Denny did not reply.
The flashlights closed to within fifty yards. It looked like the men carrying them had picked up speed on the treacherous hill. “What is it they say in this town?” Suzanne asked. “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.” Blood dripped from her lips, ran up her face and into her eyes. She listened for a response on the other end of the line, but nothing came. “You know what I bring to the table here. You need support. You need a witness in-house who saw Gentry kill Mayes. The other cars on the road are going to report multiple attackers. You can’t sell your story this time without help.”
Still nothing. She wondered if he’d hung up.
“You’ve come so close, Denny, but you are getting sloppy. Desperate. I can give you the backing you need to see this all the way through.”
The flashlights were only twenty-five yards away. She could already make out the silhouettes of the men behind the moving beams.
She thought of something else, one more Hail Mary. If this didn’t work, she’d be dead in seconds. Hanging here upside down, a bullet in her brain. “Morvay!”
Denny spoke now. “What’s that?”
“Kevin Morvay. He is a senior tech in SIGINT. He has the Dupont video. He’s seen it. He showed it to Mayes.” She sniffed tears and blood. “You see? I am helping you.”
All three flashlights centered on Jordan Mayes’s body.
Denny said, “And I appreciate your help. Good-bye.”
“I can get it from him! And get it off the system. I know how, do you? I can do so much more. I can . . . hello? Hello?” It sounded like Denny had either hung up the phone or set it down on a table. Suzanne Brewer started to cry openly. She shook hard against her seat belt, but she couldn’t get it off. She thought of screaming, begging, pleading into the phone, but she just bit her lip. No, it wouldn’t work, and she told herself she wouldn’t die like that.
The lights were on her now.
A man knelt down, peered into the vehicle, and the high-lumen light shined right in her face, unbearable, worse than her broken leg.
She shut her eyes and sobbed again. Her bloody nose almost gagged her.
Then, with a shocking suddenness, the light turned away.
She heard the wet slapping of feet on rain-soaked brush, the clap clap of boots trudging through mud. Suzanne opened her eyes and looked around. Through the stars in her eyes she saw them now, the dark silhouettes. They stood around the body of Jordan Mayes a brief time, then they began retrograding up the hill, back in the direction of the motorcycles parked along the road.
Denny Carmichael’s voice came back on the line. “Are you badly hurt?”
Suzanne wept openly into the phone. “Thank you, Denny. Thank you. You won’t regret this.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Suzanne,” he said. “You aren’t making sense. I think you must have hit your head. I’ll send help to the geo coordinates on your cell phone so we can get you to a hospital.”
And then he hung up.
Suzanne Brewer vomited upside down, covering the roof of the car below her with blood and bile.
68
After swimming ashore and changing into warm, dry clothes, Court lay in the forest for several minutes, allowing his ears to tune in to his surroundings. He’d seen only one patrol boat on the water, and he’d remained well clear of it, but he had no way of knowing how extensively the Harvey Point guard force patrolled the woods.
Court knew from his time here that this was the absolute best place to come ashore. Most of the activity at the Point was well to the east of this part of the grounds. Over there was an airstrip, along with dozens of buildings: administration and planning offices, barracks, logistics stores, and weapons caches.
This portion of the Point, by contrast, had no great value. The large forest Court moved through now was used primarily by CIA, DIA, and JSOC for escape and evasion training, small-unit tactics training, and jungle and riverine warfare exercises. To the north of the forest were a bombing range, an explosive ordnance testing ground, and two mock cities for close-quarters battle work, along with an Air Branch helicopter center, an automobile and motorcycle training facility, an underground SAD weapons cache, and an array of buildings used as a testing ground—for who and for what exactly, Court had no idea. During his time in SAD Court had had the highest-security clearance, but he wasn’t read into any code word ops that did not directly relate to him, so even though no one in America had had access to higher-level secrets than he did when he was in the CIA, there were all sorts of things going on around him that he didn’t know about.