Jill knocked on the door and then entered. To Matt she said, “You wanted to know about the bodyguards killed in Varna, Bulgaria. The one you are interested in was a UK citizen, a twenty-four-year-old former French Foreign Legion enlistee named Charles Brendan Coyle. Born andraised in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, he was working for a security company based out of London run by a man named Marcus Maragos. Maragos, perhaps not incidentally, was knifed to death in his own home two days ago. Two security men were also killed with him.”
Hanley surprised Jill with the next question. “Do we know anything about his dad?”
She looked down at her laptop, typed a moment. “Father’s name is Campbell Finley Coyle. No known address. That’s all I have here, but I only ran Charles Brendan Coyle through the database. Need me to dig deeper on the father?”
“Yes, do that. I’ll call Lacy, see what she can find out, as well.”
Erin Childers said, “Matt, your house on Meeting House Road is now off-limits. We’ll have a moving company get your things out of there, put them into storage until this all gets sorted out.”
“Okay. But there’s nothing tying me to this building.”
Childers said, “You could have been followed here from your home.”
Hanley shook his head. “I haven’t been physically followed by anyone. Here is safe. You all are safe.” He looked to Court. “Well, most of you.”
Childers nodded. To Hanley, she said, “We’ve got cots. A kitchen. A shower. Let’s keep you here, with the Five Guys. Twenty-four-hour security, for as long as this takes. No more venturing out into the field.”
Reluctantly, Hanley agreed.
He turned to Travers. “Teddy, you’re out of commission. I want you in the rack recovering, because I need you back in action ASAP. Six, go home, get a few hours’ sleep. As soon as Lacy calls with our next target, you’re going to be back on the move.”
Hightower said, “I’ll call and cancel my MRI appointment in Boulder.”
Hanley shook his head. “No, you won’t. I’ve been watching you limp around at the airport, my place, here in the office. I want you back in Boulder. Get looked at, then get back here.”
“Okay. I’ll go back tomorrow, get it done the next day, get back here as soon as I’ve met with the doctor.”
“No time to go hunting, Night Train,” Hanley said.
“I’m hunting foryounow, Pilgrim.”
Thirty-Five
Michael Scardino and James Westwood sat in J.W.’s third-floor office watching the midday national news. The vast majority of the airtime was devoted to the spate of killings around the country, mostly in the D.C. region. The media had also tied the death by a second lethal poisoning of an FBI agent in New York to the running death toll, bringing the number, when added to the six in and around the Carriage House Condominium, to a staggering fourteen in the past fourteen hours.
The press hunted for direct connections between the victims; they hunted for sound bites from lawmakers and gave airtime to talking head after talking head, each with less new information and more pointless pontification than the last.
The U.S. stock market had plummeted 820 points since the opening bell; the president had returned to the White House, cutting short a golf outing in Palm Springs, and he made a statement assuring Americans that law enforcement was leaving no stone unturned in finding the perpetrators.
As the two men in Dupont Circle had predicted, the president was careful not to blame a foreign power for the killings—not yet, anyway—but they both assumed Russia would be most everyone’s first guess. Russian intelligence activities in the West had been in the news, and the death of the Belarusian assassin, while by no means part of J.W.’s plan, did have the positive benefit of implicating the Kremlin in all of this.
Just as the two men in the office were about to mute the TV and reach out to the individual Gauntlet support teams in the field for updates, Fox broke in from yet another city on the Eastern Seaboard, where yet another murder had just been confirmed.
A man leaving his house for work in Baltimore had started his car in his carport, and then the car ignited into flames. The man staggered out, fully engulfed, and made it back into his home, but died of burns before emergency medical crews arrived to treat him.
It had been a car bomb, and though not a particularly efficient one, it had been successful in its task nonetheless.
Both the men knew Whetstone was the killer they’d assigned to the task of killing Allen Stepanski of the little-known Air Force’s National Air and Space Intelligence Center, and this meant two of the assets—Whetstone from Northern Ireland, and Masquerade from Italy—had each managed to kill two of the five targets on their lists within the first twelve hours of the operation. Snare, a hit man from Jordan, had killed the husband-and-wife CIA officers in their car, then killed a third target, a DIA officer in Columbia Heights.
Lancer had only killed one so far, but he’d checked in within the past hour and was setting up for his second hit soon.
J.W. and Big Mike were cautiously optimistic about the way things had been going since last night. Eight killings out of nine attempts in the first twelve hours: it was an extraordinary success, only blunted by the death of Spiral and the Gauntlet men around him.
J.W. rose and told Scardino he was heading downstairs to order some lunch, but before he could leave, Scardino’s phone began to buzz on the coffee table in front of him.
Scardino looked down and said, “Signal number. Unknown.” J.W. moved closer as Scardino put the call on speaker. “Yeah?”
“It’s Whetstone. Checking in, as requested.”
