He continued down I-95, passing through the town of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and here his head instinctively turned to the left and looked off into the dark. He knew the exit here onto I-64 well, because he had spent some of the most intense years of his life less than one hour directly to the east, beyond the coastal plain and all the way through the swamps at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

Back before 9/11, when Court was just a trainee working to become a singleton operator in the Autonomous Asset Development Program, he spent two years in a sequestered set of small buildings just inside the protected area at the military and intelligence installation known as the Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity. Here he’d learned tradecraft, foreign languages, survival skills, hand-to-hand combat, scuba diving, and dozens of other talents and trades, all of which turned him into one of the CIA’s best “one-man bands” of espionage. He’d been in his early twenties when he graduated from and left the compound at AADP, but he’d been back to other facilities at Harvey Point many times throughout the years. Each time he drove onto the grounds he looked off towards a swamp to the right of the road, and he’d wondered if back there on the other side of a thick copse of cypress, more young men were going through AADP training, hidden even from the rest of the men and women with Top Secret clearance allowed onto Harvey Point.

He’d heard the Autonomous Asset Program had been disbanded and he’d thought himself to be the last surviving operative from the program, but Max Ohlhauser had told him the day before that AAP had been rebranded somehow, and that it remained operational.

He wondered if the answer to all his questions was out there beyond the cypress trees and swampland, but he pushed the thought out of his mind and kept driving south, doing his best to instead brainstorm his operation to protect his dad. He began thinking back to a time long ago when the roads and farms just west of Jacksonville, Florida, had been his stomping ground. It would be surreal to be back on those roads, and he wasn’t looking forward to it, but he worried Denny Carmichael would stop at nothing to end this, and he wouldn’t think twice about sending foreign killers to target Court’s father.

Think about something else, Gentry, he told himself, desperate to find a topic to concentrate on that wouldn’t wear his mind out for the next nine hours.