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In the middle of the basement the suspect pulled the Bravo officer’s pistol out of his drop leg holster. He then heard, “You have forty-five seconds to get everything off. Go.”

—

I
t was impossible for the ERT officer to get all his gear, his armor, his tunic, his boots, and his pants off in forty-five seconds, but he did his best. Court knew he couldn’t do it, but he also knew he’d work faster with an impossible timeline.

While the man stripped, Court dressed, but he put the man’s radio headset in his ear first so he could listen in.

Soon in a soft voice he heard, “This is Alpha One. Hold all positions. We’ve got a closed closet door in the master bedroom with movement indicated under the door.”

Court now had a tunic, body armor, a balaclava, and night vision goggles on.

“Speed it up,” Court whispered to the man as the cop fought to get his belt off.

A new call from upstairs came over the radio, asking all elements to report status before they confronted whatever was hiding in the closet. Court spoke to his hostage, who by now was down to his underwear. “Quick . . . what’s your call sign? Think before you answer. If you’re wrong, I drop you right here.”

“Bravo Four,” the man said.

Court zipped up the black tactical pants while the radio came alive.

“Bravo One, check.”

“Two check.”

“Bravo Three check.”

Court clicked the transmit button, but he rubbed his headset mic against the stubble on his chin as he spoke to mask the sound of his voice. “Four check.”

The next man on the team continued the roll call.

Court fastened the utility belt around his waist, not taking time to thread the belt through the loops. It was a little large for him, like the rest of the gear, but he made it work.

Court then cuffed the ERT officer to a pipe extending from the water heater, then he pulled a flash bang grenade out of the officer’s load-bearing vest.

—

A
lpha One stood outside the master bedroom on the second floor of the Mayberry home. Two of his men trained their laser aiming devices on the closet door at the far end of the room. Under the door, faint shadows moved back and forth at irregular intervals.

Alpha One shouted, “D.C. Metro Police! Come out of the closet! Hands high!”

There was no response then, nor when he repeated the command two more times.

Finally Bravo Six entered the room, moved to the side of the door. He let his rifle hang from its sling and pulled his pistol from his drop leg holster, then he used his free hand to reach for the door. Everyone else tightened for action, their laser pointers evenly spaced across the door as Bravo Six slid it open.

On the floor in the back of the closet, a flashlight stuck out of a woman’s shoe. In front of this was a huge puddle of milk, and around the puddle, three cats moved around, lapping it up hungrily.

“Son of a bitch,” the ERT man mumbled.

A flash bang grenade went off on the ground floor below them.

—

T
he four regular police officers watching the backyard of the house from the neighbor’s yard saw the flash of light in the windows. The explosion broke glass in the kitchen that flew out over the patio. As they knelt behind a fence and watched, they heard in their radios the calls of the tactical team as they lined up on the second-floor stairs, ready to hit the floor below them from the stairwell.

It was clear they were missing a man, but these four in back understood why. A single tactical officer, his rifle in his left hand and his right hand clutching his left elbow, appeared in the side yard. The cops thought he might have come either from the front of the house or the basement apartment.

He ran up to them; clearly he was hurt, but at least he was ambulatory. While one of the cops made the officer-down call, the other three covered for the wounded ERT man as he ran past their position, all the way through
the yard, and towards the street on the other side of this property. None of the men noticed the cop was wearing a backpack that was not police issue.

One of the officers started to run to help him, but he was called back by the other three. They knew they needed to hold their position in case the suspect appeared and tried to run after the fight inside.

—

C
ourt ran to the street, where two police cars sat parked on the corner. The cars were both empty with their doors open, but four armed officers stood nearby, ready to block any traffic trying to get into the neighborhood.

“Ambulance is on the way!” one cop called out when he saw the tactical officer. “How bad is it?”

Court was all the way up to the two vehicles when he slowed and stopped. He let go of his arm now, and raised the rifle. “Show me your hands.”

“What the hell?”

“Where are the keys?”

No one spoke; they were all clearly stunned. Court glanced in one of the cruisers and saw the keys in the ignition. “Drop your weapons on the street, kick them away.”

All four did as instructed, and Court leapt into the cruiser, fired it up, and then raced off.

He knew this drive would be a short one. The helicopter pilot above would be informed of the situation in seconds, and it wasn’t tough for a cop in the sky to track a cop car on an empty street.

He pulled under a covered parking space in an apartment complex just seven and a half blocks away, parked the squad car, and leapt out, leaving the rifle behind. Just as the helo above neared his position, he sprinted through the parking lot, then he climbed a fence and dropped down into a drainage canal that ran at the back of the apartment complex.

He knew where he was going, after having studied satellite maps of his neighborhood to plan for rushed escapes.

He raced along the canal, ran to a large culvert, and ducked in. As he moved through pitch-darkness he pulled out his phone to light his way, and with this he saw a smaller drain, waist-high and not more than four feet in diameter, that ran off at a ninety-degree angle. Water gushed down from it into the culvert.

This wasn’t sewage; it was just runoff water from the streets, but there wasn’t anything clean about it. Court climbed up and into the long, narrow shaft, and he knelt low. This killed his wounded ribs, but he ignored the pain and moved as fast as he could from the area.

He wasn’t sure where the drain went—this wasn’t on the sat maps—but he had a flashlight, and he had a sense that he was moving to the east. If he just stayed in here for a few blocks and climbed out he’d find himself somewhere in the middle of the city, and from there he was sure he would be safe from the immediate threat.

D
enny Carmichael opened this morning’s copy of the
Washington Post
. DeRenzi had brought it in as soon as it arrived by courier, and Denny had been awake and waiting for it, even though it was only five a.m.

It took him no time to find the article he was looking for, just below the fold and taking up an entire half of the front page, as well as another half of A19.

Carmichael assumed Catherine King must have raced back from the CIA headquarters in McLean to the
Washington Post
’s office in D.C. to make her deadline last night. She couldn’t have possibly filed the story before midnight, which meant the newspaper had done some impressive work to get the article in the edition that went to press just a few hours later.

It was all there, under the headline “CIA suspects D.C.-area shooter is ‘known personality.’”

The description of Gentry was close to what Carmichael had handed King. She’d also reported the fact that he had spent time in Miami, along with information that he’d been trained, possibly by jihadists, likely in Yemen.

For some reason there was no mention about him coming from Jacksonville, Florida, but Denny wasn’t too troubled by this.

Nor was he bothered by the fact that King’s article clearly faulted CIA for not letting police know after the Brandywine Street incident that they had suspicions about who might be involved in the attack. Carmichael didn’t care. After all, in one form or another, CIA had been blamed for everything bad that had ever happened since the 1950s.

Other than this small trifle, there was very little editorial comment from King in the piece, which greatly pleased Denny. She did add a small caveat at the end when she wrote that the investigation was ongoing and first reports, even from top government officials, often proved to be erroneous.

Carmichael shrugged. King thought she had couched her piece with skepticism, but she had done exactly what Denny wanted her to do.

She had published an article that would bait Gentry into targeting the writer of the article.

—

A
t any other time, the impenetrable blackness around him and the rainfall beating against the aluminum roof above him would have lulled Court into peaceful sleep. But his heart rate and the adrenaline pumping through him, even now, a full hour and a half after listening to the sounds of a tactical unit preparing to smash in his door, still prevented him from calming down enough to relax and doze off.

He sat Indian style in his small storage unit, his back to the concrete block back wall, his suppressed Glock in his lap, and his Yamaha motorcycle right in front of him for cover. He faced the closed metal sliding door, stared at the black in front of his eyes, and listened to the calming rain.

And he fully expected at any moment for the door to fly open and a team of shooters to rush in behind it with blinding lights and laser-targeting devices.

Court had made it to his storage unit over a half hour earlier, after running a short SDR by using two early-morning cabs and walking through back alleys and commercial parking lots. Once in his little unit, he checked the area around him before closing the door, then he used the light of his phone to find his second bugout bag here in his cache and to check the bike to make sure it was ready to roll.

Then he just sat down and did his best to relax.

He hadn’t known who was hitting the Mayberry house at first, but after the engagement he determined they were a local police tactical unit. Their body armor said ERT, and while that was nothing conclusive—a gang of Arab goons had worn uniforms that proclaimed them to be D.C. Metro cops, after all—the tactical unit’s movements confirmed to Court they were exactly what they purported to be. The cordon of regular patrol officers in the area around the Mayberry home only sealed Court’s suspicion he’d been discovered in his hide site by local law enforcement.

That was a bit embarrassing for a tier-one operator like Gentry, but he’d
known from the beginning he would be up against a lot of different opposition forces, and he’d be taking a risk operating inside the city.

If the cops hit this storage locker now he would lift the Glock and he would point it at them, but he wasn’t about to kill a cop. He might squeeze off a couple of rounds into their body armor just to make himself feel good, but there was nowhere to run, so if the cops hit, he’d die right here, sitting Indian style and enjoying the sound of the morning spring rain.

But he wasn’t just barricading himself here to die. Instead he was waiting a few minutes more for the early part of the morning rush hour, where he wouldn’t be one of the only vehicles out on the street, and then he would climb aboard the Yamaha 650 and get the hell out of town.

But not too far. Despite this morning’s setback, he still had work to do here in the District.

For now he just worked on calming his body, relaxing himself, and waiting for the right time to run.

—

M
att Hanley was the last to enter the conference room, and as soon as he did so he realized the meeting had begun without him.

Not that he cared. If he had his way he wouldn’t be here at all, but he’d been summoned by Carmichael, and Carmichael was his superior, so he had no choice but to attend.

As he sat down at the table in an open wingback chair, he looked around at the attendees. Suzanne Brewer was in the middle of a presentation. She stood in front of a digital map of the city and addressed the room, perfectly coiffed and dressed.

Mayes and Carmichael were present, of course, as were many of the other Violator Working Group members, along with a team of techs sitting in chairs against the back wall.

And there was one more attendee. Down at the end of the conference table sat a big man with short blond hair, much of it turning gray. He wore a suit and tie, his face was cleanly shaved, and he had a small notebook in front of him.

But Hanley wasn’t fooled—he knew a shooter when he saw one.

Hanley turned away from the man, presuming him to be a JSOC liaison
or someone similar, but as soon as Brewer finished her presentation and sat back down, Hanley’s head swiveled back to the man at the end of the table.

Matt hadn’t seen Zack Hightower in five years, and he was almost certain he’d never seen him without a beard, so he forgave himself for not recognizing him. Calling out across the length of the table he said, “Morning, Sierra One. Welcome back to the land of the living.”

Zack Hightower had worked for Matt Hanley for several years, till the day Hanley was told all the men in his Goon Squad unit were dead except for Gentry, and Gentry was the culprit for the deaths of the others.

“Hey, Matt,” Zack said. He seemed embarrassed to be alive. He added, “Sorry about that.” Zack then nodded over to Denny Carmichael, who was looking down at some papers. He shrugged. “Orders. You know.”

Hanley just stared Hightower down and said, “Your funeral sucked, by the way.”

Zack gave a half smile and looked down to his empty notebook, and one of the techs in the room, a man who had no idea what was going on, broke out in a surprised laugh.

The executives at the conference table, in contrast, remained silent, until Suzanne Brewer said, “Matt, you haven’t missed anything, I was just getting started with the morning briefing. The short version is this: Gentry’s in the wind. Again. Local PD had him, but they lost him.”

Hanley asked, “How did that happen?”

“While forty cops cordoned off the neighborhood, two eight-man ERT units hit the house where he was staying. They engaged Gentry, but Gentry managed to get out of the building and past the cordon.”

Hanley said, “Let’s see . . . yesterday in Dupont Circle, Gentry brutally murdered several men. The death toll this morning
must
have been three times that, right?”

Brewer shook her head, not picking up on the fact that Hanley seemed to know the answer to this question already. “Surprisingly, no. Four men were injured, though no injuries were life-threatening.”

Hanley glanced to Hightower, and he noticed his eyebrows furrowing slightly. But Zack said nothing.

Hanley next asked, “Could someone please tell me why I’m here?”

Carmichael spoke for the first time since Hanley had arrived. “Like it or not, Matt, it’s in your best interests that we bring this episode to a close. Suzanne
wants to know where Violator will go next for shelter. Today, we suspect, will be a repositioning day for him. He will find some new location, some new bolt-hole, and I’m going to venture to guess it will be outside of the District, someplace safer. You ran the man for several years, and he hasn’t been back in the area since those days. We thought you might give us ideas about his possible new hide site.”

Before Hanley could respond, Hightower raised a wary hand.

Brewer turned to acknowledge him. “Zack, it’s not necessary to raise your hand.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Gentry will be south of D.C., in a remote location. Picture a covered ditch, a deserted cabin, a grain elevator on an abandoned farm. He will be very difficult to find once he gets there. Almost impossible. I feel our next moment of opportunity will be when he reengages us,
not
when we discover his hide.”

Brewer said, “I understand why you think he will go somewhere more remote, but why south specifically?”

“He lived and worked in northern Virginia. It’s more familiar to him. He might anticipate us making this assumption, but he is confident in his abilities to hide, especially when he knows the terrain.”

Carmichael pointed to Hanley. “Your best guess as to his location?”

Hanley heaved his shoulders, not hiding his annoyance at it all. “I was management. Hightower was labor. Next to Court Gentry, Zack Hightower is the best operator I ever had working under me.” He looked down the table at Hightower. “Before Zack’s untimely death, he was also the best ground-level leader I’d ever seen. In your infinite wisdom, Denny, you’ve resurrected Hightower to sit him in a seventh-floor conference room, dress him in a suit and tie, and ask him questions about Gentry’s new lair. Zack tells you the target has run someplace you’ll never find him, so I defer to Zack’s expertise. I guess you’ll just have to wait for him to come back out to play.”

Suzanne snapped back. “
Play
, Matt? Really? A veteran CIA official and three innocent Transit Police were murdered yesterday. I doubt their loved ones see this as a game.”

Hanley sniffed. “Yeah, about that. Yesterday, a man with Court Gentry’s abilities of escape and evasion was so backed into a corner in a location with a half dozen egresses that he was forced to murder three poorly armed and poorly trained transit cops in cold blood, in broad daylight, in a crowded
location. And yet before dawn this morning,
sixteen
highly trained tactical officers raided his secure, defended ground, and in that instance Court only knocks a few heads together. Killing none. Zero.”

Hanley was looking at Hightower now. “That is pretty damn curious, wouldn’t you say?”

Despite Hanley’s challenge, Zack did not say a word.

Brewer countered, “He did a lot more than knock heads together.”

Hanley stood up from the table. “But he did a lot less than send a dozen poor bastards to the morgue! A cold-blooded killer is cornered like a fucking rat in a cage and he doesn’t kill his way out?” He turned to Denny. “Not buying it. I’m not buying any of this bullshit. I’m walking, Chief. You have a problem with that, go to the director and have him remove me for insubordination. The way the walls are crumbling around here, you’d be doing me a favor.”

—

C
armichael didn’t stop Hanley from leaving, but Brewer chased him out and caught up with him on his way back to his office. “Matt?”

With a heave and a sigh he turned back to her. “Sorry, Suzanne. My comments weren’t directed at you, specifically. They were directed at this entire operation.”

“I understand. I just
don’t
understand why you are in Gentry’s camp the way you are. Hightower is the same way. Zack will do whatever we tell him to do, it seems clear he is a good soldier, but I don’t get the feeling his heart is in this any more than yours is.”

Hanley said, “Every day this goes on, Denny gets himself in deeper. I don’t know what the fuck is happening out there, but the story he is giving you, and the story he gave the
Washington Post
yesterday, is just the story Denny needs us to believe. It’s not the truth. I respect you, Suzanne, but when the smoke clears after this debacle, those of us who did what we could to stay outside of Denny’s gravitational pull will not be able to do one damn thing to help those who got pulled down with him.”

Hanley left Brewer there, standing alone in the hallway.