He continued down I-95, passing through the town of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and here his head instinctively turned to the left and looked off into the dark. He knew the exit here onto I-64 well, because he had spent some of the most intense years of his life less than one hour directly to the east, beyond the coastal plain and all the way through the swamps at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.
Back before 9/11, when Court was just a trainee working to become a singleton operator in the Autonomous Asset Development Program, he spent two years in a sequestered set of small buildings just inside the protected area at the military and intelligence installation known as the Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity. Here he’d learned tradecraft, foreign languages, survival skills, hand-to-hand combat, scuba diving, and dozens of other talents and trades, all of which turned him into one of the CIA’s best “one-man bands” of espionage. He’d been in his early twenties when he graduated from and left the compound at AADP, but he’d been back to other facilities at Harvey Point many times throughout the years. Each time he drove onto the grounds he looked off towards a swamp to the right of the road, and he’d wondered if back there on the other side of a thick copse of cypress, more young men were going through AADP training, hidden even from the rest of the men and women with Top Secret clearance allowed onto Harvey Point.
He’d heard the Autonomous Asset Program had been disbanded and he’d thought himself to be the last surviving operative from the program, but Max Ohlhauser had told him the day before that AAP had been rebranded somehow, and that it remained operational.
He wondered if the answer to all his questions was out there beyond the cypress trees and swampland, but he pushed the thought out of his mind and kept driving south, doing his best to instead brainstorm his operation to protect his dad. He began thinking back to a time long ago when the roads and farms just west of Jacksonville, Florida, had been his stomping ground. It would be surreal to be back on those roads, and he wasn’t looking forward to it, but he worried Denny Carmichael would stop at nothing to end this, and he wouldn’t think twice about sending foreign killers to target Court’s father.
Think about something else, Gentry, he told himself, desperate to find a topic to concentrate on that wouldn’t wear his mind out for the next nine hours.
For the first time on this drive, he reached to the knob on the radio, and he flipped it on. The speakers in this twenty-four-year-old truck were shit, and it took him several seconds to find an FM station that played something he could listen to, but as soon as he heard an old Allman Brothers tune, he stopped turning the dial, and he cranked up the volume as far as it would go.
“Midnight Rider” was just about the perfect song for tonight. He wished he could just play it on a continuous loop until tomorrow morning.
Court wore a green Caterpillar cap and a denim jacket; other than his Virginia drive-out tags he looked like a farmer or factory worker in any of the towns here in the Carolinas or northern Florida, his ultimate destination.
This was nice, he told himself. His cover legend, for maybe the first time in his operational life, felt exactly like the original Court Gentry. He’d operated undercover as a dockworker in Ireland and a financial analyst in Singapore and a commercial diver in Brazil. He’d played the roles of a light-skinned Masalit tribesman in Sudan and a Canadian businessman in Italy and an Iraqi nomad in Syria.
He’d played one hundred roles, easily, but he’d never once played the role of a hick driving his V8 beater and wearing a Cat hat and soiled denim, listening to Southern rock as the miles rolled by under his big tires.
No, he’d never played that role. But he’d lived it.
Despite the worries on his mind stemming from what he’d left behind in D.C. and the concerns he had about what he would find when he got where he was going, Court Gentry couldn’t help but feel good right now.
He felt real. He felt American.
He was hours from home still, but somehow it was as if he’d already arrived.
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