“Uh . . . would it be possible for you to come up to my cubicle? I think you should see this in person, and I don’t really want to forward it.”

—

Court did not leave Glen St. Mary immediately after seeing his father. Instead he drove into the woods behind his old high school, parked his Bronco, and slept for over three hours. He woke just after noon, feeling surprisingly good, and then he made his way back to I-10, which would take him west to I-95.

He’d only driven a few minutes when he saw the sign for the Econo Lodge just off the road in Macclenny. On a whim he pulled off the interstate, then rolled into the parking lot. He checked the tags on every car in the lot, looking for D.C., Virginia, or even Maryland plates. These would either be CIA or feds, down here hunting for him. His father had hinted that the area was crawling with people who didn’t belong, so Court expected to see cars belonging to the surveillance members.

But he saw nothing at all other than local vehicles, and a few from nearby Georgia.

It was the middle of the day, so he wondered if all the CIA vehicles were now deployed out on the streets. With a shrug he started to head back to the interstate, but then he noticed a Travelodge Suites, just across from the Econo Lodge. It looked dead over there—only a dozen or so vehicles were in sight—but he drove over anyway and began checking license plates on the cars parked at the small two-story property.

In the front of the building he saw no cars with tags that aroused suspicion; so he turned around the side of the building and headed into the back. Immediately he was surprised by the number of vehicles. While only a dozen cars had been parked out front, there were twice that number in back.

Court passed them by, careful to keep the bill of his ball cap low.

He thought there was a good chance he would find Virginia plates, making it likely they were CIA, but instead he found tags from Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. Four more vehicles, all large sixteen-passenger vans, were parked at the end of the row, and all four had North Carolina tags.

North Carolina? The first thing that came to mind was Fort Bragg, home of JSOC. Court couldn’t really picture thirty or forty Delta Force or SEAL Team 6 shooters rolling down in a bunch of passenger vans, but he couldn’t rule it out.

Curious, but just barely, Court committed two of these tags to memory as he passed, then he returned to the street.

He drove back to the Econo Lodge and parked. Then he pulled out his smartphone. He surfed the web to a site that offered registration information about license plate numbers to anyone who paid a ten-dollar fee.