like you’d expect.”
“That bad?”
“They are both good at their jobs. They don’t have to be friends.”
“Right. Look, Matt. I want to go to Berlin.”
“Court, you aren’t ready to be deployed anywhere. You need to get back into Dr. Cathey’s care.”
“Why? I was ready to fly to Caracas and shoot it out with a dozen gun monkeys, otherwise you wouldn’t have pulled me out of the medical ward in the first place, right?”
“You weren’t ready, obviously. You were all I had. Zoya was working her way into Shrike Group so I could keep tabs on the Israelis, and Zack got his dumb ass popped down in Caracas by local-yokel counterintel guys. I put you in, you got about five percent of what I needed you to get, and now you want to rush off on your next op? Look, Court. Your infection needs another few weeks of treatments.”
“Give me one week, Matt. One week, and then I’ll pull myself out.” When Hanley did not immediately respond, Court said, “I am going, and you can’t stop me. What you need to do is decide if you want to put me in play with your blessing, or if you want me to run this alone.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s an offer. I protect your asset over there so she can unravel this little mystery she’s mixed up in without having to deal with Russian assassins on her ass. She’ll never even know I’m there.” Court smiled. “I’m the Gray Man, remember?”
“You’re half a Gray Man, remember?”
Court hacked out a phlegmy cough, wiped his mouth and then his face with his paper napkin. “It’s just countersurveillance work. I can do that shit in my sleep. Let me go watch her back.”
Hanley’s pause was long enough for Court to motion for the check and pull a wad of bills out of his pocket while he waited. Finally, the DDO said, “One week from today you are back in Maryland, under Dr. Cathey’s care. You got it?”
Court nodded. “Got it.”
“It is absolutely imperative no one finds out she has confederates watching her back. You have no operational role whatsoever other than running countersurveillance for her, from a distance. You do that, and we just pray to God everything else works out.”
“Thanks, Matt, I won’t let you down.” Then he added, “Again.”
He hung up the phone and headed out of the roadside restaurant, heading to a dusty parking lot where his driver was to pick him up.
This entailed passing an auto repair shop, and he scanned the eaves of the building, searching for cameras. He did this automatically, and with the care of both a man with a lot of training and a man with an intense vested interest in keeping his mug out of any cameras, lest he fall prey to the PowerSlave system that had snared Zack. He’d been told by Drummond his face wasn’t in the database, but he had no idea if that was true or not.
He headed on to the parking lot, fully unaware that the owner of the repair shop, after dealing with numerous break-ins that began with his outdoor cameras being destroyed, had instead placed a high-quality Bluetooth security camera on a display shelf inside the building, pointed out a grimy window.
Gentry had ducked and dodged fifty cameras since arriving in Venezuela the night before, but it was the fifty-first that got him.
* * *
• • •
He slept in the right seat of the Cessna seaplane for most of the ninety-minute flight back to Aruba, and as soon as they landed, the aircraft taxied to a fixed-base operator and the pilot shut off the engine. Court was about to climb out, but instead he reached over and put his hand on the pilot’s forearm. The man turned his way.
Court said, “I need to book another flight. As soon as possible.”
The pilot didn’t seem surprised that his quiet passenger was immediately rehiring him. “Caracas again?”
“Negative. Leipzig.” Court was ultimately heading to Berlin, but he wouldn’t tell this pilot his true destination. He knew that if he could get to Leipzig, then he could climb aboard an ICE, Germany’s high-speed train, and get from the airport to Berlin’s central train station in less than an hour and a half.
The pilot flashed him a bemused expression. “You think this Cessna can make a transatlantic hop?”
“Of course I don’t. But I’m guessing you can recommend someone. I’ll pay you a finder’s fee, but I need to leave Aruba tonight.”
The pilot seemed to think it over