by Mark Greaney
Parks turned to Babbitt, who was already looking up at the ceiling in a show of frustration.
“I hate singletons,” Babbitt groaned. “Call him. He won’t answer, but do it anyway. I want everyone in the signal room to keep pushing data about the operation to Dead Eye’s phone. Even if he won’t talk to us, I want him to know what’s happening with the hunt.”
“And then?” asked Parks.
“And then we wait for Dead Eye to turn up in the AO. He wants Gentry as bad as we do. He’ll be there. He just won’t follow our game plan.”
Parks shook his head as he disconnected the call. “Prick.”
Babbitt said, “Part of managing individualists like Whitlock is knowing when to back off. Let him think he’s the brains of this operation; I don’t give a shit. The only thing I care about is getting a picture of Court Gentry’s ugly mug in a pine box when this is all said and done.”
EIGHT
The woman was pretty, although she looked a little sad. She sat there, alone, deep in the shadows of a potted orange tree at a table in the outdoor café, ignoring the patrons sitting in the sun as all but a few of the men there ignored her. Her face was half-hidden behind her huge designer sunglasses, and her head hung over the demitasse of espresso nested in her hands on the bistro table. Occasionally she appeared to gaze out across the street in front of her, past four lanes of moderate traffic and toward an alley that ran behind a four-story apartment building and a parking garage.
It was a perfect December afternoon in Faro, Portugal, with sunny skies and temperatures in the midfifties. And although this was certainly not an intersection with a scenic view, nor did this urban neighborhood possess any tourist value whatsoever, the tables that poured onto the sidewalk from the café were more than half occupied, mostly by afternoon shoppers and locals from the nearby middle-class apartment building and the alley behind it.
But the woman under the orange tree just sat by herself, far away from the rest of the patrons, nursing her espresso. She flicked her midlength brown hair out of her face and glanced again to the apartment building.
A text appeared on the iPhone lying next to her purse on the table. She picked up the phone and glanced at it.
Where are you?
She tapped back a response with her thumb.
Watching TV on the sofa. Why?
She put the phone back on the table and resumed her languid gaze across the street, but seconds later she heard the screech of metal chair legs dragging across the sidewalk next to her. An attractive middle-aged man in a gray suit sat down, putting his phone on the table alongside hers. She saw the text she had just sent displayed on the screen of his phone.
He spoke softly as he settled in. “It hurts my feelings when you lie to me.” His accent was thick, but his English flawless.
The woman smiled a little now, but she did not turn to look at the man. “You know me too well, Yanis.”
Yanis had already bought a cup of tea from the counter inside, and he stirred sugar into it while he talked. He, unlike the woman, did not smile.
“You aren’t supposed to be here,” he said.
“I know.”
“You did the same thing in Buenos Aires, and you did the same thing in Tangiers.”
“And in Manila. But you didn’t catch me in Manila.” She turned to him; her smile was no longer sheepish. It had turned sexy. Coquettish. “What can I say? I like to watch.”
Yanis was not as playful. “It’s not the protocol. You know that. This could be dangerous.”
She turned back to the building across the street. “Were you so concerned for my safety at any time during the past six weeks? I don’t recall you once asking me if I was keeping a safe distance from those two bastards in that apartment over there. As a matter of fact, weren’t you pressing me to get even closer?”
Yanis Alvey softened his tone. “The investigation is over, Ruth. Your role is complete. Let’s get out of here and let the bad boys do their part.”
“I’m not in the way. And I am not going anywhere.”
Yanis sighed. He’d fought these battles with Ruth Ettinger before, and he’d always lost. He was senior to her in their organization, but she was both so damned obstinate and so damned good at her job that he let her get away with little things like this.
Yanis knew he would lose now unless he claimed victory. “All right. You can stay. I guess you deserve it.” Yanis gazed up and down the street, then spoke into his phone. “Clear.” He put the phone down and turned his attention back to the pretty brunette. “It feels odd executing in daylight.”
“That was my suggestion. The targets stayed up all night, worked till past noon. Right now is the best time to hit them.”
“I hope you are right.” He cleared his throat. “You aren’t armed, are you?”
“I’ve got Mace in my purse.”
“That must be of great comfort to you.” His sarcasm was clear. “I am armed, of course. If there is any trouble, stay with me.”
“Thank you, Yanis.” She said it like she meant it. And then, “How are they going to play it?”
Yanis sipped his tea and, over the top of the cup, he cast his eyes to the apartment building next to the parking garage. “In a moment two sedans will arrive, each carrying three men and a driver. A third van will provide a blocking force at the top of the exit to the garage. The six will go upstairs and effect the action.”
Ruth nodded. “You wish you were on the team going in, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.” He said it without equivocation. “I enjoyed that part of my life very much. But now I am the man who sits across the street to watch instead of one of the men who swoops in to carry out justice.”
“You could still do it, I’m sure,” she said.
He waved the comment away. “Someone has to evaluate the surroundings to give the all clear. Plus, none of those boys get to enjoy the afternoon at a café with a beautiful woman. They are probably all jealous of me.”
Ruth just smiled softly.
He looked at her a long moment. “You feel okay about this one, yes?”
“Yes. Of course I do.”
“Good. I know it has been difficult for you since—”
“Shhh.” She hushed him, then gestured with a subtle tip of her head toward the building across the street. Two gray cars turned into the alley and disappeared. A van pulled in behind them, turned into the mouth of the alley, and then stopped, blocking anyone trying to leave from the alley or the parking garage exit on the right.
Yanis said softly, “Fifty euros says it goes wet.”
Ruth shook her head. “Sucker’s bet. It will go wet. Somebody is about to die on the third floor of that building over there.”
They sat silently for a moment; Yanis drummed his fingers on the tabletop. He was thinking about how damn much he missed it, the action going on across the street. Ruth reached out and put her hand over his hand and the drumming stopped, and then she rewrapped her thin fingers around the espresso.
Across the street a Toyota hatchback pulled out of the parking garage adjacent to the building but was blocked from leaving by the van. The Toyota honked, but the van did not move.
Ruth knew this, very likely, was the only excitement she would see of the operation across the street. It wasn’t much, but she did not care.
As she’d told Yanis Alvey, she liked to watch.
Ruth Ettinger was thirty-seven years old, and though she had a clean and bureaucratic-sounding official title, her job description was really quite simple: She was a targeting officer for Mossad, Israeli intelligence.
Ruth ran a team of operatives on one of several task forces under Mossad’s Collections Department, all given the mandate of protecting Israeli government officials from assassination and kidnapping. In actuality, virtually all of her cases involved threats against the prime minister of Israel, Ehud Kalb, the sixty-seven-year-old ex-IDF Special Forces officer who led her nation.
Ettinger had never m
et Kalb, had never even been in the same room as her prime minister, but she had taken it as her life’s work, her one overbearing responsibility, to find those suspected of harming him, assess the credibility of the threat, and then, if that threat was determined to be real, to call in Mossad’s action arm, Metsada, to finish the job.
Yanis was Metsada, in control of the operators and her link to the Operations Department, and she was his link to the Collections Department.
Together they had chased terrorists, hit men, and nut jobs all over the globe. For more than five years Ruth had been serving on this task force, first as a support officer, and then as a targeting team leader. Ruth had become the best targeter in the Collections Department at locating, tracking, and assessing threats, and Ruth damn well knew it.
And then, the previous spring, Rome happened.
An incident in Rome had turned into a debacle for her agency, but she had not been blamed; a Mossad psychologist had cleared her to return to the field just days later, and soon Ruth was back short-circuiting the nefarious schemes of her nation’s enemies.
The job that had encompassed her every waking moment for the past six weeks had been the hunt for a pair of Palestinian brothers who had learned the art and science of bomb making in the territories, then detonated explosives in Afghanistan to hone their craft. As awful as this was, it was not, in and of itself, enough to garner the dogged focus of Mossad’s top headhunter. But when the two brothers masked their faces and appeared on Lebanese television proclaiming themselves to be the men who would bring Israel to its knees, Ruth was given the job of looking into their bold claim to see if there was anything behind their braggadocio. She tracked them from Beirut to Ankara to Madrid and then, finally, to Faro, and here she found them amassing chemicals and timers and researching the travel plans of the Israeli prime minister. Kalb was due at an economic conference in London the following week, and the two bomb brothers had booked ferry tickets to the United Kingdom.
Ettinger and her team determined that this was, in fact, a credible threat on their PM, so they called in Yanis and his kill/capture crew from Metsada, and then Ruth and her team were ordered to stay the hell away from the target location while the hard men from Tel Aviv swooped in to end the threat.
But now Ruth sat less than a hundred yards from the action, sipping espresso in the cool shade.
She was not worried about her colleagues in Metsada. The bomb brothers had been mixing chemicals and constructing timers for the past eighteen hours and they were sound asleep, and the cameras her team had passed through the ventilation ducts in the apartment across the street confirmed that the front door to their flat was not booby-trapped. She knew the Israeli operatives would burst through the door with orders to capture the men if it was feasible to do so. But she also knew the two men in that flat had exactly one Kalashnikov rifle, and it was staged on the floor directly between their two beds, and they would both wake, both reach for it, and both fumble it.
And the Metsada officers would make the decision in a single heartbeat to shoot the two young men with their silenced pistols.
And then they would back up through the door and leave not a trace of their act behind other than the bloody bodies and a few untraceable shell casings.
Across the street the Toyota had stopped honking. One of the operatives in the blocking van climbed out and, in halting Portuguese, explained to the Toyota driver that his friend was having trouble with his van’s transmission and, if the man in the Toyota could just give them a moment, they would push the vehicle out of the way. The Toyota driver complied, perhaps recognizing that the polite foreigner was doing his best to rectify the situation, and perhaps also noticing that the polite foreigner had a hard and formidable look about him, and it might be best not to piss him off.
There was a brief screech of tires now. Ruth and Yanis watched as the two carloads of Mossad operators backed out off the alley, stopping behind the Toyota. The blocking van rolled off to the west, the Toyota pulled into the street and turned to the east, and the two cars then executed perfect three-point turns in the narrow alley and followed the van to the west.
No one sitting at the outdoor café around them had any idea they were witnessing the ending of the perfectly choreographed assassination across the street.
Yanis Alvey said, “And . . . scene.”
“Never gets old,” Ruth said, no happiness or levity in her voice now. Yanis noticed this.
“You hate when it’s over.”
She corrected him. “I love when it’s over. As long as we have done our jobs correctly, and there is no collateral.”
Unlike Rome, Yanis thought, but did not say.
Ruth added, “What I hate is the day after. When I don’t have anything to do.”
“Dinner tonight?” Yanis asked, sounding a little more hopeful than he would have liked.
Ruth finished her espresso. “Sorry. I have to sanitize the safe house.”
He nodded, careful to affect an air of nonchalance. He wasn’t surprised, really. “Not a problem. I imagine you wouldn’t be much company. You get incredibly disagreeable and difficult to be around when you don’t have a head to hunt.”
Ruth stood, then knelt back down, speaking softly into Alvey’s ear. “I can only hope someone proclaims their intention to kill our prime minister in the next few days so that I can have a raison d’etre.”
She drifted away through the bistro tables, and Yanis reached for his wallet to pay her tab. He was not offended by her brush-off. It was part of her show, her faux tough exterior. He knew this, and he also knew what lay beneath.
She was brave and proud and smart and competent. But she was also vulnerable.
Yanis Alvey was glad for her success today in bringing down the Palestinian bomb brothers cleanly and quietly. But as she walked off he thought, not for the first time, that one more Rome just might destroy her.
NINE
At oh one hundred hours the Helsinki Polaris and the two tiny vessels chasing it converged in the black waters of the Baltic Sea, twenty miles due south of Helsinki.
The eight Townsend operators of Trestle Team rode in the two black Zodiac MK2s, powered by beefy but quiet motors that allowed them to cut through the cargo ship’s wake and advance on the stern unnoticed but with commanding speed.
The Zodiacs had one man at the helm, while the three others on each boat held on to rope handles on the craft’s inflatable rubber walls. The two small rubber boats separated behind the cargo ship, with one heading to the starboard side and the other to port. They came abreast of the Polaris simultaneously, and telescoping climbing poles with padded hooks at their tips were raised and hung over the railing of the main deck. Within sixty seconds the first two men were up the poles, over the railing, and lowering a rope ladder so the poles could be removed and the second and third men on each Zodiac could climb more quickly and more safely. After another minute the rope ladders were unhooked from the railing and stored on the deck, and the six men concealed themselves from anyone awake above on the bridge who decided to gaze back to stern.
Within two minutes of arriving alongside the cargo ship, the six-man boarding party was moving up the deck with their Heckler & Koch MP7s held at the high ready.
In the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the entire staff of the signal room watched the giant screen in front of them. It displayed the action via a ScanEagle UAV flying overhead. The drone had been deployed from the backyard of a safe house in Helsinki and operated by the same team who, only twenty hours earlier, had been working from a safe house near Gregor Sidorenko’s dacha.
The direct action team searched the vessel, staying low profile, using their night vision equipment to move in the shadows and soft communications over their headsets to remain in contact with one another while moving through the cargo ship’s labyrinthine passageways.
Twenty-six minutes after boarding, Trestle Actual entered the captain’s cabin and knelt down over the captain’s bunk. He p
laced his gloved hand over the silver-haired Russian’s mouth and, shining a tactical flashlight in his eyes, woke the man with a hard shake.
“G’de Americanskiy?” Where is the American?
The man’s eyes were wide, the pupils pinpricks in the bright light. He tried to turn away from the beam but the hand held him firm. The light burned through his lids as he squeezed them shut.
“G’de Americanskiy?”
The gloved hand let go of the face and the captain spoke hesitantly.
“The passenger? He said he was German.”
“That doesn’t matter. Where is he now?”
“He disembarked.”
“When?”
“Wha—what time is it?”
“It’s one thirty.”
“About midnight, I think.”
“How did he leave the ship?”
“A boat came for him. It must have been prearranged. We were not told about it until it appeared. On the radio they said it had come for the passenger. He was already on the deck waiting for it.”
“What kind of boat?”
“A Bayliner, I think. White. Canvas canopy.” The man shook his head. “Just a regular little twenty-footer.”
“What language did the man on the radio speak?”
“Russian.”
“Where did it take him?”
“I . . . I don’t know. Helsinki, maybe? It was the closest port. Forty kilometers from our position at the time. Must have been going to Helsinki.”
Trestle Actual evaluated the captain’s responses and deemed him credible. He seemed entirely too bewildered and terrified to attempt to deceive the armed men in black over him.
The lead Townsend commando looked over his shoulder and reached back a hand, and a teammate placed a syringe in it. He popped the cap of the needle with his mouth, held it there between his lips, and reclamped his hand over the captain’s mouth, just as the man started to scream and thrash, the fear of what was about to happen engulfing him.
