by Mark Greaney
“How are the Americans treating you?”
“Like we’re part of the team. CIA is desperate to get this guy.”
Yanis heard something in her voice. “You are, too, right?”
“So far, I’m more curious. It’s obvious the Americans want us to help, but it is not obvious at all to me that Gentry has any interest in taking out the PM. I can’t stop thinking about all the good this man has done, on his own initiative, while on the run.”
“Good guys do bad things. No reason bad guys can’t do good things once in a while, too.”
“I guess so. I’ve got an open mind on this, but I’m not sharpening my dagger just yet.”
Yanis said, “This is time critical. The likelihood of any danger to Kalb right now is only increased by the fact that he will be more vulnerable over the next two weeks during his travel. You don’t have the luxury of spending too much time on building a perfect target folder. I need you to find him, identify him, and monitor the Townsend people to make sure they stay on target. If they want to send their hitters to go in and kill him, they have their reasons, and you stand back and let them do it. Whether he’s a threat to Ehud Kalb will become a moot point if the Americans eliminate him.”
“I understand, Yanis,” she said, but still, there was reticence in her voice. “But when did we become the hunting dogs for the CIA?”
“When the fox started sniffing around our hen house, Ruth.”
“Right,” Ruth said.
“Get to work, but be careful. CIA conducted a teleconference briefing with us this morning about the Gentry case. He is a slick bastard, well trained to spot a tail. Find him, but stay loose.”
“Thanks for the concern, Yanis, but I’ll be fine.”
“Of course you will.”
TWENTY-NINE
Court had spent the day in his room, mostly surfing innocuous travel websites about Stockholm on his laptop. He also spent an hour and a half on a punishing series of bodyweight-only exercises. Push-ups and jackknives and handstand press-ups against the wall, enjoying the workout even less than normal because his body was still banged up after the operation in the forest near St. Petersburg and then the ambush in Tallinn two days later.
After a shower to ease his tired and sore muscles and an hour lying on the bed flipping channels on the tiny TV, he sat at the little table in the corner and ate a dinner of cold salmon out of a can and cold rice from a microwavable bag.
He drank a beer with his meal, all the while thinking he would rather be sitting in a dark, out-of-the-way bar somewhere in the neighborhood.
Not tonight—he had other plans for his evening.
When he was finished with dinner he went to the window and spent a few minutes looking through a narrow partition in the curtains, taking his time to check for cars or trucks that looked out of place and to follow passersby with his eyes, watching one person at a time as they strolled by on the sidewalk one floor below him. He scanned for faces he had seen before, though he felt confident he had made his escape from the Baltic without anyone tailing him here to Scandinavia.
After spending thirty minutes watching the flow of vehicles and pedestrians outside, he shut the curtains and sat down on his bed. After a slight hesitation he picked up his mobile phone and the scrap of paper with the phone number written on it.
He began to dial Whitlock, but he changed his mind. He had read everything he could find on the Internet about how secure the MobileCrypt application was, satisfying himself that using the app to obtain information about the Townsend men hunting for him was worth the risk, but Court was still a careful man. He put on his coat and slipped his earphones into his ears, then headed out of his flat and down to the street.
He’d make the call, just not from here.
Fat snowflakes floated and swirled under a streetlamp in Tegnerlunden Park, just a few minutes west of Gentry’s rented room. Court stood there under the light for a moment to read the number off the paper, holding his phone in his hand. He wore wired headphones with a built-in microphone under the hood of his coat. He dialed the number through the MobileCrypt app, but he did not press the send button. Not yet. He began walking, away from the park and toward the west, hoping that if all the information he read was somehow wrong, and it was, in fact, possible to trace the call, he would be harder to pinpoint if he was on the move.
Am I really doing this? he asked himself. Court did not seek out conversations with others; he did everything he could to avoid them. He preferred to order food from machines, buy train tickets from automated kiosks, and obtain information necessary for his missions from online searches at Internet cafés. In the past five years Court had, several times, gone weeks without talking to another human being other than an occasional two– or three-word exchange, usually in the form of a cash transaction at a market or directions for a cabdriver.
Tonight, in contrast to years of self-imposed solitude, he would actually reach out.
He told himself he had to do it but he worried, maybe, he just wanted to do it.
“Don’t you fucking go soft, Gentry.” He said it softly, admonishing himself for what he was about to do.
Despite deep reservations, he pressed the send button.
Russ Whitlock sat on the floor of his room at the Grimaldi. In front of him, the Blaser sniper rifle lay in pieces. He’d spent the past half hour taking it apart and putting it back together. First slowly and carefully. Then quickly, as if under stress. The next time he put it together normally but disassembled it only employing his right hand, simulating an injury to his left arm or hand. Then he tried the same trick with his left hand, which took considerable time.
Next to him on the floor, a tray of artisan cheeses and an iced open bottle of Lenoble Grand Cru Blanc du Blanc sat ignored. He wanted to put the weapon together and disassemble it a few more times before he rewarded himself with the luxurious indulgence.
He’d had a busy day, spent in intense preparation for his planned Saturday late-morning assassination of Amir Zarini. He’d taken a train to his planned area of execution and then surveyed the surroundings and the target location to determine both the ingress and egress points. He’d made it back to his hotel in the early evening, taken off all his clothes, and then removed the blood-and-pus-soaked bandages on his hip.
When he was finished undressing his wound he stood there nude in front of the full-length dressing mirror examining the holes, caked over with scabs, and the black bruising around them. His eyes lifted from the injury, taking in the rest of his body slowly and with no small amount of appreciation. He began a martial arts kata, never taking his eyes off his own face and body while he exercised. His hip burned and sweat began to flow within minutes. His face became a mask of intensity and even fury as he punched and kicked, performed throws and elbow strikes designed to break bones.
It took him several minutes to come down from the angry high of the simulated fight; his hip began bleeding freely and the pain was excruciating.
After his exercise Russ showered and changed and by now he was famished, but he imposed more discipline on himself by ordering food and drink and then letting it sit while he worked with the rifle, steeling both his mind and his body to as much hardship as he could generate in a four-star hotel on the French Riviera.
Russ had a lot of experience with sniper rifles, but little experience with the Blaser. As a scout sniper in the Marine Corps he had been issued the M40, and he loved the weapon. For the sake of familiarity he would have preferred an M40 for this job, or its civilian equivalent, the Remington 700. But, he had to admit, Gentry had chosen well with the R93. The German rifle had a straight pull-back bolt that allowed for slightly faster follow-on shots, faster than the M40 although certainly not as fast as a semiauto rifle. Still, Russ imagined he could empty the weapon’s four-round box magazine quickly and accurately at the distances he had planned, even without spending much time at the firing range with this particular weapon.
He had just begun reassembl
ing the gun for another left-hand-only takedown when his earpiece chirped on the floor next to him. His phone was on the desk across the room, so he just put his Bluetooth set into his ear and tapped a button to answer the call.
“Go.”
“Hello.”
It was Gentry. Russ bolted up from the floor and pumped his fist in the air. He composed himself quickly and spoke in a relaxed tone. “I was just thinking about you.”
“Sorry about not calling the other night.”
“Not a problem, brother. I didn’t expect you to call for a few days.” It was a lie, but he wanted to seem nonchalant about the conversation.
“Why not?”
“I know you, dude. I know how you think.”
“Why is it I don’t know how you think?”
“What do you mean by that?” Russ pulled the bottle of Lenoble from the ice and took a sip. It was time to celebrate.
“I don’t understand what your game is.”
“No game, Court. I just want to help. Why can’t you believe that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ll answer that question for you. You have been dicked around and lied to by everyone you ever worked with at CIA. Carmichael, Hightower, Hanley—”
“How is Hanley?”
“You mean since you shot him in Mexico City?”
“You do know everything.”
Russ swigged champagne. This conversation was going just the way he wanted it. “Matt Hanley’s okay. He’s back at Langley. Getting shot by the Gray Man is a career builder, I guess.”
“Speaking of gunshot wounds, how’s the hip?”
“It hurts,” responded Whitlock.
“Yeah, they have a tendency to do that.”
Russ asked, “Any trouble getting out of Tallinn?”
“You tell me. What do your friends at Townsend say? Is there any heat on me I haven’t noticed?”
Russ lied again. He’d heard nothing at all from Townsend for a couple of days, but he needed to keep his value high in Gentry’s eyes. “They said they might have a target for me very soon. They did not elaborate. Wherever you are, stay there, but you might want to check back with me sooner rather than later.”
After a pause Court said, “Okay. What about you? No problems with fallout from them after what happened the other day?”
“I told you, I can handle them.” Russ took a long swig of champagne. “This other opportunity I told you about is coming up pretty soon. Have you thought any more about our conversation the other night?”
“About you wanting to go freelance?”
“Yeah.”
“Help me understand just why you want to do that.”
“I want to be my own boss.”
Court chuckled. “Working freelance means you have more bosses, not fewer. I never would have had to hit that dacha west of St. Petersburg if I didn’t have trouble with my employers. You can’t trust anyone in this line of work.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
Court replied, “If you are taking career advice from me, then you are an idiot.” He added, “Guys like us are better off alone.”
“I disagree, Court, because there are no guys like us. There is only us. We’re the last two. We should stick together.”
“The last two?”
“Nineteen men entered the Autonomous Asset Development Program. The oldest was Joseph Pelton, at twenty-eight. The youngest was Courtland Gentry, at nineteen. I was twenty-five when I got in.”
“And?”
“Four died in training.”
“Can’t say that surprises me. I almost died a couple times.”
“Me, too. Eight died in the field working in AAP. Five more died during subsequent work, either in CIA, high-risk private sector security postings, or suicide.” Russ drank from the champagne bottle. “And that, my friend, leaves Gentry and Whitlock, alone in the world.”
“Shit.”
“Hey, it’s not so bad. If there were more of us, we’d be less valuable.”
“Higher value just means a bigger target on your head.”
“It means a bigger payday if you are freelance,” countered Whitlock.
Court asked, “Do you ever wish, sometimes, that you could go back to the way you were before?”
Russ asked, “Before what?”
“Before we got trained? Before we were made.”
Russ swigged again. “No. Hell no. Never.”
Court said nothing.
“You do, I take it,” said Whitlock.
“Just sometimes,” admitted Court.
“You should appreciate what you are.” He paused. “You should appreciate it a lot more than you do. You have a skill set that, arguably, only one other person on the planet has.”
“You?”
“Yeah, me. Like I said the other night, I’ve studied your ops. Down to the letter, everything you’ve done, I would have done exactly the same way.”
“How about that,” Court muttered, a little sarcasm in his voice.
“Yep.” After a slight hesitation, Russ said, “Of course, the only one that has me stumped is Kiev. I sure wish I knew how you pulled that off.”
“Again with Kiev?”
Russ drank his champagne. A few days earlier he thought he would need all the details of the Kiev op to secure the Kalb contract from the Iranians. But he’d bluffed his way past this gap in his knowledge and cajoled them with the promise of the Zarini hit, and now the details of Kiev were no longer so important. Still, he was genuinely curious. He said, “Some day, Court, I’ll get it out of you.”
The line was silent for several seconds, and then Gentry said, “I’ve got to go.”
“You have a hot date?”
“No. I need to get back to my place and set up a barricade in case you can trace this call and you plan on sending another crew of shooters my way.”
“Court, use your brain. If I wanted you dead all I had to do was stay in my bunk Monday night and let the Townsend gunners kill you. You might have all sorts of good reasons to be paranoid, but in this case you aren’t being logical. I’m a friend. Not an enemy. We are one, you and me. Sooner or later you are going to realize that. We would make one hell of a team.”
To this Court just said, “I’ll check with you tomorrow.”
“I hope you do, for your sake. Townsend might have a fix on you. Help me help you.”
“Tomorrow. No bullshit this time. I’ll call.”
The line went dead, and Russ sat on the edge of his big bed with the bottle of cold champagne in his lap. He would have liked to string Gentry along a little further, pulled him deeper into his plan, but tonight’s baby step forward was much better than no step at all.
The dumb son of a bitch had made contact, and that was key. And when Court realized that no one was going to attack him after this conversation, well, Russ concluded, that poor lonely sad sack Court Gentry would probably start calling him every motherfucking night.
Ruth and Aron had spent the afternoon and early evening walking the choke points of the city within a two-kilometer diameter of the electronics shop where Gentry bought his computer. At eight P.M. they grabbed carryout Indian food for themselves and the UAV team and took it back to the safe house. As the two climbed up the stairs to the fourth-floor flat, Laureen and Mike were heading down the stairs, ready for three or four hours of manhunting in the evening snow.
In the safe house Ruth passed the food out to the three men and sat with them at the laptop control center for the UAVs. Carl was flying a Sky Shark over the Gamla Stan, the Old Town portion of Stockholm, but while he flew he was able to one-hand a few bites of naan dipped in sauce and wash it down with beer.
Lucas reported that in their seven hours of near-constant flying, they’d had more than sixty possible sightings, each one of which had to be manually ruled in or ruled out by the UAV team by looking at images on the laptop.
Lucas and Carl had eliminated them all.
“Still,” Lucas sa
id, “it’s only the first day. Parks will probably have us keep the coverage up for three or four days more unless the facial recog software they are using on all the hacked cameras around the area turns up something somewhere else.”
“He’s here,” Ruth said. “I can smell him.”
Carl and Lucas exchanged a look but did not respond.
Ruth and Aron finished their meal and headed to their room to get some sleep; they’d planned to hit the streets before first light the next morning. The Townsend UAV technicians decided to make one last slow track over a heavily trafficked pedestrian-only street before bringing their drone home for the evening.
Fifteen minutes later Ruth brushed her teeth in the bathroom wearing only shorts and a tank top. She thought she heard someone calling out, so she turned off the tap.
“Aron? Did you say something?”
But it was Lucas who had shouted, and now he repeated himself, this time louder. “We got a hit!”
THIRTY
Ruth raced into the living room in her shorts and tank top; she’d taken out her contacts, so she fumbled to get her glasses on, and her bare feet slapped the wooden floor as she approached. “Are you sure?”
Lucas said, “I’m not, but the computer is. Well, relatively sure. We’ve been tracking a guy for about two minutes. He’s turned back twice to look behind him, which kind of looks like tradecraft to me. More importantly, the facial recog software puts his periocular region at 73 percent chance of a match.”
Ruth looked past Lucas’s shoulder to the screen and saw a greenish image of dozens of pedestrians moving along in the dark in both directions through an outdoor mall. A lone individual in the crowd walked through the snow and slush wearing a hooded black three-quarter-length coat. He or she faced away from the camera. Ruth would not have known which person to focus on in the scene except the figure in the dark coat was framed by a superimposed red square.
“That’s him?”
“Watch him for a second. He’ll look back.”
Ruth did as Lucas suggested, but while she waited for him to check his six, a thought occurred to her. She asked, “How is it that no one is noticing the UAV? You are pretty low.”
