Back Blast (40 page)

By the time she climbed out of the passenger’s seat and looked around, he was gone.

—

C
ourt walked for only a few minutes before arriving at his motorcycle locked to a rack outside of the Rhode Island Avenue Metro.

He slipped on his helmet, revved the engine, and began heading west through the city.

He was hopeful something would come from Catherine King’s investigation of Operation BACK BLAST, but he couldn’t allow himself to focus on that right now.

No. Now he had a new problem. He had to go back to his hide site in the middle of the forest, grab as much of his and Zack’s gear as he could fit into a small backpack, and then go purchase another vehicle.

It didn’t have to be anything fancy. It just had to get him to Florida.

Despite what he’d told the
Washington Post
reporter, Court was not from Dayton. He was indeed from a small town on the highway between Tallahassee and Jacksonville, and the fact Carmichael had dropped that little tidbit into the conversation, Court knew, was either meant as bait or as a threat.

If it was bait, then Court would be in real danger heading down to Florida.

But if it was a threat, if there was
any
chance at all something might happen to his father, his only close living relative, then Court knew he had no real alternative but to get involved.

He had to go.

He wasn’t worried that the CIA was going to hurt his father. But the other group out there, this mysterious proxy force of Middle Easterners; what was to keep Carmichael from sending them down to Florida to hurt his dad, to punish him for the actions of his son in some way, or to hold him hostage?

Court didn’t think much of his father. They hadn’t spoken in nearly twenty years. But his dad was his dad, and Court couldn’t let the same group of killers who murdered Max Ohlhauser get their hands on him.

A
middle-aged secretary called for Denny Carmichael as he sat on the sofa outside the office of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. “The director will see you now.”

Denny walked into the office of the D/CIA, a seventy-three-year-old former congressman and senator from Alabama who had also served in the directorships of Homeland Security, Defense, and even Energy. The man’s political career began in the state house in Birmingham, and it had never stopped, covering a period of fifty years.

Carmichael saw D/CIA as an intelligent man, but ultimately nothing more than a carpetbagger, a pol who took the reins of U.S. intelligence only because it was considered by others to be a coveted position, and his friend the president asked him to do so as a personal favor.

Despite the negative view the director of the National Clandestine Service held for the chief of the CIA, the man had left Denny alone, having gotten the hint from the former director of intelligence that the less one knew about the inner workings of Denny Carmichael’s NCS fiefdom, the better for one’s own tenure. Denny got things done . . . no need to dig into just how he accomplished this.

But now, as the two men shook hands perfunctorily and Denny sat on a sofa across from the handsome septuagenarian in the four-thousand-dollar suit, he worried that was all about to come to an end in the director’s mind, because D/CIA was finally getting serious heat from those above him.

The director said, “Not sure if you’ve heard yet, but I’m heading to Capitol Hill tomorrow morning for a closed-door session. I’m going to have to talk about this mess going on in the District. And I’m not going to get away with saying I don’t know a
goddamned
thing, even though the truth is that I really
don’t
know a
goddamned
thing.”

Carmichael said, “I understand, sir. Please know, I kept this situation off your radar for your own good.”

“I’m sure you did, and nine times out of ten I need you to do just that. But this time my willful ignorance has bit me in the ass, because I don’t know anything more than what I’ve seen on TV and read in the papers.”

“Yes, sir. Unfortunately, the enemy gets a vote, and this personality we are after has proven extremely difficult to remove from the chessboard.”

“Cathy King over there at the
Post
says it’s a homegrown threat. That true?”

Carmichael heaved his shoulders. “More or less.”

D/CIA cocked his head and looked at Carmichael through narrow eyes. “More? Or less?”

“He used to be one of ours. Former SAD Ground Branch.”

D/CIA winced as if he’d just put his hand on a hot plate. “Don’t tell me it’s the Gray Man.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“My predecessor told me about this one. He’s on the presidential kill list. Number one target, from what I remember. Is that right?”

Denny corrected him gently. “Actually he’s the number one target who is also a U.S. Citizen. He’s number nineteen on the list overall.”

“Right,” D/CIA said. “You know, I get to claim some plausible deniability with you and your exploits, since the president has supported your work for so long. I mean, hell, when POTUS is also president of your fan club, I can let a lot of things slide. But not this time.”

Carmichael said, “If you can run interference with Congress and do your best to keep the DOJ away from this, even for just a couple more days, then I give you my personal guarantee that we will terminate this individual, and there will be nothing more to do but handle a little after-action fallout.”

Carmichael expected D/CIA to open his drawer and pull out a bottle of Maalox. He wasn’t suited for this type of work. But the next thing the man from Alabama said surprised him greatly.

“What alternative do I have? I can already hear them in the congressional inquiries. Carmichael’s
your
top spook, they’ll say . . . This happened on your watch. Hell, the Republicans are already plucking the chickens and heatin’ up the tar.”

Denny said nothing. Must have been some sort of Alabama reference, he assumed.

D/CIA said, “I can take some heat and buy you some time. But not much. What else can I do for you, something that might make killing this man easier?”

Carmichael blew out an inward sigh of relief. Then he decided to press his luck. “There is one other initiative that might be helpful, sir.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Unmanned aerials.”

“Unmanned aerials? You mean drones?”

“Small ones. No more than three up at any one time. Crisscrossing the District. We have the best facial recognition suites known to man, but this personality has gone to great lengths to defeat them. If we were able to find, fix, and finish him from the air, then we could end this situation in short order.”

“Finish.” D/CIA said it softly, a statement, not a question, weighing the import of that word.

Denny nodded slowly. He had expected some shock from the man, but the older man showed nothing to indicate this was unexpected.

“You are asking for armed drones, then?” the director asked.

Denny replied defensively. “There are weaponized platforms that are extremely discreet. Virtually undetectable, and fundamentally no chance for collateral damage considering all the fail-safes and controls we have in place to prevent accidents and overkill.”

The silence in the room hung over both men. Until: “Just one perfunctory question, Denny.”

“What’s that?”

D/CIA leaned forward. “Have you lost your
fucking
mind?”

Carmichael sighed. Clearly, he would
not
be getting his armed drones.

“I’m not putting fucking remote-controlled killing machines in the airspace over Washington, D.C.!”

“I understand, sir. We’ll proceed without them. I just thought you understood how dangerous a situation we have here, from a political perspective, if nothing else.”

D/CIA snorted out a laugh. “There is one thing you are not taking into consideration, Carmichael. One thing that makes me very different from you.”

“And what’s that?”

“I don’t really give a damn about your Gray Man. I hope you get him before he murders more of our good people, but this really isn’t
my
fight. And I don’t care about politics. Not anymore. CIA won’t be my last job, but it sure as hell will be my last government job. I’ll be a college president three weeks after walking out the door here, and no one at UCLA or Duke is going to give a rat’s ass that a rogue assassin rampaged around in D.C. for a few days shooting fascist spymasters before he was shot dead.”

Neither Ohlhauser nor Babbitt were fascists, nor were they spymasters. But Denny got the point.

“I understand, sir,” Denny said, but it wasn’t true. He was tired of kissing this man’s ass. It hadn’t won him what he wanted. So he changed gears. “You don’t want to be involved, I get it. But understand this. I
will
get what I need. Even if I am forced to pursue other avenues.”

“You mean you’re going to go to POTUS.”

“I haven’t ruled it out.”

The director said, “
I’m
the goddamned director of the CIA. You report to me.”

“And I have reported.”

The seventy-three-year-old fumed. “You see yourself as the king here, Carmichael. The master of all you survey. You don’t think you can be stopped, do you?”

A small snicker from Denny now. “Not by you, sir. No.”

D/CIA rose to this challenge. “I might not be a killer like you, but by virtue of my title and rank, you know I have access to people who can stop people like you.”

Carmichael just smiled. “You have
direct
access, of course. You just call me up, and I arrange it. Which means, I have access to the same assets as you.”

“That a threat?”

Carmichael shook his head. “Nothing of the sort. I am just reminding you that I serve as a buffer between you and the elements out there that could be harmful to you.” He paused. “Politically. I am speaking in purely political terms. Don’t get dramatic.”

“Get out of my office.”

Denny stood and turned for the door. Then, just as Denny knew he would, the director blinked.

“Carmichael?”

Denny turned. “Sir?”

“Go back to your cave. Kill this man who’s causing so much trouble. I’ll give you a lot of latitude, just like you were going after some high-value target overseas. But I’m not giving you killer robots.”

“Very well, sir.”

He turned to leave again, but once more the director called out. “They tell me you have been sleeping in your office for the last week.”

“Well . . . I’ve been working.”

“I’ll abide a lot of your extreme actions, Denny, but not that one. Not even considering your situation. Sets a bad tone for the younger generation when we old folks don’t behave with the proper decorum. You’re a divisional director, for God’s sake. Start acting like one. This isn’t a boardinghouse.”

Carmichael blew out a hidden sigh of frustration. “Sir.”

—

C
armichael stuck his head in Suzanne Brewer’s TOC just five minutes later. Brewer had been leaning over one of her analysts while he checked a possible Gentry sighting in Foggy Bottom. It wasn’t Gentry, the two of them decided almost immediately, so Suzanne was just about to head back to her office when she looked up to find herself facing the director of her division.

“Sir?”

She’d grown accustomed to Denny’s clipped voice.

“I need a safe house, stat. You keep the TOC running here, but I need to get away from the Langley Campus to work without the director’s interference. I want to be linked to you with a dedicated umbilical, not out in the boonies, but close by.”

Brewer thought a moment. “Springfield Twelve has all the coms you’ll need.”

Carmichael shook his head. “Alexandria Eight has better security, I’ll go there.”

“We haven’t used Alexandria Eight in years.”

“It’s a fortress. I want a fortress.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll get a team there stat to sweep and clean, and pull tech staff
to get everything online. I’ll oversee it personally. Give me a little time to prep and we’ll schedule a movement to your new facility by the end of the day.”

“Good,” Denny said, then he disappeared from the doorway.

“Sir?” she called after him, and he returned. He looked annoyed. “Zack Hightower isn’t answering his phone.”

“Don’t worry about it. He’s doing something for Mayes. You might or might not get him back.”

“But—”

Carmichael interrupted. “Alexandria Eight, Suzanne.”

“Yes, sir.”

C
atherine King pushed right through the closed door to the office of the executive editor of the
Washington Post
. She got away with doing this sort of thing because she’d known the man since the late seventies when he had been her professor. The two had worked together at the
Post
since soon after, they’d become close friends, and they had developed an informal rapport that stunned some of the younger reporters.

But the other five men and women who came in behind Catherine all felt a sense of panic and dread when she ordered them to follow her in with assurances that all would be forgiven once she told the executive editor what had just occurred. While Catherine took a seat, her four-person investigative team, as well as metro reporter Andy Shoal, all lined up against the wall, most looking at their shoes or at books on a bookshelf, because no one wanted to make eye contact with the man behind the desk.

No one else in the room knew the subject of this impromptu confab except Catherine herself, but her excitement put everyone on notice that something big was about to be revealed.

Ten minutes later everyone, including the executive editor, knew what they had to do. The dramatic but simple narrative the paper had advanced in the past few days—that a psycho with a gun was terrorizing intelligence officials—had suddenly transformed into a multilayered story of international intrigue and government cover-up. No one knew what was true, but these were journalists; so the knowledge that they had to find the answers quickly meant everyone crammed into the office felt like a sprinter in the starting blocks, ready for the gun to go off.

And the executive editor pulled the trigger.

“All right. Catherine is on the first flight to Tel Aviv. Tonight. This story
is moving too fast to wait around till this shooter turns up dead and no one gives a damn anymore.”

Eager nods from everyone save for King, who did not like the thought of the death of the man she’d just met an hour earlier being discussed as if it were a fait accompli.

The executive editor continued, “The rest of you get to work on all our contacts in Israel. Hell, talk to anyone you know who has contacts over there in intel circles. We have a date where a man entered a hospital with a gunshot wound to his stomach. Could be a civilian or a military hospital. Talk to other Mossad people and find out the protocol for treating a Mossad man injured on the job.”

Catherine added, “He said the shooting took place in Hamburg, Germany, so maybe we extend the range by a few days in case he was hospitalized there first. And check hospitals in Hamburg.”

The EE agreed. “And when we find anything about this patient, we’ll go to work on figuring out his identity. It doesn’t matter if we can’t dig into his government file; we just need to know where he lives, so when Catherine lands in Tel Aviv tomorrow she can hit the ground running.”

“We don’t know he’ll know anything about the event in Trieste,” one of the other reporters said. “We just know he helped Six.”

“That’s true,” Catherine said. “And from that we know he has goodwill towards Six. If he doesn’t know about Trieste, maybe he can help us find out who does.”

Andy was the most junior reporter in the room, so he was surprised when the editor pointed to him. “Shoal, I want you to go back to Chevy Chase and to Dupont Circle. I want you interviewing everyone who lived or worked in the immediate area, as well as first responders and commuters who passed by at the time of the shootings. I want you digging even harder for evidence than the cops dug. Find somebody who saw something other than this guy named Six running around.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Catherine.” The executive editor turned to her. “While you’re on that plane I want you e-mailing every government official. Call in every favor. Don’t bring up the fact we are going after this wounded guy the suspect named, but do ask for comments about an Israeli asset rescued by American
intelligence in Italy six years ago. I don’t care if they won’t speak on the record. I want to know what they
don’t
say just as much as what they
do
say. If you get a lot of ‘No comments,’ or denials that sound like they are coming out of an official echo chamber, then we’ll know we’re on to something.”

“Will do.”

The huddle in the executive editor’s office ended by four, and Catherine ran back to her desk, threw as much into one of her roll-aboards as would fit, and then rushed to the elevators.

Five minutes later she was in the back of a hired car booking a six ten flight to Tel Aviv from Dulles while the driver wove through D.C. traffic.

—

C
ourt looked down at his watch as he passed the sign announcing he was leaving Virginia and entering North Carolina. It was seven forty-five in the evening; he’d been on the road less than two hours.

This meant he had another nine to go, and with that realization he reached down into the cup holder of the big pickup truck and lifted his massive cup of coffee. Half empty, half cold.

It was going to be a long, long night.

Court drove a 1992 Ford Bronco that showed just about the same amount of rust as it did its original blue and white paint job. He’d bought the vehicle two hours earlier for $1,900 at a “tote-the-note” used car dealership in Richmond, telling the salesman he needed something that could get him as far as the West Coast. The salesman proudly showed him the Bronco’s 87,000 “original” miles, which to Court meant the odometer had been rolled back, but he inspected the truck inside and out and he decided it would get the job done.

He could have spent a lot more—he still had over seven grand from the money he took from the drug dealers last Saturday night—and he could have bought something more obviously reliable, but the moment Court saw the Bronco he knew it
had
to be his transport down to Florida, because it reminded him of some of his better memories of his youth. He’d driven an ’87 blue and white Bronco around central Florida as a teenager, and it just felt right to him to return home driving virtually the same vehicle he’d used back then.

He told himself he needed to stay productive on this long drive, and he
had two objectives: One, to come up with a plan about what he would do when he actually found his father. And two, to come up with a plan about what he was going to do when he got back to D.C.

But he really had not yet begun to tackle either of the two problems, because he still had other issues running through his mind. Namely Catherine King, and his desperate hope that she had believed enough of what he had said this afternoon to where she would do what he had asked her to do—fly to Israel to find answers about Operation BACK BLAST. As long as he was occupied on this side trip, this errand a thousand miles from where he needed to be, the reporter for the
Washington Post
was his only hope at getting any closer to a resolution to all this mess.

He put his chances for this at fifty-fifty; meaning he thought there was just as much possibility King would rush onto the set of Fox News to talk about her harrowing kidnapping ordeal at the hands of a maniac as there was she would fly to Israel and run down a vague lead about a wounded Mossad officer who might know something about an old asset who had once been rescued from the clutches of al Qaeda while on a trip to Italy.

It was all so tiring to think about, and he had to concentrate on staying awake.

He continued down I-95, passing through the town of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and here his head instinctively turned to the left and looked off into the dark. He knew the exit here onto I-64 well, because he had spent some of the most intense years of his life less than one hour directly to the east, beyond the coastal plain and all the way through the swamps at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

Back before 9/11, when Court was just a trainee working to become a singleton operator in the Autonomous Asset Development Program, he spent two years in a sequestered set of small buildings just inside the protected area at the military and intelligence installation known as the Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity. Here he’d learned tradecraft, foreign languages, survival skills, hand-to-hand combat, scuba diving, and dozens of other talents and trades, all of which turned him into one of the CIA’s best “one-man bands” of espionage. He’d been in his early twenties when he graduated from and left the compound at AADP, but he’d been back to other facilities at Harvey Point many times throughout the years. Each time he drove onto the grounds he looked off towards a swamp to the right
of the road, and he’d wondered if back there on the other side of a thick copse of cypress, more young men were going through AADP training, hidden even from the rest of the men and women with Top Secret clearance allowed onto Harvey Point.

He’d heard the Autonomous Asset Program had been disbanded and he’d thought himself to be the last surviving operative from the program, but Max Ohlhauser had told him the day before that AAP had been rebranded somehow, and that it remained operational.

He wondered if the answer to all his questions was out there beyond the cypress trees and swampland, but he pushed the thought out of his mind and kept driving south, doing his best to instead brainstorm his operation to protect his dad. He began thinking back to a time long ago when the roads and farms just west of Jacksonville, Florida, had been his stomping ground. It would be surreal to be back on those roads, and he wasn’t looking forward to it, but he worried Denny Carmichael would stop at nothing to end this, and he wouldn’t think twice about sending foreign killers to target Court’s father.

Think about something else, Gentry,
he told himself, desperate to find a topic to concentrate on that wouldn’t wear his mind out for the next nine hours.

For the first time on this drive, he reached to the knob on the radio, and he flipped it on. The speakers in this twenty-four-year-old truck were shit, and it took him several seconds to find an FM station that played something he could listen to, but as soon as he heard an old Allman Brothers tune, he stopped turning the dial, and he cranked up the volume as far as it would go.

“Midnight Rider” was just about the perfect song for tonight. He wished he could just play it on a continuous loop until tomorrow morning.

Court wore a green Caterpillar cap and a denim jacket; other than his Virginia drive-out tags he looked like a farmer or factory worker in any of the towns here in the Carolinas or northern Florida, his ultimate destination.

This was nice, he told himself. His cover legend, for maybe the first time in his operational life, felt exactly like the original Court Gentry. He’d operated undercover as a dockworker in Ireland and a financial analyst in Singapore and a commercial diver in Brazil. He’d played the roles of a light-skinned Masalit tribesman in Sudan and a Canadian businessman in Italy and an Iraqi nomad in Syria.

He’d played one hundred roles, easily, but he’d never once played the role of a hick driving his V8 beater and wearing a Cat hat and soiled denim, listening to Southern rock as the miles rolled by under his big tires.

No, he’d never played that role. But he’d lived it.

Despite the worries on his mind stemming from what he’d left behind in D.C. and the concerns he had about what he would find when he got where he was going, Court Gentry couldn’t help but feel good right now.

He felt real. He felt American.

He was hours from home still, but somehow it was as if he’d already arrived.