“You know why I told you to meet me here?” Coyle asked.
Court looked around at the cemetery a moment. He gave a little shrug. “As good a place as any, I guess. You wanted to meet here at high noon. You’ve probably watched too many old Westerns, but whatever. I’ll play along if it means your death.”
When Campbell said nothing, Court said, “It’s quiet. You and I can fight. Nobody is going to get in the way.”
Still, Campbell did not speak.
A strong breeze blew Court’s coat open a little, revealing the butt of a semiautomatic pistol. Campbell looked down at it.
He said, “That’s an old-model Glock. You get that from an IRA cache?”
“Yep.”
“You know an old Provo, do ya?”
“Nope,” Court said. “I know somebody who knows where weapons are still hidden around here. He tried to talk me out of what’s about to happen, but when I pressed him, he gave me your daughter-in-law’s address, and then he told me where I could get this weapon.”
A rumbling old farm tractor rolled by; neither man took his eyes off the other to look at it.
Finally, Campbell Coyle said, “I’ll answer the question you can’t answer. Why here?”
“What’s to answer?” Court responded. “This is Church of Ireland. You and your family are Catholic. Your son isn’t here. I don’t know why the fuck we’re…”
Court stopped talking when he saw a pair of large buses appear through some trees on Ramoan Road, far in the distance. They rolled this way slowly.
His eyes flitted back to the Northern Irishman, and he saw a little smile on the man’s face.
Court brought his hand closer to his weapon, because Coyle’s eyes looked confident now, and his smile looked like danger.
—
The three vehicles containing the deputy director for operations of the CIA, the former deputy director for operations, and ten bodyguards rolled along Potomac Avenue heading for the exit to Reagan National Airport. A plane passed by on the right, on final for Runway 1, flying just feet over the river.
Hanley had been looking at Watkins with mistrust for the past couple of minutes, wondering if Watkins could have somehow been sucked into a cabal in the American government responsible for the deaths of nearly two dozen in the past week. Surely, Trey couldn’t have been with them from the beginning, but certainly, by his actions and by his words today, he’d implicated himself at the center of the conspiracy.
Hanley said, “Tell me one thing, Trey. Angela Lacy. If you were going to sell us out, why did you bring her into this?”
“I didn’t sell you out. I didn’t sell Angela out. I didn’t sell Jim Pace out.”
“Prove it.”
Now the DDO gave an annoyed sigh, then put his hands up in the air. “How on earth can I possibly prove a negative? What will it take to convince you that I’m not part of whatever you think might be going on around—”
When it happened, it happened in an instant.
The light and the sound and the motion.
The heat and the pain.
It was all one sensation. One experience.
The Navigator was armored, but it came apart as if it had been made of nothing but rusty tin.
A roar of an explosion, then the vehicle launched into the sky, flipped onto its side; crashed down to the street. A flash fire erupted throughout the interior, then the screams of men, then the screeching of metal.
Matt Hanley was thrown through the open roof, as was the bodyguard traveling in the rear of the vehicle next to him, and the two men tumbled along the road together, then off the road, then down a grassy hill and into the trees at the bank of the Potomac River.
Neither of the other two vehicles suffered any damage at all, but the DDO’s limo was completely destroyed, finally coming to rest in a ball of fire on the Potomac Yard Trail. Black smoke and yellow flames reached into the sky.
