Court made himself look again. A smear of blood covered the right side of his torso all the way down to his waistband, and with help from the flashlight he could see plainly the dull gray white of bone in the wound—one of his lower ribs was exposed in the seeping hole.

He spoke slowly and softly. “Fu-uck.”

He couldn’t stitch this up. A half-inch-wide and one-and-a-half-inch-long swath of skin and muscle was gone, so there was nothing for the sutures to hang on to. Instead all he could do was clean the wound and cover it with a sterile compress, and tape that down nice and hard so the bleeding would stop. The compress would foul with the coagulating blood and he’d have to peel it away a couple times a day to clean the wound, an excruciating process he’d have to keep repeating for at least a week.

He’d hurt from this, to be sure, but he’d survive, and he told himself this wouldn’t slow him down. He’d compartmentalize the pain and keep going.

Court pushed it out of his mind now and thought about his situation. He had dumped the stolen taxi deep in the woods in Bethesda, near the Grosvenor metro station. It would be daylight before it was found; he was certain of this. Now he just had to get himself out of this ditch and make his way to an all-night bus stop, then use the mass transit system to get back to his Ford Escort.

His mind went back to the second shoot-out of the evening. He found himself astonished that a half dozen D.C. Metro police officers opened fire on him like that when he had no weapon in his hands, and without saying anything to him before the shooting began.

Cops don’t do that, do they?

For a brief moment he wondered if those men might have been SAD Ground Branch paramilitary officers disguised as police. No, that didn’t make sense to him. On occasion the Agency could be bold as hell when operating in other countries, but if they were chasing him here in the nation’s capital, there was no way they’d be playing by a rule book that allowed them to impersonate police in the course of an extrajudicial assassination.

That was just too ridiculous to contemplate.

Court lowered his shirt, closed his jacket, and looked at his watch.

It was nearly three a.m.

He had to move, he had to get someplace to get the supplies he needed to treat his injury, and he had to get home before first light.

“Move your ass, Gentry.” He said it to himself, and it worked. He pulled himself up into a sitting position and then, with one hand pressing on his right rib cage, he struggled to stand.