Back Blast

41

Max Ohlhauser swallowed the remnants of his third martini and called for the bill, despite the sincere efforts of the Frenchman across the table to stop him. From as close as a few tables away it looked as if Ohlhauser’s guest was fighting for the check, but nothing could be further from the truth. No, it wasn’t that the Frenchman wanted to pay. Rather, it was that the Frenchman didn’t want to stop drinking just yet.

The man sitting across the booth from Ohlhauser was a ruddy-faced ex-diplomat from Paris, here in D.C. this week for a conference at the Shoreham on nuclear disarmament. The two had gone to boarding school together in Switzerland, back in the late seventies when they were rebellious teenagers of wealthy parents; now they were both ex — government service types, living the last decade or two of their work lives raking in the big bucks, capitalizing on the access they’d cultivated while making peanuts employed in federal government jobs.

Of the two men, Max was by far the most successful. He was an attorney, after all — he could have been making bank without twenty-something years in the CIA — but with such an eye-catching CV he garnered some of the biggest international corporate clients in the USA. He spent his days either suing on behalf of his clients or lobbying on behalf of his clients, depending on the corporate legal strategy chosen.

The Frenchman was doing all right himself, but he’d been a foreign ministry official and an ambassador to Canada, so now he mostly served on corporate boards and spoke at universities. His speaker’s fee was big money, unless you compared it with what Ohlhauser raked in each day he lunched with a congressman on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and pitched an international treaty beneficial to one of his clients.

It was a quarter after two in the afternoon now; Ohlhauser and his guest had downed two dozen of the Old Ebbitt Grill’s freshest Copps Island oysters and two orders of pan-roasted calf’s liver, along with martinis before, during, and after the meal. The Frenchman could outdrink the American by a wide margin, but it had been thus since they were sixteen-year-olds sneaking out of their dorm to down beers behind the horse stables at their Montreux boarding school. Even back then the Frenchman was known for having the constitution of a water buffalo, and Max Ohlhauser was known as the brainy nerd who liked to wear red bow ties.

Much had changed in their lives in the forty years since, but some things had remained unaffected by time.

Max paid the tab, but only after the Frenchman ordered one more round for himself with plans of taking it to the bar. The American would have stayed himself, but he had to get back to the office. After a round of good-byes and au revoirs, Ohlhauser stood with barely a wobble and shook the hand of his old friend. He then headed for the exit, taking his coat from the hostess with a wink as he did so.

A well-dressed businessman sitting at the bar paid for his beer, left the second glass half full, and headed for the door, just a few seconds behind the dark-haired man in the red bow tie. The businessman collected his raincoat and his umbrella from the hostess, and then he stepped out into the afternoon gray, slipping on a pair of sunglasses because he saw a few others wearing theirs, and popping open his umbrella because the misty afternoon warranted it.

Pedestrian traffic was exceedingly heavy at the moment; in the District it was common for businesspeople and government workers to go to lunch around one, so now huge throngs of men and women in work attire walked along in all directions, returning to their offices. The White House was just a block to the west, and the adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office building alone accommodated hundreds of government employees.

The businessman turned to his right, in the same direction of Max Ohlhauser, and he began walking north.

Court Gentry had enjoyed his time drinking draft beer in a nice restaurant, but now he was back on the street, where he felt more comfortable. He adjusted his umbrella from his left hand to his right hand, and he picked his way through the crowd. As he walked he glanced up in the direction of the fifty-five-year-old attorney from time to time, but he didn’t fix his eyes on him. There was some risk he could lose his target in the undulating mass of well-dressed humanity here on the sidewalk, but Court knew his main focus needed to be on the four men on the street who did not quite belong.

He’d noticed them within his first five strides out the door of the Old Ebbitt. There were probably 250 people in view on the street, but the four guys revealed themselves in seconds as a tail on Ohlhauser.

They did most things right, and that was their problem. Court knew better than almost anyone how to conduct a foot-follow, so he simply let his eyes travel to where his training told him he would position himself if he were tailing Ohlhauser, and there he saw the first pair of men. They were 150 feet or so back from their target, and their clothing was more rugged than the attire of the office workers around them. Court put them in their thirties — a prime age for this type of work.

He saw their tag-team partners a few moments later. They were also in their thirties, and just like the other duo, these guys were wearing comfortable shoes and raincoats from REI instead of Nordstrom or Brooks Brothers like most everyone else out here. They walked along behind Ohlhauser, on the same side of the street, just ahead of Court by fifty feet or so. They didn’t eyeball the attorney, like the other pair; instead they kept their heads on swivels, scanning the crowd around them.

Court knew they were looking for him, but he knew they would never find him.

Court’s suit and his glasses and his umbrella and the vague form of his body revealed through his black raincoat helped disguise him, but that wasn’t the most important thing. No, Court walked with purpose, like he was a guy on his way back to work like most everyone else out here; like he belonged on this sidewalk and he wasn’t doing anything shady or wrong.

The four watchers could look in this crowd all they wanted. Until Court actually made a move on Max Ohlhauser, they’d never spot him.

Court decided quickly that these four men weren’t Delta, or whatever the hell the JSOC army-side special mission unit was called now. Delta was slicker and smarter than these four. And these guys sure as hell weren’t SAD Ground Branch. Hanley had said SAD was not involved in the hunt for him, and although Court didn’t know for certain if that was true, he did know SAD men working a foot-follow wouldn’t be doing it while wearing 5.11 Herringbone Covert Shirts under their raincoats. It was a good brand, and low-profile enough to fool civilians, but Court knew a trained operator could ID the maker and the style, and he would know that the wearer of the gear would be in the same game as himself.

Court decided these guys were contractors, no doubt working for the CIA, no doubt involved in the Violator hunt, and no doubt armed. But they wouldn’t work as shooters themselves, Court imagined. Instead they had been brought in to tail Ohlhauser, to use him as a lure. There would be shooters close by, and ready to swoop in, if this team spotted their target.

Court took a deep breath to center himself, then he picked up the pace, and began closing on his target.

He stepped up to the first major intersection since beginning his tail on Ohlhauser, and here, as he continued walking, he deftly moved his head to the right while turning his umbrella in a leftward angle that covered his face from the eastward-facing traffic camera there. When he got to the end of the street he quickly turned his head to the left and swiveled his umbrella a little to the right to cover himself from the northbound lane camera. He’d have to do this for the duration of his walk, and all the while keep his body language nonchalant and his eyes on Ohlhauser’s tail.

Court continued closing on his target. He moved in stride with two women now, walking back to their jobs after lunch, and he positioned his umbrella over one of them without her even noticing. While doing this he passed the two followers, looking like he was with the two female office workers. The men in the REI jackets looked right through him, as he knew they would. When they turned to check their six, Court stepped away from the women and skillfully bladed his body to cut through a thick cluster of strolling businesspeople, and in seconds he was out of view from the CIA contractors.

Ohlhauser’s office was on the corner of 12th and K streets, but due to the crosswalk signals not cooperating with his shortest route, Max walked east on G all the way to 12th before turning north. He was just about to pass the entrance to the Metro Center station when a man in a suit wearing a raincoat walking along next to him bumped him slightly on his left side. This jostled him closer to the escalators down into the Metro.

Ohlhauser felt a slight but unmistakable sharpness on his hip as he walked, and he looked quickly to the man, who was still almost shoulder to shoulder with him.

“Watch out,” Ohlhauser growled.

The man pushed him forward with his shoulder, but he kept walking in stride, and he didn’t even look his way. Softly the clean-shaven man said, “Hello, Max. In my right hand is a knife with a seven-inch blade. Keep moving along quietly or I’ll drive it through your back and into your lung.”

Ohlhauser’s eyes went wide, and instinctively he slowed, but the man in the raincoat kept moving, nudging him onward through the lunchtime crowd with another bump of his shoulder. Ohlhauser started walking again, complying even if he did not yet comprehend, and he looked down at the man’s right hand. It was mostly hidden by the cuff of his raincoat, but the glint of steel protruded just an inch between the man’s bent fingers.

Ohlhauser said softly, “What… What do you want?”

“I just want to talk. Keep looking straight ahead. Not at me.”

“Who are you?” Max’s own voice had lowered several decibels, to match that of the man talking to him.

The man in the raincoat smiled a little. He seemed surprisingly calm as far as Max was concerned, especially considering the man was, apparently, executing some sort of an armed confrontation in broad daylight. Raincoat man said, “Tomorrow morning you’ll be the biggest talking head on all the news shows, and this time you’ll actually have something to talk about.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re a smart guy, Max. You’ll figure it out.”

Ohlhauser walked on a moment, still in the middle of the crowd, still with the raincoat man less than a foot away. After a wheezing gasp he said, “Violator?”

“Keep moving. There are four men following you. If they see me, I’m fucked, which means you’re fucked, because I’ll gut you like a fat fish. Got it?”

“Please. I want you to understand, I didn’t have anything to do with—”

“Not now, Max. We’re going to take the escalator down into the Metro. You go first, I’m right behind you.”

Max Ohlhauser did as he was told, veering off the sidewalk and towards one of the entrances to the Metro Center station. Together the two men took the escalator down.

JSOC unit commander Dakota drove a black Suburban while his teammate, call sign Harley, sat in the front passenger’s seat, hunched over a laptop displaying navigational information, as well as a constant array of images of the streets around them.

The twelve-man JSOC team was split up into two-man teams today. The two pairs who’d spent the evening watching over Hanley’s house were sleeping off their long night’s shift, which left four teams of two, each in a different vehicle, each in a different sector of the District.

Jordan Mayes had called Dakota two hours earlier and asked him to vector one of the teams closer to Max Ohlhauser’s office, and to hold position in the neighborhood. Mayes didn’t want anyone to actually tail the former CIA attorney. The head of the JSOC special mission unit cell immediately tasked himself to Ohlhauser’s area, along with a teammate. It was a low probability callout because no one expected Gentry to be just idly wandering the streets outside of Ohlhauser’s office, but until Suzanne Brewer and her people at the TOC got some better lead, Dakota figured he might as well give it a shot.

There were thousands of people walking and driving around the heart of D.C. near the White House, so it was a good thing Dakota and Harley didn’t have to use their own eyeballs to hunt for the target. Instead they had mounted a state-of-the-art digital camera on the front grill of the GMC Yukon XL, and the camera scanned the entire street in a 120-degree arc, taking in all the facial recognition data it could pull from passersby, and feeding it into the computer.

While Dakota drove a crisscrossing pattern in a three-block radius of Ohlhauser’s place of business, Harley’s job was to sit in the passenger’s seat and watch the laptop. Every second new faces were analyzed by the software as the computer searched the streets.

It was good technology under the care of hardworking and well-trained men, but even though they’d been at it for a half hour so far, they’d come up empty. They’d not had a single hit — not even a false alarm.

Dakota was frustrated, but he was committed to the search, so he kept his patrol up. He planned on making a right at the next intersection, then heading back in the direction of the center of his surveillance zone. Dakota and Harley both assumed Ohlhauser was sitting in his office in the center of their search pattern, and they had no clue he was, instead, walking down the street just in front of them as they headed west on G approaching the 12th Street NW intersection.

Harley had barely said a word in the past fifteen minutes, but he called out in a loud voice just as Dakota flipped his turn signal lever.

“Got a hit, boss!”

Dakota turned off the signal as he looked towards his partner in surprise. “Where?”

“Wait one.” Harley looked away from the screen and out through the front windshield. After a few seconds to orient himself, to find a correlation between the frozen picture on the monitor showing Violator’s image highlighted with a red square and the real world outside, he pointed towards the escalators ahead on his right. They descended down into the Metro. “Right there.”

“I don’t see him.”

Harley checked the image again. A running digital timer in the upper right corner of the software told him how long ago the image was taken. It had just hit the ten-second mark. In the picture Violator was stepping onto the escalator. Harley said, “He’s gone down into the Metro.”

“Shit!” Dakota shouted, then he grabbed the walkie-talkie on the center console between the two men. “All elements, Dakota. Target acquired! He’s heading into the metro station at Metro Center Square. Stand by.” He sped the Yukon through the intersection and whipped into a parking space left vacant a second before by an Audi sedan. Looking again to Harley, he asked, “What’s he wearing?”

“Black raincoat. Umbrella in his hand.” Harley looked closer at the image in front of him. “Aw, hell! He’s with that Agency guy, Ohlhauser!”

“Are you sure?”

Harley could see the right side of both men’s faces in the image, because they had been moving perpendicular to the camera. “Fat dude with a red bow tie is right in front of him on the escalator. Looks scared shitless. Gentry’s in contact distance to Ohlhauser. Might have a weapon in his hand.”

Dakota spoke again into the walkie-talkie. “Consult your Metro maps and GPSs, and route yourself to nearby stations. Be advised. Subject has one hostage.”

Dakota knew he didn’t have enough men to conduct running surveillance in the Metro, so he pressed a button on his Bluetooth earpiece. Seconds later he relayed all the information regarding the facial recognition hit to Jordan Mayes. He expected this would get him more bodies to help with his hunt; either CIA contractors or regular D.C. police, whom the CIA could simply ask to be on the lookout for a man fitting Court’s description.

And his call did bring out these forces, because Mayes immediately relayed his info to Suzanne Brewer in the Violator TOC, but Dakota had no way of knowing that Denny Carmichael would also receive word of the sighting within moments. Denny immediately contacted Saudi intelligence chief Murquin al-Kazaz. In minutes another force would be descending on the immediate area and conducting a hunt of its own, and if Dakota had only known what an absolute tragedy this would create, he no doubt would have kept word of the Violator sighting to himself.