For a brief moment Brewer wondered if her target could have possibly been so thorough in his skills to have known that the sun would hit windshields at that time, in that location, at that angle. But she dispelled this notion.
Sure, it was possible to be that lucky, but Court Gentry could not possibly be that good.
Could he?
After the JSOC team got no joy at the garage, Dakota and his men raced around the station until nightfall, and then they spent another few hours widening their search area to include virtually all of central D.C., but now they were back in their safe house, waiting for the next sighting to be reported at the TOC and, Suzanne presumed by Dakota’s tone when he called her cell phone forty-five minutes earlier, they were angry with her for the goose chase.
Her plan was to throw some compliments their way, take any grief they wanted to give her about the lack of a target, and then go home.
Now she sat in the living room of the house. Dakota was alone with her while the other men either bunked out, ate, or relaxed in the other rooms.
Catherine had declined the JSOC officer’s offer of tea, but he poured a cup for himself and stirred a sugar cube into it slowly.
Impatient, Brewer started the conversation. “Look. I’m tired, and I know you are, too. But honestly, if you felt the need to browbeat me for not getting you a target after five days of hunting, you could have just done it over the phone.”
Dakota took a sip of hot tea. “No, ma’am, that’s not it at all. I’ve been in the army too damn long to get pissy when something doesn’t pan out. Bad intel is the rule, not the exception.”
“Then what am I doing here?”
Dakota wasn’t happy with the flavor of his drink, so he tossed another sugar cube in, but he didn’t bother with stirring this time. “Coming from the army, I always did have a pretty fair understanding of whose side I was on. I’m getting worried that something’s gotten lost in the shuffle on this op, so I’m hoping you can help me sort it out.”
“I’m not holding anything back from you. Just tell me what you want to know.”
“I want to know the identity of the other bozos we keep running into. The other team involved in the Violator hunt.”
Brewer furrowed her eyebrows. “I don’t know what you mean. It’s you guys, Agency support personnel, and contracted plainclothes security. I told you this already.”
“That’s not all the pieces on this checkerboard, Ms. Brewer.”
“Look, we’re doing our best to keep PD and DOJ out of this, but Gentry has stirred a hornet’s nest. Shooting up subway stations and convenience stores and taking down SWAT teams draws the attention of law enforcement, as you can imagine. Obviously local PD was in Columbia Heights yesterday morning, and I’m sure they’re looking as hard as they can for the same target we’re looking for, but we aren’t coordinating with them.”
Dakota drank more tea, looking over the rim of the cup at Brewer with a skeptical eye.
The CIA Programs and Plans officer leaned forward in her chair. “If you have something to say, just say it. Otherwise, I’m going home.”
“There’s another group out there. Foreigners. They are being sent where we’re being sent.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Foreigners? Bullshit.”
“No, ma’am. The only bullshit is that the Agency is farming out this job to some overseas actor. You folks can get yourselves thrown into prison for that, you know.”
“I don’t have a clue what you are talking about.”
“Maybe you don’t. Maybe you do. Maybe somebody is keeping you in the dark, same as us. But they are out there. We saw them yesterday morning when we got to Columbia Heights. A couple of unmarked cars, multiple individuals in each one. A couple of motorcycles that didn’t look like they belonged. We got close to them, and they bugged out.”
To Brewer this did not sound particularly conclusive.
Dakota continued, “And today at Union Station. Four more two-man tag teams wandering around inside the mall. I don’t mean contractors or Agency spooks, I mean foreign actors of some variety.”
“What variety?”
“They are Middle Easterners, that’s for sure. Otherwise I don’t know. It’s not my mission to unravel that mystery, I only kept an eye on them to make sure my guys stayed safe, and I only bring it up with you so you know that’s not the way we operate. I know there are one hundred thousand things you can’t tell me, and to be honest I don’t give a damn about any of them. But I demand to be told who else is going to be running around armed in my area of operations!”
Brewer was thoroughly confused, but she did not want to reveal that to the man who needed to follow her instructions. Instead she promised to speak with her higher-ups to see if they could clear her to reveal more information about the operation.
A few minutes later she was back in her car, but her plans to return home to Springfield had changed. Instead, she’d go back to the TOC. She told herself she’d sleep when this was all over, but until then, there were too many balls in the air for her to worry about her own needs.
61
By the time dawn broke over the tiny town of Glen St. Mary, Florida, the roosters on the farm just north of Claude Harvey Road had already been crowing for hours.
Court had known they would be. The ancestors of those roosters had been screwing with his sleep for as far back as he could remember.
To call this a farm at all was putting it charitably. It was fifty acres of mostly hard-packed sandy dirt, covered in trees and shrubs on the edges and flat as a pancake. There was a pond and a double-wide and a detached garage made of corrugated tin, and there were a few chickens in a coop and a few goats in a pen, but that looked like the full measure of the place if you were driving by on Claude Harvey, the only paved road in sight.
But a passing motorist wouldn’t be able to see the largest structure on the farm from the road. It was back behind the trees, two hundred yards off Claude Harvey, just this side of a fat man-made earthen berm that had long since become overgrown with thatchy privet and wild oak.
The structure was a two-story shoot house, a firearms training center, constructed like a fort out of railroad ties, old tires, plywood, Conex boxes, and other rusted metal. At over nine thousand square feet, it was massive, although it had never been fancy and had fallen into disrepair in the past fifteen years. Next to the old wooden structure, several firing ranges could still be detected in the underbrush, and old rusted steel man-shaped targets leaned haphazardly against the berm.
The owner of the farm and the shoot house was a sixty-eight-year-old native Floridian named James Ray Gentry. Gentry had served as a marine in Vietnam, a small-town cop, a large-city SWAT officer, and his department’s lead firearms instructor, and then, when he was still in his early thirties, he quit the force and opened his own private tactical training center for state and local law enforcement agencies. This was the early 1980s, when Florida’s cocaine wars put armed bad guys with automatic weapons on the streets, in the bars, and in the boats offshore. Cops and deputy sheriffs all over the state needed to learn how to transition from the days of six-shooters and minimal chance for danger to fighting protracted street battles with heavily armed men with little reluctance to kill or die to protect their millions in product.