Court added, “That baby’s mine now. Thanks.” He tossed Zack’s keys into some low bushes nearby.
Hightower was more focused on his immediate predicament. “Wait. How the hell am I supposed to get my hands untied?”
“Easy. Just scream like a little girl when somebody passes by. Sooner or later someone will come to your rescue.”
“C’mon, bro. Unnecessary. We’re on the same team now, remember? You, me, and Hanley are going to smoke out those Muj Denny has tracking you.”
Court just laughed. “I remember I asked you to join my team. Don’t remember you giving me anything like your full-throated support.”
Zack was pissed. The prospect of having to call out to a civilian for help was almost more than his bravado could bear. “You son of a bitch. I swear to God when I—”
Court interrupted. “It’s this or shoot you dead in a ditch. I thought I was doing you a favor, but if you prefer . . .”
Zack slammed his head back against the headrest. “Just go, asshole!”
Court chuckled again. “If you want I can make this look like some kind of kinky S&M scenario that got out of hand. Might help with your cover story.”
Zack pulled even harder on his bindings. “I swear if you fuckin’ touch me, dude, I’m going to rip your head off and shit down your neck.”
“Say hi to Matt for me. Tell him I appreciate his support.” Court left Zack in the passenger’s seat of his truck, struggling against his bindings.
54
The fallout from the previous day’s article in the Washington Post had been immediate and intense. The D.C. assassination story was the lead news item all over the USA, after all, and Catherine King’s piece had been the first and only one to provide something that looked, to the layman anyway, like an explanation as to what was going on. That Catherine herself remained wholly unconvinced she was reporting much more than official government spin had been irrelevant to America, even though she tried to relay her misgivings in her article as clearly as possible without pissing off the managing editor of her paper.
She’d been careful to throw in a disclaimer, even going so far as to say much of her information came from unnamed CIA sources who were government employees with their own version of events. Still, despite this proviso, as far as Catherine was concerned, the only thing she’d done this week was scratch the surface on a huge story, then get a completely bullshit version of events from a key player who had his own ax to grind.
And then she reported the false version.
She felt dirty.
Many times in Catherine King’s illustrious thirty-year journalistic career she’d landed a big story ahead of her peers, and each time it happened it played out much the same way. Forced into a victory lap by her paper, she was paraded around other media venues like a trophy.
And today had been just this sort of event for her. She’d done two segments each on CNN and Fox, and one each on CBS, ABC, and NBC. She’d fielded calls from her colleagues at the wire services and National Public Radio, each time talking about what she knew about a madman on the streets of Washington killing two of our nation’s Intelligence officials.
And through it all Catherine saw herself as a phony, because she knew she was profiting off a version of events that was probably far from accurate.
Between each interview, however, often while sitting in a makeup chair, she worked her phone, pumping and prodding all her contacts in the U.S. intelligence community, trying her best to get more information about what the hell was going on over at Langley. She had over fifty feelers out, and she would have had more, but her exhausting schedule of media appearances kept her from doing as much as she would have liked.
In contrast to Catherine, twenty-eight-year-old Andy Shoal was having a hell of a good time. He’d been given the night off of his evening duties as a cops reporter so he could spend the daytime hours in studios and on the phone, making a dizzying series of local and secondary radio and cable shows, talking about how he and his “partner” Catherine King had stumbled onto a terrorist assassin being hunted by the CIA on America’s streets. He talked about the Washington Highlands shoot-out, about Chevy Chase, Dupont Circle, and Columbia Heights, and he made it out like he was Bernstein to King’s Woodward.