Chapter Nine
Nine
“This is your home now.” He shrugged. “You don’t own it. Pruitt Partners does.”
“Wait. Who is Pruitt Partners?”
“A subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of TerreCom Industrial Consultants.”
“Right.” Court continued taking it all in. He hadn’t had a fixed residence in many years. He’d lived off grid with Zoya in Latin America earlier in the year, but they never stayed anywhere for more than a couple of weeks. That had felt like domestic bliss to a vagabond like Court.
Now he had, from what Hanley was telling him, a permanent address.
But he didn’t have the girl with him.
Hanley said, “You can sail this up to D.C. in less than a day. New York in two days. But you will be based here. TerreCom’s headquarters is just a couple miles away.”
“Okay,” Court said. “So…like…I get an office there?”
“Negative.”
“A cubicle?”
Hanley shook his head with a laugh. “What are you going to do with a cubicle?”
“I don’t know what anybody does with a cubicle. I’ve never had one.”
“No, kid. This is where you stay when you’re in town, but to be honest, you’ll be on the road a lot, and when you’re not on the road, much of the time you’ll be training.”
“For what?”
“For whatever.”
“Where do I train?”
“Drum Hill.”
Court had trained at over fifty facilities in the United States, but he’d never heard of Drum Hill. “Which is…where?”
“In North Carolina, on the VA border. Maybe a forty-five-minute drive from here. There’s a farm there, owned by…a guy.”
“Sounds legit.” Court said it sarcastically.
“Legit enough,” Hanley replied. “He’s an old friend of mine from the army, started a private facility to train PMCs during the GWOT, then lost all his customers a few years back when government funding ran dry.
He’s retired, but I called him up the other day and told him I wanted to rent his entire facility.
“He was pleased, to put it mildly. Drum Hill has a grass strip, my buddy has a Vietnam-era UH-1, and he can get you from there to here in twenty minutes, and to any airport around D.C. in under an hour.”
“Tell me you’re restoring his Huey, too.”
“That’s in the works.” When Court did not reply, Hanley looked back to him. “Look, this isn’t going to be first class. You’ll have gear, you’ll have training, you’ll have logistics and intelligence coordination, and you’ll be supported in the field.”
For the first time, Hanley opened his little lunch box and pulled out a pair of beers that had been kept cool with cold packs.
“More importantly than this boat, we’ve got a contract with a charter air service at Hampton Roads Executive Airport. Bellstar Aviation.”
“They’re an Agency front, too?”
“No, but a private contractor staffed by ex–Air Force, Navy, and Air Branch pilots. They do government work, but through dummy corps and such.”
“So…they’re an Agency front, too,” Court repeated.
“That’s not how Washington works these days. Everything is contracted out. It’s not a front, it’s a…relationship.”
Court didn’t really understand how things worked around here; he had spent a grand total of about a week in the D.C. area in the past decade.
“Anyway, at Bellstar, we have use of a Hawker Beechcraft 800XP, a twelve-seat business jet. Bellstar has crews they can call up in a moment’s notice, and we have larger and smaller aircraft that can be rented.”
“Kinda like an Agency front.”
Hanley sighed. “Like any good company. That airport is thirty minutes from here in traffic, and I have an FBO employee badge for you that gets you right onto the tarmac. And you can forget that Altima you pulled up in. You’ve got a black Tahoe in the lot here at the marina.
It’s registered to another shell TerreCom owns. ”
“Cool.”
“And if I need you at the airport quicker than that, there’s a rented shed here just off marina grounds with something faster inside.”
Court was intrigued. “You gonna keep me in suspense?”
“A motorcycle.” Hanley opened up his phone and scrolled through something for a moment, putting on reading glasses as he did so. He said, “I don’t know bikes, but I talked to someone who does. Yeah, here it is. A Yamaha YZF. The R1M.”
It was a powerful motorcycle Court was familiar with. The sport bike, Court knew, could whip through traffic a hell of a lot better than a Chevy Tahoe.
“Sweet. Registered to…?”
“Brian Webb.”
“Who is—”
“Brian Webb is you when you’re in the States. We’re still getting your legend together, should have that all sorted in a few days, but we do have the bike in that name, at least.”
“What happened to Patrick Sanders?” The identification he carried at the moment was fake, as well.
“He just died. Burn those creds, throw the ashes overboard. Forget the name.”
“Brian Webb,” Court said softly to himself. He’d had dozens of aliases in his life, however, so his attention quickly went back to the motorcycle.
He said, “Somebody’s come into some money.”
“TerreCom has twenty-five million dollars behind it. Some Homeland Security appropriation that was shuffled out of the light and into the black. Don’t know when I’ll get more, so we have to be shrewd with our expenses, but it helps that—for now, at least—I’ve only got one human asset to support.”
Court leaned back in the chair. “So, Zack’s not healed up yet?”
“Hightower is on injured reserve another week, at least. He has an MRI scheduled, and that will either clear him for service or extend his vacation.”
Zack Hightower had been with Court the night in Russia when he was shot, and Hightower himself took an AK round in the back of the thigh, a much more serious wound than Court’s. He, like Court and Hanley, had been ordered to start this sub rosa operation by the deputy director for ops at the CIA.
“What’s Zack doing now?” Court asked.
“Ignoring my calls, mostly. Sending me texts to keep me happy. He says he’s doing PT, but he’s also out in Colorado, hunting.”
“Hunting what?”
“Dunno. Not humans. Not yet.” After a moment, Hanley waved his hand in the air. “Look, before we get to the reason I called you here, I wanted to fill you in about your dad.”
Court sat up straighter. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. Like we discussed, we have to assume that Russian intelligence obtained your name a few months ago.
That could, theoretically at least, put your only living relative at some risk.
A few weeks back I found an ex-Unit guy who lives down in Florida and works as a PI to keep an eye on your pop, just to make sure there wasn’t anyone snooping around him who shouldn’t be. ”
Court knew this; he’d discussed it with Hanley in their first phone conversation after he returned from Russia. “And?” he prompted.
“And…your dad might be a crusty old goat, but he’s not an idiot.
My guy down there says your dad made him in a hardware store two weeks ago, came up and started talking to him.
Asking him why he just showed up in the area, why he’d seen him in a rental with Miami tags on his street, that kind of thing. ”
“Shit,” Court muttered. “Were guns pulled?”
Hanley laughed. “No, nothing like that. But Skip, that’s the PI, had to double down to keep his story straight. He told your dad he was buying property there in the neighborhood.”
Court raised an eyebrow. “Meaning one of your non-CIA fronts now has a shitty house on a gravel road in northern Florida?”
“Yep, with a sixty-six-year-old former Delta guy in it. A guy who now has a standing invite to meet your dad for coffee every morning.”
Court groaned at this. “Some covert surveillance operation.”
Hanley shrugged. “It’s all good. Echols is doing his job. He hasn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. Your pop is fine, and now he has a new friend to bitch to about all his conspiracy theories.”
“Sounds like him,” Court said. “I appreciate you watching over him.”
Hanley waved this away. “CIA has seen no evidence that the Russians are even bouncing your name around in their internal communications. Best-case scenario, the one guy in FSB who knew who you were is now the one guy we have on ice in a black site in Morocco.”
An FSB colonel named Baronov had run an operation where he learned Court’s name. Court had then, with help, kidnapped the man and brought him out of Russia.
“Fingers crossed,” Court said, but he wasn’t overly concerned about the Russians having his identity. He switched gears. “So, when you called this morning, you told me to get my ass here on the double.”
“Yeah. I wanted to rush you down here today to get you settled in, because I’m about to send you out into the field for the first time with this new venture.”
Court leaned forward, his beer still untouched in his hand. “What’s up?”
Hanley took a sip of his beer. “You’re going to Nicaragua.”
Court took a gulp himself, finally, and looked down at the bottle. It was an IPA. He hated IPAs. So much, in fact, that he was more bothered by his beverage than the fact that he’d just been told he’d soon be on a plane to a semi-hostile nation in Central America.
Hanley said, “An asset in their national police is claiming to be burned. Doesn’t trust the local station. Wants extraction from the country. Normally, the Agency would tell the agent to pound sand, but this particular agent is claiming to have something big enough to earn the extraction.”
Court didn’t get it. “The agent doesn’t trust the local station, fine. Send a Ground Branch team from up here. Why send me? I thought we were going to be used for big shit that the Agency can’t manage.”
“This is big shit, apparently, because Trey Watkins came to me directly.”
Watkins was the deputy director for operations at CIA. The man who’d ordered the creation of this entire enterprise.
“That asshole,” Court mumbled.
“That asshole who saved your life by helping to get you out of Russia?”
Court shrugged. “Still an ass.”