Chapter Thirty-Nine
Thirty-Nine
Car alarms rang up and down the street, adding to the concerto of chaos that had erupted in Georgetown.
The BMW came to rest next to the Armada, and only then did Court see the bloody, broken body of what had seconds ago been the Jordanian hit man fall out of the sky, hit the sidewalk, and then roll to a stop.
Looking at Catherine next to him, he saw that she was unhurt but in an obvious and understandable state of shock herself.
Zack, on the other hand, had already flung his door open. He climbed out, held his Staccato up, and aimed it at the Nissan Armada, which was now nearly fifty feet away. He moved forward without waiting for Court to support him.
Court fell out of the tow truck onto the street because the passenger-side door had been ripped off and flung somewhere else. He climbed to his feet, raised his own little pistol, and began moving forward towards the crashed-out BMW.
As Zack came up on the Armada, he fired several rounds, presumably at someone in the front seat, but Court had to get around the crashed 3 Series, which had come to rest with its grille right in the driver’s-side door of the Armada.
Court cleared around the side of the black sedan; the airbags had deployed so it was hard to see who was behind the wheel, but soon a figure began climbing over into the passenger seat, pushing the still-inflated airbag out of the way.
He saw a pistol in the man’s right hand.
“Toss the fucking gun!” Court shouted.
The man coughed several times; obviously he’d breathed in the smoke filling the cabin of the BMW, but he did eventually comply, tossing an H his white shirt was torn and smudged with grease. His eyeglasses were bent comically, his hair a mess.
He did not acknowledge Court at first; he just looked past him.
Court followed Pace’s eyes and realized he was checking out the body of the Jordanian hit man lying facedown on the sidewalk. Snare’s legs were twisted around each other, almost like a pretzel; one arm was dislocated up over his head, and his head hung at a seventy-degree angle from his neck.
After another cough, Jim finally looked back to Court. “You…want to put an insurance round into him?”
Court, still bewildered, shook his head. “I’ll save the bullet for someone who needs it.”
“Roger that,” Pace said.
Zack Hightower came around from behind the Armada now, lowered his gun when he saw Pace, and slapped the man on the back.
The three of them all just stood there, disoriented for a few seconds, and then Zack put his hand to his ear.
Court saw that Zack’s AirPod was still in place, but only barely. “Repeat your last, Gumdrop?”
An instant later Zack’s eyes focused. “Cops are on Wisconsin, approaching on foot. A lot of patrol cars are converging, two minutes out.”
Pace said, “I can’t be here.”
To this, Court replied, “And we can?”
Pace scooped up his weapon, and the three men met up with Catherine as she climbed out of the tow truck. She retrieved her handbag, and then Court pulled out his empty Scorpion, collapsed the stock, and slung it over his neck.
Following a suggestion from Zack, the four of them separated so they couldn’t be picked up on cameras moving together, but they all headed west on foot for a block, then turned to the north.
—
Matthew Hanley himself picked them all up five minutes later in front of the Volta Park Recreation Center. They climbed into Hanley’s rented minivan, and everyone remained silent as the vehicle rolled off to the north.
Eventually, however, Hanley spoke into the car’s speakers. “Gumdrop. You with us?”
“I’ve got you on Wisconsin. Keep heading north and you’ll miss all the first responders converging in Georgetown. I see no more Gauntlet assets near you. I’m bringing the UAV back, so I can only see you on traffic cams.”
“Roger that.” Now Hanley turned to Pace. “Nice going back there.”
Pace said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was never here.”
“Understood.”
Pace directed Hanley to pull over at a corner, and he climbed out. Once on the sidewalk, he leaned back in, and looked to King. “We’re taking you at your word, ma’am.”
“Mr. Six and Mr. Hanley here have both taken me at my word in the past, and I hope they agree with me that I’ve never violated their trust.”
Both men nodded.
“But,” Cathy said, handing a business card to Pace with a shaking hand, “if you ever want to grab coffee, I am working on a book about—”
Pace interrupted. “I’m going to have to pass. Glad you’re okay, Ms. King, but since I don’t exist and all, I won’t be able to have coffee with you.” He disappeared down a side street and Hanley continued north on Wisconsin, leaving Catherine holding her business card.
They drove towards the safe house in a roundabout way, and the heavy breathing from everyone in the vehicle—including Hanley, even though he hadn’t been directly under any threat—steamed the windshield so bad they had to roll the windows down.
Court pulled a fresh pair of AirPods from his pack so he could listen to Jill as she flew the drone back and broke the safe house down with help from Arnold.
It had been like this when he worked in CIA’s Ground Branch as a paramilitary operations officer.
Short bursts of almost unimaginable stress followed immediately by the mundane.
They’d pack gear, climb on a jet, take a short flight, undergo some sort of after-action briefing, and then Court planned on heading back to Ship Happens, Two to clean his weapons, charge his communication devices, and hopefully get some rest while he waited on Pace and Lacy and Hanley and Watkins to give him his next orders.
Tomorrow, he imagined, it would be another surveillance op, perhaps another kinetic op, followed by another decompression cycle.
They were still on the D.C. side of the Potomac when Catherine King said, “What about me?”
Hanley answered, “Where can you go where you’ll be safe?”
“Tahiti sounds nice,” she replied. The team looked at her a moment, then she said, “But I have a girlfriend in Taos, she’s always trying to get me to visit. This might be a good time.”
Hanley shook his head. “Gauntlet no doubt has the ability to get into your credit cards, see where you are and what you’re doing. We have a safe house a few hours away; we can put you in there until this is all settled.”
Court said, “You might see someone you know there.”
“Who?”
“I’ll keep it a surprise.”
King seemed to take a moment to choose her words, and then she said, “You guys were the ones the other night in Washington Circle.” It was a statement, not a question, and for Court’s part, he was temporarily too tired to protest. She followed it up with, “If Gauntlet is behind the assassinations, then it’s a safe guess they are behind the intelligence leaks somehow.
They are going to be incredibly focused on figuring out who you all are, considering how you’ve disrupted two of their operations so far.
If they are able to obtain unlimited quantities of intelligence, then I hope you will all be very, very careful. ”
The comment hung there in the air a moment, amid the heavy breathing and the steamed windows, as the minivan took the Chain Bridge over the river, heading into Virginia, on their way to Reagan National.
—
Had James Westwood stayed home from work, he would have been able to hear the majority of the action in Georgetown.
The unsuppressed weapons at the scene would have sounded like soft pops, the screeching of tires would have made its way up to him, and perhaps even the car alarms that went off near the scene would have been audible.
He would have also found himself just a few blocks north of where Hanley picked up the two Ghost Town operators, the CIA officer, and the intended assassination victim in Volta Park.
But instead, J.W. was in his office at the Carter Center more than a mile to the east, so he had heard nothing but racing fire trucks and ambulances and wailing police cars, all heading towards Georgetown.
Despite the fact that he wasn’t there, however, he still had a pretty good picture as to what was going on, because he’d been getting near real-time updates from the scene.
Mike Scardino had laptops on the coffee table in J.W.
’s office to use as a sort of war room for the series of assassinations planned for today.
He’d been there with a headset on, linked to Gauntlet Group operators present at the killing of former Gauntlet pilot David Rudder less than two hours earlier, and he’d heard the reports from a Gauntlet surveillance team getting into position for another assassination in McLean that was due to happen later in the afternoon, and of course he’d been listening in to the chatter as two support teams, ten men in all, converged on a restaurant in Georgetown for what was supposed to have been an easy hit.
When it was reported to Big Mike that the woman they were following this morning, Catherine King, had chosen a table outside on the sidewalk, the already easy-sounding job just seemed like it was going to be that much easier.
But somehow it had all gone to hell.