She decided she and her team would do it the old-fashioned way. They would head to where she last saw him, and then they would branch out and search until they found him.
She did not tell her team she had lied about seeing him leave the building earlier. She knew they would back her, but there was no need for them to be implicated if Yanis Alvey found out the truth and recalled or even fired her for her insubordination.
THIRTY-FOUR
At ten A.M. local time on Saturday morning, Russ Whitlock climbed off the train at the town of Èze-sur-Mer, hefting a large pack onto his back as he did so. He left the tiny station and began trudging up a steep road that wound its way into and through the hamlet of Èze. Behind him as he walked, the blue waters of the Mediterranean reached to the horizon line; in the near distance dozens of small pleasure craft sat still in the morning sun, from Monaco to the east to Nice to the west and beyond.
Russell Whitlock only occasionally looked back over his shoulder toward the water and the roads below him. He wasn’t worried about being followed today; he was certain no one knew he was here. He also wasn’t terribly concerned about witnesses to what he was about to do. This was the low season in the south of France; there was very little foot traffic, even in the more touristy areas. He was, however, worried about cameras, and for this reason he avoided the cobblestoned main streets of Èze with their shops and hotels and restaurants, all of which would have some form of Internet-based or CCTV cameras for security purposes, and instead he worked his way around the backs of buildings, ever climbing, away from the sea and toward low scrub brush and rocky outcroppings on the hill to the west of the hamlet.
His hip hurt, of course; it nagged him with every step.
Whichever fucking Trestle operative had shot him — Russ had no idea who’d made the lucky shot — Russ knew the odds were seven in eight that the man was now dead, and he took great pleasure in that.
He neared his destination, still ascending through the trees and brush. He’d climbed the route the afternoon before, searching for just the right spot, and determining the manner in which he could avoid others while ingressing to and egressing from his sniper’s hideout.
Of course, broad-daylight work like this was not his first choice, but this was the only chance to hit his target. Yes, Amir Zarini would pass by on the same road this evening on his return from Monaco, and then it would be past nightfall, but Russ would not be able to identify his vehicle in the dark, not even with the Leupold scope.
If he was to hit Zarini within his promised five-day window, he had to do it this way, and he had to do it now.
He found his spot fifty minutes after leaving the train station, and he took his time to secret himself in the low green brush. He lay in the dirt, his backpack next to him, but he did not open it yet to retrieve the rifle. He had a few minutes to kill now, and the last thing he wanted was for some hippie French hikers to happen by his hide and see him with a long black gun.
He was certain he would be seen by someone before this was all through, probably over in the medieval hamlet of Èze just a hundred meters off to his left, but that was no problem, because what would they see? A white male in his thirties, with an athletic build, brown hair, and a brown beard?
That sounded a hell of a lot like another guy to Russ, a more famous guy. And that was, of course, by design.
He pictured the action to come, and, just as when he’d planned every other part of this operation, he thought about the Gray Man. He wanted to do everything just the way Gentry would do it, if he were the man here to kill Amir Zarini.
Russ knew what that entailed. He’d read every scrap the CIA had on Gentry, and they all led inexorably to one conclusion.
Gentry would do it right.
After all, Russ thought, if you read the reports about him, Gentry was smooth. Gentry was clean. Gentry was the best.
“Well, fuck Gentry,” Whitlock said aloud.
Russ could do smooth and clean as well as the Gray Man, and he knew it. He’d smoked the number two al Qaeda commander in Baghdad in 2008, and again he’d taken out his successor, this time in Peshawar, in 2011. Both times he’d slipped into a no-go zone undetected, used an M40 rifle with a suppressor — not this foreign-made Blaser bullshit that the Gray Man fancied — and he’d made it out clean.
Yeah, Russ could do it just like Gentry.
Better, in fact, and today he would have a chance to prove it to himself. Of course, no one else would know that the Zarini hit had been the work of Russell Whitlock, and that was by design, although Russ regretted the fact. The intelligence community in the United States would chalk this op up to the Gray Man; they would scratch their heads a bit because the target would look odd compared to a normal Gray Man contract, but they would attribute it to Gentry nonetheless.
Today Russ would kill two birds with one stone. He would convince the Iranians that he was the Gray Man, and he would set the table for the world’s intelligence agencies. They would see soon enough that the Gray Man was working for the Iranians.
Yes, he had promised the Iranian Quds Force man that there would be no comebacks to Iran on either this hit with Zarini or the assassination of Ehud Kalb. He’d actually said it with a straight face.
But the truth was quite different. The truth was, once Whitlock got paid for this operation, he would make sure the world knew the Gray Man had killed the PM and the Gray Man worked for Iran.
And by then, poor Court Gentry would not be in a position to defend himself.
Whitlock looked down to his watch.
It was time.
He unzipped his backpack and began assembling the Blaser R93. He put the entire weapon together in less than ninety seconds. Not his fastest time, but he was in no rush. Once he’d snapped the four-round magazine into place, he loaded a fifth round into the chamber and closed the bolt.
He did not expect to need five bullets. Just one. But it was always good to be prepared.
He took up his position behind his weapon and looked through the scope. He scanned the road far below him, the Avenue Raymond Poincaré, and found a suitable location to fire upon. He checked his range to target and saw that the distance was 335 meters. He set the elevation on his scope. He gauged the wind and determined the values to be negligible for a shot of this distance.
Now he waited, but he did not have to wait for long. Just four minutes after placing his eye behind the Leupold optic and beginning his scan for the vehicles, two Mercedes G-Class SUVs appeared on the road as they passed the train station.
They were a perfect match.
There were three people in the lead Mercedes, two in the front seats and one in the back. Through the scope Russ had difficulty identifying the man in the rear of the vehicle, and when a glint of sun off the windscreen of the lead SUV caused Russ to shut his eye into his scope for a moment, he lost another few seconds to make his identification.
As the time neared to fire, he realized he could not positively identify Zarini in the front car. He swung his scope quickly to the rear vehicle, scanned through the windshield of the Mercedes, and saw two men in the front seat and two in the back. None of the four looked like his target; they all appeared to be bodyguards.