A communications specialist answered on the intercom.
“Commo.”
“Where are we in accessing local police, D.C. Metro, and civilian camera networks?”
“We’ll be up on all systems by tomorrow at seven a.m.”
“And facial recog?”
“Ready to go. Once we have the feeds, we’ll get to work. It will be a slow process. A lot of cameras for the computers to look at.”
“I understand. Are we monitoring first responder bands?”
“Uh…”
“Do it. Police, ambulance, fire. We need to be on the lookout for anything anomalous in the District involving a single subject fitting his description. If he’s a lone wolf, he might steal a car, break into a building, rob a pawnshop in the burbs. Hell, if he’s been on a cargo ship for that long he might hire a hooker or get himself busted in a massage parlor.”
“We’ll get on it immediately.”
The room was quiet. Then Carmichael looked to Mayes. “All right. I’m sold. Suzanne is in the Working Group, in charge of the tactical operations center. She runs defense, and she is subordinate to you on offense. She sees primary intel on Violator, beginning with everything we know about his actions in the past two years.”
Brewer cocked her head. “You said he’s been on the run for five years.”
Carmichael stared her down. “You get two years. That is plenty of background for you to build a profile of his modus operandi.”
Suzanne Brewer let it go. “Thank you, sir.”
Carmichael addressed the entire table now. “Listen up. Violator has been running from us for a long time. Suddenly he’s right back here in our midst. This gives rise to the possibility he has transitioned from defender to aggressor. That should be extremely disconcerting to you all.”
He pointed a finger at the map. “The quicker we can find him out there, the better. The longer he’s free on the streets, the more time he has to set up an operation to go on the attack.” He shook his head. “We are not going to give him that time.”
5
Court Gentry stood in the darkness, a light rain falling on his head and shoulders, the back of his jacket soaked from leaning against the steps of a rusted playground slide. He shifted his feet back and forth for warmth and blew into his hands.
As he stood and shivered in the tiny park he watched a young white man in a red parka standing on the porch of a dilapidated single-story home across the street. The man lit a cigarette and looked around in all directions, his eyes searching for anyone watching him. Court was just one hundred feet away but he might as well have been invisible. The man looked through him and continued his scan, then he left the porch and headed down the street.
Court kept his eyes on the man until he disappeared around the corner a block to the south.
When he was out of view, Court turned his attention back to the house. Sandwiched between a pair of low-rent and low-rise apartment buildings, it had whitewashed wood clapboard walls and a small front porch, accented by a black metal door that looked like it could withstand a direct hit from an antitank missile. There were two security cameras visible on the property, one watching over the driveway to the right of the porch, the other pointing straight down to the front door to record anyone who approached.
A tall wooden fence rimmed with barbed wire enclosed the small backyard, and an angry dog back there barked and snarled at any sound on the street.
Court blew into his hands again while he took in the scene. The inner-city location, the beat-up house with the fortified access point, the rough-looking skinny white boys coming and going.
There was no mystery as to what he was looking at.
This was a stash house for a drug ring.
Thirty minutes after his run-in with the would-be muggers on 8th Street SE, Court had seen a man selling packets of either heroin or meth behind a gas station on Savannah Avenue. Court melted into the dark edge of the parking lot to watch, and soon he determined the man probably wasn’t dealing H, because he looked like a meth head, which meant he was both a user and a dealer, and it stood to reason he used what he dealt. The bony man made a phone call after the sale. Court wasn’t in a position to hear any of it, but from the fact the man started walking as soon as he hung up, Court thought he might be heading to a stash house to drop off money and pick up more supply.
And Court had been right. He followed the gaunt young man seven blocks, finding this surprisingly difficult to do because the man was amped up and paranoid, always looking back over his shoulder, ducking down behind things and even moving in and out through traffic racing by on Wheeler Road. But Court kept the tail, because he knew the low-level dealer was going someplace Court wanted to be.
The man finally arrived at this single-story clapboard house on Brandywine Street, where he knocked four times on the iron door, and then transferred something — almost certainly cash — through a slot at chest level, before receiving something — almost certainly drugs — in a paper bag. He headed off up the street and Court watched the man go, and soon another equally strung-out-looking white kid appeared and repeated the sequence, giving Court all the evidence he needed that he’d come to the right place.
Court had considered making his way into a neighbor’s backyard to get a better look at the property behind the stash house, but the angry pit bull snarling there encouraged him to change his mind. The dog went positively ape shit every time one of the men stepped onto the property to knock on the front door, so Court decided he couldn’t get any closer to the house without raising the alarm. Instead he moved to the derelict asphalt-covered park, stood on the playground, and cased the location from the front, planning his next move.
While he felt certain he knew what was inside the house, he had no idea who was inside the house. They could be MS-13, the Salvadoran gang, or they could be white supremacists. From the three motorcycles lined up and locked together on the drive he knew they could be some biker gang, as well, but the old, beat-up bikes weren’t nearly as impressive as Court’s mental image of what a biker gang would be riding, so he was betting against Hells Angels or Outlaws MC.
He was pretty sure who wasn’t inside. There was a pickup truck in the drive, a late-model candy-apple red Dodge Ram, and the presence of a rebel flag decal on the back window gave Court the impression that the operation in the house probably wasn’t being conducted by the D.C. Blacks, the Crips, or the Bloods.
But Court didn’t really care about the occupants themselves; all that really concerned him was the security of the property, because he planned on making entry on the house. He wanted to know about any booby traps, false access points, mantraps, or other fortified areas. At this point he wasn’t really thinking about the presence of guns because he knew there would be guns — no self-respecting drug dealer would operate in the United States without an arsenal within arm’s reach — but to Court, this was not a problem.
In fact, he was counting on it.
He checked his watch. Twenty minutes till midnight. For a second he considered hanging out there until three a.m., when the average person’s body clock was at its lowest. But almost immediately he decided against waiting. Meth heads kept weird hours, after all, and Court knew they might well be more wired and ready at four a.m. than at four p.m., so he made the decision to act now.
He left the darkness of the playground and stepped out onto the sidewalk.
He didn’t go directly to the stash house. Instead he backtracked half a block, returning to an unlocked garage he had noticed as he was tailing the street dealer through the neighborhood. He entered the garage, felt his way around, and came across a pull cord for a lamp on a worktable. Before he pulled the cord, he took off his jacket and threw it over the lamp, so he could control the amount of light the bulb gave off.