He’d gone no more than fifty feet when, ahead and off to the right of the overgrown path, he saw something big looming in the woods. He looked closer, then he rubbed rainwater out of his eyes to do a double take.
It was a two-story building, covered with vines and surrounded by oak trees. The first floor seemed to be made of stacked stone, and the second floor and the steeply pitched roof were wood plank, much of it bowed or rotten.
Court left his bike where it was and pushed into the trees to investigate the building.
The door had a lock on it, but that wasn’t going to slow Court down, because the door was lying on its side on the porch, ten feet from where it had once been affixed in the doorway.
The stone steps up to the porch were covered in vines but good and solid. Not so the porch itself, which sagged down several inches when he stepped on it. He moved along the edges until he found a crossbeam under the rotten wood, then walked along this like a tightrope to the door.
He stepped through the doorway and into a large, dark room.
This was an abandoned grain mill; he could tell from the setup. It was at least as old as the Civil War battlements supposedly out here in the forest, but probably unrelated to the 1863 encampment of Union forces. The big, dark room was open to the elements because of all the windows and the missing door, and he could hear dripping rainwater here inside, but the roof high above him seemed mostly intact.
He pulled his flashlight from his pack and walked the beam all along the inside. A small amount of graffiti on the wall and the beams above, and a larger amount of twentieth-century trash, told him he hadn’t discovered anything that had not been discovered hundreds of times by others, but he had serious doubts anyone happened by here with any regularity.
It was a roof over his head, and it was nothing if not secluded, but this wasn’t going to be comfortable, at least not until he scrounged up a few more items.
He looked at his watch. It had taken him a little less than an hour to travel here from D.C., which made this a suitable location as far as he was concerned.
This was now home.
He dropped his pack against a wall and changed into dry blue jeans and a mostly dry dark gray thermal shirt. He didn’t have any more socks other than the ones he was wearing, which, like his tennis shoes, were soaking wet, so he just told himself to forget about any real comfort and be glad for what he had.
When he was settled in, meaning sitting on a raincoat with his back against the wall, a tiny fire for warmth in front of him, he pulled out his smartphone and began calling up CNN and a few newswire services on the Internet.
It took him fewer than five minutes of surfing to come across the Washington Post article purporting to have information about a homegrown terrorist targeting the Central Intelligence Agency.
Court almost ignored it, thinking it was going to be nothing more than a bunch of bullshit conjecture, just like everything he’d seen during the daytime hours of CNN and the other cable networks. A bunch of people who knew nothing about the event pontificating just to fill airtime. But quickly he realized the writer of this article had spoken with CIA personnel. Key personnel, in fact.
Soon Court was certain Denny Carmichael had been involved in the background interview the reporter cited as her principal source.
He read through to the end of the article, and now Court’s jaw muscles tensed and he looked up from his screen, furious.
They were making him out to be nothing more than a delusional psycho who held an imaginary grudge against the CIA, who then bumbled over to the Middle East for training and support before returning home to begin his reign of terror.
Court scrolled back up to the top of the article looking for the byline. Catherine King. An e-mail address and phone number were listed as well.
Court decided he wanted to talk to King to find out about the access she’d been granted and the people she’d interviewed. This might help him learn of others involved in his situation, someone he could target next.
But Court knew something else, as well. The CIA had planted intel in the article so that he would do just that.
Court shook his head in disbelief. All these years, all this cat and mouse, and Denny Carmichael still thought Court was just some knuckle-dragging door-kicker, not smart enough to see he was being set up.
Court smiled a little and decided he wouldn’t go after Catherine King. No, not yet.
He would, instead, go after whoever it was tailing Catherine King, hoping it would be the same group of Arabs he’d been up against since at least the night he witnessed Leland Babbitt’s murder.
If the CIA was using foreign operatives here in the U.S., Court felt they would be at the center of the reasons behind his targeting. He’d love to get hold of some of these men after him, to squeeze them for intelligence, because they would surely have the answers.
He’d speak with King later if he needed to, but for now, he would seek out the hunters on his trail, because in Court’s long career, he had learned one lesson above all: it’s no big trick to turn a predator into prey.
52