Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER FIVE

Court Gentry walked along the promenade in front of Victoria Harbor at one a.m., his phone’s wired earpiece in his ear. He’d destroyed the Chinese intelligence officer’s cell phone and tossed it into the warm water seconds earlier, eliminating the chance that he could be located through the device, and now he rolled his wheeled luggage along next to him like a businessman who’d just arrived in the city on a late-evening flight.

After three rings his encrypted international call was answered on the other end.

“Brewer.”

“It’s me.”

“Identity challenge, Racecar.”

Court had a little trouble remembering his code schedule. Finally he cleared his mind of everything else, and it came to him. “Response, Requiem.”

“Confirmed,” Brewer said, and then she made a sarcastic comment about how quickly he was getting in touch with her after proclaiming just thirteen hours earlier he wouldn’t be checking in for a while. “This is your idea of going dark?”

“Something’s happened you need to know about.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s not good,” Court confirmed. “Two assholes just tried to kill me. And yes, I am sure.”

It took Brewer a while to process the information. “How can you be so certain they were trying to kill you?”

“Fair question. It started with truth opioids, and when I resisted it went to bullets whizzing by my head, that sort of thing. Trust me, I’m a pretty fair judge of lethal intent.”

He was being a smartass, and this was not the whole truth. Court had determined, on his own, to kill the men to protect his operation, but he didn’t need his CIA handler second-guessing that decision.

“But you are okay?” she asked.

The right side of Court’s rib cage screamed in agony, but only because he’d reaggravated an injury he’d picked up a few weeks ago. He wasn’t dying, so he said, “I’m okay.”

“And the two men?”

“They are not okay.”

“I see.” Court waited while she processed the information. “What is the situation now?”

“One man is in my room. He’s DRT.”

“DRT?”

“Dead right there. The other went out a twenty-fifth-floor window, fell a good twenty stories down, and is now lying on a rooftop. I’m no doctor, but I assume he’s a goner, as well.”

“Oh my God.”

Court knew what would come next.

“Blowbacks on the Agency?”

“I got out clean, there is no tail on me, but the concern would be surveillance imagery inside the Peninsula hotel. They will tie the deaths to the room, obviously, and they’ll look for stored recordings of the guest in the room.”

“We can do something about that.”

“Like what?”

“S&T techniques you aren’t cleared for.”

It felt surreal to Court to be talking about getting support from the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, chiefly because the CIA had spent a half decade trying to kill him. But everyone was on the same big happy team now, so he pushed any reticence about receiving help from the CIA out of his mind.

“Okay. Do you have cleaners here in Hong Kong?”

“Not our people, but I’ve arranged contingencies with the Brits and Australians over there. I knew there was a chance for something like this on your assignment, so all I have to do is make a call to get their teams moving.”

Court gave Brewer the room number and the location of the building with the dead Chinese intelligence officer on the roof, and then Brewer told him she would call him back.

Court left the promenade, turning to the north and moving through the busy streets of Tsim Sha Tsui. He passed karaoke bars, fortune-tellers, twenty-four-hour bank branches, and so many stand-up fast-food restaurants that the smells from one mingled with the smells from the next just as all the neon seemed to turn into one multicolored ribbon of light.

One mile north and twenty-five minutes later, he answered his beeping phone. It was Brewer again, and they rushed through the challenge and response.

Brewer said, “A British cleanup crew is entering the Peninsula now, and NSA is in the process of altering relevant security camera images. The Aussies are sending a team to get that body off the roof next door. Asian men wearing clothing similar to that of the terminated intelligence officers will be seen and recorded leaving the building, and the men you killed will be dumped in the harbor. Our Hong Kong station will provide a case officer matching your description to enter your room tonight, then check out tomorrow. He’ll come up with a story about the broken window.”

Court was impressed how much Suzanne Brewer had accomplished in less than half an hour.

“That sounds like a solid plan,” he admitted. Working with the CIA had its perks, just as working against them had its drawbacks.

Brewer was cool, but still, she was more emotional about everything than he was. “Jesus, Violator, why did they go lethal? Could you have provoked them in some way?”

Court gritted his teeth. “Provoked them? They broke into my fucking hotel room.”

“Couldn’t you have kept your cover? Stuck to your story?”

“They tried to drug me with scopolamine. It’s a drug made from a South American bush. The Colombians call it Devil’s Breath. It’s an old truth serum. Very nasty.”

“Christ. Sounds like something from a bad movie.”

“Welcome to my world.”

Suzanne Brewer took command of her emotions and challenged her agent now. “Still… could you have taken it and fought off the effects? Aren’t you trained in resistance to chemicals? It’s in your file.”

Court didn’t answer.

After receiving no response, she softened. “Look, I get it. I’m not in the field; you are.”

Court snapped back. “We can fix that easily enough. Why don’t you fly out to Hong Kong? We can walk this op together. It would give you a feel for fieldwork.”

“I’m your handler. It’s my job to question your judgment.” To that, she added, “But if you say you had no alternative to lethal means, I understand.”

“I had no alternative to lethal means.”

She let it go after a long pause. “Do you want to close down the operation? After this I can pull you. I should pull you.”

Court shook his head as he responded. “No. You get this cleaned up, and I’ll do my part to keep the Chinese from finding out I was involved.”

Finally she said, “All right. But don’t stay at the Peninsula tonight.”

Court wanted to bark back, No shit, and tell her he was already a mile north of the hotel and off the main drag of the city, but he didn’t have the inclination to explain himself any further.

Instead he said, “I’m back offline for now. I’ll report in as needed.”

He ended the call and slipped the phone back in his pocket.

Suzanne Brewer hung up her phone and immediately dialed an in-house extension. This was bad, she knew, and although she’d done everything she could think of to fix it from where she sat, she knew she still had one thing to take care of.

This wasn’t about Violator; this wasn’t about the operation in Hong Kong that had turned into a fiasco before her agent in the field had even arrived at the opening stage of the mission.

No. Suzanne Brewer wasn’t thinking about Court Gentry. Suzanne Brewer was thinking about Suzanne Brewer. She wasn’t about to swing in the wind alone with her agent in the field. Nope, she was going upstairs to pull someone else in with her.

Getting a meeting with the man in charge of all of CIA’s intelligence operations would normally require a significant amount of work for a midlevel exec in the Agency’s Programs and Plans department, but Brewer was handling Violator, so she knew she could get away with just walking right into Hanley’s office or calling his mobile in the middle of the night. The current situation warranted giving Hanley an immediate update, but still, Brewer didn’t want to look frazzled and out of her league, so she called Hanley’s secretary and asked for ten minutes of D/NCS’s time.

That Hanley himself came on the phone after a few seconds reasserted to Brewer the importance of Violator’s op.

“Hey, Suzanne. Jill says you need a face-to-face?”

“Yes, please.”

“How’s the leg? I can run down to your office if you need me to.”

Hanley’s offer was a nice touch of chivalry, but there was no way she was going to look weak and needy.

“Very kind offer, Matt, but I am managing just fine.”

“Then come on up,” he said.

Suzanne Brewer had broken her leg just above her ankle in a savage car wreck weeks before, and it would be another week before the hard cast came off, and then only after six more weeks in a boot would her orthopedic surgeon allow her to walk normally again. In the interim she moved around with the aid of a knee scooter, a device that allowed her to step with her right leg while she kept her casted left leg bent to avoid bearing weight on it. With the bicycle-style handlebars used to steer her wounded appendage, she looked more than a little ridiculous kicking along the seventh-floor hallway, but she was still in the “sympathetic look” stage from her colleagues, and everyone got the hell out of her way, so she saw some additional benefit to the awkward contraption.

Just minutes after her call Suzanne Brewer struggled off her knee scooter and sat down in front of Hanley’s desk. “This damn thing in HK is already going south.”

Hanley raised a critical eyebrow Brewer’s way. “He’s on the ground fourteen hours and you’re having problems?”

“Violator claims he was tailed from the airport. He doesn’t know how he was compromised. I’m looking into the aircraft to see if it could have been exposed to the Chinese somehow. The surveillance team attacked him about an hour ago, he says, at his hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui.” She paused. “He retaliated.” After a sigh she added, “He killed both men, Matt.”

Hanley seemed concerned but oddly unsurprised. “Does Gentry know who they were?”

“He thinks they were MSS operatives.”

Hanley sat back in his chair now. Brewer knew he was thinking about the fallout, just as she was. About telling the head of the CIA that an Agency asset had killed two Chinese intelligence operatives in a five-star hotel in Hong Kong.

Brewer felt certain Hanley had more to worry about than Violator at this point, while she was in the middle, and safe from both gunmen in Asia and politicians in Washington.

The only person she had to fear was Hanley, and from the expression on his face, he wasn’t looking to throw her under the bus for this.

Not yet, anyway.

He said, “Shit. We knew he’d run into them. But we didn’t know he would do it in the course of deplaning a CIA jet.”

“No, sir.”

Hanley rubbed his thick face, pressing red marks into his cheeks around his eyes. Brewer just looked on. She wondered if he was already thinking beyond Gentry, what he would do if his asset on the ground failed.

After a moment she said, “It’s bad, no question, but if you look hard enough for good news, there is some. We’ve got facial recog spoofed at his hotel, he can’t be ID’d from the cams, and he says no other MSS personnel could have made him. We’ve got cleaners from MI6, Australia’s SIS, and our local station helping to maintain his cover, and he’s clear of any other followers.

“Still,” she added, a darkening tone to her voice, “there might be operational fallout for the men Violator killed. When he does come in contact with MSS, if they tie him to the Peninsula, which ties him to us… his secondary cover will be blown.”

She added, “If I were him I’d be on the first commercial flight out of Asia.”

Hanley replied, “But you’re not him.”

“No, sir. He wants to go forward.”

Hanley thought it over a moment. “He is the best. If he took those men out, it was so he could stay on mission. I don’t question his judgment in the field, and you shouldn’t, either.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, but she didn’t even try to make herself sound convincing.

Hanley leaned forward, propping his arms on his massive desk. “Suzanne, you know what success on this op means for us.”

“Success could bring great advantages to the U.S., absolutely. But failure, more failure, could be extraordinarily damaging.” She hesitated before saying, “Some might say doing nothing would be the prudent course of action.”

Hanley leaned back in his chair. “It comes down to this, Suzanne. I have more confidence in Gentry than you do. You’ll have to trust that my confidence comes from a long relationship and an understanding of his capabilities.”

“Of course.”

Hanley watched Suzanne roll out of his office on her leg scooter, then stop, turn, and struggle to shut the door behind her. He almost called out for her to leave it open, but he knew she was a proud woman, and she wanted to show her boss that her broken leg wasn’t slowing her down one damn bit.

It was silly, but he just sat there and watched her struggle, until finally the door shut and he was alone again in his office.

Hanley found himself questioning his decision to put Suzanne Brewer in charge of the mission in Hong Kong. He realized from her comments that she would pull the plug on Gentry to save her own ass. As far as she was concerned, Gentry was a liability to her, even though he was an asset to Hanley. Still, she had a mind for this work, and while he didn’t trust her, he knew that folding her into this operation would make her a better case officer, and it allied her that much closer to Hanley himself.

And while he didn’t trust her, neither did he want her out of his control.

He saw Suzanne as the future of this agency. He had no doubt in his mind she might one day rule the entire building; shit, she had the moxie to be DNI, the Director of National Intelligence, the head of all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies. If Matt Hanley was still around when that happened — through some luck or some curse, he didn’t know which to bet on — then he’d need Brewer. And he’d need something to hold over her head. The Court Gentry operational relationship or, as she seemed set on calling it, the Violator operational relationship, was off book and highly irregular. It was rife with opportunities for Brewer to get her hands dirty along the way, and Matt Hanley would know about it if she did. He wanted her as a friend, but he was hoping to solidify his place here by having a “special relationship” with a future top dog.

Hanley had been a field man, but he knew how to work this building, how to manage these halls and conference rooms. Langley wasn’t as far removed from the sullied third-world streets in which he’d operated as it might look at first glance, and though you could pull Matt Hanley out of the field, you could never really pull the field out of Matt Hanley.

Brewer was the right person to run Gentry, of this Hanley was certain. But he did have to acknowledge he’d put Gentry in incredible danger on this operation, and Suzanne Brewer was the man’s only lifeline.

He knew the opportunity awaiting the CIA in Hong Kong was huge; the potential benefit to the United States if Court succeeded was real and it was massive, and Hanley knew it was his job to risk an asset like Gentry. One of China’s top government computer network experts was in the city and in the wind, everybody was after him, and Court was one of only a few with a real shot at laying hands on him. The risk to Gentry’s life was worth it for a chance to gain the knowledge in Fan Jiang’s head. Even if Gentry died in the process on this, winning in Hong Kong would be worth the sacrifice.

Hell, Hanley said to himself, if we get Fan back to America and use him against the Chinese, this could damn well be one of the biggest intel coups of all time.

But it was even bigger than that, because Hanley knew elements of the larger operation of which Gentry was just a part.

This whole op was a foul fucking mess; Brewer did not know the big picture, and Gentry sure as shit did not know the big picture.

Hanley thought he might bring Brewer into the fold at some point.

But Gentry? Hell no, Gentry would never find out the full scope of this, because if he had any clue what he was really in the middle of, he’d fucking run from it as fast as he could.