Chapter Eight
Eight
At noon Courtland Gentry pulled into the parking lot of the Bay Point Marina in Virginia Beach, Virginia; parked his rented Altima in a space next to a black Suburban; and looked around.
Court saw a man inside the Suburban sitting alone behind the wheel and talking animatedly on his phone.
The driver was Matt Hanley, a man who had once been his boss at CIA, and Court imagined the call was probably important, so he climbed out of his rental car and strolled down to the wooden dock at the water’s edge, just a dozen yards from where he parked.
With his hands jammed inside his black Carhartt coat, his mouth breathing vapor on this cold December day, he saw the gray sky merged with the gray water in front of him. Fully half of the hundreds of boats he could see were covered for the season.
He turned around and looked to the land, just on the other side of the parking lot, and took in what appeared to be several large apartment buildings, all the same design, utterly quiet at this time of day.
He wondered who lived here but quickly noticed a sign that offered vacancies for a senior living residence along with memory care services.
He did not know why he was here now. He only knew that he’d been flown here from Charlottesville on a private jet, and then he’d picked up a rental car reserved for him under an alias and followed an order to come directly to this location without delay.
Presuming Matt Hanley had no plans to put him in a home for Alzheimer patients just yet, he turned back to the water and looked over the recreational boats there, but soon his eyes looked past the marina, across a narrow channel of water, and focused on the land.
This was, Court knew, a part of Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek, the major operating base for the Amphibious Forces of the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic Fleet.
SEAL Teams 2, 4, and 8 were based right there, just across the spit of water, and while Court had known and worked with men from all three of these teams in his old life in the CIA, he’d never been a SEAL, and he certainly had no connection to Little Creek.
That said, he had worked and lived nearby, in Virginia Beach, a decade ago, as a member of a CIA paramilitary unit called Golf Sierra. At that time, Hanley had been his boss, and now as he looked back towards the Suburban, he knew that Hanley was his boss again.
They weren’t Agency now, neither of them.
Now they were sub rosa. Off book. Illegal.
Court Gentry had been doing illegal shit for years, but Matt had always had the safety net of the Agency under him, ready to catch him if he fell.
Court wondered what it felt like for a guy in his sixties to be out in the cold like this for the first time, but he didn’t ponder it long, because just then Matt finished up his call, turned the engine off, and climbed out from behind the wheel.
The older man wore a scraggly white-blond beard, with thinning hair of the same color, and it blew in the cold breeze. He sported a blue wool peacoat and khakis, brown leather boat shoes, and sunglasses.
Though the two men hadn’t seen each other in some time, Court had known Hanley for over a decade, and he’d never known him to have a beard.
“Dammit, Six.” The older man spoke first. “Good to finally lay eyes on you.” When Court had first worked under Hanley in the CIA’s Special Activities Division—Ground Branch, the younger man had carried the call sign Sierra Six, and half the call sign had somehow stuck throughout the years.
Court extended a hand and Hanley shook it.
“Been a long time, Matt. You operating without security?” Court asked, making a show of looking into the Suburban, although he’d already sussed out that Matt was alone.
“Security? For what? The best gunslinger on planet Earth is standing right in front of me. You’re carrying, right?”
“If I’ve got pants on, I’ve got a gun on.”
Hanley looked down at Court’s jeans. “Well then, it’s my lucky day, for a couple of reasons.” He turned, reached into the backseat of the SUV and pulled out a baby blue Yeti insulated lunch box.
Court said, “You’re taking me on a picnic?”
But Hanley did not answer him. Instead, he said, “How are you doing?”
“I’m fine.”
“Yeah? Lemme see.”
Court understood the request. He unzipped his black coat, then pulled up his gray sweater, revealing a ragged red scar along the right side of his midsection.
When Hanley said nothing, just kept looking, Court said, “That’s it.”
“Stitches?”
“Stapled me up back in Kharkiv. Got them out a couple weeks ago up in Charlottesville. I’m good as new.” He shrugged. “I mean, good as I was before I got shot.”
Hanley kept looking at the scar. “AK round, right?”
“I assume so. The bullet was going kind of fast, and it was night…so…
Hanley sniffed, shut the Suburban door behind him, and Court lowered his sweater and rezipped his Carhartt. Matt said, “Haven’t seen you in a year and a half and you have to be a smartass?”
“I gotta be me.”
Hanley gave a little smile. “Glad you are still you. You weren’t for a while. Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Finland, then Russia. You’ve been more lucky than smart. Hope you’re back to normal.”
“Yeah.” Court had spent over half a year on a quest, a quest that he had successfully concluded, but only with the help of Hanley, and Hanley himself had been helped by others.
Both Hanley and Gentry had sold a piece of themselves to achieve that objective, and for that reason they were now back together.
“How’s Anthem?” Matt asked.
Anthem was the code name for a woman named Zoya, and Zoya had been the objective for which Hanley and Court had sold pieces of themselves to rescue from a Russian penal colony.
Court looked off into the distance. “She’s gonna be fine. Not there yet, but doing a lot better than I’d be doing, considering it all.” He looked to Hanley. “Thanks for letting me go see her again last weekend.”
“I’ve been running you pretty hard over the last several weeks. I felt like you deserved a little downtime.”
To this, Court laughed. “You’ve had me flying all over the country setting up front companies, buying equipment, establishing safe houses, doing background checks on former government personnel. Considering what I used to do in the past, I wouldn’t say that’s running me so hard.
“What’s the deal, Matt? Am I management now? I kinda prefer being labor.”
“You’re labor, still. I just didn’t have anyone else to do the kind of legwork I needed. I’ve rectified that, so as of now, you’re back in operations.”
“Good,” Court said, but that went nowhere in explaining why he was standing in the parking lot of a quiet marina on a Monday afternoon.
Hanley looked past him to his rental car. “How much shit do you have with you?”
“Duffel bag and a backpack.”
“All your worldly possessions?”
“Pretty much, yeah. I’ve been living out of hotels.”
“Grab everything and follow me.”
Court retrieved his bags from the backseat of the car, heaving the duffel. The bigger, older Hanley made no effort to help him; he just held the Yeti, and then the two of them began walking down to the dock.
A Christmas tree sparkled through a porthole in the first houseboat they encountered, but there were very few other signs of life around the marina.
The two men passed rigid-hulled inflatable boats and runabouts no more than ten feet long, bowriders, bay boats, and ski boats a little bigger, many covered for the winter, some up on winches, but most bobbing in the water in dozens of slips.
As they came to another pier, the smaller craft gave way to larger catamarans, sailboats, and even luxury yachts up to one hundred feet long.
When they reached pier B, Hanley turned and they kept walking.
Court couldn’t imagine what this was all about. “What’s the deal, Matt? We going for a ride?”
“You’ll see,” the older man said.
Court saw a large boat docked at the end of the pier.
He recognized it by its shape; it was a sports cruiser, maybe sixty feet in length, old-looking, with a white body and a dull beige stripe running the length of the hull. A beige hard top covered the helm.
Though relatively large compared to most of the other vessels at this marina, it was certainly no luxury yacht.
The name on the bow read Ship Happens, Two.
The port of registry was the Hamptons.
The transom was just a step off the pier, and there didn’t seem to be anyone on deck.
“It’s a 1996 Sea Ray 630 sport cruiser,” Matt said as he boarded. “Upgraded in the past couple of years.”
“What happened to Ship Happens, One?” Court asked as he stepped aboard onto the transom himself.
“Hit an iceberg. Sank in the North Atlantic.”
“Really?” Court asked, surprised.
Hanley made a face of disappointment. “No, man. I don’t know. Didn’t ask.”
On the aft deck Court put his bags down, then looked out into the marina, still unsure what they were doing here.
Hanley said, “She’s faster than she looks.”
“Whose boat is this?”
“My company bought it.”
Court laughed. “Which company?” Court had been registering companies up in Delaware just a few days prior.
“TerreCom Industrial Consulting,” Hanley said. And then, “Your new employer.”
Court had not registered a company by this name. “Okay, what do we do at TerreCom?”
“Ostensibly, we facilitate relationships between foreign manufacturing industrial sectors and…” He paused.
“I don’t really know. It’s written down somewhere.
It’s legit, but purposefully boring as shit.
TerreCom was a shell company started by the Agency in the eighties.
It was run out of a clearinghouse of shells in Delaware for decades, but we bought it legally, and now we’ve leased a suite in an office park in Norfolk, hired a few staff of ex–intelligence community folks with the right clearances. ”
“We’re a CIA front,” Court said.
“Negative. We bought a CIA front. We’re running it ourselves.”
“Bought it with what?”
“CIA money.”
Court repeated himself. “We’re a CIA front.”
Hanley rolled his eyes, feigning annoyance. “Let’s go downstairs to the salon. The heater is already on; we can warm up.”
Hanley walked off. Court heaved his bags and followed, and soon they were belowdecks in a roomy but simple salon.
Both men sat down on couches and Court looked around.
The space was not plush or particularly modern; there was a strong smell of cleaning solvents and a faint smell of mildew, but the boat seemed functional.
Hanley explained. “The DEA confiscated this baby like fifteen years ago, a meth distributor up in New Jersey, I think. He’d souped it up, made it deceptively fast. It was in storage for a while after that, but a few years back, the DOJ requisitioned it for an operation they were running in the Chesapeake. They jazzed it up even more.
“That op fizzled, and it’s sat in dry dock in a shipyard in Norfolk ever since. I had a broker buy it a couple weeks ago and bring it here, after giving it a maintenance check. It’s got a lot of little bells and whistles that you might like.”
Court said, “I can guess. Acoustic sensors on the hull so no one slips up from below. An underwater camera or two.”
“Or five,” Hanley said. “There are more cameras on board. The feds had it wired up pretty good. More importantly, it has a pair of Volvo IPSs, 950 horsepower each. She can make forty-five knots, no problem.”
“That is fast. What’s it for?”
Hanley shrugged. “As you know, we’ve been staging equipment around the U.S., overseas, too, so it’s part of that. It’s for whenever we need a boat of this size in this part of the world. But more importantly, I guess, it’s for you to live on.”
Court laughed at this, but when he saw that Matt was not laughing along with him, he looked around again. “You’re serious?”