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Court squared his body towards the man and he raised his hands. But he did not drop to the ground.

“Get on the floor!” the man shouted again.

The woman lying facedown on the linoleum just beyond the counter wailed in terror. Her boyfriend put his arm over her to both shield her and hold her there, lest the panic in her voice translate to the rest of her body and she try to run.

The two men at the counter kept their pistols on LaShondra. She stared back at them through her right eye, but she kept her hands down low, right in front of the cash drawer.

“Get down!” Gray hoodie shouted it again at Court, and as one, both men at the counter turned to look at the noncompliant man by the door.

The white gunman said, “Don’t be a hero, man! Get your ass down!”

Court did not reply. He just began very slowly lowering to the ground. He kept his hands at shoulder height as he knelt.

Gray hoodie with the shotgun relaxed noticeably when he saw the white man across the room begin to obey his instructions.

His confidence was misplaced, however. Gentry had never willingly turned his back on imminent danger in his life, and he wasn’t going to start by lying facedown and obedient on a dirty floor in a goddamned D.C. convenience store.

He’d go to his knees, but he’d keep his eyes on the three men. If it looked like they were going to murder him for refusing to lie flat, then Court would make a play for the Smith on his hip.

As Court made it down into a low squat his eyes flicked off the shotgun across the room, and onto movement ahead on his left. To his astonishment, LaShondra had taken advantage of all the attention elsewhere, and she had produced an aluminum baseball bat. It rose quickly above the counter.

Oh, hell no.

Court saw the bat before anyone else because all three armed men still had their eyes on him. But he knew in less than a second one of the three gunmen would notice the woman behind the counter, and then, even if she managed to crack one of these kids’ heads wide open, she’d still die for her bravery.

Court was in a full squat with his left hand out in front of him as if to help him to the floor, the bag of groceries hanging from it. In full view of the three men he dropped the bag, fired his right hand down inside his open jacket, wrapped his fingers around the butt of the Smith and Wesson pistol, and began drawing it out of his waistband.

Simultaneously to this his legs spread a few inches wider and his knees softened, and he dropped to the floor in a kneeling position. As his pistol rose in front of him he lowered his body behind the gun.

The shotgun thundered, spitting fire and smoke across the front aisle of the market, over the backs of the prostrate couple. It sprayed hot lead the length of the room at a speed of 1,200 feet per second. The shot pattern expanded one and a half inches for each yard along its flight path, so when the buckshot reached Court’s position they passed inches over his head in a pattern the size of a large pizza. The lead then exploded through the glass door just above and behind him.

Gentry knew gray hoodie would have to rack a new shell before he fired
again, so he shifted his sights to the men with pistols. Both were swiveling their arms to get a bead on the armed man in the raincoat on his knees in front of the door.

Just as LaShondra hit one man in the shoulder with her aluminum bat, Court fired two rounds without pausing, one into the upper torso of each man, left to right. Then he swept further right to gray hoodie, and pressed off another round. His pistol rose in recoil and arced back to the counter in a blur and he fired two more shots, hitting the first man in the left temple as he dropped and spun and the second man dead center in his throat.

Court returned his aim to gray hoodie, who was stumbling backwards into the stockroom of the market with a nine-millimeter hollow point bullet lodged in his heart.

Court shot him again, this time high in the stomach as he tumbled back.

All three men lay still, but the six spent shell casings from the Smith were still moving, either in flight or rolling, spinning, and bouncing on the linoleum. The tinkling sound of brass was the only sound in the market for several seconds. Then the casings stilled and quieted, and their sound was replaced by an audible prayer from LaShondra, who had stood her ground by the cash register, her bat still high as if she were standing at the plate at Nationals Park.

Slowly the panicked sobs from the lady facedown on the floor grew, and then the sobs morphed into the same prayer LaShondra was reciting.

Court’s ears rang. The couple on the ground climbed slowly to their knees. She wept openly now as she prayed, and he tried to comfort her. LaShondra lowered the bat and she turned, just stared at the man with the gun by the door. Blood and brain and bits of bone dripped off the rack of pastries next to her.

And Court just stood there. Taking it all in.

Loud and messy.

Without a word he turned and stepped through the shattered front door, his weapon high in front of him, his eyes flitting up and down, close and far, seeking the dark places on the street and between the other buildings, actively hunting for threats.

The maroon Monte Carlo squealed away from the gas pumps. Court watched it go, then he headed for his car.

A
ndy Shoal and Catherine King stood on the sidewalk in front of the Easy Market on Rhode Island Avenue, their umbrellas protecting them from a light rain. The lot and the market were blocked off with police tape Andy had not been able to charm his way through, but the two
Washington Post
reporters had managed to learn several things, even from distance.

Dawn was just breaking, but the lights on inside the convenience store made it easy to see two of the bodies on the floor, even from seventy-five feet away. Both men were faceup in front of the register; one man’s leg was draped over the torso of the other. The glass front door was shattered, bloodstains around the counter were obvious, and Andy, whose eyes were better than Catherine’s even though she wore her glasses, said he could make out the feet of another body halfway into the stockroom at the back of the store.

Detective Rauch was here and he confirmed three deaths, all young armed men, and all of whom, he said, were in the commission of a strong-armed robbery when a civilian shopper pulled his own gun and dropped them all. Rauch gave Andy the general description of the shooter.

Thirties, white, clean-shaven, nondescript.

Andy replied with a hopeful tone, “Sounds just like the perp on Brandywine street, and just like the Leland Babbitt assassin.”

But Rauch, a man who’d not only seen a lot of crime, but had also seen a lot of reporters who were too quick to create a narrative that made a story more dramatic, threw cold water on Andy’s supposition. “And it sounds just like tens of thousands of guys in the greater D.C. metro area. Should I start sending out paddy wagons to pick them all up?”

Andy put his hands up in surrender. “Fair enough. But what about the skill? Can tens of thousands of citizens do all this?”

“What do you mean?”

“On Brandywine Street you mentioned the shooter knew what he was doing. Any initial impressions about this scene?”

Rauch hesitated a moment. Finally he said, “I watched the security camera footage. It was beautiful.”

Andy’s eyes rose. “A guy uses a gun in your jurisdiction and you say it’s beautiful?”

“You put that in your paper and I’ll kick your ass, I’m not kidding. I don’t condone it. I’m just saying the shooter was fast, sure of himself, and clean. Between you and me . . . four armed assholes walk into a building and only one armed asshole walks out. Around here, that doesn’t sound like crime. That sounds like progress.”

“Any chance I can watch the video?”

“Evidence, Andy. You’ll have to wait for it.”

Catherine King had remained to the side of this conversation, allowing Andy to work his magic with the police. But when Rauch headed back into the Easy Market to check on the progress of the crime lab technicians, she stepped up next to the young reporter. She said, “What do you think? Same guy as the others?”

Andy nodded. “Sure seems like it could be. But what I don’t get is the fact that the CIA people aren’t here.”

Catherine had an answer for this. “I bet we scared them off. They won’t be investigating the crime scenes in person anymore.”

Andy nodded, and the two reporters started heading back to their cars. Andy said, “You know what’s bothering me?”

“What?”

“This highly trained killer knocks off a couple of Aryan Brotherhood drug dealers in a shoot-out, but lets the others live because they stopped fighting back. Then he encounters an armed robbery here, and kills these bad guys.”

Catherine knew where Andy was going with this. “Good against evil,” she said.

Andy said, “Right. But that Babbitt thing doesn’t seem to fit. Either Babbitt was a criminal and we don’t know it, or the guy who did this and Brandywine Street didn’t kill Babbitt.”

Catherine said, “You are good at this, Andy. I think you are on to something.”

“Enough to put into my article? I mean, I could just mention the difference in the victims.”

“No. I’d leave Babbitt out of it for now. Mention the killing in the Highlands along with this event, maybe draw some parallels, but I think there are enough questions about Babbitt still to where you should not speculate.”

Andy said, “You are working on your own piece about the CIA’s involvement, aren’t you?”

Catherine shook her head. “
I’m
not.
We
are. Trust me, when I get something ready I’m going to involve you, both in the work and in the glory.”

Andy said, “You keep promising me that, but when?”

They were back at her car now. She fumbled for her keys in her purse, then pulled them out. “How ’bout I buy you breakfast and we get to work?”

—

Z
ack Hightower sat in front of a computer terminal in the fourth-floor Violator tactical operations center, his eyes fogged both from the early hour and from the steam pouring out of the coffee cup under his nose. The coffee had been placed in his hand a minute earlier by a young CIA analyst, and Zack had been put here—in front of the monitor in the TOC, that was—by Suzanne Brewer.

A half hour ago Zack had been snoring away in his McLean hotel room when a call came from Brewer informing him of a possible Gentry sighting in the District. Before he’d even processed this information she told him she was sending a car, and to be ready in five minutes.

Hightower shook himself awake and asked to be vectored to the location of the potential sighting instead of the office. Brewer wasn’t using Hightower as a hard asset, however, so she didn’t understand the request. No, she’d countered, he needed to come in and look at some video, to make a positive ID, and to let her know what he thought of the analysis.

Zack grumbled to himself but agreed, and now he sat here in front of a black screen, with Brewer standing just behind him.

When nothing happened on the monitor for several seconds Hightower took a sip of hot coffee and made a joke. “Inconclusive.”

“It hasn’t started yet,” Brewer snapped back, and Zack realized his humor would fall flat on a bureaucratic automaton like Suzanne Brewer.

Soon the video began playing. It was security camera footage from a convenience store. Zack saw the time stamp and realized it took place less than three hours earlier.

“Where is this?”

“Rhode Island Avenue. East of Logan Circle.”

A man in a black baseball cap and a raincoat entered the store, but the camera did not have an unobstructed view of his face. It only showed the bottom of the man’s chin and the bill of his hat. He moved into the store, seemed to say something to the woman behind the counter, then headed to the back.

Another camera angle picked him up there, but it revealed even less than the first one. Only his back and a brief view of a portion of his chin.

Still, Hightower took another sip of his coffee and declared, “That’s him.”

“How can you be certain? His face is obscured.”

“Ma’am, I spent the majority of a decade looking at this dude’s ass as he ran point on my team. Most of the time his face was obscured then, too. Trust me, I know how he moves.”

Brewer wasn’t convinced. She remained silent so Zack could focus on the screen. The first Hispanic male entered the convenience store, wearing a gray hoodie. He was soon followed by an African American couple. The man in the ball cap stood at the counter, facing just slightly away from the camera above him on his right, while the cashier bagged his groceries.

A Monte Carlo parked out front in the rain. Two men climbed out.

Hightower watched all this quietly. Slowly a little smile curled on his lips. “Hot damn, there’s gonna be some kind of a fracas, isn’t there?”

“Just watch, please.”

Zack did so. He saw the positioning of the three young men, the movement around the market of the African American couple, and the man in the cap at the magazine rack who could have just turned and walked out the door next to him, but instead squared off to the room.

When the man in the gray hoodie pulled the shotgun and pointed it at Gentry, Hightower just mumbled, “Last mistake of your dumb, short life,
ese
.”

The next few seconds of video chronicled the shoot-out, beginning with the shotgun blast and ending when Gentry fired his sixth round from his handgun, the two men at the counter crumpled into their own blood
splatter on the floor, and the gray hoodie with the shotgun disappeared, falling backwards under the camera’s view.

The screen froze just after Gentry left the convenience store, three dead bodies in his wake.

Brewer sat on the edge of the desk next to Hightower and faced him. “Impressions?”

Hightower shrugged. “Boarding house rules.”

“Boarding house rules? What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the shot sequence. Everybody gets a first helping before anybody gets seconds. It’s textbook. Only a topflight close-quarters guy can cycle his weapon around a room like that, hit three guys center mass, back-stopping each one, and then recycle and shoot them all again before they hit the ground.”

Brewer frowned. “One of the Townsend operators reported that Gentry stole his handgun at the McDonald’s.” She looked through some notes on the iPad in her hand. “A Smith and Wesson model M&P. It’s hard to tell the weapon the man is using in the video due to the poor quality of the recording, but I had the analysts here look at the gun and they say it can’t be the same gun, because the Smith and Wesson has an external safety lever on the side, and Gentry doesn’t seem to take time to disengage a safety before he fires. What do you think of this analysis?”

“Ma’am, I think that analysis blows.”

Brewer reacted with obvious surprise, and an analyst in earshot looked back over his shoulder at the big man, a scowl on his face.

Brewer asked, “And why is that?”

“Gentry wouldn’t need to fan the safety off, because it would already be off.”

“You’re sure?”

Hightower snorted. “External safeties are for chickenshits and losers. I know that. Gentry knows that.” He nodded his head towards the video. “Can we watch the video again?”

The recording played through a second time. Hightower viewed it with an unmistakable smile on his face.

“Enjoying yourself?” asked Brewer coolly.

“Professional respect. Gentry’s still got the touch. It’s obviously not the most impressive thing I’ve seen out of him, considering the low quality of
the opposition. But he still possesses the speed and the marksmanship he did when he was in the Goon Squad.”

“Why didn’t he just leave the store when he had the chance?”

Hightower took a moment to select his words, so Brewer helped him out. “Let me guess. Because he thinks he’s a good guy?”

Hightower countered, “He
is
a good guy. We’re targeting him because of orders. We aren’t vanquishing evil or any bullshit like that.”

“But—”

“But nothing. You and me?
We’re
the assholes in the mix. If we left Gentry to his own devices he’d be fine, and the world would be better off.”

“I wouldn’t let Denny hear you talk like this if I were you.”

Zack shrugged. “I’m here to do a job. I don’t have to like the job and I don’t have to hate Court Gentry. I have my orders. I’ll keep the Agency safe from him, I’ll help you find him, and, if you let me, I’ll kill him for you.”

He gave Suzanne Brewer a little wink and a smile. “I don’t mind being the bad guy. It’s more fun.”