No, this wasn’t much defense at all, but Court realized he needed to try to get his energy back before doing anything else to fortify the room, so he lay there with his eyes closed and tried to will himself to sleep.
He’d been on the go for over a month. Moving from place to place in Russia, in Sweden, in Germany and Belgium. Then to Spain and into Portugal, where he met up with the cargo ship that brought him to the U.S.
Eight days on the water, the daylight hours in his hiding place in the bowels of the ship like a bilge rat, the late nights walking or running the holds for exercise.
He’d had help in his escape. A Mossad officer who felt like he owed Court a debt, though in truth Court knew the man owed the debt to someone else. Still, the guy worked as Court’s genie in a bottle, granting him his wish and getting him into the United States.
Court had decided he’d have no more dealings with the Mossad officer. Court knew personal relationships were points of vulnerability, so his plan all along had been to use the man as a conduit into the U.S. and then to break contact, to go his own way.
He’d done exactly that by leaving everything behind on the cargo ship save for the clothes on his back. He hadn’t planned it exactly that way, but he heard the helicopters approaching, and he knew they were coming for him.
On shore he hotwired a car and drove it to the Greenbelt metro station on the outskirts of D.C. He used some coins he found in the car’s ashtray to buy a Metro card that got him as far as the Congress Heights Station.
He needed cash and a weapon, and he knew this area would afford him the most target-rich environment in which to obtain both.
He got what he’d been after and now he had a suitable base of operations, at least for the time being. He knew it was possible he’d have to relocate multiple times during the next few days, but he’d do what he could to keep his new safe house free of compromise.
Court’s mission here in Washington, as he saw it anyway, was very simple. His former employer, the Central Intelligence Agency, had spent the last five years trying to kill him, and he did not know why. He’d been running all that time, living abroad, off grid, staying away from relationships and ties. Looking over his shoulder all day, every day.
They’d almost caught him a few times, and during his flight from the Agency, other entities out there had come even closer to killing him.
He had grown tired of running, so he decided it was time to end this, once and for all.
In his years of small unit tactics training he had learned a great many truths, but one stood out from the rest. When the opposition attacked, it expected you to play your role; to run, to cover. But turning the tables, attacking into a threat, was often the most useful way of defending oneself.
Court’s principal trainer at CIA, a man he knew only as Maurice, used to say a mantra over and over, so often Court now heard it in Maurice’s gravelly voice. “You can run, but if you can’t run anymore, then you can hide. You can hide, but if you can’t hide anymore, then you can fight. There is nothing after the fight, so you fight until there is nothing.”
Court couldn’t run anymore, and he couldn’t hide anymore, so he came back to fight. To attack into the threat, to get answers and to get closure.
He knew he would not be leaving D.C. without a resolution to this nightmare. Either he would uncover the CIA’s motives behind the shoot-on-sight sanction against him and somehow end the sanction, or else he would die trying.
He had come up with a working theory as to what this was all about. At the beginning of Court’s career with the CIA he had been part of a small initiative called the Autonomous Asset Program. He and several other young men like him had been given individual instruction by a cadre of the CIA’s best operations officers, and then they had been sent into the world, allowed to run solo ops, tasked with difficult, deniable missions, and left, in large part, to their own devices.
The program was disbanded, Court was folded into another unit, and other than the fact that he had been given better solo training than the other CIA Special Activities Division men, the Autonomous Asset Program was behind him.
But Court had just found out the previous month that he was the last man alive from this entire program. Seventeen other young men had all been killed in the intervening years and, by necessity, Court himself had killed the only other remaining singleton asset out there.
Court saw it clearly now. For some reason the CIA was erasing anyone who had been in AAP. All the others were gone.
And now it was down to Court Gentry. The last man standing.
What he did not know was why.
He could reveal what he knew about the program and the termination order for the assets, but first he needed proof. Without proof—if he just called up the New York Times and told them what he suspected—he’d be considered a crackpot and there would be no story.