Denny Carmichael is a weird man, King thought to herself.
Catherine stood, and Carmichael followed suit. She said, “I do appreciate your time. If you want to do another interview, one that isn’t so obviously stage-managed, then I am always available.”
Catherine King had only just stepped into the elevator with her control officer when Jordan Mayes entered the conference room via the side entrance. Carmichael relayed the major points of the conversation to his second-in-command.
Mayes followed with, “I’ll put a team on her.”
Carmichael shook his head. “That was my original plan, but she’s a wily character. I underestimated her. She’ll be looking for a tail at this point, and it will just make her think she’s important, which will just make her think she’s onto something.”
“She is onto something,” Mayes corrected.
“Something ephemeral. She is wandering in the mist. As she said, she will be forced to print what I gave her tonight. She might throw some disclaimers here and there in her article, but she will print the fact that CIA said they are looking for a man from Jacksonville who once lived in Miami. That is accurate, so Gentry will know she spoke with someone involved in the Violator hunt, and he will want to talk to her.”
“But if we don’t have a team of JSOC men ready to—”
Carmichael interrupted. “Put Zack Hightower on her. Just Hightower. She won’t see one man as readily as she would see a team.”
Mayes nodded. “Shall I give Hightower lethal authorization to target Gentry if he encounters him?”
Carmichael headed for the side door, on his way back to his office. Without looking back, he said, “You bet your ass.”
47
The rain battered the tiny window high on the wall of Court’s basement apartment. He lay awake in the closet, his bandaged ribs bare and his backpack under his head as a pillow.
His new Glock 17 pistol, now with the suppressor screwed on to the end of the barrel, lay by his side.
He hadn’t left this apartment since he arrived home just before six the afternoon before; it was nearly three a.m. now, and he hadn’t slept one damn minute of the past nine hours. He’d not accomplished much since watching the news and changing his bandages other than eating a dinner of bland collard greens and black beans, then washing it all down with tepid tap water and a pair of bottled beers.
After that, he vegetated, watching TV for hours.
The first half of his viewing was for purely operational purposes. He watched the major networks as they ran reports about the “terrorist massacre” in Dupont Circle. The faces of the reporters talking were different, but only a little. Their reports, on the other hand, seemed almost word for word the same.
After he couldn’t take any more regurgitated information or uninformed conjecture, he switched off the news and began flipping through the entertainment channels. There wasn’t much on that interested him, other than a comedy on basic cable about a group of guys who woke up with hangovers after a bachelor party in Las Vegas. Apparently this was the first film of a trilogy, but Court had never heard of it, and he wondered if watching all three would have increased his enjoyment. But despite the banality of it all and notwithstanding everything that had happened to him this week, Court caught himself laughing out loud at the absurd dilemma of the protagonists to the point his gunshot wound throbbed in protest at his enjoyment.
After the movie was over he turned off the TV, crawled into his closet, and assumed the awkward sleeping position he’d adopted since arriving here in the Mayberrys’ basement. Like every night, he popped the Walker’s Game Ear in his right ear, and immediately he could hear new sounds in the quiet neighborhood. A barking dog, the soft rumbling of a passing car, one of the Mayberrys leaving the kitchen above and walking up the staircase to their second-floor bedroom.
Now he lay here, fighting for sleep, moody and unable to find a way to shake it off. It grew from his utter frustration in his lack of forward momentum after the Ohlhauser meeting and the chaos that ensued from it. It was as if the wind had been pulled from his sails. He had no idea where to go next, and now he needed to find the momentum to regroup, to reacquire a target, and to reboot his operation.
He told himself he needed to work on his next move, which sounded good until he hit a wall the moment he tried to think. His original plan here in the D.C. area had been to talk to three men to get all the information he needed to determine his next course of action. Indeed, he had spoken with Chris Travers and Matt Hanley, but Leland Babbitt had been killed before he could interrogate him. And although Ohlhauser hadn’t been on his radar at the beginning of this op he’d managed to talk to him before he, too, had been killed.
But now what? Court thought back to his conversations with the three men, trying to pull out some actionable nugget that he hadn’t noticed before. Something that had eluded him.
Shit, thought Court. He was a shooter and a spy. He wasn’t an analyst or an investigator. He wanted a mission, not a fucking puzzle.
Then it hit him. A way to reanalyze the problem. He asked himself, what one thing did all the men agree on? What was the continuum between all parties?
He knew the answer as soon as he posed the question.
Fucking BACK BLAST.
This was understandable, Court reasoned, because Denny had told everyone it was an op gone bad. It had been his justification to hand down the shoot on sight. Now, in the middle of the night, with nothing else to do and nowhere else to turn, he told himself he had no choice but to try to reach back into his memory banks somehow and to replay every minuscule aspect of this one op out of dozens in his time with the Goon Squad, and hundreds in his life as an operator.
The normal routine with the Goon Squad after a mission was to perform an immediate hot wash, an after-action review where all elements involved discussed the good, bad, and ugly. They did it while memories were still fresh. But BACK BLAST had been different because Court had worked alone, without a net, much as he had in the early part of his career, when he’d been a member of the Autonomous Asset Program.
After Trieste there had been no hot wash, no after-action review, literally no mention of the event ever again.
This made details very fuzzy after more than half a decade, but as Court lay in his long, narrow closet, his head next to his ersatz escape hatch to the basement proper and his booted feet pressed up against the wall, he committed himself fully to this endeavor.
He forced himself to do his best to remember an operation that took place a half dozen years ago.
Court Gentry didn’t mind commercial travel, not even in coach, because even a long-haul international flight over the Atlantic was far superior to any of the hundreds of trips he’d taken on Agency transport in his years with CIA. The majority of the time when he moved from one country to another it was in the ass end of a loud, cold cargo aircraft that smelled like jet fuel and BO. Even the Special Activities Division Air Branch Gulfstream that normally flew transport missions for the Golf Sierra unit was outfitted for function over form, and on the inside it looked nothing like what people assumed from its sleek and businesslike fuselage.
But tonight’s flight from Dulles to Milan was something special, because by the time the SAD logistics staff bought Court’s ticket coach was full, so he got to fly in business class.