Court shrugged. “I’ve had a pretty full plate recently. What the hell was BACK BLAST?”
“Trieste, Italy.”
Gentry looked away a moment, thinking back. “The thing in Trieste had a name?”
Hanley nodded in the dark. “In your defense, it was kind of thrown together, wasn’t it? But it did have a name. It’s possible Hightower never read you in on the name of the op.”
“But… what about it? That op was solid.”
“Denny says it wasn’t. He says you rogued it. Ohlhauser confirmed it, and the director seemed to agree.”
Court stood from the chair quickly, startling Hanley. “That’s a damn lie! I remember everything that happened in Trieste. A terminal sanction along with a personnel recovery. I wasted the bad guy and scooped up the good guy. Whatever Carmichael’s real reason for wanting me off the table, it sure as shit wasn’t anything that happened in BACK BLAST.”
Hanley remained seated, but he put his hands up in surrender. “I only know what he told me, and he told me you were derelict on BACK BLAST. I fought him tooth and nail for more intel, and when he wouldn’t give it up I just begged him to cashier you, or have you charged with something and pulled off Golf Sierra and thrown out of the Agency. But the term order was the term order, and that was that.”
Court was barely listening now. He knew he’d done exactly as instructed on that mission, but there was one thing about Trieste that did stand out. He had been working with Zack Hightower’s Golf Sierra Task Force at the time, but on that particular operation he’d been sent in alone due to operational requirements. Nothing had gone wrong on BACK BLAST, he was sure of it, but if it had, it would have been a mission where he was the only one who would have been blamed. Not the rest of Golf Sierra.
Court turned back to Hanley. “Do you know more than what you are saying?”
“Listen carefully, Court. Denny calls the shots at the Agency. He has more power than the director of the CIA. More power than the Director of National Intelligence. Denny is the king, and the king is after you. Better you just declare victory on this little operation. You came to D.C. to get intel on what went down. You got intel. You got me to tell you this knot isn’t going to be unraveled. So now go, get out of the country, back into the Third World, and back to your life. You have one hell of a good business model. An assassin of assholes. You can be proud of that. Don’t throw it all away because you are so naive to think you can come home and fix the goddamned CIA.”
Court knelt down, right next to Hanley. It was the first time the director of the Special Activities Division had been able to clearly make out the face of his former asset.
Court said, “I’m not leaving till I clear my name. I’m dead otherwise, and you know it. Forget about BACK BLAST, this has to do with AAP, not some on-the-fly term and rescue I did in Italy.”
Hanley said, “What’s AAP?”
Court said, “It’s the program I was part of before I worked for you.”
Hanley gave Gentry a quizzical look. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“Exactly! No one does but those involved, and they’re all dead. Carmichael wants me dead, too, before others find out.”
Hanley shook his head back and forth. “I think you’re wrong, buddy. I think you digging any deeper is just going to go bad for you.” He hesitated for a moment, then said, “Six, I saved you in Mexico City… I can’t save you here.”
“I didn’t come here to get saved.”
“That’s what worries me. You came back to go out with one last big bang.”
Court said nothing.
Hanley put his hand on Court’s shoulder. “Just remember why we got into this work in the first place. To help this country. Not to hurt it.”
“Don’t lecture me about the mission.”
Hanley raised his hands in surrender. “You’re right. You’ve done your part. There should be more guys like you, Court.” He paused, gave a slight shrug of his shoulders. “Not many. Two. Three, tops. Doubt we could handle more than that.”
Just then there was a loud banging on the open back door downstairs. A male voice called out. “Hanley?”
Hanley’s own pistol appeared in Gentry’s hand in a heartbeat, and he jammed it under the SAD director’s thick chin.
“Who the fuck is that? You hit a panic button?”
Hanley answered back, his eyes shut tight because of the gun jabbed in his throat. “No. It’s just Jenner. He didn’t want me to stay here without security. He’s checking on me.”
Court said, “Say something to him,” but he pressed the barrel of the weapon harder into Hanley’s beefy neck.
Hanley shouted out of his bedroom and up his second-floor hall. “What the hell, Jenner?”
“You didn’t answer your phone, boss. Your back door is propped open down here. You okay?” As the man spoke, it was clear he was moving closer. From the den to the stairs.
Hanley shouted, “I’ll be fine when you get the fuck out of my house!”
“Just let me put eyes on you first. Make me feel better.”
Court stood, began moving to the door, pulling Hanley with him by the collar of his flannel shirt. Court whispered, “I’ll send you downstairs, but I swear if you say a fucking word I’ll kill you both.”
Hanley nodded, then said, “Six. The pistol. It was a gift from my dad.”
Court rolled his eyes. “I’ll toss it in a backyard flowerpot.”
Hanley held a hand out for Court to shake, then Jenner called out again. Court ignored the extended hand, spun his former boss around, and pushed him out into the hall. Hanley did not look back. He continued towards the stairs. Quickly he wiped nervous perspiration from his face, and he disappeared from Court’s view. As he descended the stairs Court heard him speaking to Jenner, who sounded like he was halfway up the stairs himself.
“I’m sorry, boss, but shit. Why is your door open? And why are you dressed?”
“I needed some air. It’s fine.”
“You took a walk? With Violator out there?”
“Relax. Snipers are on every rooftop around here, anyway. Hell, they probably just watched me take a dump through my bathroom window.”
The men kept talking, but their voices receded. Court waited another moment, then he left the bedroom, moved up the second-floor hallway past the stairs, and entered a dark guest room full of storage boxes. He felt his way to the window and raised the blinds. This was the southwest side of the house, the only portion Court knew was clear of surveillance.
Seconds later he was outside, using a copper drainpipe to make it down to ground level, struggling with dull pain in his right forearm and sharp pain in his ribs. In the backyard he moved low, placing the .45 pistol in an old wheelbarrow with a flat tire next to the back fence. He climbed the fence into another yard, and within minutes he was two blocks away on Cathedral Street making his way back to his car.
The JSOC watchers had no idea they’d missed him.
37
Court drove through the trailing edge of the thunderstorm on his way back to his basement apartment, his mind twisted with plots, conspiracy, and guesswork. It was a bad time to think. It was midnight, there was a good bit of traffic even with the weather, and the old Fort Escort’s wipers were shit. He struggled to see the road, and he found this even tougher to do than normal because his mind was near capacity processing everything Matt Hanley had just told him.
Again, much the same as in his conversation with Travers, most of what he’d heard from his former boss sounded like secondhand disinformation. Court felt certain Operation BACK BLAST was nothing more than a red herring. He remembered the op as a two-day in extremis rush job that took place at least a full year before the shoot-on-sight sanction came out for him. Court didn’t think it was relevant to his problem now at all, other than the fact that Carmichael was using BACK BLAST as an excuse for the termination order, because he had to keep his real reasons under wraps.