Pace said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was never here.”
“Understood.”
Pace directed Hanley to pull over at a corner, and he climbed out. Once on the sidewalk, he leaned back in, and looked to King. “We’re taking you at your word, ma’am.”
“Mr. Six and Mr. Hanley here have both taken me at my word in the past, and I hope they agree with me that I’ve never violated their trust.”
Both men nodded.
“But,” Cathy said, handing a business card to Pace with a shaking hand, “if you ever want to grab coffee, I am working on a book about—”
Pace interrupted. “I’m going to have to pass. Glad you’re okay, Ms. King, but since I don’t exist and all, I won’t be able to have coffee with you.” He disappeared down a side street and Hanley continued north on Wisconsin, leaving Catherine holding her business card.
They drove towards the safe house in a roundabout way, and the heavy breathing from everyone in the vehicle—including Hanley, even though he hadn’t been directly under any threat—steamed the windshield so bad they had to roll the windows down.
Court pulled a fresh pair of AirPods from his pack so he could listen to Jill as she flew the drone back and broke the safe house down with help from Arnold.
It had been like this when he worked in CIA’s Ground Branch as a paramilitary operations officer. Short bursts of almost unimaginable stress followed immediately by the mundane. They’d pack gear, climb on a jet, take a short flight, undergo some sort of after-action briefing, and then Court planned on heading back toShip Happens, Twoto clean his weapons, charge his communication devices, and hopefully get some rest while he waited on Pace and Lacy and Hanley and Watkins to give him his next orders.
Tomorrow, he imagined, it would be another surveillance op, perhaps another kinetic op, followed by another decompression cycle.
They were still on the D.C. side of the Potomac when Catherine King said, “What about me?”
Hanley answered, “Where can you go where you’ll be safe?”
“Tahiti sounds nice,” she replied. The team looked at her a moment, then she said, “But I have a girlfriend in Taos, she’s always trying to get me to visit. This might be a good time.”
Hanley shook his head. “Gauntlet no doubt has the ability to get intoyour credit cards, see where you are and what you’re doing. We have a safe house a few hours away; we can put you in there until this is all settled.”
Court said, “You might see someone you know there.”
“Who?”
“I’ll keep it a surprise.”
King seemed to take a moment to choose her words, and then she said, “You guys were the ones the other night in Washington Circle.” It was a statement, not a question, and for Court’s part, he was temporarily too tired to protest. She followed it up with, “If Gauntlet is behind the assassinations, then it’s a safe guess they are behind the intelligence leaks somehow. They are going to be incredibly focused on figuring out who you all are, considering how you’ve disrupted two of their operations so far. If they are able to obtain unlimited quantities of intelligence, then I hope you will all be very,verycareful.”
The comment hung there in the air a moment, amid the heavy breathing and the steamed windows, as the minivan took the Chain Bridge over the river, heading into Virginia, on their way to Reagan National.
—
Had James Westwood stayed home from work, he would have been able to hear the majority of the action in Georgetown. The unsuppressed weapons at the scene would have sounded like soft pops, the screeching of tires would have made its way up to him, and perhaps even the car alarms that went off near the scene would have been audible.
He would have also found himself just a few blocks north of where Hanley picked up the two Ghost Town operators, the CIA officer, and the intended assassination victim in Volta Park.
But instead, J.W. was in his office at the Carter Center more than a mile to the east, so he had heard nothing but racing fire trucks and ambulances and wailing police cars, all heading towards Georgetown.
Despite the fact that he wasn’t there, however, he still had a pretty good picture as to what was going on, because he’d been getting near real-time updates from the scene. Mike Scardino had laptops on the coffee table in J.W.’s office to use as a sort of war room for the series of assassinations planned for today. He’d been there with a headset on, linked to GauntletGroup operators present at the killing of former Gauntlet pilot David Rudder less than two hours earlier, and he’d heard the reports from a Gauntlet surveillance team getting into position for another assassination in McLean that was due to happen later in the afternoon, and of course he’d been listening in to the chatter as two support teams, ten men in all, converged on a restaurant in Georgetown for what was supposed to have been an easy hit.
When it was reported to Big Mike that the woman they were following this morning, Catherine King, had chosen a table outside on the sidewalk, the already easy-sounding job just seemed like it was going to be that much easier.
But somehow it had all gone to hell.
Five Gauntlet men were dead. Two more were injured. Snare’s shattered body would be identified by authorities soon enough, and the media would learn that a Jordanian assassin active for years in Europe had been killed by unknown parties in the heart of one of the most exclusive portions of Washington, D.C., on a sunny morning.
The gunfight in Georgetown had happened four hours earlier, and only now were Mike and J.W. about to get the answers they’d demanded the day before from Lewis Shaw.
The young man had insisted on coming into the Carter Center. He had been picked up by a Gauntlet team in Tysons Corner, near his office at Liberty Crossing, and driven here. Security on Church Street out in front of the Center was heavy as he was shuffled out of a van with a hat and a hood on, holding a backpack with an iPad inside, and then he’d come up here, set up in the war room, demanded coffee, and drunk a full cup before he was ready to talk to the two older men.
