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