Back Blast (42 page)

S
uzanne Brewer pulled her BMW 535i into the garage of the JSOC safe house three blocks from the U.S. Capitol. She was annoyed to be here; she’d rather be either back at the TOC at Langley running down the latest leads, or else curled up in her bed at home in Springfield, desperately trying to catch one of her all too few three-hour cat naps. It was ten-thirty p.m., after all; she had been on her way home for a break when she diverted all the way into the District, and since the last spate of Violator sightings were eight hours old she doubted she’d be needed back at Langley until the morning.

But she was here because Dakota had called and demanded a meeting.

The JSOC team had done everything she’d asked of them as they’d been sent on one chase after another over the past few days, so she gave in to his demand without putting up much of a fight. She knew they’d be tired and angry for being spun up again and again, often getting to locations where facial recog hits were too old for them to do more than wander around with only faint hopes their target might just be loitering in the area reading a newspaper.

The most recent callout of the JSOC team had taken place near Union Station around two p.m. Brewer’s team at the TOC had caught the facial recog hit, and Brewer herself had double-checked it within five minutes of the image being captured.

The image was of a man, very possibly Violator, walking into the large parking garage just to the west of the massive train station in the center of the District.

Another image showing the same man was captured inside the garage just a minute later, and it had him walking up a ramp towards one of the higher levels. This photograph did not contain a good view of his face,
but with the first image to go on, Suzanne decided to deploy Dakota and his men.

The full twelve-man JSOC team arrived, followed shortly behind by CIA assets, and they all searched the entire area.

But no sign of Violator was detected, and the analysts at the TOC were unable to find any images of him leaving the area. The interior of the train station was virtually enveloped by camera coverage, and the lack of any computer matches there led Brewer to the conclusion her target had simply vanished.

Suzanne then sat down at a monitor in the TOC and individually checked the image of each and every vehicle that left the parking garage from the moment Violator entered until four hours later, long past the time JSOC had ruled out Gentry still being in the area, because she worried they might have missed him. Early in this slow, laborious endeavor she thought she detected the problem. She noticed an issue with one of the cameras covering the garage. The angle at which the sun’s rays hit the windshields of the cars leaving the H Street NE exit from one forty-five to two fifteen p.m. caused a large flashing glare on each and every digital image, and even by going manually through all the images time-stamped during this period, Suzanne could barely make out the drivers of any of the cars and trucks. If Gentry had left by this exit, inside a vehicle, within a half hour of when he arrived, it would have been almost impossible to identify him.

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.

B
y 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.

And James Gentry taught most of the state’s SWAT teams right here on Claude Harvey Road. By the nineties he was training federal law enforcement and even some CIA units, as well, all of whom knew he had the abilities to show them how to clean and clear houses without subjecting large portions of their units to near-certain death.

James’s wife died back in the eighties, but not before she gave him two healthy boys. Courtland, and then two years later, Chancellor. Chance seemed destined to follow in his father’s footsteps from birth. He always wanted to wear his father’s police gear, or dress up like the Lone Ranger.

Court was night and day different from his little brother; he was obsessed with Indians as a child, he was more interested in horses than in police cars, and Court became the Indian outlaw to Chance’s U.S. Marshal. They chased each other all over the farm in character. Chance versus Court. Cowboy versus Indian. The good guy versus the bad guy.

The father’s son, and the rebel.

Both boys assisted their dad in his business, first by helping to pick up spent brass around the ranges and shoot house, then by cleaning the training weapons each night while the SWAT teams sat in meeting rooms, going over the day’s actions.

Even as a small boy Court had been a mascot of the school. Though he didn’t have his brother’s obsession with guns, he’d been a natural with firearms, even better than his brother, and students from all over the country training at the school would bet handfuls of ammunition they could outshoot the ten-year-old son of the legendary James Gentry.

The older Gentry took all their bets, and invariably he’d end up with more loaded ammo to throw into his oil drum full of Court’s winnings.

By the time Court was fourteen, he and his brother had found themselves at the center of the family business. Their dad would let them play hooky from school so they could serve as opposition forces pitted against
visiting SWAT teams, waiting in the dark for cops to come into the shoot house with guns loaded with paintballs.

Often the Gentry boys would take down full eight- or twelve-man units without so much as a single splatter on their own bodies.

And more often than not furious police captains screamed red-faced at James Gentry, insisting the training was rigged against his men, because no one could believe a couple of teenaged brothers, one short-haired and personable, the other long-haired and reserved, could wipe out well-trained tactical units of veteran cops.

James Gentry sometimes allowed the captains to make the rules in the next drill, to stack the deck in favor of their own men, and often the result was the same.

But Court’s rebellious nature grew exponentially in his late teens and he ran afoul of his taciturn father. Though Chance did his best to keep the peace between them, Court and James were two stubborn personalities, and conflict between them became the norm.

Court drifted away from Glen St. Mary as soon as he turned eighteen, and he ended up in Miami. There, looking for work, he took a job in security for a shady businessman and, with no clear understanding of what he was involved with, he slowly realized he had managed to become a henchman for a drug dealer. This career lasted exactly two months, and it ended abruptly when an attempt on his boss’s life at Opa-locka Airport caused Court to pull out his Micro Uzi and open fire.

In five seconds three men were dead, and in thirty seconds more, Court was on his knees with his hands in the air, complying with the orders of the undercover DEA officer who stared him down over the barrel of his shotgun.

The fact that the dead men were all Cuban assassins did not get Court off the hook and, by age nineteen, it looked like he’d spend the rest of his life behind bars.

But a CIA officer who’d once taken a weeklong course at the tactical training center in Glen St. Mary found out about the older Gentry brother’s misfortune, and he sent recruiters to the penitentiary where Gentry was serving time.

Accommodations were made, his record was expunged, and soon Court Gentry was in training at the CIA’s facility in Harvey Point, North Carolina, to become a singleton operator for the CIA.

He never looked back, and he never returned to north Florida.

Until now.

Court lay prone under a pine tree, eighty yards from his father’s driveway. Through the scope of Zack Hightower’s rifle he had line of sight on the front door of the double-wide, and he could see all the lights were off in the windows inside. He’d detected no sign of surveillance, and an F-250 pickup truck was parked in the drive just exactly at the angle his dad had always parked his car, so he thought the odds were good his dad was home.

As the sun came up a little more and the light grew, he took in more of the property.

Court saw his old beloved Bronco sitting up on blocks next to the garage. It was half-hidden by the weeds and covered in grime from twenty years of accumulation from the crab apple tree above it.

He’d come to rescue his dad, but for a moment he thought about saying “Screw it,” leaving his father to the enemy, and just rescuing his old truck instead.

But not for too long. By eight a.m. he saw the first movement of something larger than a rooster on the property—a new gray Chrysler 300 rolling up the dirt road towards his father’s farm. It looked like it was probably a rental car, but after it stopped and two men climbed out, Court knew in a heartbeat these guys were either FBI or state investigators, or perhaps CIA officers posing as law enforcement.

Court lowered his eye back into the rifle scope and tracked the men carefully as they parked by the F-250 and headed up to the front door of his father’s old trailer.

The door opened after a few knocks, and Court put his eyes in his binoculars. His father answered, and he stood there in worn boxers and an old gray T-shirt with the logo for the NRA on the front.

Court zoomed his binos in on his father’s face.

“Jesus, Dad. You got old.”

Court chastised himself immediately. The last time he’d seen his father’s face, James would have been in his late forties. Court himself had been a teenager, and since then his life had been hard lived, to say the least.

He figured if anyone looked twenty years older than the last time the two had spoken, it would be Court.

The three men on the little wooden porch talked for over a minute, and
Court couldn’t hear a bit of it. The Walker’s Game Ear was in place, and he could clearly hear their voices, but with the ambient sounds of a steady breeze and the clucking chickens it was hard to make out much of the conversation.

Finally Court heard one word, spoken by his father, in a surprised, questioning tone.

“Breakfast?”

These goons were asking to take Court’s dad to breakfast on this fine Saturday morning.

And this told Court exactly where they were heading.

He wanted to back away right now, but instead he waited, and he was glad he did, because James Gentry invited the men inside, presumably so he could change clothes. As soon as the door closed, Court began a quick but careful egress across a small field till he got to the higher brush near the pond, and then he stood in a crouch and began hurrying back to his Bronco.

As soon as he made it to his vehicle, he pulled out all the clothes in his backpack and began digging through them. He wanted to pick just the right attire to wear for the surveillance he had planned.

Five minutes later Court had already changed clothes, and he was pulling out of the trees and onto a dirt road.

—

T
here wasn’t just one diner that served breakfast in Glen St. Mary. There were two. But as long as Court could remember, his father had only gone to one of them.

Court pulled into Ronnie’s dressed in jeans, work boots, a canvas jacket, and a baseball cap. With these clothes and the three-day growth on his face he looked like every trucker, every farmhand, every male for ten miles in any direction.

He was the Gray Man—he knew he could remain invisible, even to the government types palling around with his father.

Court was already sitting at the counter, a cup of black coffee in front of him and a plate of toast and eggs on order, when his father entered with two men in suits. The elder Gentry wore jeans and a Carhartt pullover, a Caterpillar baseball cap, and Roper boots, and he nodded to the young waitress behind the counter. She greeted him by name and gave a quick but curious glance to the two men, as did another table of old-timers, but no
one looked Court’s way, not even his dad when he passed within feet of him on his way to his favorite table, a booth in the back corner.

Court had his Walker’s Game Ear in his right ear and he had turned it up before the trio arrived, so when his eggs came he was able to position the hearing enhancer perfectly in line with the booth on his right while he ate.

In this way he could hear every word the men said.

“Again, Mr. Gentry. The two of you haven’t had any contact in how long?”

Court listened to his dad sigh. He thought the old man sounded much older than he remembered him sounding, and his voice was slow, slurred a little.

Court had the impression his dad was drunk.

“I told you this morning, and I told your coworkers the other day when they came by.”

“Sorry, Mr. Gentry, but we need you to tell us again.”

“You fellers want to write it down this time? Might help you remember.”

“Please, sir. How long?”

A sigh. “It’s been nineteen years, give or take.”

Court bit into his toast, and he heard the pages on a notepad flipping over at the corner booth.

“What do you do for a living, sir?”

“Social Security. I had a stroke a few years back. Can’t work.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Shit happens,” James said.

Court wanted to look to his father, but he fought the urge. He ate his bacon and looked at his plate, finding himself relieved the man was not, in fact, drunk.

One of the men said, “You had another son. Chance. He was a police officer for the City of Tallahassee.”

A pause before the elder Gentry responded. “That’s correct.”

“He was killed in the line of duty.”

“Are you asking me, or telling me? Because I already know.”

Court knew about his brother, but it still hurt to hear his dad talk about it. He chanced a half glance to his right, but still kept his ear turned towards the booth. He saw his father looking out the window now.

He looks so damn rough,
Court thought.

“So . . . you are saying Courtland missed his own brother’s funeral?”

Gentry looked back to his breakfast. He waited to hear what his old man had to say about that.

“It’s crazy,” James replied. “The whole time that funeral was going on, I kept expecting Court to pop his head out from behind a tree, like he and Chance always did when they played cowboys and Indians as kids.”

“How did that make you feel? Losing your son like that?”

“Chance died serving his community. You go into police work knowing that’s on the table.”

Court heard his father trying to be stoic, but Court wasn’t buying it. Chance’s funeral had probably just about killed him. It easily could have led to his stroke. Court felt like shit for not being there, but his access to the United States had been limited at the time, to say the least.

Court knew that if he had come to his brother’s funeral, he probably would have been shot through the head by a Delta Force sniper and dropped into the hole meant for his brother.

Killed while in the service of his community.

The other goon took over now. “One thing is troubling me, Mr. Gentry. I’ve got to admit I think it’s pretty interesting that you haven’t asked us anything about your son. Aren’t you curious as to why we are here? Don’t you want to know if he’s in some kind of trouble?”