“Like a real commercial tow truck. From a towing company, not something all stripped and beat up for sale online. I need a legit wrecker from a legit company that’s working the streets of D.C. regularly.”
“What are you going to do with—”
Court ignored him. “The truck needs to be parked in Georgetown by nine a.m. tomorrow with the keys in it. Have him put a disguise for me in there. Plus, a short-barreled rifle, but something very compact. Pistol caliber is fine, just make sure it’s small…and suppressed. An MPX, a Scorpion, something like that. I want an Aimpoint optic, no magnification. I want the weapon loaded with a mag that will fit in the backpack, but I also need two extra magazines, subsonic ammunition.”
Hanley took notes.
“You need to get Zack armed and behind the wheel of a getaway car. Something big and heavy but fast, just in case. Jill can monitor all the cams in the area with her facial recognition software. We do all that, and we might be able to pull this off.”
“Jesus, Six. It’s Georgetown, not Mogadishu. You’re not getting in a shoot-out over a lunch date.”
“You keep telling yourself everything’s going to go smoothly. I’ll keep preparing for reality.”
Hanley nodded. “I’ll call Arnold; if anyone can make that happen, he can. We’re wheels up at five a.m. tomorrow. I want you at the airport at four thirty. By noon tomorrow, with a little luck, we will have taken another enemy hitter off the playing field.”
Court looked away a moment.
“You’re hoping it’s this Whetstone guy.”
“That would kill two birds with one stone.”
“Whoever it is, the assassin who shows up tomorrow is your objective. We clear?”
“Of course, any dead asshole will be a win. But getting Catherine out of this alive is my objective, as well.”
He didn’t get any pushback from Hanley on that. Instead, the older man said, “Right now, Six, you need to sleep. You look like absolute shit. Don’t worry. Tomorrow’s going to be fine.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“It is easy. I’ve got you.” Court noted the sarcasm in Matt’s voice.
Five minutes later Hanley had made it back to the Suburban with his security team, and Court had locked the wooden door over the companionway that led down below deck. His cameras were up, on the app on his phone and on the monitor of his laptop, and they would alert him to any movement above or below the water.
He situated himself in a fiberglass hold along a wall of the main cabin that stored sofa cushions, just across from his bed. It was, essentially, a long low box, slightly curved, and the lid of the hold had cushions on it, serving as a small sofa, as well. The space was cramped, especially because his shotgun and his mobile phone were nestled beside him, but Court was accustomed to discomfort, and he rarely slept in beds or on couches, soparanoid was he that he was always minutes away from someone sneaking up on him in his sleep.
It had happened in the past, often enough that he felt justified in ignoring his bed and making other arrangements. This fiberglass hold wasn’t the most comfortable bed he’d ever found, but with the gentle rocking of the sixty-three-foot boat, in minutes he was sound asleep.
Thirty-Seven
La Bonne Vache served casual French fare on Prospect Street, on the corner of a quiet residential strip of row homes just a block north of M Street, the bustling main drag of Georgetown. This morning at eleven thirty a.m. the air was several degrees warmer than usual, just north of forty-five, and the sun shone through the bare trees lining both sides of the quaint street.
Café tables in December in Georgetown weren’t common, but the staff had set a half dozen bistro tables and chairs on the brick sidewalk out in front of La Bonne Vache, along with a few gas patio heaters, and already before the real lunch hour had begun a few patrons sat at two-tops and four-tops outside.
Fifty-nine-year-old Catherine King snagged the deuce closest to the corner of the street so she could see both up and down Prospect and Potomac Streets. She sat alone. Her Patagonia coat, knit cap, and two layers of Lululemon pants were slight overkill for the occasion because of the heat coming from the propane flame tower heater right next to her. An iPad sat in front of her; her oversized purse was hooked under her metal chair, a habit she’d learned living and working both in D.C. and in dense and developing cities around the world for much of her career.
As a large white tow truck with a “Big Cheeze Wrecker Service” decal on the side passed by slowly, she ordered a latte from a friendly waitress, then logged in to the restaurant’s Wi-Fi to peruse X while she waited forher lunch date. She saw that no new killings directly associated with the intelligence community had been announced this morning, and some in the media were already pontificating that the immediate danger had passed, but Catherine wondered if the slowdown in incidents had more to do with members of the IC watching their backs and less to do with whatever bad actor was out there either running out of targets or dealing with a sudden bout of morality after the dozen or so assassinations in the last day and a half.
The low-hanging fruit had been picked over the last thirty-six hours, and she imagined that those still threatened were taking all necessary precautions.
No one in the media had been endangered, so far, and even though she worked with the IC every day and wrote exclusively about American national security, she didn’t think for a moment she was in any danger herself.
Her latte came, and she checked her watch and saw that the man she was meeting was running a few minutes late.
She opened up theWashington Postwebsite. She’d been laid off back in the summer; she was still pissed about that, but she didn’t take it out on the other writers, and therefore continued to read their work. She perused a new piece about the massive shoot-out in Washington Circle, including the death of a Belarusian assassin named Kravchuk who had been known to work with the Russians, along with the killing of five members of Gauntlet Group. The official word from the U.S. government was that the Gauntlet men had been working on an unrelated surveillance mission for Homeland Security; they happened to be in the area, just a mile or so from the White House, and they had tried to thwart the attack but were instead ambushed by confederates of the dead Belarusian.
The story was already moving down in priority on theWashington Post’s website, mainly because of all the other killings that had happened since then, and the consensus across the media that this was a Russian irregular warfare operation running in D.C., and not some sort of abuse of power by a private American security company.
The Russians themselves were denying they had anything to do with what was going on, but they also denied they knew anyone named AlexiKravchuk, a provable lie, so they weren’t to be believed. Still, the woman sitting alone at the two-top on the sidewalk in Georgetown had her own reason to doubt the official U.S. government line.
