Travers did not press the issue; even though Hightower was nearly fifteen years Travers’s senior, he was still an intimidating character.
The three men loaded the aircraft, then they climbed in themselves. Travers took off into a sunny morning and flew the men to the north.
As they flew, Zack and Court discussed their options. Using Travers’s tablet computer with a cell connection, Court pulled up all the imagery on the Arlington safe house he could find. Looking it over, he saw it was a large but nondescript building in a middle-class neighborhood with a fence around the yard. The one interesting feature was that it backed up to an industrial area, with a large parking lot just behind the property.
“It’s going to be defended,” Court said.
Zack agreed. “We can hit it at night, use NODs.”
Court moved the map around the area. Just north of the location was a small park, with trees, two baseball diamonds, tennis courts, and a soccer field. And just beyond that was a large mall.
“Maybe instead of attacking into an enemy position, we can draw them out into the open.”
“How so?”
“We bait them with the one thing they are after.”
“Where are you going to find seventy-two virgins?”
“I mean me.”
Zack understood immediately. He joked, “Just one virgin, then. I like it.”
—
Catherine King had only been back in the States a few minutes when she learned about the death of Andy Shoal. She rushed from Dulles to the crime scene, stood there on the sidewalk just like she’d stood on the sidewalk with Andy many times in the past week, surrounded by cops and flashing lights, searching for answers as to what had just happened.
She didn’t know why Andy had been killed by Denny Carmichael, and now she wondered why he had yet to come after her.
No, not for a second did she think the man known to the American press as Jeff Duncan had anything at all to do with this. The media had already convicted him, of course, and their reporting had gone beyond ridiculous, with experts on all the twenty-four-hour news stations opining about every possible motivation and tactic. Video games were being blamed; antigovernment anarchists were implicated; a four-year-old local high-profile missing persons case had been brought up by reporters at a press conference to a bemused FBI spokesperson who didn’t have a clue how to respond.
Every American with the common name Jeff Duncan was being sought, not by the police or the feds, because they all rightly assumed that it was a pseudonym, but by local reporters. A man in Illinois with the right name, the right general age, and the right general description had been frustrated by a reporter’s demands he account for his whereabouts, and he threw a punch at the man. Now Jeffrey Duncan of Peoria was behind bars and a hundred reporters from around the globe stood outside the jail in the rain, thinking the D.C. assassin might just possibly be this loudmouthed tire store clerk with a right hook that couldn’t even drop a spit-shined J-school grad.
And Catherine felt a sense of responsibility for it all. It had been her reporting that started everyone looking in the wrong place, had taken eyes off Carmichael and his Agency.
And she wondered if, once the shock wore off, she would feel responsible for what had happened to Andy, as well.
For the twentieth time since she’d been off her flight from Tel Aviv she tried to call Six. As with all the other times, there was no answer. She wondered if he was still alive, or if all this commotion in the country about him was continuing on long after he was no longer around to take the blame for all these things he did not do.
Catherine headed back to her office, knowing good and well that the second she arrived she would be surrounded by her investigative team and the executive editor, and they would want to know everything about Tel Aviv and how it all related to Andy Shoal’s murder. Most would agree that the man who kidnapped her at Union Station three days ago was an assassin, and that Catherine’s Stockholm syndrome had just blinded her to this fact.
And she wouldn’t argue with them; she didn’t have the energy.
—
The Fashion Centre at Pentagon City was a large multistory mall with a luxury hotel and several restaurants. The average shopper would not realize it, but the mall also had dozens upon dozens of security cameras.
And all of these cameras were part of the network of image feeds that ran through the software at the Violator tactical operations center.