“Joining us this morning from Miami is former FBI counterterrorism director and CNN contributor Greg Michelson, and from Washington, former CIA chief council and CNN contributor Maxwell Ohlhauser. Greg, I’ll start with you.”
Court spun to the TV and dropped his ACE bandage onto the floor. It rolled out across the little room.
A tan man with gray hair looked sternly into the camera on a split screen with the anchor. The anchor said, “Greg, two nights ago the killing of Washington private security executive Leland Babbitt has many inside the Beltway frightened. What are your sources telling you as far as who might be responsible?”
Court ignored his wound now. He just sat there and waited for the talking head, ex of the FBI, to finish pontificating about the all-points bulletin out for the vicious assassin and the probability that the hit man was either by now somewhere back home in the Middle East or hiding in a rat hole in the city waiting for the coast to clear.
Gentry drank his coffee and watched his television, wondering what made this ex-FBI guy such a shitty expert on the tradecraft of assassins.
The screen switched to a heavy man with a round face, dark hair, and a red bow tie. Under his image was the caption Maxwell R. Ohlhauser, Former Chief Legal Council, CIA.
“Now, Max, you were with the CIA, so you know what a dangerous job spy work is. But usually it isn’t so dangerous here at home, is it?”
“Don, you are right about that. What we saw in Maryland two nights ago was no random act of violence.”
“Son of a bitch,” Court said. The man on television had been part of the small group of men that had sanctioned his assassination. And now here he sat, big and proud and famous, as happy as a clam to talk to the world about the CIA.
Court saw from the text on the screen that Ohlhauser was now a former employee of the Agency. He reached for his laptop, which lay on the bed nearby, and typed the man’s name in Google. In seconds he discovered that Maxwell Reid Ohlhauser was now working as a private attorney here in D.C., with an office on K Street. There was a link to his Twitter account, and Court clicked on this. The most recent tweet from Ohlhauser announced he was due to appear on both Fox and CNN this morning in Washington, then he was looking forward to eating oysters for lunch at Old Ebbitt Grill with a good friend from college.
Well, that’s helpful, Court thought.
He typed the restaurant into Google and pulled up a map to it. He found it just next to the White House, within walking distance to Ohlhauser’s office on K. Also, the lawyer had helpfully added a link to the Twitter account of his lunch date, so Court could look into this man and gauge his potential as a threat.
Ninety seconds after first seeing Max Ohlhauser on the news, Court knew more than enough to find and fix his prey. He looked up from his laptop, a bewildered expression on his face. In his career Court had often hunted a single target for months before acquiring his location, and rarely had he discovered the exact place one of his targets would visit within days, or even weeks, of beginning the hunt. That Ohlhauser had been so accommodating to broadcast his day’s to-do list almost made Court wonder if he was being led into a trap. But after another ten minutes on Twitter he saw that the fifty-five-year-old attorney had a huge social media profile, and for as far back as Gentry checked, the man told those who followed him on Twitter many of his most mundane of daily activities.
Court checked the time on the television. It was just after ten a.m., so he knew he had to get moving if he was to have any chance to get eyes on his new target by one. The restaurant was only a few minutes away by Metro, but Court couldn’t go there directly.
First, he needed to go shopping.
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.