Instead, she forced him into specifics, hammered out dates for meetings and general ground rules for sharing information, and then she kept her poker face as long as she could. Finally she reached out a hand. “I look forward to following your tenure here very closely, Director Hanley.”
Hanley shook her hand, and she could see on his face that he recognized he’d just paid dollars to someone ready to accept dimes.
“I bet you do, Ms. King.”
—
Arthur Mayberry opened the wooden door to his home, but he left the storm door locked. Through the Plexiglas and bars he saw a white male in his thirties standing in the morning sunshine. He wore a suit and tie, and a serious expression.
The media had moved from his sidewalk a week or so after Jeff Duncan nearly blew up all of Columbia Heights, but these damn cops just kept coming.
Bernice appeared at Mayberry’s side just as he said, “I’ve told you boys everything I know.”
“I’m not here to ask questions.”
“Then what can I do for you?”
The young man held out an envelope. “You can take this, and not ask me any questions. To be honest, I don’t care for them any more than you.”
Mayberry looked at the envelope. “Well, what is it?”
“That’s a question, Mr. Mayberry. Please pay attention.”
Mayberry unlocked the door, took the envelope. He opened it. It was a fat stack of one-hundred-dollar bills.
“Lord have mercy,” he said softly.
The young man smiled a little. “Someone wishes to apologize for any inconvenience you might have endured in the past week or two. He asks that you accept this as repayment for the damages.”
Bernice looked at the money. She whispered, “Drugs.”
The man in the suit took no offense. “Not at all, ma’am. This is something else. Are you familiar with the FBI’s Witness Protection Program?”
Bernice said, “I . . . I believe I saw it on Law and Order.”
“Yes . . . well . . . things aren’t always how they appear.”
Arthur gasped. “You mean to tell me Jeff Duncan was in the Witness Protection Program?”
The young man raised an eyebrow and, with it, he gave a little smile.
Arthur Mayberry said, “No questions?”
“Exactly right, sir. Have a nice day.”
The man returned to his car, the car rolled off, and Mayberry locked the door. Only when this was complete did he pull the cash out of the envelope.
“How much is it?” Bernice asked.
Arthur Mayberry took a moment to thumb through it, making sure all the bills were hundreds. They were. He said, “It’s enough to where we won’t ever have to rent out the basement to another crazy man.”
The Mayberrys looked at each other and shared a smile.
EPILOGUE
Court Gentry wore a full beard and mustache, and his dark brown hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail. This, along with the leather jacket, faded jeans, and work boots, gave him the look of a man who fit in well here. There were tens of thousands of miners, farmers, and other industrial workers in southern Pennsylvania, and most all of them dressed like this—more or less, anyway—so he did not look out of place at all.
Not even here, at Somerset Regional Airport—not that his look mattered much, because all the commercial flights had flown for the day, he was far from the terminal in a private hangar, and there was no one else around.
Just Court and a sleek white executive jet, its turbines spinning slowly.
Court sat alone in the hangar’s tiny executive lounge, his small backpack at his feet and a bottle of water in his hand. The TV high on the wall was set to CNN. Court had watched several stories about the crazy happenings a couple hundred miles to the southeast of here in D.C., but he’d learned nothing new.
A second aircraft landed in the dark distance, then it taxied over and parked in the hangar, next to the plane right outside the window of the executive lounge. Court waited quietly for a few minutes, then watched a single man deplane and walk down the air stairs and up the steps into the lounge.
Matt Hanley wore a wide Cheshire cat grin, but to his credit, he didn’t try to hug his former employee. The two men just shook hands. Matt sat down in the chair in front of Court, then he produced a flask from inside his coat, along with two shot glasses.
“You bring those all the way from Langley?”
Hanley shook his head. “Stole them off the plane. Actually, it’s an Air Branch aircraft, so as long as I give them back or expense them, I can do whatever I want with them.”
He poured two shots of neat scotch and passed one to Court, and they drank them together.
Hanley said, “You’ve been up in the mountains two weeks?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit. How much did that suck?”
“It beat D.C.”
Hanley chuckled, but moved on. “Been digging into NCS files. Old code word programs and ops. I’ll be unraveling this shit for months, years maybe, but the short version is this: Carmichael was in some sort of a dysfunctional three-way relationship between Saudi Arabia and Israel. He fed both sides intel pulled from the other, kept both in the dark about where he was getting information.”