Shit, thought Court. He was a shooter and a spy. He wasn’t an analyst or an investigator. He wanted a mission, not a fucking puzzle.
Then it hit him. A way to reanalyze the problem. He asked himself, what one thing did all the men agree on? What was the continuum between all parties?
He knew the answer as soon as he posed the question.
Fucking BACK BLAST.
This was understandable, Court reasoned, because Denny had told everyone it was an op gone bad. It had been his justification to hand down the shoot on sight. Now, in the middle of the night, with nothing else to do and nowhere else to turn, he told himself he had no choice but to try to reach back into his memory banks somehow and to replay every minuscule aspect of this one op out of dozens in his time with the Goon Squad, and hundreds in his life as an operator.
The normal routine with the Goon Squad after a mission was to perform an immediate hot wash, an after-action review where all elements involved discussed the good, bad, and ugly. They did it while memories were still fresh. But BACK BLAST had been different because Court had worked alone, without a net, much as he had in the early part of his career, when he’d been a member of the Autonomous Asset Program.
After Trieste there had been no hot wash, no after-action review, literally no mention of the event ever again.
This made details very fuzzy after more than half a decade, but as Court lay in his long, narrow closet, his head next to his ersatz escape hatch to the basement proper and his booted feet pressed up against the wall, he committed himself fully to this endeavor.
He forced himself to do his best to remember an operation that took place a half dozen years ago.
Six Years Earlier
Court Gentry didn’t mind commercial travel, not even in coach, because even a long-haul international flight over the Atlantic was far superior to any of the hundreds of trips he’d taken on Agency transport in his years with CIA. The majority of the time when he moved from one country to another it was in the ass end of a loud, cold cargo aircraft that smelled like jet fuel and BO. Even the Special Activities Division Air Branch Gulfstream that normally flew transport missions for the Golf Sierra unit was outfitted for function over form, and on the inside it looked nothing like what people assumed from its sleek and businesslike fuselage.
But tonight’s flight from Dulles to Milan was something special, because by the time the SAD logistics staff bought Court’s ticket coach was full, so he got to fly in business class.
And though he was the one man on his team who never bitched about the austere conditions that came with his work, Court really didn’t mind sitting in a soft and wide business-class seat, either.
It wasn’t lost on him at all that three days earlier he’d been lying on his belly inside a hot metal shipping container that had been left smashed on the banks of a levee somewhere on the outskirts of Mogadishu. With him had been Sierras Four and Five, and they had spent a day and a half waiting for the signal from Sierra Two that their target had been identified at the target location. Court’s body armor, hidden under the rags the locals wore, pressed into him, his ammunition digging into his stomach while he swatted flies and did his best to ignore Keith Morgan’s unceasing farts.
And now here he was days later, wearing a Tommy Hilfiger blazer and L.L.Bean khakis and sipping champagne from real glass barware while a drop-dead gorgeous English flight attendant went over his myriad options for dinner.
So much better than a Keith Morgan gas attack in all respects.
Sometimes Court’s cover for action was a hell of a lot better than his real life, so he took advantage of it on these few missions with the Goon Squad when he got to play dress up. He felt weird not working with the rest of his team on this, but he’d spent the first several years in CIA doing singleton ops, so it was no big trick for him to operate alone.
Over Nova Scotia he dined on salmon pomegranate with Turkish pilaf, and he washed it down with white burgundy. He’d rather have a glass of Redbreast Irish Whiskey or Knob Creek bourbon, or just a bottle of cold Pacífico beer, but his cover for action was a mild-mannered American businessman who would know that white wine paired nicely with salmon.
After his meal, while his Virgin flight flew over Greenland, he opened up his laptop and began scrolling through satellite and street maps of his target location.
The woman in the seat next to him was Italian; she never looked over at his computer to see the map of Trieste, but had she done so, Court would have just said he was in the consumer goods industry and heading to several Italian cities to meet with vendors.
He looked like an eager businessman getting a jump on his trip by committing locations to memory, but in fact he was concentrating on the maps so he could pick out his primary, secondary, and tertiary ingresses and egresses to the target area.