With his window of opportunity rapidly closing, Whitlock pushed the stock of the rifle up, pointing the muzzle down a fraction, and centered his optics back on the lead SUV. As the vehicle neared the point directly below his position, he no longer had visibility of the man in the backseat since he was sitting on the other side of the Mercedes.
He could only see the driver now, and in another few seconds he would lose him as he passed around a bend.
Shit, Russ thought. No way to do this clean.
He lined up his scope, took in a breath, blew it halfway out and held it.
He fired the Blaser.
One third of a second later, the driver’s-side window of the lead Mercedes shattered; the driver’s head slumped to the side, and the vehicle veered dramatically to the right. At speed the SUV scraped along a low retaining wall that ran alongside the road and, with a dead driver behind the steering wheel, it jacked back to the left, into the opposing lane.
The SUV slammed headfirst into an oncoming Volkswagen Cabriolet; an explosion of metal and glass and steam and spraying fluids erupted into the air, instantly killing Amir Zarini, the two other men in the Mercedes, and three college students inside the Volkswagen.
The rear Mercedes swerved almost sideways on the road to avoid the carnage in front of it, coming to a stop just twenty-five feet from the accident. All four occupants of the rear vehicle poured out; one of them ran to the wreckage, but the other three drew their P90 submachine guns and pointed them at the hillside, reacting to the sound of the sniper rifle.
Russ pulled the bolt back and chambered another round, and he scanned the wreckage below him, looking for any signs of life. Although the Mercedes now lay on its side along a short scatter path of wreckage, there had been no massive fireball or other event that told Whitlock, definitively, that the wreck was unsurvivable. After deciding he needed to be absolutely certain his target was dead — the Gray Man would not leave a scene with a wounded target behind him, after all — Russ fired on the Mercedes quickly. Four equidistant holes in the roof; each round would strike a different portion of the backseat and, Russ was certain now, would kill anyone left alive after the crash.
Russ also knew exactly what four more gunshots, all from the same portion of the hillside, would do to the four armed men below. All the private security officers began firing bursts from their P90s. Gunfire echoed off the hills all around Whitlock while he calmly ejected the magazine and replaced it with a fresh one. The high-pitched screams of rounds ricocheting off rock around him only encouraged him to work more quickly. He added one more bullet in the chamber to make five, and then he aimed at the first security man on the Avenue Raymond Poincaré below and shot him through the chest. The man fell back to the street; his suit coat whipped up crazily as his arms flailed, and his weapon skittered to the asphalt.
A second security officer sprayed rounds toward Whitlock’s hide. The P90 was out of range at 335 yards, which meant only that accurate and effective fire was difficult, not that a round from the gun could not strike Russ dead. But Russ fired his long-range rifle and sent a big bullet into the forehead of the security officer, dropping him dead next to his colleague on the seaside roadway.
By now the last two security men had seen the futility of their predicament, and both turned and ran, leaping for the low retaining wall that ran along the road. Russ tracked the movement of one man and fired once more, striking him with a shot to the low back.
The fourth executive protection officer made it to cover and, Russ felt sure, he would keep his head down for some time to come.
Just as Russ took his eye out of the scope to begin the quick takedown of the gun, he heard shouting to his left. He looked across the hillside and saw several locals as well as a uniformed police officer, a member of the local police municipale, standing there, at the edge of the hamlet of Èze. The cop had some sort of pistol in his hand, and he fired it at a distance of 125 yards. He missed; dirt and dust kicked up ten feet from where Russ lay, but he quickly spun his rifle toward the cop and aimed at the top of the man’s head to allow for the fact that he’d adjusted the scope for the 335-yard shot. Russ fired just as the municipale fired; the cop missed again, but Whitlock’s .300 Winchester magnum round nailed the man between the eyes.
Russ fired one last round at the crowd of idiots standing there watching, missing the civilians by inches, and then he quickly and calmly disassembled his weapon, stuffed it in his backpack, and began running up the hill, limping through the pain in his hip.
It took him less than three minutes to make it to the Moyenne Corniche, a winding hillside road almost empty of traffic. He’d parked his BMW at a scenic lookout, and he leapt into it, throwing the rifle bag into the passenger seat, and then he sped off in a cloud of white dust, minutes before local authorities could respond en masse.
Four hours later Russ Whitlock stood in front of a full-length mirror in a three-star hotel room in Genoa, Italy. He had showered, shaved off his beard, and cut his hair short and neat. He had rebandaged the wound on his hip and then dressed in an Armani suit he’d had waiting on him here in the room.
He admired his look in the mirror, and he felt the pride in today’s accomplishment wash over him. No, it had not gone according to plan; there had been some collateral damage. Killing the cop had been unavoidable and very much necessary to achieve his objective, in Whitlock’s opinion, and the dead civilians in the car had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He did not blame himself for any of the deaths, though he remained objective enough to know that this assassination did not look exactly like a Gray Man assassination.
But still, he told himself, it would suffice for his purposes.
After straightening his tie once more in the mirror, he zipped closed his Italian leather roller bag and headed out the door.
He went downstairs and rolled his luggage out onto the street. A taxi driver motioned to him, but Russ waved him away. Instead, Russ took out his phone and walked up the sidewalk, away from the entrance to the hotel, so he could have some privacy.
He dialed a number using the MobileCrypt app and waited for an answer on the other end.
“Yes?” It was Ali Hussein, the Quds Force operative he’d met earlier in the week in Beirut. Whitlock recognized the voice.
“It’s me. It’s done.”
“I know. It is all over the television. We had hoped for more… discretion.”
“You are not implicated in what happened.”
“That is not what I mean. My organization is highly uneased by today’s events. We are impressed you succeeded in your mission, but the collateral damage makes us very concerned you are not the man you say you are.”
Whitlock squeezed the cell phone tightly as he tensed with anger. He said, “The tactical realities of the event resulted in unanticipated loss of life.”
“What does that mean?”
Angrily Russ said, “It means ‘shit happens.’”
After a delay, Hussein said, “This, what transpired today, does not look like the work of the Gray Man.”
Russ tried to calm himself before continuing, taking two long, silent breaths and telling himself everything was riding on his powers of persuasion. “I understand your concerns. I do. I am disappointed in some aspects of the operation. But I am who I say I am, and you only have to ask yourself who else could have executed this operation on such a tight timeline to see that I am telling the truth.”
“There is only one way you can convince us.”
Russ knew Hussein was referring to Kiev. He closed his eyes; he had to force himself not to throw the phone into traffic and then turn around and slam his fist into the wall of the hotel.