He told himself he needed to work on his next move, which sounded good until he hit a wall the moment he tried to think. His original plan here in the D.C. area had been to talk to three men to get all the information he needed to determine his next course of action. Indeed, he had spoken with Chris Travers and Matt Hanley, but Leland Babbitt had been killed before he could interrogate him. And although Ohlhauser hadn’t been on his radar at the beginning of this op he’d managed to talk to him before he, too, had been killed.

But now what? Court thought back to his conversations with the three men, trying to pull out some actionable nugget that he hadn’t noticed before. Something that had eluded him.

Shit, thought Court. He was a shooter and a spy. He wasn’t an analyst or an investigator. He wanted a mission, not a fucking puzzle.

Then it hit him. A way to reanalyze the problem. He asked himself, what one thing did all the men agree on? What was the continuum between all parties?

He knew the answer as soon as he posed the question.

Fucking BACK BLAST.

This was understandable, Court reasoned, because Denny had told everyone it was an op gone bad. It had been his justification to hand down the shoot on sight. Now, in the middle of the night, with nothing else to do and nowhere else to turn, he told himself he had no choice but to try to reach back into his memory banks somehow and to replay every minuscule aspect of this one op out of dozens in his time with the Goon Squad, and hundreds in his life as an operator.

The normal routine with the Goon Squad after a mission was to perform an immediate hot wash, an after-action review where all elements involved discussed the good, bad, and ugly. They did it while memories were still fresh. But BACK BLAST had been different because Court had worked alone, without a net, much as he had in the early part of his career, when he’d been a member of the Autonomous Asset Program.

After Trieste there had been no hot wash, no after-action review, literally no mention of the event ever again.

This made details very fuzzy after more than half a decade, but as Court lay in his long, narrow closet, his head next to his ersatz escape hatch to the basement proper and his booted feet pressed up against the wall, he committed himself fully to this endeavor.

He forced himself to do his best to remember an operation that took place a half dozen years ago.

Six Years Earlier