.
Lacy was skeptical herself, mainly because Ortega’s work at DNI wasn’t specifically involved with Russia.
Killing Ortega might provide some benefit to some bad actor, but therewere a lot of people who did what she did, so both Hanley and Lacy suspected that Irene Ortega was targeted for something specific that she knew, and not solely because of her job title.
Hanley climbed from his cabin chair, then made his way back past Arnold and Travers to a seat just this side of the fabric partition in the cabin. Calling out through the bedsheet hanging there, Hanley said, “Irene, let me start by saying we are very happy you are alive.”
There was a pause, and then he heard the woman speak. “That makes two of us. But I don’t understand why I can’t see your faces.”
“We need to understand what side of this you are on.”
“I don’t even know whatthisis.”
“You knowsomething. Why do you think those men were trying to kill you tonight?”
“Who areyouguys?” she asked again, flatly. Any shock or terror she’d felt earlier in the evening had evaporated. It was as if she were genuinely terrified of the assassination attempt, but the men and woman who’d rescued her and put her on a private jet did not elicit the same amount of concern out of her.
With menace in his voice, Court Gentry said, “Answer the question, lady.”
“I don’t even know who they were.”
“I think you do,” Court said.
When she did not respond, Matt said, “You see the predicament you’re in, Irene? We saved you tonight; you might not trust us, but you have to ask yourself, Who elsecanI trust?”
“I’ll just keep my mouth shut. You can kill me, or you can release me. Your choice.”
Hanley said, “We didn’t go to all this trouble to save you just so we could then kill you. We will, most definitely, release you, but you might want to think about the ramifications of that. The man who came after you tonight was a contract killer known to the CIA as Deep Space. The other men—some of them, at least—were contractors from Gauntlet.”
There was a long pause. Then she said, “How do you know that?”
Hightower answered this question. “We ran tags on one of the vehicles, plus people in both vehicles admitted it. Why is Gauntlet after you?”
