Court took the phone. “I’ll call her boss. He’ll be just as pissed about this, but he’ll also be a little more helpful.”
“I don’t really have much of an office, but you can use my hooch for some privacy.”
* * *
? ? ?
Captain Anderson led Court out of the little mud, stone, and plywood building and through a warren of similar structures, all built deep in the hills. This Special Forces forward operating base was well hidden here, protecting it from possible Russian or Syrian aircraft above, and the FSA unit they were embedded with held a solid-looking defensive perimeter. Robby told Court there was one ODA here, or Operational Detachment, Alpha—meaning a dozen Green Berets working with some seventy-five FSA fighters. The Americans were here fighting against ISIS, not the Syrian regime, but the FSA fought against both groups.
Anderson led Court into a small room on the ground floor of a bombed-out building and told him no one would disturb him during his call.
Court sat on the cot, looked at the phone in his hand, then took a deep breath.
He dialed a number from memory, but he wasn’t really sure what he would say when the call went through.
CHAPTER 65
As the director of the National Clandestine Service of the CIA, Matthew Hanley often worked late into the evening. Today had been no different. He’d arrived at his office in McLean, Virginia, just before eight a.m., and it was just after nine p.m. when he crossed the Potomac River on his way home to D.C.
His driver got him back to his Woodley Park neighborhood by nine fifteen, but just a few blocks from home, Hanley changed his mind and decided to go out to dinner instead.
Hanley was a bachelor in his midfifties, a former Green Beret, and he didn’t splurge on much in life apart from good food and wine. Tonight he made the last-minute decision to indulge at the Bourbon Steak restaurant in the Four Seasons hotel, not because he had anything special to celebrate, but rather because the pressures of his job had him certain it would kill him one of these days, so why shouldn’t he enjoy a good meal while his heart was still beating?
He and his four-man security detail entered without a reservation, but a table for one was found in the center of the room, and Hanley ate while his detail maintained a discreet 360-degree watch over the dining room and the street out front.
Apart from an urgent call from the office, he enjoyed the first half of his meal in silence at his table while he listened to the soft murmur of conversation from others seated around him. Well-heeled couples talked about their kids and marriages, businesspeople discussed their work, and foreign travelers to D.C. spoke in foreign languages, most of which Hanley understood, and the big man in the middle listened in on it all while he dined alone.
At ten thirty he poured the last of his first full bottle of cabernet into his glass, and was just about to cut off another slice of his twenty-two-ounce bone-in rib eye, when his cell phone rang. The sound of the ring told him it was on his encrypted app, so he decided he should answer it.
This was his second encrypted call of the past forty-five minutes, and he was certain it would have some relation to the first.
“Hanley.”
“Hey, Matt. It’s me.” It was Violator. Courtland Gentry. Hanley’s wayward lone-wolf asset.
Hanley put his fork on his plate and leaned back from the table. “Yeah, I know. Brewer called. She’s about to have an aneurysm.”
“Fingers crossed.”
Matt smiled but didn’t let Court hear him chuckle. He took a sip of his cabernet with his free hand. “So . . . last I heard you were in Frankfurt, about to go on vacation. Did you get off at the wrong bus stop on the way to the beach?”
“Yeah, the one in the Syrian Desert.”
“Right. Some indigenous forces working with an A-team captured you in the middle of a firefight, thought you were ISIS or Al-Nus. I trust you’ve charmed the hell out of them and smoothed things over.”
“Yes, sir. We’re all gonna get matching tats when this is over.”
“And you want my help in getting the hell out of there.”
There was a pause on the line.
“Court?”
“I don’t want to leave, but I do need some help.”
“You are on the job?” Hanley said it as a question. “Aren’t you getting support from your employer?”
“Negative. The guy running me is untrustworthy. I might just go it alone from here on out.”
Now Hanley put his glass down. “If you were going it alone, we wouldn’t be talking. What do you need?”
“Not sure how much I should tell you, actually.”
“The line is clean, but you know that. You don’t know how much you should tell me so that I maintain plausible deniability over what you are about to do. Is that it?”
“In a nutshell.”
“Well . . . maybe keep it vague. Theoretical. Hypothetical.”
Court breathed into the phone a moment. Then, “Let’s say an opportunity arose where someone could eliminate a very bad actor at the center of a very bad situation.”
Hanley looked around for the waiter, and when the two men met eyes, the big man lifted his empty wine bottle. He had a feeling he was going to need some more alcohol in the next few minutes. Court was talking about assassinating Ahmed Azzam; there was no question in Hanley’s mind. He controlled his own breathing and said, “Go on.”
“The elimination of this bad actor might well help things . . . but it might not have any real effect. Who knows . . . things could conceivably get worse.”
“The future’s hard to predict.”
“That’s right. I guess I’m trying to decide, should this person in a position to do this thing to this bad actor act . . . or should he wait for someone with more knowledge of the situation to decide if the elimination of the bad actor is the right thing to do?”
Hanley said, “You want a vague answer?”
“I want an ironclad thumbs-up or thumbs-down, but I’ll take what I can get.”
“You are after my blessing, then.”
“Something like that . . . I guess.”
“Well, kid, I can’t just give you carte blanche to delete anyone in the world you want to delete. Officially or unofficially.”
“I understand.”
“Having said that,” Hanley continued, “I’ve learned over the years that you have pretty fair judgment.”
Court did not reply to this.
“And . . . if the question is, ‘do we take a bad actor off the game table, even if we don’t know what will come next,’ I kinda have a philosophy about that.”
“I’d be very interested in your philosophy, Matt.”
Hanley kept his voice low as his eyes flitted about the room. “If a bad guy gets dead, well, it might make the next bad guy think a little bit. It might not, there’s no silver bullet to fix every problem, but at the end of the day, a little street justice, an eye for an eye . . . well, that might be the most sure thing there is out there to hold back the monsters.”
There was a long pause. “I’ve been thinking pretty much the same thing.”
“I know you have. And you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. Officially speaking, though, I haven’t said shit, and you have not been tasked. You got that?”
“Got it.”
The connection crackled for several seconds.
“Court, old buddy, I’ve got a rib eye staring me down here.”
“I’ll let you get back to your steak. Sorry to bother you.”
“You kidding? Between you and me, this little phone call has made my week.”
“Guess that means you had a shitty week.”
“I’d say you have no idea, but you probably do.” Hanley sipped water now. “Your mom misses you.”
“Suzanne Brewer’s definitely not my mom, and I doubt she misses me. She probably was hoping I hadn’t checked in because I got hit by a bus.”
“Brewer knows she’s not that lucky.” Hanley laughed aloud, then adopted an authoritative tone. “I want to hear back from you again, soon. You copy? We still have an arrangement, if you remember.”
“Copy. Let me figure out my current predicament, then I’ll reach out.”
“Put a couple weeks in between,” Hanley said. “For the sake of plausible deniability.”