After his meal, while his Virgin flight flew over Greenland, he opened up his laptop and began scrolling through satellite and street maps of his target location.

The woman in the seat next to him was Italian; she never looked over at his computer to see the map of Trieste, but had she done so, Court would have just said he was in the consumer goods industry and heading to several Italian cities to meet with vendors.

He looked like an eager businessman getting a jump on his trip by committing locations to memory, but in fact he was concentrating on the maps so he could pick out his primary, secondary, and tertiary ingresses and egresses to the target area.

He worked till late in the night, then caught a few hours’ sleep before the end of the flight.

His plane landed in Milan before nine a.m., and Court breezed through customs using a CIA legend he’d been handed during the van ride over. With just his carry-on it was smooth sailing out of the airport, and he found himself in the train station less than an hour after touchdown.

The train from Milan to Trieste was six hours and passed first through Bologna. Court found his first-class compartment empty for nearly the entire ride, so he used part of his journey to continue working on memorizing the map of his destination city.

—

He arrived in Trieste just after four p.m. during a light February drizzle, and at a counter in the train station he rented a gray 2008 Peugeot four-door that looked like it would melt in nicely with the Italian traffic.

He found his safe house to be a one-bedroom apartment on the Via Valdirivo, just a few blocks from the port. The local station had prepped it for his arrival, apparently assuming he’d be spending some real time here. There was fresh milk in the fridge, along with meat and cheese wrapped in paper from the butcher. Court bypassed the niceties left by CIA station Italy, walked to the back bedroom, and saw a table, a bed, and a tall wooden armoire. He pushed the armoire away from the wall, just as he’d been briefed by Hightower the day before.

Behind the heavy piece of furniture he found a quality but nondescript briefcase. He brought it over to the bed, sat down, and opened it with a four-digit code—again, provided to him the day before.

Inside the case he discovered a small manila folder, which he placed to the side so he could see his equipment: a full-sized Beretta 92G semiautomatic pistol, an Advanced Armament silencer, three fifteen-round magazines, and a case of fifty rounds of expanding full metal jacket subsonic ammunition.

He was a fan of this brand and model of suppressor, but neither the gun nor the ammo were his top choices.

But they would do.