“We aren’t monitoring tip line calls, there are a hundred every hour, most all of them useless. We only monitor the radio traffic of dispatched police units. This call went over a landline directly to a supervisor, and not out over the radio. He used his mobile phone to send out detectives, they weren’t dispatched regularly. I guess they are suspicious a terrorist might be listening in to police radio traffic. When they decided it was a legit lead they called everyone out. We’re a good twenty minutes behind the action.”

Carmichael was furious the TOC hadn’t accounted for the possibility the D.C. police would have a special protocol set up for Crime Stoppers tips.

“Where is JSOC?”

“En route, but they won’t make it in time. ERT is going to hit that house any second.”

“Give me the address, now!”

She did so, Carmichael hung up, and immediately he called Murquin al-Kazaz.

If ERT attacked, Court might die, but if he lived and escaped, the Saudis needed to put themselves in position in time to cut him down.

The worst-case scenario, for Carmichael anyway, was for Gentry to be taken alive by Washington, D.C., law enforcement. The thought of Court Gentry secure in a jail cell talking to a public defender made his stomach boil with acid.

—

D.C. Metro Police Department! Search warrant!”

Court opened the small hatch just as the shout came from outside his front door.

He knew the cops weren’t going to wait for him to answer, and he was right. One second after the call came he heard a shotgun blast; a slug was fired into one of the hinges of the storm door. A second shot came one second later, and the door fell from the frame.

A battering ram would crash through the wooden door any second.

But Court wasn’t waiting around for that. He had the hidden escape hatch door out of the way and he pushed his backpack through the hole, then he backed into it and reached for the hatch door to pull it back into place.

The battering ram slammed into the wooden door of his apartment as he did so.

The chair propped under the knob held for the first strike of the ram, and even the second, but as Court reseated the hatch and backed into the basement proper he heard the chair break fully and the door crash in, and then he heard another noise, followed by just exactly what he expected would come next.

He heard the screams of men.

—