The stone steps up to the porch were covered in vines but good and solid. Not so the porch itself, which sagged down several inches when he stepped on it. He moved along the edges until he found a crossbeam under the rotten wood, then walked along this like a tightrope to the door.

He stepped through the doorway and into a large, dark room.

This was an abandoned grain mill; he could tell from the setup. It was at least as old as the Civil War battlements supposedly out here in the forest, but probably unrelated to the 1863 encampment of Union forces. The big, dark room was open to the elements because of all the windows and the missing door, and he could hear dripping rainwater here inside, but the roof high above him seemed mostly intact.

He pulled his flashlight from his pack and walked the beam all along the inside. A small amount of graffiti on the wall and the beams above, and a larger amount of twentieth-century trash, told him he hadn’t discovered anything that had not been discovered hundreds of times by others, but he had serious doubts anyone happened by here with any regularity.

It was a roof over his head, and it was nothing if not secluded, but this wasn’t going to be comfortable, at least not until he scrounged up a few more items.

He looked at his watch. It had taken him a little less than an hour to travel here from D.C., which made this a suitable location as far as he was concerned.

This was now home.

He dropped his pack against a wall and changed into dry blue jeans and a mostly dry dark gray thermal shirt. He didn’t have any more socks other than the ones he was wearing, which, like his tennis shoes, were soaking wet, so he just told himself to forget about any real comfort and be glad for what he had.

When he was settled in, meaning sitting on a raincoat with his back against the wall, a tiny fire for warmth in front of him, he pulled out his smartphone and began calling up CNN and a few newswire services on the Internet.

It took him fewer than five minutes of surfing to come across the Washington Post article purporting to have information about a homegrown terrorist targeting the Central Intelligence Agency.

Court almost ignored it, thinking it was going to be nothing more than a bunch of bullshit conjecture, just like everything he’d seen during the daytime hours of CNN and the other cable networks. A bunch of people who knew nothing about the event pontificating just to fill airtime. But quickly he realized the writer of this article had spoken with CIA personnel. Key personnel, in fact.

Soon Court was certain Denny Carmichael had been involved in the background interview the reporter cited as her principal source.