While Babbitt faced the window, drink in hand, his wife stood behind him near the stairs. She stared him down, waiting for him to answer for himself or to notice her. Neither of which he did.
Babbitt’s two kids were in college, so they had the place to themselves, but since the kids had left for school they’d done little to take advantage of the privacy. Babbitt had been obsessed with Gentry since well before Brussels, but after returning from Europe, minus a huge contingent of his men and the Top Secret clearance that gave his company the access they needed to function, Babbitt had barely acknowledged the existence of his wife.
His wife, who was still behind him and still hoping for some reaction from her husband, just sighed and headed for the stairs.
—
Court Gentry moved his binoculars back and forth between Babbitt and his wife. To himself he said, “She’s pissed, and he couldn’t care less.”
Neither could Gentry, actually; he was just trying to get an accurate accounting of who was inside the property.
By the time Babbitt arrived home Gentry had already been in place for hours. He’d climbed over the back fence just after eight p.m., after a one-hour reconnaissance spent up in an oak tree on the first fairway of the golf course, and now he lay flat on his cold and muddy belly in a thick corner flower garden that was not yet in full bloom, but nevertheless provided a fair amount of cover, as long as Court remained low.
He wore black Carhartt work pants, a black hoodie over a black thermal, and dark brown boots. His face was covered by his gaiter and his knit cap, and on his hands he wore black Mechanix gloves. His black backpack completed the theme to his ensemble. He wasn’t invisible, but he was damn close. It would take both a keen pair of eyes and a direct hit from a flashlight to notice him here.
Court had spent the last two hours carefully thinking over his ingress to the target location. He saw several motion sensor lights closer to Babbitt’s house, but he knew he could defeat them when he made his approach by simply moving slowly. All motion sensor equipment was calibrated to detect objects traveling above a certain speed, and Court had spent nearly twenty years of his life in work that, more often than one might imagine, required him to outsmart the little computer chip in a motion detecting light.
He also took care to identify the lines of sight from the different windows of the property so he could avoid advancing in view of anyone inside.
It seemed to Court like Babbitt put the majority of his trust for his family’s safety in the hands of his goons in the SUV out front, and the foot patrol. The Babbitts didn’t have a dog; this became clear when Court scanned the perfectly green back lawn. The only disruption in the grass was on either side of a paving stone walkway that circled the house, and from the foot patrol that began once Babbitt came home, it was obvious the two men walking abreast were the culprits.
The security officers looked competent to Gentry, but he knew they wouldn’t be members of Townsend’s A-team. No, these were static guards, well trained, but not to the level of the Townsend operators he’d squared off against in Belgium. And they were well equipped, but not as well equipped as the men he’d fought before.
That said, Court looked at their gear longingly. Each guard carried an HK MP5 nine-millimeter submachine gun hanging from a two-point sling around his neck, and wore a black Kevlar bulletproof vest under a light chest rig that carried three more thirty-round magazines for the sub gun, as well as two mags for the Smith and Wesson M&P nine-millimeter pistols that jutted out of the holsters on their utility belts.
Court thought about how much he’d like to take one of these guys down, drag him back into the bushes, and liberate him of all that good gear.
But that wasn’t going to happen in any sort of low-profile way, so he pushed the fantasy away.
Now Court observed Lee Babbitt himself standing right in front of his huge back window, exposed to the world, and he noticed the relaxed nature of the man, as well as that of his protection detail. While Gentry scanned through his binos he thought about the lackadaisical attitude of the guard force, and he found it odd that the CIA had not told Babbitt to beef up his security profile yet. It made no sense to him whatsoever the man had not been informed that the person he’d chased all over the world was now on the loose in his own area code.