As soon as he’d blown the roof, Court pressed a preset button on the drone and it fired straight up through the hole created by the breaching charge. The Buzzhook pulled its cordage to a height of nine hundred feet in just seconds. Here it stopped suddenly and began hovering, staying perfectly in place with its onboard GPS receiver and its gyroscope.

An infrared light blinked on the drone, and a second infrared light, attached to the cord a hundred feet below the Buzzhook, blinked as well.

Within moments of the drone launching out of the roof of Alexandria Eight, a de Havilland Twin Otter with a painted-over tail number flew to the exact same GPS coordinates, but at an altitude of only 400 feet. The hundreds of people on the ground—the media, first responders, local cops, FBI, and interested CIA officials—all stood and stared. Police helicopters had seen the craft coming in from miles away, but it had claimed to be on its base leg for nearby Washington National Airport, and it only deviated from its flight path forty seconds earlier, so there was no time to begin tracking it before it arrived.

Timing had been everything, of course, and here Court had had to make a few educated guesses. He’d told Zack to plan on arriving directly above Alexandria Eight at twelve thirty a.m., but to plan to have an excuse ready for air traffic control that could speed them up by five minutes, or slow them down by the same amount.

That gave Court a ten-minute window.

The Twin Otter captured the Kevlar cord and pulled Gentry into the sky at twelve thirty-three, yanking him almost straight up by entering a steep climb.

Court looked down at an altimeter on his watch and saw he had ascended four hundred feet. He looked up and behind him, and finally he saw the aircraft, flying black now, all its lights extinguished. He kept his body tucked as tightly as possible, felt the incredible wind and cold and even the thick mist as he was pulled along through a small cloud, and he told himself that this was not nearly as bad as he thought it was going to be. As long as the tiny cord that served as his lifeline held, then he would be fine.

But as he was looking at the dark aircraft above him, he saw something that made his heart stop. The Twin Otter suddenly banked to the left . . . hard to the left.

Court knew physics well enough to understand what would come next, so he closed his eyes and held on to the harness inside his clothes by wrapping his arms even tighter across his chest.