Court went over the side, dropping his forty-pound bag from his hands as he did so. It pulled at his waist for a moment but as both he and his equipment bundle reached maximum velocity, he knew he wouldn’t think about it again.

Not until he pulled the rip cord. He did this at four thousand feet, he felt the canopy catch above him, and instantly the bag yanked hard below him. He checked his chute; it was almost impossible to see in the cloudy night above, but he saw his lines were taut and he realized he had a good, full canopy.

Checking the GPS on his wrist, he began steering to the left, then he looked down, trying to pick out the large clock tower of Alexandria Eight. It took him some time, but on his right he saw the lights of a jet on final approach to nearby Reagan National, and he used this as a reference point. His eyes tracked south from the airport, along the Potomac River, then he looked along the lights of King Street, which led from the river all the way to the massive George Washington Masonic National Memorial, the highest building in the city. From here his eyes tracked to the left, to the west, and within a few seconds he centered on Alexandria Eight.

Once he had the clock tower of the safe house in his sights, he looked at little else, because the tower was his landing zone.

He thought the darkness would improve his chances of parachuting all the way to the tower without being seen by the guard force on the property, but he had wanted to do something to improve his chances even more.

Below him on North Quaker Lane, five pairs of headlights moved slowly to the edge of the property at the front of the safe house grounds. When they rolled under the streetlight closest to the driveway, this revealed them to be five large black SUVs. They stopped one hundred feet in front of the guard shack and just sat there. They weren’t threatening anyone or anything, but they were a curious sight indeed.

The five SUVs were from Uber, and Court had ordered one to go to that location with each of his five phones. He’d texted each driver with instructions to wait at the end of the driveway. The drivers inside the vehicles didn’t know anything more than that; when they found themselves forming into a motorcade with other drivers, they likely assumed a group would be coming down the driveway from the big property any minute and piling in to go to dinner or to another location.