Brewer smiled a little while looking down at her iPad. Hanley got the impression she was trying to extricate herself from what she saw as nothing more than a personal conflict between Hanley and Carmichael. She did so by ignoring his comments entirely. “I know Gentry killed several men in his unit when they tried to detain him. Can you tell me what he did before that? Why they were after him in the first place?”
Hanley saw Brewer wasn’t going to listen to his advice. Denny was top dog, so she would do what he said, not follow Hanley, a topped-out and burned-out minion.
He said, “I don’t know what Gentry did before he killed the other men on his task force. Whatever happened with Court Gentry five years ago, it hurt Denny personally or professionally, maybe both.”
Brewer said, “CIA does not vendetta-kill our own because some exec is pissed off.”
Hanley smiled at her. “If you think Denny Carmichael is just an exec, then you aren’t going as far in this building as I thought you were. Denny is the CIA these days. He has the president’s ear, because he kills a lot of bad guys, and the director fears him, because the director doesn’t want to get any of Denny’s blood on his own hands. In the history of this Agency there has never been a more powerful entity than Denny Carmichael. Never. Doing his bidding will help you move up to the seventh floor, but like I said, Denny’s house of cards will tumble, and those left standing will sweep away anyone connected to the man. If you know what’s good for you—”
Apparently Suzanne Brewer had heard enough. “Director Hanley, this has nothing to do with my future aspirations with the Agency. Violator is a threat to Agency personnel, and it is my job to protect Agency personnel. It is as simple as that. Take yourself, for example.”
“What about me?”
“You have to know you are a potential target of this man.”
“Of course I know.”
“Then why don’t you let me increase your security profile?”
“Carmichael and Mayes put a team of JSOC skull fuckers on my house. They are hoping Gentry comes after me.”
“And that makes you feel secure?”
“Hell no! It makes me feel like a goat tied to a stick! I’ve got two of my guys riding with me and I’ve requisitioned an armored car. But it won’t be enough. If Gentry wants me, he’ll get me.”
“Then let me help you. I can give you a full motorcade, a dozen security officers.”
Hanley did not answer her directly. Instead he said, “Last night I walked out onto my back patio and talked to the trees. I figure that if Gentry is coming for me, he’s probably back there somewhere waiting for me to go to bed.”
“What are you telling the trees?”
Hanley laughed. “The truth. I’m telling them that all this shit is Denny’s doing. Not mine.”
“Aren’t you just giving him an easy shot?”
“Gentry doesn’t need an easy shot. Won’t make any difference to him if he has to skulk into my house. This way my poor Ecuadorian cleaning lady won’t have to wipe my brains off the wall, she can just hose it off the patio tile.”
Suzanne Brewer stood. “I certainly hope that doesn’t happen to you.”
He stood as well, and they shook hands. “Yeah. Me, too. Somebody has to be left standing when Denny goes down. I’m hoping it’s me.” He shrugged, lurching his big shoulders up and down. “I’m hoping it’s you, too.”
“Thank you for your time today, Matt.”
Brewer left the office, and Matt knew he had not managed to dent her thick armor at all.
35
Matthew Hanley sat in the backseat of an armored Toyota Camry, gazing through the tempered glass at the heavy evening traffic on Rock Creek Parkway. A flash of lightning illuminated the high hill to the right of his vehicle, thick with trees and shrubs. The director of the Special Activities Division took the quarter second of illumination as an opportunity to scan the high ground, searching for signs of a man there with an antitank weapon.
The darkness returned, and Matt closed his eyes.
Calm the fuck down. He’s not after you.
Two Ground Branch paramilitary operations officers sat in front of him in the armored car, but they knew better than to disturb the silence. Jenner drove and watched the other cars on the road while Travers rode shotgun and watched everyone and everything that was not riding inside another vehicle. They kept their HK MP7s stowed below the dash and at the ready, and both men carried radios that would connect them with CIA security forces positioned in D.C.
Hanley did not usually carry a weapon himself, but an MP5 with a collapsible stock sat inside a briefcase on the floorboard by his leg.
Another flash of lightning gave him another chance for a quick scan of the road. This time a slight rumble of thunder worked its way through the bulletproof glass, letting him know the storm was moving closer.
This nine p.m. drive home from work felt to Matt like a movement in a hostile environment, and in a way it was, but Hanley was less certain of Gentry’s intentions than anyone else at Langley, because Hanley knew something no one else knew. A year ago he had run into Gentry in Mexico City. Hanley had been a station chief at the time in Port-au-Prince, but the CIA had tracked the Gray Man to Mexico, and Hanley flew in to assist with the hunt.
A drug lord captured Gentry before the CIA got to him, so Carmichael ordered Hanley to render a positive ID of their old asset and then let nature take its course, meaning Hanley was to let the drug lord’s henchmen kill his former CIA paramilitary operations officer.
Instead, Hanley saved Gentry’s life, not because he particularly liked the guy, but rather because he disagreed with the op on principle. Hanley found the events in Mexico were so much against everything he stood for he could not sit by and watch Gentry die at the hands of the cartel.
Now as he rode in the back of an armored sedan, Hanley wondered if he should have just let Gentry get smoked by the Mexicans. He didn’t know for sure. He did not for a moment think things were patched up or in any way simpatico between himself and Gentry, but he wasn’t so sure the world’s best assassin would put a bullet in his brain, either.
He put the chances somewhere around sixty-forty in his favor.
Still… only a forty percent chance that the world’s best assassin was gunning for him didn’t exactly fill Matt Hanley with serenity.
Hanley saw Gentry as a good man who’d been soiled and turned into something dangerous by his work. He was like so many others in CIA, but he was several cuts above the rest, because Court Gentry had just gotten so damn good at being so damn bad.
He looked at the two men in front of him in the car. Jenner was an SAD Ground Branch team leader, and Travers was his number two. Hanley had gotten an e-mail earlier in the evening from personnel requesting that Jenner’s entire team come in for a drug screening tomorrow, but Hanley hadn’t passed this information on just yet.
This happened from time to time, it was part of the work, but Hanley knew Carmichael had ordered the screen, because Carmichael was looking for an excuse to pull Travers. Some doctor working for personnel would do what Carmichael told him to, which meant Travers was twenty-four hours away from testing positive for some controlled substance, and this would derail his career.
Probably his life.
And Hanley didn’t think he could do a goddamned thing about it, because Carmichael was the king.
Matt Hanley lived on 28th Street NW in Woodley Park, a tree-lined hilly section in northwestern D.C. He was a bachelor after a divorce twenty years earlier; both his kids were grown, living on the West Coast near his ex-wife.