He knew the high treason would continue, he knew the stakes would rise, and he knew that, very soon, the information he passed on would cause actions, lethal actions, not in some far-flung third-world locale where no one mattered and no one cared, but right here.
Right here in D.C.
This is heavy stuff when you stop to think about it.
J.W. Westwood’s suddenly pensive mood was not a bout of morality. No, he’d made peace with what he was doing.
It was, instead, the magnitude of his position that weighed on him.
He was changing the world. Not alone. But nevertheless…his was no small part.
Treason was only treason if history recorded it as such, and James Arthur Westwood III had faith that history would record him as it did George Washington.
Less as the leader of a rebellion.
And more as the father of the country.
It was true, he admitted to himself, that the world he was helping to create was not entirely the world he would have chosen.
But at least he’d be in it, he would be powerful, and he would be a force for good when the inevitable bad threatened this great nation.
J.W. reached for his coffee, satisfied in the belief that someday he would be richly rewarded for his time in the shadows.
Eight
At noon Courtland Gentry pulled into the parking lot of the Bay Point Marina in Virginia Beach, Virginia; parked his rented Altima in a space next to a black Suburban; and looked around.
Court saw a man inside the Suburban sitting alone behind the wheel and talking animatedly on his phone.
The driver was Matt Hanley, a man who had once been his boss at CIA, and Court imagined the call was probably important, so he climbed out of his rental car and strolled down to the wooden dock at the water’s edge, just a dozen yards from where he parked.
With his hands jammed inside his black Carhartt coat, his mouth breathing vapor on this cold December day, he saw the gray sky merged with the gray water in front of him. Fully half of the hundreds of boats he could see were covered for the season.
He turned around and looked to the land, just on the other side of the parking lot, and took in what appeared to be several large apartment buildings, all the same design, utterly quiet at this time of day. He wondered who lived here but quickly noticed a sign that offered vacancies for a senior living residence along with memory care services.
He did not know why he was here now. He only knew that he’d been flown here from Charlottesville on a private jet, and then he’d picked up arental car reserved for him under an alias and followed an order to come directly to this location without delay.
Presuming Matt Hanley had no plans to put him in a home for Alzheimer patients just yet, he turned back to the water and looked over the recreational boats there, but soon his eyes looked past the marina, across a narrow channel of water, and focused on the land. This was, Court knew, a part of Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek, the major operating base for the Amphibious Forces of the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic Fleet.
SEAL Teams 2, 4, and 8 were based right there, just across the spit of water, and while Court had known and worked with men from all three of these teams in his old life in the CIA, he’d never been a SEAL, and he certainly had no connection to Little Creek.
That said, he had worked and lived nearby, in Virginia Beach, a decade ago, as a member of a CIA paramilitary unit called Golf Sierra. At that time, Hanley had been his boss, and now as he looked back towards the Suburban, he knew that Hanley was his boss again.
They weren’t Agency now, neither of them.
Now they were sub rosa. Off book. Illegal.
Court Gentry had been doing illegal shit for years, but Matt had always had the safety net of the Agency under him, ready to catch him if he fell.
Court wondered what it felt like for a guy in his sixties to be out in the cold like this for the first time, but he didn’t ponder it long, because just then Matt finished up his call, turned the engine off, and climbed out from behind the wheel.
The older man wore a scraggly white-blond beard, with thinning hair of the same color, and it blew in the cold breeze. He sported a blue wool peacoat and khakis, brown leather boat shoes, and sunglasses.
Though the two men hadn’t seen each other in some time, Court had known Hanley for over a decade, and he’d never known him to have a beard.
“Dammit, Six.” The older man spoke first. “Good to finally lay eyes on you.” When Court had first worked under Hanley in the CIA’s Special Activities Division—Ground Branch, the younger man had carried the call sign Sierra Six, and half the call sign had somehow stuck throughout the years.
Court extended a hand and Hanley shook it.
