He raced along the canal, ran to a large culvert, and ducked in. As he moved through pitch-darkness he pulled out his phone to light his way, and with this he saw a smaller drain, waist-high and not more than four feet in diameter, that ran off at a ninety-degree angle. Water gushed down from it into the culvert.
This wasn’t sewage; it was just runoff water from the streets, but there wasn’t anything clean about it. Court climbed up and into the long, narrow shaft, and he knelt low. This killed his wounded ribs, but he ignored the pain and moved as fast as he could from the area.
He wasn’t sure where the drain went—this wasn’t on the sat maps—but he had a flashlight, and he had a sense that he was moving to the east. If he just stayed in here for a few blocks and climbed out he’d find himself somewhere in the middle of the city, and from there he was sure he would be safe from the immediate threat.
50
Denny Carmichael opened this morning’s copy of the Washington Post. DeRenzi had brought it in as soon as it arrived by courier, and Denny had been awake and waiting for it, even though it was only five a.m.
It took him no time to find the article he was looking for, just below the fold and taking up an entire half of the front page, as well as another half of A19.
Carmichael assumed Catherine King must have raced back from the CIA headquarters in McLean to the Washington Post’s office in D.C. to make her deadline last night. She couldn’t have possibly filed the story before midnight, which meant the newspaper had done some impressive work to get the article in the edition that went to press just a few hours later.
It was all there, under the headline “CIA suspects D.C.-area shooter is ‘known personality.’”
The description of Gentry was close to what Carmichael had handed King. She’d also reported the fact that he had spent time in Miami, along with information that he’d been trained, possibly by jihadists, likely in Yemen.
For some reason there was no mention about him coming from Jacksonville, Florida, but Denny wasn’t too troubled by this.
Nor was he bothered by the fact that King’s article clearly faulted CIA for not letting police know after the Brandywine Street incident that they had suspicions about who might be involved in the attack. Carmichael didn’t care. After all, in one form or another, CIA had been blamed for everything bad that had ever happened since the 1950s.
Other than this small trifle, there was very little editorial comment from King in the piece, which greatly pleased Denny. She did add a small caveat at the end when she wrote that the investigation was ongoing and first reports, even from top government officials, often proved to be erroneous.
Carmichael shrugged. King thought she had couched her piece with skepticism, but she had done exactly what Denny wanted her to do.
She had published an article that would bait Gentry into targeting the writer of the article.
—
At any other time, the impenetrable blackness around him and the rainfall beating against the aluminum roof above him would have lulled Court into peaceful sleep. But his heart rate and the adrenaline pumping through him, even now, a full hour and a half after listening to the sounds of a tactical unit preparing to smash in his door, still prevented him from calming down enough to relax and doze off.
He sat Indian style in his small storage unit, his back to the concrete block back wall, his suppressed Glock in his lap, and his Yamaha motorcycle right in front of him for cover. He faced the closed metal sliding door, stared at the black in front of his eyes, and listened to the calming rain.
And he fully expected at any moment for the door to fly open and a team of shooters to rush in behind it with blinding lights and laser-targeting devices.
Court had made it to his storage unit over a half hour earlier, after running a short SDR by using two early-morning cabs and walking through back alleys and commercial parking lots. Once in his little unit, he checked the area around him before closing the door, then he used the light of his phone to find his second bugout bag here in his cache and to check the bike to make sure it was ready to roll.
Then he just sat down and did his best to relax.
He hadn’t known who was hitting the Mayberry house at first, but after the engagement he determined they were a local police tactical unit. Their body armor said ERT, and while that was nothing conclusive—a gang of Arab goons had worn uniforms that proclaimed them to be D.C. Metro cops, after all—the tactical unit’s movements confirmed to Court they were exactly what they purported to be. The cordon of regular patrol officers in the area around the Mayberry home only sealed Court’s suspicion he’d been discovered in his hide site by local law enforcement.