Back Blast

57

Catherine King pushed right through the closed door to the office of the executive editor of the Washington Post. She got away with doing this sort of thing because she’d known the man since the late seventies when he had been her professor. The two had worked together at the Post since soon after, they’d become close friends, and they had developed an informal rapport that stunned some of the younger reporters.

But the other five men and women who came in behind Catherine all felt a sense of panic and dread when she ordered them to follow her in with assurances that all would be forgiven once she told the executive editor what had just occurred. While Catherine took a seat, her four-person investigative team, as well as metro reporter Andy Shoal, all lined up against the wall, most looking at their shoes or at books on a bookshelf, because no one wanted to make eye contact with the man behind the desk.

No one else in the room knew the subject of this impromptu confab except Catherine herself, but her excitement put everyone on notice that something big was about to be revealed.

Ten minutes later everyone, including the executive editor, knew what they had to do. The dramatic but simple narrative the paper had advanced in the past few days — that a psycho with a gun was terrorizing intelligence officials — had suddenly transformed into a multilayered story of international intrigue and government cover-up. No one knew what was true, but these were journalists; so the knowledge that they had to find the answers quickly meant everyone crammed into the office felt like a sprinter in the starting blocks, ready for the gun to go off.

And the executive editor pulled the trigger.

“All right. Catherine is on the first flight to Tel Aviv. Tonight. This story is moving too fast to wait around till this shooter turns up dead and no one gives a damn anymore.”

Eager nods from everyone save for King, who did not like the thought of the death of the man she’d just met an hour earlier being discussed as if it were a fait accompli.

The executive editor continued, “The rest of you get to work on all our contacts in Israel. Hell, talk to anyone you know who has contacts over there in intel circles. We have a date where a man entered a hospital with a gunshot wound to his stomach. Could be a civilian or a military hospital. Talk to other Mossad people and find out the protocol for treating a Mossad man injured on the job.”

Catherine added, “He said the shooting took place in Hamburg, Germany, so maybe we extend the range by a few days in case he was hospitalized there first. And check hospitals in Hamburg.”

The EE agreed. “And when we find anything about this patient, we’ll go to work on figuring out his identity. It doesn’t matter if we can’t dig into his government file; we just need to know where he lives, so when Catherine lands in Tel Aviv tomorrow she can hit the ground running.”

“We don’t know he’ll know anything about the event in Trieste,” one of the other reporters said. “We just know he helped Six.”

“That’s true,” Catherine said. “And from that we know he has goodwill towards Six. If he doesn’t know about Trieste, maybe he can help us find out who does.”

Andy was the most junior reporter in the room, so he was surprised when the editor pointed to him. “Shoal, I want you to go back to Chevy Chase and to Dupont Circle. I want you interviewing everyone who lived or worked in the immediate area, as well as first responders and commuters who passed by at the time of the shootings. I want you digging even harder for evidence than the cops dug. Find somebody who saw something other than this guy named Six running around.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Catherine.” The executive editor turned to her. “While you’re on that plane I want you e-mailing every government official. Call in every favor. Don’t bring up the fact we are going after this wounded guy the suspect named, but do ask for comments about an Israeli asset rescued by American intelligence in Italy six years ago. I don’t care if they won’t speak on the record. I want to know what they don’t say just as much as what they do say. If you get a lot of ‘No comments,’ or denials that sound like they are coming out of an official echo chamber, then we’ll know we’re on to something.”

“Will do.”

The huddle in the executive editor’s office ended by four, and Catherine ran back to her desk, threw as much into one of her roll-aboards as would fit, and then rushed to the elevators.

Five minutes later she was in the back of a hired car booking a six ten flight to Tel Aviv from Dulles while the driver wove through D.C. traffic.

Court looked down at his watch as he passed the sign announcing he was leaving Virginia and entering North Carolina. It was seven forty-five in the evening; he’d been on the road less than two hours.

This meant he had another nine to go, and with that realization he reached down into the cup holder of the big pickup truck and lifted his massive cup of coffee. Half empty, half cold.

It was going to be a long, long night.

Court drove a 1992 Ford Bronco that showed just about the same amount of rust as it did its original blue and white paint job. He’d bought the vehicle two hours earlier for $1,900 at a “tote-the-note” used car dealership in Richmond, telling the salesman he needed something that could get him as far as the West Coast. The salesman proudly showed him the Bronco’s 87,000 “original” miles, which to Court meant the odometer had been rolled back, but he inspected the truck inside and out and he decided it would get the job done.

He could have spent a lot more — he still had over seven grand from the money he took from the drug dealers last Saturday night — and he could have bought something more obviously reliable, but the moment Court saw the Bronco he knew it had to be his transport down to Florida, because it reminded him of some of his better memories of his youth. He’d driven an ’87 blue and white Bronco around central Florida as a teenager, and it just felt right to him to return home driving virtually the same vehicle he’d used back then.

He told himself he needed to stay productive on this long drive, and he had two objectives: One, to come up with a plan about what he would do when he actually found his father. And two, to come up with a plan about what he was going to do when he got back to D.C.

But he really had not yet begun to tackle either of the two problems, because he still had other issues running through his mind. Namely Catherine King, and his desperate hope that she had believed enough of what he had said this afternoon to where she would do what he had asked her to do — fly to Israel to find answers about Operation BACK BLAST. As long as he was occupied on this side trip, this errand a thousand miles from where he needed to be, the reporter for the Washington Post was his only hope at getting any closer to a resolution to all this mess.

He put his chances for this at fifty-fifty; meaning he thought there was just as much possibility King would rush onto the set of Fox News to talk about her harrowing kidnapping ordeal at the hands of a maniac as there was she would fly to Israel and run down a vague lead about a wounded Mossad officer who might know something about an old asset who had once been rescued from the clutches of al Qaeda while on a trip to Italy.

It was all so tiring to think about, and he had to concentrate on staying awake.

He continued down I-95, passing through the town of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and here his head instinctively turned to the left and looked off into the dark. He knew the exit here onto I-64 well, because he had spent some of the most intense years of his life less than one hour directly to the east, beyond the coastal plain and all the way through the swamps at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

Back before 9/11, when Court was just a trainee working to become a singleton operator in the Autonomous Asset Development Program, he spent two years in a sequestered set of small buildings just inside the protected area at the military and intelligence installation known as the Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity. Here he’d learned tradecraft, foreign languages, survival skills, hand-to-hand combat, scuba diving, and dozens of other talents and trades, all of which turned him into one of the CIA’s best “one-man bands” of espionage. He’d been in his early twenties when he graduated from and left the compound at AADP, but he’d been back to other facilities at Harvey Point many times throughout the years. Each time he drove onto the grounds he looked off towards a swamp to the right of the road, and he’d wondered if back there on the other side of a thick copse of cypress, more young men were going through AADP training, hidden even from the rest of the men and women with Top Secret clearance allowed onto Harvey Point.

He’d heard the Autonomous Asset Program had been disbanded and he’d thought himself to be the last surviving operative from the program, but Max Ohlhauser had told him the day before that AAP had been rebranded somehow, and that it remained operational.

He wondered if the answer to all his questions was out there beyond the cypress trees and swampland, but he pushed the thought out of his mind and kept driving south, doing his best to instead brainstorm his operation to protect his dad. He began thinking back to a time long ago when the roads and farms just west of Jacksonville, Florida, had been his stomping ground. It would be surreal to be back on those roads, and he wasn’t looking forward to it, but he worried Denny Carmichael would stop at nothing to end this, and he wouldn’t think twice about sending foreign killers to target Court’s father.

Think about something else, Gentry, he told himself, desperate to find a topic to concentrate on that wouldn’t wear his mind out for the next nine hours.

For the first time on this drive, he reached to the knob on the radio, and he flipped it on. The speakers in this twenty-four-year-old truck were shit, and it took him several seconds to find an FM station that played something he could listen to, but as soon as he heard an old Allman Brothers tune, he stopped turning the dial, and he cranked up the volume as far as it would go.

“Midnight Rider” was just about the perfect song for tonight. He wished he could just play it on a continuous loop until tomorrow morning.

Court wore a green Caterpillar cap and a denim jacket; other than his Virginia drive-out tags he looked like a farmer or factory worker in any of the towns here in the Carolinas or northern Florida, his ultimate destination.

This was nice, he told himself. His cover legend, for maybe the first time in his operational life, felt exactly like the original Court Gentry. He’d operated undercover as a dockworker in Ireland and a financial analyst in Singapore and a commercial diver in Brazil. He’d played the roles of a light-skinned Masalit tribesman in Sudan and a Canadian businessman in Italy and an Iraqi nomad in Syria.

He’d played one hundred roles, easily, but he’d never once played the role of a hick driving his V8 beater and wearing a Cat hat and soiled denim, listening to Southern rock as the miles rolled by under his big tires.

No, he’d never played that role. But he’d lived it.

Despite the worries on his mind stemming from what he’d left behind in D.C. and the concerns he had about what he would find when he got where he was going, Court Gentry couldn’t help but feel good right now.

He felt real. He felt American.

He was hours from home still, but somehow it was as if he’d already arrived.