Mark Greaney
Dead Eye
For my awesome nephew,
Kyle Edward Greaney
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Nick Ciubotariu, Christopher Clarke, Nichole Geer Roberts, J. T. Patten, Hooligan 003, James Yeager and his team at Tactical Response, Jeff Belanger, Dalton Fury, Keith Thomson, Igor Veksler, Michael Hagan, Chris Owens, Devon Gilliland, Devin Greaney, the Tulsa Greaneys, Dan and Judy Lesley, Jennifer Dalsky, John and Wanda Anderson, Captain Michael Hill, United States Army, the Echols family, the Leslies, Amanda Ng and Caitlin Mulrooney-Lyski at Penguin, Stephanie Hoover at Trident, Jon Cassir at CAA, Mystery Mike Bursaw, and George Easter.
Special thanks to Scott Miller at Trident Media Group and Tom Colgan at Penguin.
EPIGRAPH
But the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.
PROLOGUE
Leland Babbitt shot through the doors of the Hay-Adams Hotel and ran down the steps to the street like he had someplace to be.
The White House was just across Lafayette Square, awash in lights and radiant in the cold rainy evening, but Babbitt ignored the view, looked to his right, and began racing toward the limo waiting for him there.
The chauffeur hadn’t been expecting his passenger for another hour and a half, but he was a pro; he quickly extracted himself from the warm Town Car and opened the back door. He noticed that the man seemed to have forgotten his overcoat in his haste — to say nothing of his wife.
The thickly built passenger folded quickly into the limo; the driver climbed back behind the wheel and looked into the rearview mirror for instructions.
In a voice commanding yet hurried, Babbitt said, “Sixteen twenty-six Crescent Place. Break every law you need to break, but get me there now!”
The chauffeur didn’t know his passenger; he’d only been hired for the night to ferry Mr. Babbitt and his wife from their home in Chevy Chase to a black-tie gala here at the Hay-Adams, and then back home again. But the driver knew this town. He’d been shuffling VIPs around D.C. for a quarter century; this wasn’t the first time some suit had told him to blow through the lights to get to a destination on the double.
He started the engine. “You got a badge?” he asked, still making eye contact with the man in the backseat via the rearview mirror.
“Play like I said yes.”
The chauffeur’s eyebrows rose now. He’d danced this dance before. “National security?” he asked.
“You bet your ass.”
With a shrug the driver said, “That’ll work,” and he shoved the transmission into gear and squealed the tires. Behind him, his passenger lifted his cell phone to his ear.
“En route.”
The chauffeur couldn’t imagine what was so important on Crescent Place, a two-lane road of majestic Georgians and neo-Colonials, and he was certain he would never know. This was D.C., after all. Shit went down behind the gates of tony residences all over the city that was far above the driver’s pay grade.
His job began at the front door of one building, and it ended at the front door of another, and whatever went on inside was not his problem.
Babbitt had his phone clutched to his ear now, and even at speed the driver could hear the man’s voice clearly over the engine of the whisper-quiet Lincoln — short, soft blasts of interrogatives and shorter bleats that sounded like commands. The man behind the wheel did his best to tune the words out, standard operating procedure for a limo driver in Washington. Twenty-five years hauling dips, pols, spooks, K Street douchebags, and foreign dignitaries around the nation’s capital had taught the driver discretion, to ignore his passenger’s voice unless he himself was being addressed.
He could have listened in; surely the fate of nations had been decided in the backseat of his limo more than once in his career.
But the driver, quite frankly, didn’t give a damn.
And tonight, even if he had tried to pick up any of his passenger’s side of the conversation, he would have heard only generic phrases, cryptic-speak, and alphanumeric references. The man in back had himself spent a lot of time in limos, and he had his own standard operating procedure when being chauffeured around — if he did not know good and well that the guy behind the wheel had Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance with a full-scope polygraph and codeword access to the relevant program, then it was cryptic-speak or nothing at all.
Leland Babbitt had been in this game too damn long to rely on the professional discretion of a fucking limo driver.
ONE
The Lincoln squealed through a hard left turn, drifting in the slick intersection awash in the glow of headlights from angry oncoming traffic. It raced up Crescent Place and then past a small, unlit sign that read Townsend Government Services. After squeezing through electronically operated iron gates still in the process of opening, it rolled up a winding driveway lined with bare cherry trees to a huge peach-hued brick mansion bathed in floodlights. Lee Babbitt climbed out of the Lincoln without a word to the driver and ran through the cold rain up the stone steps of the residence, passing through a door held open by a lean man in a sport coat.
In the round marble foyer of the building, two more young men with military haircuts and civilian clothing stood with Heckler & Koch automatic weapons hanging from slings over their shoulders. Before anyone spoke, a man in his late thirties, some decade younger than Babbitt, came rushing up a long hallway that led to the rear of the building. He wore a cardigan sweater and corduroy slacks, and an assortment of card keys and laminated badges bounced on his chest from a chain around his neck.
Babbitt met the younger man in the middle of the foyer, and his voice echoed off marble. “It’s happening?”
“It’s happening,” the man in the cardigan confirmed.
“The assault is underway?”
“Infiltrating to target as we speak.”
“One man? One man is going to hit that fucking fortress?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And it’s him? It’s our boy?”
Jeff Parks took his boss by the arm and quickly ushered him back up the hall. “We think so.”
“You’ll have to do better than that,” Babbitt said. While he walked, he unfastened his bow tie and opened the top button on his shirt, freeing his thick neck. “There is more than one motherfucker out there who wants to stick a knife into the neck of Gregor Sidorenko.”
The long hallway was trimmed in stained cherry, and the tastefully lit walls were adorned with fine art of the American West. There were Russell watercolors of cowboys on a cattle drive, regal George Catlin portraits of Native Americans, and a pair of Frederick Remington desertscapes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, as well as a Remington bronzed buffalo statue on a side table lit by antler lamps.
As they rushed up the corridor, Babbitt pulled off his damp jacket and slung it over his arm. He asked, “How did we pick him up?”
“One of the UAVs was up on a calibration flight. No one expected activity tonight. It’s Saturday; a party was in full swing at the target location until about an hour ago, which put three times the number of personnel on scene as normal. Plus, the weather’s shit and the next illumination cycle isn’t for two days.”
“Right.”
“The ScanEagle pilot spotted movement a half mile off the coast. We tracked the signature for less than a minute before determining we were most likely looking at a singleton attack on Sid’s property.”