The EE agreed. “And when we find anything about this patient, we’ll go to work on figuring out his identity. It doesn’t matter if we can’t dig into his government file; we just need to know where he lives, so when Catherine lands in Tel Aviv tomorrow she can hit the ground running.”
“We don’t know he’ll know anything about the event in Trieste,” one of the other reporters said. “We just know he helped Six.”
“That’s true,” Catherine said. “And from that we know he has goodwill towards Six. If he doesn’t know about Trieste, maybe he can help us find out who does.”
Andy was the most junior reporter in the room, so he was surprised when the editor pointed to him. “Shoal, I want you to go back to Chevy Chase and to Dupont Circle. I want you interviewing everyone who lived or worked in the immediate area, as well as first responders and commuters who passed by at the time of the shootings. I want you digging even harder for evidence than the cops dug. Find somebody who saw something other than this guy named Six running around.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Catherine.” The executive editor turned to her. “While you’re on that plane I want you e-mailing every government official. Call in every favor. Don’t bring up the fact we are going after this wounded guy the suspect named, but do ask for comments about an Israeli asset rescued by American intelligence in Italy six years ago. I don’t care if they won’t speak on the record. I want to know what they don’t say just as much as what they do say. If you get a lot of ‘No comments,’ or denials that sound like they are coming out of an official echo chamber, then we’ll know we’re on to something.”
“Will do.”
The huddle in the executive editor’s office ended by four, and Catherine ran back to her desk, threw as much into one of her roll-aboards as would fit, and then rushed to the elevators.
Five minutes later she was in the back of a hired car booking a six ten flight to Tel Aviv from Dulles while the driver wove through D.C. traffic.
—
Court looked down at his watch as he passed the sign announcing he was leaving Virginia and entering North Carolina. It was seven forty-five in the evening; he’d been on the road less than two hours.
This meant he had another nine to go, and with that realization he reached down into the cup holder of the big pickup truck and lifted his massive cup of coffee. Half empty, half cold.
It was going to be a long, long night.
Court drove a 1992 Ford Bronco that showed just about the same amount of rust as it did its original blue and white paint job. He’d bought the vehicle two hours earlier for $1,900 at a “tote-the-note” used car dealership in Richmond, telling the salesman he needed something that could get him as far as the West Coast. The salesman proudly showed him the Bronco’s 87,000 “original” miles, which to Court meant the odometer had been rolled back, but he inspected the truck inside and out and he decided it would get the job done.
He could have spent a lot more—he still had over seven grand from the money he took from the drug dealers last Saturday night—and he could have bought something more obviously reliable, but the moment Court saw the Bronco he knew it had to be his transport down to Florida, because it reminded him of some of his better memories of his youth. He’d driven an ’87 blue and white Bronco around central Florida as a teenager, and it just felt right to him to return home driving virtually the same vehicle he’d used back then.
He told himself he needed to stay productive on this long drive, and he had two objectives: One, to come up with a plan about what he would do when he actually found his father. And two, to come up with a plan about what he was going to do when he got back to D.C.
But he really had not yet begun to tackle either of the two problems, because he still had other issues running through his mind. Namely Catherine King, and his desperate hope that she had believed enough of what he had said this afternoon to where she would do what he had asked her to do—fly to Israel to find answers about Operation BACK BLAST. As long as he was occupied on this side trip, this errand a thousand miles from where he needed to be, the reporter for the Washington Post was his only hope at getting any closer to a resolution to all this mess.
He put his chances for this at fifty-fifty; meaning he thought there was just as much possibility King would rush onto the set of Fox News to talk about her harrowing kidnapping ordeal at the hands of a maniac as there was she would fly to Israel and run down a vague lead about a wounded Mossad officer who might know something about an old asset who had once been rescued from the clutches of al Qaeda while on a trip to Italy.
It was all so tiring to think about, and he had to concentrate on staying awake.