world, and she chalked it up to her bad luck that he was so good and she wanted him to fail so bad.
But he was a man not afraid to risk it all, and she was a woman not afraid to throw him into peril, time and again, in hopes that someday her luck would change.
And for that to happen, all she needed was for his luck to change.
* * *
• • •
Court saw the silhouette of vehicles ahead of him, parked together off a dirt road under a thick canopy of fir trees. He recognized them as the van and the sedan he’d been tailing across the Midlands, so he drew the SIG pistol he’d taken from the Agency flight attendant and approached warily. Behind the van and the car he saw bloody gauze and sterile pads lying in the pine needles on the ground as if they’d fallen out of the backs of the vehicles as men climbed out.
Court didn’t know if the prisoner had been hit in the melee, but he hoped like hell all the blood meant some of the men involved who’d survived the airport would be unable to fight here if it came down to it.
He looked inside the sedan and found it empty other than some blood smeared on the wall and flooring. But when he opened the back of the van he found six dead bodies lying in a heap.
He quickly picked through them for a moment looking for identification, weapons, or cell phones, but they had been stripped of everything save for the clothes on their backs.
It occurred to Court this might explain why no one came out of the woods while Court circled above. Stripping a half dozen dead and dealing with wounded surely would have taken them some time.
He followed a sporadic blood trail to the south one hundred yards, to within sight of the edge of the trees. Leaving the bike there, he crawled forward. Directly in front of him he saw a small gravel lane, and in front of it a massive redbrick monstrosity that looked like something from the nineteenth century.
Several smaller buildings of the same red brick were all around.
Scanning both the main structure and the outbuildings, Court determined everything in the area had been abandoned for some time. He thought the main building was probably an old hospital; half the windows were boarded up and the other half fully broken out. These he began peering into, and soon he saw a shadow of movement in an open window on the top floor. Further inspection revealed a man just inside, using the darkness of the room to keep himself undetected from the outside, although Court’s trained sniper’s eye managed to pick him up.
In the darkness of the room he couldn’t tell much about the man, but he certainly seemed to be a sentry watching to the north. A scan of the other run-down redbrick buildings in the area revealed no more activity, so he returned his focus to the structure that looked like a hospital.
Soon he saw a second man step out of a doorway and stand there, looking out across the open land to the trees. He was fit, black, with a bloody dressing on his shoulder, and he wore a pistol in a drop leg holster.
Definitely the right place, Court thought. He reached into the go-bag for his binoculars, and as he did so his hand ran across the M320 grenade launcher. For a moment he fantasized about dropping a few rounds of “forty mike-mike” into the hideout of this group of killers, but he knew he had to make an effort to recover the prisoner alive.
He pulled out his binos and settled in, quickly detecting two more men walking around the western side of the hospital towards a large garage.
Shit, he said to himself. If there were four men in sight, that likely meant there were a lot more he couldn’t see.
He backed into the woods and opened the go-bag. Inside he found prepackaged food and water. He broke both open while looking through the other items. He chewed on a protein bar and drank water from a bottle while he pulled out climbing ropes, which he put to the side, along with fire-starting materials and water purification equipment.
He found a smartphone in a waterproof case. He knew it would be loaded with all manner of communications and tracking software, as well as encryption and decryption applications. His own phone had a