Zack held his fist high over Gentry’s face. Then slowly the fist lowered. His jaw tightened. He nodded slowly. He reached behind his back and drew a snub-nosed nickel-plated revolver from his waistband.
Zack swung it around and pressed it to Court Gentry’s forehead in a single motion.
Court blinked, his cheeks twitched, but then he looked up at Zack, up the tiny barrel of the gun. His voice was soft. “Might as well just tell me why. What’s it going to hurt now?”
Zack ignored the question, just held the gun against Gentry’s head steadily for five, ten, twenty seconds. Then he said, “Just so you know. Whatever happens after this, Six . . . for the rest of your life. Everything from now on . . . is a gift from me.” With a cruel look in his eyes he lowered the gun, slipped it back into the small of his back.
Court blinked away a bead of sweat that had trickled into his right eye.
Zack put his hands on his hips, still looking down at his prisoner. Through heavy breaths brought on by the physical activity of the beating and the intensity of the moment, he asked, “Did ya miss me, Court?”
Court blinked again. Said, tentatively, “Like a hole in the head.”
Zack smiled wryly. “Easily arranged.”
Without another word, Hightower left the room, giving Court the opportunity to calm his nerves a bit and take stock of his surroundings. Immediately he decided from the thick white paint and bare furnishings of the small space that he was on a boat. Near the engine room, he surmised, from the humming in the walls. He could not feel the motion of water, but he knew that his equilibrium was toast at the moment, so that didn’t mean much.
Hightower returned with a clear plastic bag full of ice and a small utility knife. He stepped behind Court’s chair and, with a well-practiced single motion, cut away the flexi-cuffs binding Court’s wrists. Zack then grabbed another chair from the hallway, dragged it across the floor with a painful screech, and sat facing Gentry, dropping the bag of ice into his prisoner’s lap. Court immediately brought it to his eye and lip to deaden the growing pain there.
Gentry looked the man over with his right eye. It had been four years since they last worked together in the CIA’s Golf Sierra unit, unofficially known, to those few who knew of it at all, as the Goon Squad. Hightower had been Sierra One, the team leader. Gentry was Sierra Six, the youngest, most junior man on the team, but always the first through the door. Hightower was now forty-five or so, but his eyes were still as bright and blue as a baby boy’s. He was razor lean and square-jawed. His hair was cut in a classic military high and tight; flecks of silver now blinked in the sandy blond. He was six one and two hundred pounds, not an ounce of it excess fat. He moved with confidence, walked with his broad chest leading the way. Court knew Zack was Texas born and bred, had joined the navy after college baseball, spent a decade on the storied SEAL Team Six before joining the CIA’s Special Activities Division as a Paramilitary Operations officer. Zack was smart and tough and sure of himself, exceptionally charming with the ladies, and popular with the guys.
In short, a typical SEAL.
“How ya been?” Hightower asked as he looked down to his own injury, a hand swollen at the knuckles. Court thought briefly about leaping off the chair and spearing the bigger man’s windpipe, but he knew the drugs in his system would slow his reflexes still. Zack didn’t seem worried about Court attacking, and Court figured Zack would know better than he did what was still pumping through his bloodstream.
“Some days better than others, I guess.”
“Scuttlebutt is you’re doing all right. You’ve run three to five ops a year for the past four years. All over the map. Making some pretty good bank is the word on the street. Langley thinks you smoked both of the Abubaker brothers, one in Syria and the next a few weeks later in Madrid. French intelligence says someone fitting your general description blew up half of French-speaking Europe last December. The Ukrainians are even running around saying you did that shit in Kiev. You didn’t, did you?”
“Don’t believe everything you hear. How’d you guys find me?”