by Mark Greaney
He stopped in the middle of the room, surrounded by a crowd who paid no attention to the events going on around them.
Gentry leaned into Ruth’s ear. “I want your right hand on the bar. I will keep your left wrist for now.”
She did not move her right hand fast enough. The blade under her shirt moved, and the sharp edge burned her skin with a single soft stroke.
Her hand shot up to the top of the bar. It shook a little, so she gripped the lacquered edge.
Court said, “I want to talk to you, but I don’t want to talk to him.”
She just nodded. Looked again at Aron and motioned with her head for him to back up farther. He complied slowly.
“And I don’t want to talk to the shooters outside.”
“There . . . there is no one outside.”
“What about the rest of your team?”
“There is no one else.”
“Bullshit, lady.” He pulled her closer with his right hand and, with his left hand, he touched the sharp tip of the knife against her ribs, right below her bra. She gasped and her lips quivered.
“Okay, okay. There are two more outside. But they aren’t armed. I swear to God.”
“And where are the Townsend guys?”
She fought to keep from succumbing to panic. Court could see something else in her eyes. She had no idea how he knew about her, about Townsend. “I kept them from you. I . . . I saw you leave the rooming house this morning. Townsend was going to fuck it up, so I didn’t tell them where you went.”
He removed the knife pressing against her stomach, but she assumed it remained just inches away. She did not look down.
He leaned in close again, and he spoke just loudly enough to be heard over the music and the crowd. “Why are you working with the Americans to find me?”
“Because of Ehud Kalb.”
Court cocked his head. “What about him?”
She did not answer at first.
“What—about—him?”
“If you kill me you will never get out of here alive.”
“If you don’t answer me, neither will you.”
A tear dripped down her cheek, but she kept her chin up. “Did you meet with Quds Force operatives in Beirut on Wednesday?”
“Quds? Iranian Revolutionary Guard?”
She nodded.
“Lady, I’ve never met with Quds Force about anything, and I haven’t been to Beirut in years.” He added, “Beirut is fucking dangerous.”
He let go of her wrist now, reached across his body with his right hand, and hefted his beer, then took a drink. He appeared relaxed again, but she knew he was just trying to blend in with his surroundings, despite what was going on between the two of them.
She had not moved, so Gentry motioned to her drink. “Can you take a sip? Is your hand shaking?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Give it a try.”
She reached for her beer, took a small sip and started to put it down, but then brought it back to her mouth and chugged a healthy gulp.
“Your intel is wrong,” Court told her.
“I . . . I thought so, too. But our source is good.”
“Apparently, your source sucks,” Court said. “I am not after anyone, much less the PM of Israel. I just want to fade away.” He took another sip. “Leave me alone and I will.”
She hesitated. Then said, “There is—there is something else.”
He did not like the sound of this, and he let her know with his tone. “What?”
“They think you were in Nice.”
“Don’t I wish?” he quipped, and he brought his beer bottle back to his mouth. He asked, “When?” and took a long swig.
“Today.”
“Today?” He almost spit out his beer. “What the hell would I be doing in—”
“Assassinating Amir Zarini.”
“The director? He finally got smoked?”
She nodded. “This morning. They are saying you did it.”
“But you said you saw me this morning here in Stockholm.”
She nodded.
“Does the Mossad think I can teleport?”
“I can’t tell them I let you slip away this morning.”
“So you’ll stand by and watch them kill me?”
“Does this look like I’m standing by?”
“I don’t know what you are doing. You sure as shit aren’t here to pick me up.”
She said, “I came in here because I’m trying to decide what the fuck is going on. I’m trying to find some way to exonerate you, because I know you weren’t in Nice.”
He started to reply to this, but then he stopped, leaned close to her ear suddenly, and grabbed her wrist again, startling her. It startled her more when he spoke in the loudest voice of the conversation. “Back him the fuck up!”
Ruth looked to her left. Aron had closed to within ten feet.
She waved him away angrily, and he backed off a few steps.
She had no idea how Gentry knew what was going on behind his back. She said, “He thinks you’re going to hurt me.”
“I won’t unless I have to. To be honest, right now it’s looking iffy.”
“He’ll stand down.” She pointed at him again, then pointed back against the wall. Hamlin backed up farther with his hands up in supplication.
Still no one in the bar had noticed a thing.
She said, “Listen. I’ve read your file. I’ve seen our version, and . . . and the one from your country. Your agency file has a lot of holes in it. From the start this investigation didn’t feel right. I told them Kalb wasn’t a Gray Man target. They didn’t believe me.”
“You told who?”
“Carmichael, Babbitt, my people.”
“Carmichael,” he said thoughtfully. “That name seems to turn up when things get complicated.” He sipped his beer. “And they still think I was in Beirut?”
“Yeah.”
“And now Nice?”
“Yeah.”
Court just looked off into space a moment, then shook his head. She looked him over closely. He appeared tired, drawn. Defeated. But his eyes narrowed with resolve, as if the heavy thoughts had cleared away for just a moment. “All right. You are going to get your wish tonight.”
“What wish?”
“I’m going to buy you a drink.” His left hand appeared with a one-hundred-kronor bill, and he laid it on the bar between her glass of beer and his bottle. “Are you carrying a weapon?” he asked.
“I have Mace.”
He cocked his head. “Seriously? That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“If I check your purse and find a pistol I’m going to get really grouchy.”
“I don’t carry a gun.”
His eyebrows rose, but he did not respond. Next he said, “I am going to step away from the bar, and you are going to move with me. When I get to the door to the kitchen, I am going to separate from you and slip out. If you come after me, if any of your little helpers come after me, somebody is going to get hurt.” He stopped speaking, but she just looked at him in shock. “Nod your head if you believe what I am telling you.”
“I believe you.”
“All right, Ruth. I hope you will tell your leadership that I wasn’t involved with what happened in Nice.”
“They aren’t listening to me. They want you off the map, Gentry, and I’m not going to be able to change that.”
Court said, “Then I guess I’d better get moving.” He turned toward the kitchen access, and Ruth followed along with him.
“I see any Townsend cowboys or Mossad ninjas, I’m going to know you lied to me.”
“There aren’t any,” she said.
Without another word Court turned away, stepped behind the bar, and moved into the kitchen. The two bartenders did not even notice him pass.
Ruth put her hands out on the bar to steady herself, and Aron came up beside her. “You okay?”
She nodded distantly. After a few more seconds to compos
e herself, she headed for the front door and Aron followed.
Moments later, the four Mossad officers were back in Ruth’s room at the Gamla Stan Lodge. As Ruth took off her coat and did her best to calm her nerves with slow deep breaths, she had to endure a barrage of questions from her team that was peppered with none-too-subtle expressions of their opinions.
Laureen asked, “What the hell were you doing?”
“Having a drink with a knife held to my rib cage.”
“What did he say?” Mike asked.
“He knew about us. About Townsend. He said he doesn’t want to kill Kalb.”
“Sounds like what someone would say if they did want to kill Kalb.”
“Right, but it’s also what someone would say if they did not. I believe him.”
Mike said, “We can call Townsend, see if the UAV has located him.”
Laureen said, “Or maybe you two can just meet for drinks again tomorrow and we can pick him up then.”
Ruth wasn’t in the mood for the sarcasm, or to be lectured by her team. “It didn’t go down the way I planned it, no. But I believe the guy. He’s not after Kalb and he wasn’t in Nice. I’m not telling Townsend that there has been a sighting; they’ll just kill him.”
“So?” asked Mike. “What do we do?”
“I’m going to call Yanis, and probably hear more of the same from him that I just heard from you three.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Court walked quickly but calmly through Stockholm’s central train station, his hood up, his knit cap low, and his scarf high. It was almost midnight; the grand waiting hall of the station had at most a hundred people milling around in an area that could easily accommodate twenty times that number. And Gentry looked at each and every person as he walked along near the wall, because each and every person was a potential threat.
He knew he was also under surveillance by security cameras now, and although he was confident he could avoid any facial recognition pings due to his obscured face, he also was pretty sure anyone looking for him by this point would know what his coat looked like and what his backpack looked like and could therefore make a pretty good guess that the man trudging alone through the station was probably the same guy they’d been chasing through Stockholm.
There wasn’t a thing he could do about this; he knew he’d be seen and he knew assholes with guns would descend on the train station in minutes, but he hoped to be long gone by the time they got here.
But not on a train. Court wasn’t here to get on a train.
Not right now, anyway.
No, this was a surveillance detection run, albeit an SDR with a dual purpose.
His main purpose here at the train station was to survey the building, to find the security cameras and to evaluate the police presence. He had a plan to come back, and when he did, he wanted to move through the building as if invisible.
He passed a small police station there in the building; the officers behind the glass were in deep conversation and did not look his way.
Court then focused on the security cameras, his greatest hazard here in the building. He noted their number and position high on the walls in the main hall. He knew they would be there, and he could have guessed where they would be and how to avoid them without coming here tonight, but he needed to be thorough, and he was well aware that there would be other cams placed throughout the building he would have to avoid.
He saw two ATM machines near the food court on the main floor, and both of these would have security cams that looked out to a distance five yards or so across the floor. Both machines, conveniently for Gentry’s needs, were on the same side of the room. He also found a camera above a self-service food stand.
He detected twelve electric eyes in all, just here in the waiting hall, and each one, he assumed, was sending his face at this moment to a server somewhere, maybe in D.C., or Colorado or Silicon Valley, and there the bits and bytes that made up all the data points of his face would be run, automatically of course, because there were millions of faces going through the same process.
He descended an escalator and entered a brightly lit passage, and here he saw a camera high over a Burger King on his right. As he passed through a doorway leading to the unheated platform hallway, he saw another cam, but this one was down beyond the first platform, so he made a hard left and went up the stairs.
Up by the tracks he saw one camera on each platform, and he recognized the model of the unit and knew that although it contained a built-in panning motor that could be controlled by an operator, the lens itself only had a sixty-degree field of view, and he could avoid being captured by it if he moved along the left edge of the platform as he passed.
His entire survey of the central station took less than five minutes, and when he finished he walked far down a platform, past the high covered roof and into the darkness, and then he climbed down and began walking up the snow-covered tracks of a commuter line.
Twenty minutes later he’d climbed aboard a train that ran to a town twenty minutes outside Stockholm, and there he jumped a late-night bus that would take him a little farther still. As he rode he kept his face covered and his backpack on his lap, and he laid his face on it, knowing that he was as safe now as he could be.
For a few hours, anyway.
He considered staying outside the city for a day or two but quickly vetoed the idea. Even though the men and women watching for him would certainly be located in the capital, the crowds and clutter of the urban world were the safest place for Court to hide. If he wandered around a suburb or a village someplace he’d draw more attention, and if he accidentally tripped a security camera and his face brought gunmen down on the area, his escape and evasion options would be next to nil.
No, Court knew he could shoot out to the ’burbs for a few hours at most, but he had to get back into the city before he could slip away to the next big city.
Ruth Ettinger sat with her team in her hotel room, talking over their next move. She’d just gotten off the phone with her supervisor, Yanis Alvey, who was not pleased with her, to say the least. Although he neither yelled nor fumed—that was not his way—he made it clear he felt she’d shown incredibly poor judgment in engaging her target in conversation. He suggested it might be best for everyone if he replaced her and her team with a new set of targeters, but in the end he backed off.
Ruth won the argument, barely, although she made no ground in her insistence to Alvey that it was highly unlikely Gentry was involved in the Amir Zarini assassination. Not surprisingly, Gentry’s own words carried little weight with him.
He ordered her, in no uncertain terms, to stay as close to Gentry as possible so that when the Mossad technical surveillance team on the way from Tel Aviv arrived in the city early the next morning, they would have a target to begin tracking.
She acknowledged her superior without her normal borderline insubordinance, because she knew Mossad surveillance was exactly what this operation needed. If she could get a fifteen-person tech survey operation in place around Gentry, they would determine quickly that he was not planning any sort of attack on anyone, much less Ehud Kalb.
Ruth sat there quietly after the phone conversation, and for a moment she considered revealing to her team that she knew, without a doubt, that their target had not shot across the continent last night to perform a massacre at lunch, then shot back up to be seen at a 7-Eleven just after dinnertime. Again she decided to keep the information to herself. If she could not tell Yanis—and she was more certain now after her most recent conversation with him that she could not tell him—then it was not fair for her to bring her three employees into her deceit.
Aron brought her out of her moment of quiet consternation. “I feel like we need to get back out in the field. At least to cover the train station in case he tries to skip town.”
Ruth nodded. “I agree, but we need to keep it static. We start moving around the city in the middle of the night and I can guarantee you he will see us before we see him. Find a
stationary survey location in or near the central station, someplace where we are ironclad sure we won’t be compromised, and we’ll start a three-hour watch rotation.”
Aron had his coat zipped and his hood up within seconds. “I’ll take first watch.”
Mike grabbed the keys to the Skoda. “And I’ll drive car pool.”
Court spent the early morning hours riding a bus to Jakobsberg, a town southwest of Stockholm. There was nothing in Jakobsberg for him to see or do; as soon as he arrived he would climb aboard a bus that would return him to Stockholm.
There were only a half dozen other riders, but Court was alone in the back, bundled in his coat with his backpack on his lap. His phone sat on the backpack and his headphones were in his ears; he’d sat like this for a half hour because he was having a tough time psyching himself up to contact Dead Eye.
He knew he needed to make the call. Whitlock was his one connection to intelligence on the opposition, not just of Townsend but also of the Mossad team working with them. Whatever Russell Whitlock’s motives were for offering to help him, and whatever the reason behind the man’s seemingly obsessive curiosity about the event in the Ukraine three years earlier, Court knew the five minutes it would take him to give up details could easily mean the difference between life and death.
He called Whitlock’s number through MobileCrypt and tucked his head deeper into the hood of his coat, all but insulating himself from the world around him.
Whitlock had rented a BMW at the airport and then he took a room at the Grand Hotel in the city center. For the past two hours he’d sat waiting on the comfortable sofa in the sitting room of his junior suite. He was still dressed in his now somewhat wrinkled dark suit, his tie was loose and his collar was open. Next to him on the end table was a half-empty and tepid split of champagne from the mini bar, and a prescription bottle of Adderall. He hadn’t taken any pills, but he had them staged and ready so that he could swing into action at a moment’s notice.
His face wore a near catatonic expression. He was awake but despondent. Each minute Gentry didn’t call was another minute nearer to the failure of this operation. Russ occupied his brain with thoughts of killing the Gray Man; he’d come up with a dozen savage schemes to do just that, all because the son of a bitch wouldn’t play his role in Whitlock’s escapade and make contact. He also thought of ways to kill Ali Hussein. The fucking Iranians weren’t playing their role, either. As far as Whitlock was concerned, he’d pulled off the Zarini hit close enough to convince them he was the Gray Man; they were just splitting hairs with their ridiculous complaints about collateral damage. Their request for the one piece of proof that he had not been able to deliver them infuriated him and, he told himself, if this entire thing fell through, he would make his way back to Beirut and put a dagger into the eye of Ali Hussein.
