Court’s mission here in Washington, as he saw it anyway, was very simple. His former employer, the Central Intelligence Agency, had spent the last five years trying to kill him, and he did not know why. He’d been running all that time, living abroad, off grid, staying away from relationships and ties. Looking over his shoulder all day, every day.

They’d almost caught him a few times, and during his flight from the Agency, other entities out there had come even closer to killing him.

He had grown tired of running, so he decided it was time to end this, once and for all.

In his years of small unit tactics training he had learned a great many truths, but one stood out from the rest. When the opposition attacked, it expected you to play your role; to run, to cover. But turning the tables, attacking into a threat, was often the most useful way of defending oneself.

Court’s principal trainer at CIA, a man he knew only as Maurice, used to say a mantra over and over, so often Court now heard it in Maurice’s gravelly voice. “You can run, but if you can’t run anymore, then you can hide. You can hide, but if you can’t hide anymore, then you can fight. There is nothing after the fight, so you fight until there is nothing.”

Court couldn’t run anymore, and he couldn’t hide anymore, so he came back to fight. To attack into the threat, to get answers and to get closure.

He knew he would not be leaving D.C. without a resolution to this nightmare. Either he would uncover the CIA’s motives behind the shoot-on-sight sanction against him and somehow end the sanction, or else he would die trying.

He had come up with a working theory as to what this was all about. At the beginning of Court’s career with the CIA he had been part of a small initiative called the Autonomous Asset Program. He and several other young men like him had been given individual instruction by a cadre of the CIA’s best operations officers, and then they had been sent into the world, allowed to run solo ops, tasked with difficult, deniable missions, and left, in large part, to their own devices.

The program was disbanded, Court was folded into another unit, and other than the fact that he had been given better solo training than the other CIA Special Activities Division men, the Autonomous Asset Program was behind him.

But Court had just found out the previous month that he was the last man alive from this entire program. Seventeen other young men had all been killed in the intervening years and, by necessity, Court himself had killed the only other remaining singleton asset out there.

Court saw it clearly now. For some reason the CIA was erasing anyone who had been in AAP. All the others were gone.