While one of the Saudi assets raised his Glock and fired at the primary target, a second asset eliminated the bystander by firing several suppressed rounds into her head.
The third asset did not even draw a weapon. Instead, he walked directly to the counter, stepped behind it, and located the security camera Blu-ray recorder. He popped out the disk running in the machine, and he slipped it into his pocket. He then turned the Blu-ray player off, giving the impression it had not been running today at all.
By the time he finished he heard the last cries for mercy from the man on the floor. The asset behind the counter did not even pause to look at the target. Instead he just went to the front door and held it open for his two colleagues, who both slipped their weapons into their raincoats before calmly walking out into the late afternoon.
The third asset followed.
After only thirty seconds inside the convenience store the three Saudis were back on the street. An old van with stolen plates pulled up to the curb, and the three men climbed in, barely breaking stride.
65
Court slept four full hours at a rest stop just south of Savannah, Georgia, then he woke up as refreshed as he’d been in weeks and pulled back onto the highway. His meeting with his father—actually, he knew he couldn’t really call it that, considering there was no conversation between them—had left him feeling settled in a positive way that felt foreign to him, but it was a good feeling, and it had helped him push through the miles heading back north.
Music had propelled him on, as well. On the radio he’d found a station here in North Carolina that played a good mix of Southern rock, the stuff he and his brother grew up loving.
An old Tom Petty tune was playing now and Court had the volume up as loud as it would go. He was enjoying the rock and the old Ford Bronco. He was still tired, the wound in his ribs still hurt, and his future was still very much in doubt, but all things considered, he wasn’t having a bad day at all.
He realized he’d been driving along for the past few hours without checking his phone, so he lifted it from the center console and looked at it.
His RedPhone app showed four missed connections. He’d also received a text.
Driving along at seventy miles an hour, he opened the text.
Crucial that I reach you. Call me, no matter the time. —Cathy
The text and the calls that preceded it had been received about an hour earlier, and it was now nine p.m., and this disappointed Court greatly. Not because he’d missed the calls, but rather because, due to the seven-hour time difference between the East Coast and Israel, the calls and text had begun around four a.m. in Tel Aviv. Court doubted Catherine would be calling him in the middle of the night her time, which meant she probably had not gone to Israel, after all.
He assumed she was still in D.C.
Still, he punched his code into the RedPhone app, then he typed in her number.
The phone rang twenty times before he gave up and disconnected the call.
He listened to the last few bars of Tom Petty’s “Rebels,” and then he turned off on Highway 64, heading east.
Court stopped at a twenty-four-hour Walmart in Rocky Mount, and he bought everything he needed to conduct the operation he had planned for this evening, but he also bought a lot of things he didn’t need, so as better to obfuscate his plan. It wasn’t as if he thought the cashier was going to turn him in to the CIA thinking he was about to perform a solo frogman raid on a secure military and intelligence installation, but Court knew there was a possibility the cameras in the store would pick up a usable image of his face, and if this happened, he wanted to minimize any chance Agency analysts would be able to determine just how, in fact, he planned on going about his operation.
He hoped the camera feeds this far away from the District weren’t being pulled into the dragnet for evaluation by the NSA’s facial recog computers. If they were, he had to just pray no one would expect him to go to Harvey Point, or if they did, that they didn’t expect him to get the materiel necessary for such a high-risk clandestine operation at a twenty-four-hour Walmart.
After he loaded up his purchases he drove east for most of an hour, until he could see water on both sides of the road. He made a left on Osprey Drive and took it till the road ended, and here he turned south onto an unmarked road. Of course he would be significantly stealthier if he went lights out on this drive, but Court understood enough about his opposition on this mission to know that it didn’t really matter. The entire guard force at the Point operated with night observation devices, so they would see him anyway, and if they saw a truck rolling down the road with its lights extinguished, they would presume the occupant of that truck was up to no good.
Court knew it would be much better if he just operated like he belonged right where he was.