But Court knelt down over a black watertight case and pulled a laminated instruction booklet out of an attached plastic pouch.
Hightower walked over to the unit and bent down to see what had Court so engaged. He read the label on the case, then he read it again. Then he shook his head. “Hell no.”
“Hell yes,” replied Court.
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“You’re a hero, dude. But you’re not a superhero. That right there is a one-way ride to hell.”
“I can make it work.”
“You’re gonna die.”
“Gotta die of something.”
“Shit, man, die of something else.”
Despite continued protests from Zack, Court lifted the twenty-five-pound case and lugged it out with the rest of the gear they would take back with them.
Zack followed him out. “Seriously, Six, what the hell are you thinking about doing? It’s eight dudes in a house. We go in, hit it, and quit it.”
Court said, “I’m planning ahead. I’m going after Denny.”
“Fuck that. Denny’s untouchable. Hanley would never sanction it.”
“Then it’s a good thing I don’t work for the CIA. I’d probably get written up or something.”
Just after nine thirty a.m., a small blue and white helicopter flew low over the trees at the west end of Harvey Point, and then it slowed to a hover over a grassy field just south of the SAD storage facility. Zack and Court stood next to all their cases and packs of gear and watched the helicopter land.
The aircraft powered down and Chris Travers climbed out of the right seat, then walked directly over to the two men.
There was no greeting. He just said, “I hope you dumbasses don’t think you are taking all that shit on board this helo.”
Zack said, “We weighed it. Two hundred forty-five pounds of kit. That’s a Robinson R44 you’re flying there. You can carry this, us, and more.”
Travers did not press the issue; even though Hightower was nearly fifteen years Travers’s senior, he was still an intimidating character.
The three men loaded the aircraft, then they climbed in themselves. Travers took off into a sunny morning and flew the men to the north.
As they flew, Zack and Court discussed their options. Using Travers’s tablet computer with a cell connection, Court pulled up all the imagery on the Arlington safe house he could find. Looking it over, he saw it was a large but nondescript building in a middle-class neighborhood with a fence around the yard. The one interesting feature was that it backed up to an industrial area, with a large parking lot just behind the property.
“It’s going to be defended,” Court said.
Zack agreed. “We can hit it at night, use NODs.”
Court moved the map around the area. Just north of the location was a small park, with trees, two baseball diamonds, tennis courts, and a soccer field. And just beyond that was a large mall.
“Maybe instead of attacking into an enemy position, we can draw them out into the open.”
“How so?”
“We bait them with the one thing they are after.”
“Where are you going to find seventy-two virgins?”
“I mean me.”
Zack understood immediately. He joked, “Just one virgin, then. I like it.”
Catherine King had only been back in the States a few minutes when she learned about the death of Andy Shoal. She rushed from Dulles to the crime scene, stood there on the sidewalk just like she’d stood on the sidewalk with Andy many times in the past week, surrounded by cops and flashing lights, searching for answers as to what had just happened.
She didn’t know why Andy had been killed by Denny Carmichael, and now she wondered why he had yet to come after her.
No, not for a second did she think the man known to the American press as Jeff Duncan had anything at all to do with this. The media had already convicted him, of course, and their reporting had gone beyond ridiculous, with experts on all the twenty-four-hour news stations opining about every possible motivation and tactic. Video games were being blamed; antigovernment anarchists were implicated; a four-year-old local high-profile missing persons case had been brought up by reporters at a press conference to a bemused FBI spokesperson who didn’t have a clue how to respond.
Every American with the common name Jeff Duncan was being sought, not by the police or the feds, because they all rightly assumed that it was a pseudonym, but by local reporters. A man in Illinois with the right name, the right general age, and the right general description had been frustrated by a reporter’s demands he account for his whereabouts, and he threw a punch at the man. Now Jeffrey Duncan of Peoria was behind bars and a hundred reporters from around the globe stood outside the jail in the rain, thinking the D.C. assassin might just possibly be this loudmouthed tire store clerk with a right hook that couldn’t even drop a spit-shined J-school grad.
And Catherine felt a sense of responsibility for it all. It had been her reporting that started everyone looking in the wrong place, had taken eyes off Carmichael and his Agency.
And she wondered if, once the shock wore off, she would feel responsible for what had happened to Andy, as well.
For the twentieth time since she’d been off her flight from Tel Aviv she tried to call Six. As with all the other times, there was no answer. She wondered if he was still alive, or if all this commotion in the country about him was continuing on long after he was no longer around to take the blame for all these things he did not do.
Catherine headed back to her office, knowing good and well that the second she arrived she would be surrounded by her investigative team and the executive editor, and they would want to know everything about Tel Aviv and how it all related to Andy Shoal’s murder. Most would agree that the man who kidnapped her at Union Station three days ago was an assassin, and that Catherine’s Stockholm syndrome had just blinded her to this fact.
And she wouldn’t argue with them; she didn’t have the energy.
The Fashion Centre at Pentagon City was a large multistory mall with a luxury hotel and several restaurants. The average shopper would not realize it, but the mall also had dozens upon dozens of security cameras.
And all of these cameras were part of the network of image feeds that ran through the software at the Violator tactical operations center.
At six p.m., video monitors at the TOC came alive with images and facial recognition hits. While the men and women working in the TOC struggled frantically to pin down the location on a map of the building, they saw shot after shot of Court Gentry’s face, totally exposed without a hat or sunglasses. He entered the north entrance of the mall at the ground floor, walked south through the food court, stood in line for a minute to buy a cup of coffee at a kiosk in the center of the large crowded space, and then took his drink to the escalator.
By now the TOC had him fixed and they had live feeds from the Fashion Centre camera network, so they were able to track him in real time. While one analyst contacted the JSOC operatives, who were twenty minutes away in the center of D.C., a second analyst ordered all CIA contract officers in the area into the location.
A third analyst, under orders to do so, contacted the head of the National Clandestine Service. Due to the death of Jordan Mayes, and Suzanne Brewer’s hospitalization with a broken leg, Denny Carmichael had taken over operational control of the Violator TOC. Denny had the live video feed patched through to his Alexandria safe house, and he immediately disconnected the call.