by Mark Greaney
The man—clearly now it was Russ—stopped in the snow, lifted his left hand to his face to check the blood, then pressed his hand again to his hip and limped on.
Shit. Court wanted to watch the man pass and disappear in the snow, but his innate sense of self-preservation was eclipsed, in this instance anyway, by his innate sense of honor, and he could not bring himself to leave the wounded American behind.
Court stepped out of the alley and whistled. In moments Russ crossed the street and joined him in the doorway.
Russ said, “I was beginning to think you hit the bricks.”
“No,” Court replied, wondering if he should have done just that.
“I heard shooting. You run into more assholes?”
“Yeah. Nothing left but us good guys now.” Court moved Russ’s hand away from his left hip and pulled a flashlight from his backpack and shined it on the area. There was a hole in Russ’s jeans just below his belt on the far left side of his hip, and blood had soaked the denim all the way down to the knee.
Court said, “You aren’t trailing blood, not yet, but we’ve got to find a place to treat that wound. We can lie low for a bit, at least until all the first responders get out of the way.”
Russ just nodded, pressing down on his hip again to slow the flow of blood.
They moved down the alley and found a staircase in the darkness that led down to a basement door. Court picked the lock with help from his flashlight and a set of picks from his pack. While he did this Russ sat silently on the steps and watched.
In under a minute they were inside and found themselves in the tiny kitchen of a pub that had closed for the evening hours earlier. They made their way to the bar area, and Russ stepped behind the bar and grabbed a bottle of Redbreast Irish whiskey. He bit off the cork, spit it on the floor, and took a long swig.
Court headed to the front of the establishment, parted the vinyl curtains, and saw that the entrance to the pub was belowground, just like the rear. A tiny staircase led up to street level at the front.
He checked his watch; it was four forty-five A.M., and the sign on the window said the bar did not open until three P.M.
“We’ll be fine here,” he called back to Russ. “No one can see us from the street.”
Court moved back to the bar, and for the first time since the action in the Old Town he realized he was also banged up. He had his own bumps and bruises and scrapes and pulls; the adrenaline in his bloodstream and, to a lesser degree, the cold air had numbed him, but now all the jumping over alleys and falling off roofs was catching up to him. Still, Court knew from experience that most things on his body that were hurting were going to hurt even more tomorrow no matter what he did now.
Russ, on the other hand, was truly injured, and Court knew he had to treat him quickly. He flipped on a small table lamp on the bar, and, motioning to the wound, he asked, “You okay with me checking that?”
Russ took off his coat and lifted his shirt, then undid his bloody jeans and lowered them a few inches. He leaned his elbows on the bar, bracing himself for the pain that was sure to come.
Court grabbed a bottle of cheap vodka from behind the bar and unscrewed the cap. He didn’t bother to tell Russ that it was going to hurt; he had no doubt the other American would know that as well as he. Instead he just poured half a bottle of the clear spirit over the bloody injury, washing away the blood and giving Gentry his first chance to assess the damage. He saw both entry and exit wounds, two inches apart just below the man’s belt line on his left side. “Nice one,” he said.
Russ grunted with the burn, then growled, “In what sense is it ‘nice’?”
“You aren’t about to die, so that’s nice for you. You’ve got an exit wound, so it’s through and through. That’s good, too. You okay with me checking it for frag?”
Again, Court was certain the other man would know exactly what he meant.
Russ tensed up, holding on to the side of the table. He grunted again in anticipation of the pain. Then whispered, “Do it.”
Court poured the vodka over the fingers of his right hand, then began feeling around the outside of the entry wound. He said, “No fragments. It’s a little hole. Not a handgun. They were rocking MP7s, so you took a four-point-six-millimeter round. Personally, I’m not a fan of the caliber.”
Russ said, “I am developing a bias against it myself.”
Court snorted out a polite laugh. He kept digging, feeling into the hole now with his semisterilized fingers. Court fought a slight trembling in his hands, concentrated on his task, and hoped this stranger would not be able to pick up on the fact he was unnerved by his close brush with death.
Russ showed he had more pressing problems by grunting with pain.
Court poured more vodka on his hand, washing off the blood. “I need to see if your hip is broken. You ready for this?”
Russ did not speak; he just nodded. Sweat covered his brow.
Court’s finger felt its way through the path of the bullet; he rubbed against the bone under the torn skin and muscle and felt a scored and jagged hardness, but no major fracture. “You are a lucky son of a bitch. It just grazed the bone. It will hurt for a couple of weeks, but if you don’t get an infection, you’ll forget it ever happened.”
Court pulled his hand out of the wound, then emptied the bottle of vodka into the hole. “Jeez, man. You’re a bleeder, aren’t you?”
Russ bit his lip from the pain. His face was almost white, and the only thing holding him up was the bar.
Court wiped away blood with a bar towel. “We’ll need a compress and some ice.”
Court fashioned a bandage from a bar towel, then soaked it with more vodka to clean it and tied it tight around Russ’s waist with a cotton apron. He filled a plastic bag with ice from the bar freezer and cinched this over the bar towel with another apron.
Russ then walked around the bar for a moment to test his leg and his hip. He gave Court a weak thumbs-up. “Good work.”
With the ice numbing the wound area and the blood flow under control, Russ appeared stronger almost immediately. He washed the blood off his hands, drank some water from the tap, then grabbed the bottle of Redbreast and two shot glasses from behind the bar. He looked at Court. “How ’bout you let me buy you a drink?”
SEVENTEEN
The two men sat in a booth adorned with dusty vinyl cushions, staring across the table at one another and sipping in silence. The only light was from the lamp on the bar across the room, and a little residual glow from the street that filtered through the curtains.
Court had questions for the man, of course, but for now he tried to feel him out via nonverbal cues. Tried to read his face and body language to see what kind of a threat he still might be.
Court Gentry could accept that Russ had saved his life, but he was still not ready to trust him.
Under the table, Court had pulled the Glock from his jeans and placed it between his knees. His right hand rested just next to it on his thigh.
While he kept his fallback option under the table, he realized he was getting nowhere with his nonverbal evaluation above the table. Other than an occasional wince of pain when he moved, the face of the man across from him was as unreadable as Gentry imagined his own to be.
“Your hands are shaking,” Russ said, and Court looked down and saw he was right. The tremor in the fingers of his right hand was slight, but obvious. He wrapped them around the shot glass, and the tremor went away.
“Just cold.”
“Adrenaline,” Russ corrected. “Lots of people get the shakes when they’re under fire.”
Gentry downed his drink. Repeated, “I’m cold.”
Russ did not argue. Instead, he refilled Court’s glass. “I’m sure that’s all it is.”
Court fought to keep his hands still while Russ eyed him from across the table. To change the subject, Court said, “One question. None of my business, but I’d like to know.”
“I’m an open book.”
“What are you on?”
“What am I ‘on’?”
Gentry nodded. “That hole in your hip is bleeding more than it should. You seem too young and fit for blood pressure meds, and you aren’t coked up, so I figure you are taking amphetamines of some form.”
“Spoken like a man who knows his pharmaceuticals,” Russ replied.
Court did not respond to this. He had developed an addiction to pain pills after an op a year or so earlier, but he could not imagine how this stranger across the table would know about that.
After a moment Russ answered, “Adderall. Helps with reaction time, cognitive function, mutes pain.”
“Are you trying to sell it to me?”
“Just explaining why I do it.”
Court said, “I’m not your mom.” It was still in the dark and dusty pub for a moment. Finally he said, “I’ve got a lot more questions.”
To this Russ nodded. “I bet your head is spinning with them.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Russell Whitlock.” He looked Gentry over with a searching gaze. “Mean anything to you at all?”
Court shook his head. “Should it?”
A shrug. “Doesn’t hurt my feelings.”
“You called me Violator back there.”
“I did.”
“You are Agency?”
“Used to be.” Russ sipped some more whiskey from the little glass, the movement of his shifting in the vinyl seat providing most of the noise in the room now. Russ reached out a hand. “Code name, Dead Eye.”
The men shook hands.
“Never heard that one either, have you?” asked Russ.
“No.”
Russ smiled. “We weren’t supposed to know about each other. OPSEC and PERSEC and just good manners to mind our own busi-ness.”
“But you know me.”
“I know everyone.”
Court did not press. Instead, he said, “The team that hit us this morning. They were Agency assets?”
“No.”
“Then who?”
“Townsend Government Services.”
“And that is . . . what exactly?”
“Private contractor. Bounty hunters, basically.”
“How did they find me here in Tallinn?”
“They had a UAV on station over Sid’s compound. It tracked you to the Helsinki Polaris. Townsend assets hit the Polaris the night before last, but you’d already sneaked off. I was the one waiting for you to turn up here, and when you did, I tailed you to the hotel, then called in Townsend’s strike team.”
Court put his half-empty glass of Irish whiskey down slowly. “You?” His right hand slid to the pistol under the table between his knees, and he took it and pointed it at the man across the table.
“Yeah. I probably should have told you.” He cleared his throat and looked down at his hip for a moment, then said, “I work for Townsend.”
Russ heard a muted click under the oak table now. He identified the sound easily; it was the hammer of a SIG Sauer pistol being pulled back, readying the gun to fire with only slight pressure on the trigger. He said, “Let me guess. You’ve got another gun pointed at my dick.”
“Tell me more about Townsend.”
“Privately held. Been around forever. Ten twenty-four contract. Paid by CIA with black fund money.”
“What’s their mission?”
“Brother, right now, you are their mission.”
“And they sent you to kill me?”
“They sent me to find you. The direct action team was supposed to kill you. The goons who hit the hotel tonight, Trestle Team, has been in St. Petersburg for sixty days, waiting for you to stick your neck out at Sid’s place. There is another team, run by a guy called Jumper. He’s in Berlin. A third unit, Dagger, is back in the States. I expect they’ll be cycling over here to Europe before long.”
Court lowered the pistol under the table but kept his finger ready over the trigger guard. “Who’s in charge?”
“The guy after you is Leland Babbitt. He’s about fifty. Ex-military, Air Force, then a civilian at DIA for a while. He moved over to FBI counterintel. He got drummed out of the Hoover Building for his methods, strong-arm shit that was getting cases tossed on grounds of civil liberty abuses.”
“He runs Townsend?”
“Affirmative. His number two is Jeff Parks. All-American-looking prick. He was a case officer at Langley, tossed during the harsh interrogation pogroms a few years back. The rest of Townsend is mostly ex-agency folks. Midlevel bureaucrats. Not seventh-floor material, for one reason or another.
“Townsend has been doing government-contracted dirty work since the 1800s. They were in the Indian wars, and in the Philippines when that blew up. They killed a Supreme Court nominee in the fifties. Rumor has it that James Earl Ray, the dude who shot Martin Luther King, was a Townsend asset. They whacked Olaf Palme, prime minister of Sweden, a shitload of human rights lefties in Latin America. Most anybody the administration in power didn’t like but couldn’t be caught targeting, Townsend got the call.”
This sounded, to Court, like a load of horseshit. He’d done his own share of denied black ops. He’d never got wind of a commercial enterprise doing the same sort of thing, especially an enterprise that had been in existence over several generations. “Are you going to tell me that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Townsend man?”
Dead Eye shook his head. “Negative. Oswald was just a narcissistic prick with a bolt-action rifle and an entry-level job that gave him line-of-sight on POTUS’s open-faced limo.”
Court knew this to be true. He was relieved to see that Dead Eye was not too far off into fantasyland.
Russ continued. “Townsend does other stuff as well. Training and security and investigations and arrests and renditions. They work for American concerns in industry, not just the Agency or the White House. But the feds like to use them as a proxy force for untouchable ops. They worked for Noriega back when he was our guy, and they were involved with bringing him in when he wasn’t our guy anymore.”
Court had been around too long to be surprised by much of anything, but this was all news to him. “What else?” he asked.
“They did CIA-supported hits for Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the apartheid government in South Africa in the eighties, for Mubarak and the Croatians in the nineties. After 9/11, Townsend worked with Afghan warlords that the CIA wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.”
“That’s saying something.”
Russ pressed down on his bandage with one hand and waved the other in the air. “Look, Court, you probably should spend less time worrying about Townsend’s old contracts, and instead concern yourself with their present-day target.”
“Me.”
“Yeah.”
Court said, “Okay. But before we get to me, what’s your story?”
Russ sipped. Said, “Thirty-four years old, born and raised in Washington State. Little town outside Olympia called Sequoia Park.”
Court reached across the table with his left hand and poured himself another shot. “And you like unicorns and long walks on the beach.”
“Who doesn’t?”
Court said, “Everything I saw you do tonight. It was like looking in a mirror.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“I mean to say I can tell you are a solo operator. We were in the same program?”
Russ nodded. “The Autonomous Asset Development Program. I was recruited out of the Marine Corps. A two-year workup, marathons in combat boots, scuba training, flight training, sniper craft, tradecraft, Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, language immersion, alpinist work in Wyoming, desert survival and land nav in the Mojave. All the same fun and games you went through, I guess.”
“I was in the Sonora.”
“Mexico? Ha, you old-timers were hard-core.”
Court did not smile.
“Anyway, I was approved for operational status, activated, and then I moved around the next several years, mostly
in the Middle East and North Africa.”
Court thought this over. His career with the Autonomous Asset Program had primarily taken place in the former Soviet Union, but he’d done time in the Middle East as well. More when he joined the Goon Squad. He wondered if he and Russ had run around the same AOs at the same times through the years.
“And then you left CIA?”
“Moved over to Townsend a year ago. Better pay and less bureaucracy. Really, other than the fact they target American heroes like you for termination, it’s not such a bad gig.”
“Why do you think I am a hero?”
“I was read in on your dossier to prep for the op. As I studied you, it felt like I was reading my own history. You spend a lot of years doing your thing for the USA, snappin’ necks and cashing checks, and this is the thanks you get? The shoot-on-sight against you is bullshit. I could no more be involved in your assassination than I could in my own. We’re both good guys in a bad world.” He held his shot glass out for Court to clink it. “Two brothers.”
Court did not reach for his glass. Instead he asked, “Did you tell this Babbitt guy about these reservations of yours concerning the shoot-on-sight?”
“Fuck no. They would have just fired me as unreliable, and they would have sent someone else. Court, I’m not looking for a pat on the back, but if I hadn’t been the guy here in Tallinn tonight, you’d be dead.”
“Thank you.” Court said it flatly. He was having a hard time understanding this man’s motivation. The cynic in him could not allow himself to believe Russ had gone through all this just because he thought Court was being treated unfairly.
“You’re welcome,” said Russ. Then, “I’ve got to admit, I’m surprised to see the tremor.”
“The tremor?”
“In your hand. As much action as you’ve seen, I didn’t think it would affect you like that.”
