Catherine knew where Andy was going with this. “Good against evil,” she said.
Andy said, “Right. But that Babbitt thing doesn’t seem to fit. Either Babbitt was a criminal and we don’t know it, or the guy who did this and Brandywine Street didn’t kill Babbitt.”
Catherine said, “You are good at this, Andy. I think you are on to something.”
“Enough to put into my article? I mean, I could just mention the difference in the victims.”
“No. I’d leave Babbitt out of it for now. Mention the killing in the Highlands along with this event, maybe draw some parallels, but I think there are enough questions about Babbitt still to where you should not speculate.”
Andy said, “You are working on your own piece about the CIA’s involvement, aren’t you?”
Catherine shook her head. “I’m not. We are. Trust me, when I get something ready I’m going to involve you, both in the work and in the glory.”
Andy said, “You keep promising me that, but when?”
They were back at her car now. She fumbled for her keys in her purse, then pulled them out. “How ’bout I buy you breakfast and we get to work?”
—
Zack Hightower sat in front of a computer terminal in the fourth-floor Violator tactical operations center, his eyes fogged both from the early hour and from the steam pouring out of the coffee cup under his nose. The coffee had been placed in his hand a minute earlier by a young CIA analyst, and Zack had been put here—in front of the monitor in the TOC, that was—by Suzanne Brewer.
A half hour ago Zack had been snoring away in his McLean hotel room when a call came from Brewer informing him of a possible Gentry sighting in the District. Before he’d even processed this information she told him she was sending a car, and to be ready in five minutes.
Hightower shook himself awake and asked to be vectored to the location of the potential sighting instead of the office. Brewer wasn’t using Hightower as a hard asset, however, so she didn’t understand the request. No, she’d countered, he needed to come in and look at some video, to make a positive ID, and to let her know what he thought of the analysis.
Zack grumbled to himself but agreed, and now he sat here in front of a black screen, with Brewer standing just behind him.
When nothing happened on the monitor for several seconds Hightower took a sip of hot coffee and made a joke. “Inconclusive.”
“It hasn’t started yet,” Brewer snapped back, and Zack realized his humor would fall flat on a bureaucratic automaton like Suzanne Brewer.
Soon the video began playing. It was security camera footage from a convenience store. Zack saw the time stamp and realized it took place less than three hours earlier.
“Where is this?”
“Rhode Island Avenue. East of Logan Circle.”
A man in a black baseball cap and a raincoat entered the store, but the camera did not have an unobstructed view of his face. It only showed the bottom of the man’s chin and the bill of his hat. He moved into the store, seemed to say something to the woman behind the counter, then headed to the back.
Another camera angle picked him up there, but it revealed even less than the first one. Only his back and a brief view of a portion of his chin.
Still, Hightower took another sip of his coffee and declared, “That’s him.”
“How can you be certain? His face is obscured.”
“Ma’am, I spent the majority of a decade looking at this dude’s ass as he ran point on my team. Most of the time his face was obscured then, too. Trust me, I know how he moves.”
Brewer wasn’t convinced. She remained silent so Zack could focus on the screen. The first Hispanic male entered the convenience store, wearing a gray hoodie. He was soon followed by an African American couple. The man in the ball cap stood at the counter, facing just slightly away from the camera above him on his right, while the cashier bagged his groceries.
A Monte Carlo parked out front in the rain. Two men climbed out.
Hightower watched all this quietly. Slowly a little smile curled on his lips. “Hot damn, there’s gonna be some kind of a fracas, isn’t there?”
“Just watch, please.”
Zack did so. He saw the positioning of the three young men, the movement around the market of the African American couple, and the man in the cap at the magazine rack who could have just turned and walked out the door next to him, but instead squared off to the room.
When the man in the gray hoodie pulled the shotgun and pointed it at Gentry, Hightower just mumbled, “Last mistake of your dumb, short life, ese.”
The next few seconds of video chronicled the shoot-out, beginning with the shotgun blast and ending when Gentry fired his sixth round from his handgun, the two men at the counter crumpled into their own blood splatter on the floor, and the gray hoodie with the shotgun disappeared, falling backwards under the camera’s view.
The screen froze just after Gentry left the convenience store, three dead bodies in his wake.