On Target

years didn’t happen? Everything goes back to the way it was in the old days?”

“Negative. I’m offering contract work. Keeps Langley’s hands clean, and it pays a damn sight better than a real government salary.” He smiled. “We want you back.” Then he shrugged his shoulders. “Well, let me rephrase that. I’m not talking about a desk and a reserved parking space at Langley. That doesn’t happen to guys like you. CIA won’t acknowledge working with the Gray Man. But from time to time we run into situations where I hear people say, ‘Sure wish Sierra Six was still here, instead of out in bumble fuck, doin’ private hits for pimps and drug dealers.’ I swear, we miss you sometimes.”

He paused before saying, “You always were the best. We want you alive, Court. Doing the dirty jobs under a false flag.”

“How do I know you aren’t just going to kill me when the Sudan op is done?”

“Because we need you. We aren’t asking you to go raise daffodils in Iowa in the Witness Protection Program here. We want you to keep doing what you’re doing, living out here in the cold, and we’ll keep up the front that we’re still after your ass. Look, this shit is in your blood, and the agency can still use you, despite your fuckup in ’06. Washington won’t let the SAD get its hands dirty these days. But if we play this right, we can let you get the dirty hands, and we can support you. It’s fucking perfect, man. Like coke off a whore’s ass. Know what I’m saying?”

Court shook his head slowly. “Not really, no.”

“Look, you act all cynical, but I know you. You are a patriot, kiddo. You piss red, white, and blue. The White House has a need, I have a need, you have a need. We can all help each other.” He grinned. “Everybody wins.”

The discussion steered to the potential operation for several minutes. Zack had an answer ready for every question Gentry posed. When there were no other operational details left to go over, Court grabbed the ice pack back from Hightower and pressed it to the swollen flesh on his face. Zack looked at it longingly a moment but did not reach for it. Behind the ice pack Court said, “I need to hear this deal from somebody above you.”

“Like who?” asked Hightower with no appearance of surprise.

“I’d settle for Mathew Hanley. I figure our old supervisor is probably running SAD now, if not higher up than that.”

“Matt’s out of SAD. Riding a desk in South America last I heard. Paraguay, maybe?”

Court did not hide his puzzlement. “He used to be the wunderkind of black ops. What happened?”

“You happened, fucko. Having one of his door kickers go nuts and shoot up his own squad didn’t help his ascendancy to the top.”

“So I get blamed for that, too?”

“History is written by the victors. You may have survived, sorta, but the CIA is still around to write the official version of what you did and why.”

Court thought a moment. Finally he just repeated himself: “I need to hear this deal from someone above you.”

Hightower nodded. “That’s cool. Sit tight, and I’ll be back.”

Court was given his clothing back. He dressed, and then he waited.

ELEVEN

Over an hour later two of Zack’s men returned to the room where Court was being held. He’d spent the time massaging ice into his face. He wondered how he was going to explain the obvious bruising to his Russian colleagues /captors. Two of Zack’s men, one big and black and the other older and white, led him down a narrow and low hallway, past water and steam pipes, up a narrow flight of stairs, and into a room on the upper deck. Zack’s men didn’t like Court, that much was plain by their eat shit looks and the way they bumped him with their muscular bodies to get him to turn into the new room. Gentry recognized that taking down one of their team with a cracking shot to the face wasn’t going to endear him to these hardy boys.

But he didn’t care. He wasn’t looking to make friends, even if they were all going to work together on the mission to come. These guys would be pros, just like him, and the op would take precedence.

They didn’t need to like each other to do their jobs.

Once Court was seated in the new room, he noticed a blue monitor on a desk in front of him. Zack entered a moment later, stowing a sat phone in a pouch on his hip as he did so.

“Okay. You are going to talk to somebody. He’s read in on this op, and he knows who you are, but for all intents and purposes, you are not a NOC, not a CIA employee, not a former CIA employee, not an American citizen. You are a foreign national agent and will be treated as such. Your code name will be your old Goon Squad call sign, Sierra Six.”

Court nodded.

“And the code name for President Abboud will be Oryx.”

“What’s an oryx?”

“I had to ask, myself. It’s some kind of an African antelope or something.”

Court shrugged. This type of code word protocol had been his life for many years. When he was in the Goon Squad he’d been Sierra Six, though he’d used literally dozens of cover names for his assignments. And before working for Zack, back when he was in the Autonomous Asset Program, his code name had been Violator. The code words were supposedly randomly selected by computer, but Violator seemed uncannily accurate. The CIA had pulled Gentry out of a south Florida penitentiary, where he was serving a life sentence for the triple second-degree murder of three Colombian drug runners, and presented him with a job offer he could not refuse.

He had never believed for a second that it was a computer who dubbed him Violator.

The screen in front of him flickered to life.

The image of a man in a gray suit and a Brooks Brothers tie in a full Windsor. He was over sixty, thin glasses low on his nose. The face and countenance of a soldier. After a short moment Gentry recognized the man.

Court was surprised. Shocked, even.

“Sierra Six. Do you recognize me?” His voice was clipped and curt. There was no smile nor emotion of any kind.

Gentry answered immediately. “Yes, sir.” He turned to look at Zack. Hightower smiled and raised his eyebrows, obviously proud of the juice he possessed to command a video link with this other man.

The man was Denny Carmichael, currently the director of U.S. National Clandestine Service, and recently the head of the Special Activities Division. He was a legend at the agency, a Far East specialist and a longtime station chief in Hong Kong.

Denny Carmichael was, in short, the top guy in CIA operations. Court knew this mission was big, but this kind of dirty work usually went on without the fingerprints of the top brass of the U.S. intelligence community.

“I understand Sierra One has laid out our proposal to you regarding the extraordinary rendition of Oryx. I am prepared to reaffirm the details of Nocturne Sapphire.”

“Yes, sir,” repeated Court. It was all he could think to say. He’d never spoken to anyone this high in the food chain. He found himself almost starstruck. It felt odd, doubly so since Carmichael would certainly have been a signatory to the shoot-on-sight directive against him that had been in place since 2006.

Carmichael laid out the general plan that Zack had discussed, though he spoke in more euphemistic terms. Court would “detain Abboud with force,” not “snatch him” as Hightower had instructed. He would “neutralize all threats from Abboud’s close protection detail,” as opposed to Zack’s suggestion that he “pop a hollow point or two into each bodyguard’s snot box.”

This dissimilarity in the vernacular was a common distinction between labor and management in this industry. Court was accustomed to hearing more from Zack’s ilk and less from men like Carmichael, but he knew the results would not differ depending on the political correctness of the vocabulary used. The operation would be the same, no matter how pleasantly or corrosively it was explained.

Men would die.

While Carmichael spoke, Hightower leaned against the wall of the ship, occasionally making an open and closed hand gesture to mock the verbosity of the man on the screen. But otherwise Sierra One minded his manners.