Court opened his eyes and found himself out of business class and back in his closet.
More than ever he was sure he’d done his fucking job on BACK BLAST, just exactly like he’d been told.
But it was no big mystery to Court as to why Denny Carmichael had chosen BACK BLAST to use to scapegoat him. It was the one op Court had performed during his Goon Squad years that hadn’t involved the rest of the team. Denny could tell Hanley, Ohlhauser, and the director of the CIA that Court went to Italy on an op, that he took a payoff from the Serbs, that he let a bad guy slip away.
And he’d killed some innocent guy instead.
Court looked at the dark ceiling of the closet above him, and he felt weak, impotent, and low. He had no idea how to convince anyone he was innocent of the charge Carmichael accused him of.
He closed his eyes, telling himself he needed to sleep awhile to be able to think straight.
But almost immediately his eyes fired back open.
A faint noise, something indistinct but vaguely familiar, grabbed his attention. There was no way he would have heard it without the Walker’s Game Ear increasing his hearing, but still, it barely registered.
While his brain was processing the origin of the sound, he heard it again. Soft but unmistakable.
A slight scratching.
A mouse?
No. Yes. He knew what it was now.
It was a plastic buckle, probably a FastTech, commonly used on tactical gear. Court had worn equipment adorned with FastTech buckles for the majority of his life, so he knew the sound they made when they touched other surfaces almost as well as he knew his own inner voice.
The buckle had brushed against the wooden wall on the little patio of his basement apartment, right next to the cement steps up to the driveway.
Now Court concentrated, listened beyond the ever-increasing sound of his own pounding heart, and he detected footsteps just outside his door.
He pictured the scene just six feet from where he now lay. A half dozen SWAT officers filed down the steps, then, one by one, they stacked up on the wall right outside his door. One of the men accidentally bumped his drop leg ammunition pouch on the wall as he moved into position, brushing the buckle against the wood.
Court reached for his gun.
49
Arthur Mayberry shook his head in disbelief, but Bernice Mayberry nodded her head as if she had known all along.
They both sat in plastic chairs in an all-night laundromat three blocks from their home. Arthur wore his pajamas and a blue jacket handed to him by an ambulance driver. He stared ahead, still unable to process what was happening around him, and Bernice sat next to him in her housecoat, equal measures scared and angry, but she had already professed herself to be wholly unsurprised by tonight’s events.
Out through the windows of the laundromat law enforcement officers stood around, radios to ears. On the street ambulances and paddy wagons idled, and first responders waited for the order to roll forward.
Arthur and his wife had been roused by a phone call, just after three a.m., asking them both to very quickly and quietly come to the front door to speak with police officers. They’d complied, of course, and when they did they were told they needed to leave their home immediately. Bernice had demanded to know what was going on, and an officer said there was a chemical spill on the nearby train tracks, and everything would be explained at the command center. They were whisked away by a team of armed cops in body armor and taken here to the laundromat, where dozens of cops were already set up, and whatever they were planning on doing didn’t look to Arthur like it had one damn thing to do with a chemical spill.
Guns, grenade launchers, night vision equipment, riot shields. Arthur hadn’t seen so much military gear since Saigon in 1969.
He and his wife were led to seats near the front of the laundromat and, as a group of cops parted to let them through, Arthur saw a large photograph of his basement tenant posted on cardboard and leaning against the wall.
“Oh, hell no,” Mayberry mumbled under his breath.
Fifteen minutes had passed since then, and now Arthur watched while the police looked over his hand-drawn diagram of his basement, including the corner apartment he built with his own two hands. He imagined when this was all over he was going to be in some serious trouble for all his building code violations, but he looked on the bright side… He sure as hell wasn’t in nearly as much trouble as Jeff Duncan.
He’d done what he could to deflect blame away from the man in his basement. Jeff Duncan was probably up to no good, but the very idea the mild-mannered white man living on his property was some sort of a terrorist was asinine. Arthur had seen something on the man’s face; a world-weariness, a hardened interior, maybe. But he wasn’t as bad as all this, Arthur felt sure.
Bernice, on the other hand, kept muttering to herself that she knew Jeff Duncan was low-down and no-account, and she berated her husband mercilessly for not seeing this for himself.
The Washington Metro Police Department refers to its SWAT unit as ERT, the Emergency Response Team. The head of the ERT unit had sat down with Mayberry a few minutes earlier and asked, “You are certain there is no access to the house from the basement apartment?”
“Look, young man. I told the other officers. I built that place myself. You would need to knock a hole in the wall to get into the basement, and even if you could bust through, you’d be over there on the side with the furnace and the water heater.”
Arthur had then drawn up the diagram, and although the police seemed to be very concerned about the man in the basement, Arthur could tell the Emergency Response Team captain was glad he wouldn’t have to split his men and hit multiple entrances at the same time. They could, instead, enter the basement, and then, if the subject wasn’t there, they could exit and reenter the home to clear it. Another thirty police officers were on the scene and charged with cordoning off the block to keep anyone from entering or exiting. If the cordon around the property was any good, and their suspect was inside, they’d get him, wherever they found him.
Now Arthur and Bernice sat quietly, waiting for the tactical officers to get on with their raid and remove their tenant from their home in handcuffs, so they could go back home and back to bed.
Denny Carmichael awoke from a deep sleep on his sofa.
The phone on his desk trilled and he grabbed it, both surprised and hopeful.
“Mayes?”
“It’s Brewer, sir.” She sounded almost out of breath.
“Talk.”
“D.C. Emergency Response Team has surrounded a house in Columbia Heights. They think they have the suspect from Dupont Circle holed up inside.”
Carmichael clenched the receiver tight. “And why do they think this?”
“A Crime Stoppers tip led them to the area. Detectives came out and interviewed neighbors, showing them a picture taken from the Easy Market, and another taken at Dupont. They got a hit, apparently.”
“And why are we just learning about this now?”
“We aren’t monitoring tip line calls, there are a hundred every hour, most all of them useless. We only monitor the radio traffic of dispatched police units. This call went over a landline directly to a supervisor, and not out over the radio. He used his mobile phone to send out detectives, they weren’t dispatched regularly. I guess they are suspicious a terrorist might be listening in to police radio traffic. When they decided it was a legit lead they called everyone out. We’re a good twenty minutes behind the action.”