Court moved calmly through the deep darkness at two a.m., avoiding the glow of streetlamps and the lights shining from porch lights and the occasional passing car. The streets were quiet here, a mile and a half from where the action went down an hour and a half earlier. Though he still heard the thumping of helicopters patrolling to the south, they weren’t close enough to worry him, and he’d neither seen a police car nor heard a siren for the past thirty minutes.

He wore a different set of clothing now. An hour earlier he’d taken all the clothing he’d worn during the gunfight, every last stitch that had been visible to the shooters, the witnesses, and any security cameras, and he’d shoved them down a drainage culvert. Then he’d pulled a wad of clothing out of his backpack and dressed in a light gray parka, a gray thermal, a pair of black track pants, and a red baseball cap.

Now he was walking north on Rockville Pike, feeling good about his chances, but questioning just what the hell had happened back at Babbitt’s house. The man had been assassinated, that much was clear, but Court could only make uneducated guesses about who might have been involved.

From the first moment it happened he felt like it must have been a CIA hit. The Agency knew Court was here in town, they wanted to get rid of Babbitt for some reason, and the symbiosis of these two things resulted in a shooter on a rooftop near Babbitt’s house at the same time Court was ninja-crawling through the man’s backyard.

Court knew he’d be blamed for the hit. Hell, he would have been blamed even if he hadn’t been on the scene at the time, but the entire chaotic escapade with his exfiltration through the McDonald’s just played even more into the CIA’s plan to pin Babbitt’s assassination on him.

“This night sucks ass,” he mumbled to himself. He’d accomplished nothing this evening with the exception of getting a crystal clear understanding that the CIA was going to fight his fire with fire of their own, and the objectives of the CIA were even murkier than he’d imagined.

Why the hell did they kill Babbitt?

Just ahead was an overpass that ran over the Capital Beltway. On the other side was an apartment complex and, next to this, a bus stop where he could take a bus that ran all night. Court knew this bus followed a route that would drop him within a few blocks of his car, about a mile away. He’d passed this stop this afternoon on a bus that got him closer to Babbitt’s house, and noted this location as a secondary exfiltration route in case he wasn’t able to make it directly back to his car for some reason.