by Mark Greaney
Mike tried to scream, to shout for help, but he had no open airway with which to do so. His legs kicked out, left and right, frantically trying to make some noise, but his attacker swung him to the right and then the left, counteracting his attempts by rolling him onto one hip or the other.
The passerby walked in front of Mike, but he was completely unaware of what was happening in the darkness of the hall by the service elevator.
Mike tried to call out again, but he could make no sound other than a single low wheeze of air, and when he did this the garrote cinched even tighter around his neck.
As his vision narrowed, as his mind dulled and hazed and as his panic-stricken heart went from a furious pounding beat to arrhythmia and then arrest, he saw now.
He did not understand, but he saw.
The man passing in front of him was Courtland Gentry.
FORTY-TWO
Russ held the garrote around the dead man’s neck for longer than necessary, but he was winded, and the pain in his hip was excruciating. He dreaded rolling back up, climbing to his knees, and then standing, so he just lay there, the dead man on top of him.
This one had been a fighter. Deceptively strong.
Still, he was dead, Court had passed by without knowing what was happening in the dark, and by now he would be on the escalator back up to the platform access level.
He’d told Gentry he wouldn’t lay a hand on the Mossad, but just like in Nice, Russ had decided the tactical situation required a small adjustment to his initial plans. He was out of the loop with Townsend now, he couldn’t obtain any intel from them about their own actions, much less the actions of the Mossad, so Whitlock decided to improvise to help Gentry get out of the city.
With any luck Court would be on a train and out of Stockholm in minutes, free of the surveillance that had been on him here, and Russ’s operation would be back on track.
Russ struggled to his feet; he slipped the bloody garrote back into his coat pocket, and then he wiped his hands on his pants.
That was when he felt the blood on his hip.
Dammit. It wasn’t the dead man’s blood; no, it was his own. His gunshot wound had ripped open again.
Russ was done, for now. He couldn’t provide any more help for Gentry without running the risk of being compromised, stumbling along through a crowd with a growing bloodstain running down his leg.
No, he needed to get out of here now.
He limped into the service elevator and headed back upstairs.
Ruth moved slowly through the brightly lit passageway; her eyes remained locked as far ahead as she could see, searching for any glimpse of her target.
Mike had not transmitted in over a minute. He’d gone silent after claiming to have eyes on a possible subject. It was common during close survey ops to interrupt transmissions for OPSEC, so Ruth thought nothing of the delay in his reply.
But as she walked down the passage, she arrived at the point where it opened at the northern tip of the bottom level of the train station, and she still had neither seen nor heard from Dillman. Here in the station she noticed a taped-off area of construction to her right, and back there, in the dark, she saw the service elevator, but she did not see her man.
She stopped walking. “Mike?” she said softly into her earpiece. “I told you static survey only. If you are in foot-follow on the target, I need you to back off.”
There was no response.
“Mike, if you can’t transmit, can you at least tap your earpiece?”
She expected to hear a scratchy set of thumps indicating Dillman was tapping his Bluetooth microphone, but again, she heard nothing.
Aron had been listening in. He tried to raise his teammate. “Dillman, Ruth is trying to establish comms with you. Are you receiving?”
By now Ruth was concerned. She stepped over the caution tape and into the darkened closed-off area. “Mike, I want you to break off survey and communicate right now.”
Laureen came over the net from her position upstairs. “I’ve got eyes on target, say again, eyes on. Gentry is at platform level; I’m watching him from the mezzanine.”
“Is Mike tailing him?” Ruth asked.
“Negative. I don’t see him.”
Aron said, “I’m en route to the station.”
Ruth arrived at the service elevator, then pushed the button to call the car, thinking perhaps she’d lost comms with her junior officer because of poor mobile coverage.
But as she waited to go up to the main hall, she looked around, saw the construction materials, saw the Dumpster along the wall, and she saw a pair of boots sticking out from behind it.
For an instant she thought it might have been a homeless person sleeping in the station. There were homeless all over Europe, after all. But something about the way the boots were positioned, facing up, made her grab her flashlight from her purse and snap it on.
She recognized the boots now. A small gasp came from her lungs and then she ran forward, moved around the Dumpster, and found Mike Dillman. Her light reflected off his open glassy eyes and the glistening blood around his neck. She dropped to the floor and began checking him.
In her earpiece she heard Laureen. “The subject is at platform twelve, say again, one two.”
Aron said, “Ruth, you want me with you or on the target?”
Ruth did not respond. Tears welled in her eyes and she stifled a cry as she began checking Dillman’s vital signs.
“Ruth? Respond, please.”
But Ruth did not respond. She did not make a sound. She sat down on the floor slowly, avoiding a wide smear of blood next to Mike’s body, and she put her face in her hands.
There was no question in her mind as to what had happened. Gentry had come across Mike and somehow killed him so he could get away clean. She did not understand it; it went counter to every piece of psychological and historical data she’d collected on her target in the past days, but there was no doubt. What other explanation could there possibly be?
She had been wrong. Gentry was a threat, a threat to her PM, a threat to her own personnel.
Her mind seemed to slow, to regain its ability to calculate, and she realized that she could not tell her two other team members. Not yet. They had to stay on mission, they had to track Gentry out of town; if she told them that Mike was lying here, faceup, dead next to a pile of garbage, they would lose all mission focus.
Aron called over the net. “Ruth?”
She reached into his coat and took his wallet, then pulled his phone. She found his earpiece on the floor, and she picked it up and pocketed it with the other items.
Laureen transmitted now, concern in her voice. “Ruth? Mike?”
Ruth hated herself right now; she detested whatever cold, calculating recess of her brain allowed her to fight off all emotions and to stay on mission.
Aron said, “Ruth, I’m heading downstairs. There in two minutes.”
She could grieve later, yes, but she already knew she would only hate herself more later, when she reflected back on what she had done.
She fought to deliver the next transmission cleanly and without any hint as to the horror she felt right now. “Negative. Stay on the target. I’m coming up.”
“What about Mike?”
She closed her eyes and tears streamed down her face. She bit her lip hard, lifted her chin, and said, “Mike’s comms are down. I’m sending him back to the car to get another headset.”
“Roger that,” said Aron. “Heading to platform twelve.”
Ruth left Mike’s body behind, then began rushing to the escalator that led up to the platform level of the station.
Platform twelve was crowded with passengers due to the fact that long twelve-car international-bound trains were parked on both sides.
Ruth had just climbed the stairs to the platform when Laureen came over the net. She had been watching the target from the mezzanine above and behind Ruth’s position.
“Gentry is on the train on platform twelve-A. I’m checking the board u
p here. It’s headed to Oslo, and it is leaving immediately.”
“Aron, where are you?” Ruth asked, her voice not as commanding as normal, though she hoped with the adrenaline rush of the close foot pursuit, her two junior officers would not detect anything amiss.
“I’m boarding the train now, front car,” Aron said. He was fifty yards ahead of her, and she began pushing to get herself to the train before it left the station. “Are you on board?” he asked.
“Negative. Thirty seconds.”
A conductor blew a whistle at the front of the train.
“You’d better hurry,” Aron said.
Mercifully, a lane formed in the crowd in front of her and she rushed forward, squinting in the vapor of a hundred mouths breathing frozen air, trying to keep her forward progress going before the doors closed and the train took off for Oslo.
Just then she saw a man wearing a dark coat and carrying a backpack climb off the second to last car of the Oslo-bound train. His hood was up and she could not see his face, but she thought it might have been Gentry. He crossed the platform quickly and stepped aboard an SJ express train facing in the other direction.
Ruth stopped in her tracks. “Is that him?” she said into her mic. “Laureen? Did he get off the train?”
“No,” came the reply. And then, “I don’t know, I didn’t see anyone leave, but there are a dozen cars and a ton of people.”
The electronic sign over the platform next to the second train said HAMBURG and the departure time was imminent. The conductor at the far end of the train blew his handheld whistle. “Shit!” Ruth said, unsure which train to climb aboard.
Ruth had no time to make a decision. The doors closed on the Oslo train and it began moving slowly away. She wasn’t getting on that one. It was either stay here in Stockholm or take a chance that her target was on the Hamburg train.
She leapt aboard the last car of the SJ express train. Within seconds this train began to move as well.
She stayed where she was in the rear of the train in a first-class car, her eyes fixed on the door ahead that led to the gangway connection between the cars. If she saw any movement in the gangway she was ready to shoot up and head to the restroom in the rear of her car.
She sat quietly for a few minutes while she waited for Aron to slowly and carefully walk the length of the Oslo-bound train. While she waited, she gazed out to the blackness of the early morning, and she thought of finding Mike, stripping him of anything that could identify him or indicate what kind of work he was doing, and then leaving him there. She thought of her mission, a mission in which she had already failed by getting one of her men killed because of her assuredness that her target posed no threat.
It wasn’t assuredness, she told herself now. It was incompetence.
She thought of Rome.
She’d come out of Rome smelling like a rose; the Mossad commended her actions for trying to warn operations that the surveillance wasn’t complete, but she had always known she had not deserved to walk away with her career intact. She could easily think back to the times when she could have forcefully spoken up and stopped the Metsada hit that killed the innocent civilians. Not an e-mail to her superior in Tel Aviv saying she wanted more time to build the target pictures. But a full-throated protest of the impending attack. Screaming across departments and disciplines, standing in the way of the kill/capture unit, even tipping off the occupants of the house and giving them time to flee.
But she had not done any of that, for one simple reason.
She wanted the hit. Yes, she could prove otherwise after the fact with her e-mail, but she’d only thrown up a caution flag because she was trying to protect the Metsada men. To make sure no one else inside was armed or a threat.
She never thought for one moment her target was anything other than guilty as sin. She wanted him dead, and she did not give a damn if his friends in the house died with him. Even though she hadn’t had time to ID them, she felt sure that their association with him made them guilty as well.
She had no idea an innocent family was inside the house, but that did not exonerate her in her eyes. It was her job to know.
She’d gotten away scot-free because her e-mail had been worded vaguely enough to vindicate her. On top of this, she felt that the investigating committee in the Knesset wanted to find one shining light in the entire mess, and they latched on to the uplifting narrative of a young female officer who spoke truth to power and did her best to save lives, and help the tarnished image of her organization.
She’d always known she was one half-assed bitching e-mail away from the same fate as all the others involved in the Rome catastrophe.
And now this. Mother of God. Now this?
She put her head in her hands.
“I’m so sorry, Mike.”
It took Aron fifteen minutes to slowly and carefully search the train. When he was finished he came over the net. “Ruth, I think he’s with you. I can’t find him on board.”
Ruth stood from her seat, unsure if she should try to find Gentry. No. She sat back down. That was too chancy. She would sit here and monitor the stops to see if he disembarked. She picked up a route brochure in the pocket of her chair and looked it over. She fought to calm her voice again. It took considerable effort to do so. “Understood. We’ll hit Copenhagen at eleven ten A.M. Get on a plane; I want you guys there waiting for us when we arrive. If he gets off before Copenhagen, we’ll adjust.”
“Roger that,” said Aron.
“Understood,” said Laureen.
Several seconds later Aron said, “Mike, you hearing us?”
Aron waited patiently for a response.
Ruth sat in her seat in the rear car of the train. She had the row to herself, but directly in front of her a man sat facing her, reading a newspaper.
Ruth put her hands on her knees, felt a quiver in her body. Acid in her stomach surging up into her chest. Slight at first, but growing.
Laureen came over the net. “Something is going on here at the station. I’ve got sirens. An ambulance and several police cars just pulled up.”
Aron called now. “Ruth. Can you raise Mike?” She heard alarm in his voice.
And then, almost suddenly, it became too much.
Ruth Ettinger lost it.
She launched out of her seat, turned to the rear of the car, and rushed through the door to the tiny gangway. She slammed the bathroom door shut and vomited into the sink.
Tears flowed along with the vomit, and her sobs continued long after.
Twenty minutes later, Ruth Ettinger stood outside the bathroom in the gangway section at the back of the train, her phone to her ear, her face red from crying, and the hood on her coat up in an attempt to cover her emotions to anyone who might come back here to use the restroom.
On the other end of the line was Yanis Alvey. She had told him everything. She had told him about finding Mike, about lying to her two subordinates, but that was not all. She revealed to him that she had seen Gentry the morning before and had purposefully let him slip away from the Townsend kill team.
She put up little defense of herself. She muttered something about not wanting a massacre at the hands of Beaumont and his Jumper team, but she could have argued her point more vigorously.
Her self-loathing did not allow it. This was not going to be Rome all over. She would not snake her way out of the blame.
When she had nothing left to say, when the crying had stopped, Yanis spoke gently yet forcefully. “Ruth. It’s over. You are being recalled, and you will be replaced. I will notify Metsada that their target is on the train and I will green-light a kill/capture operation.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I just want you to sit there until the next stop, then get off, and we’ll send someone to pick you up. I’m heading to Copenhagen, leaving within the hour. I’ll meet with you there and I will put you on a flight back to Tel Aviv.”
Ruth nodded at the phone. “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”
�
��I’m sorry, too,” he said. Then, “I’m sorry for Mike.”
He hung up.
She took her earpiece out of her ear and slipped it in her purse, then turned off her phone and put that in as well. She headed back into the bathroom to wash her face.
Rome had clouded her judgment. Since the day the family was gunned down by the Metsada operatives in Italy, Yanis had told her he worried about her being back in the field, and she had scoffed at his concerns.
But he was right, and she was wrong. Rome had ruined her.
She was off the Gentry operation. She could accept this; she had no choice. And Yanis clearly had no choice in recalling her.
But with the realization that she was done came the knowledge that she now had no masters. No one to report to.
Nothing to lose.
Somewhere ahead of her on the train was the man who had murdered her colleague. He was still free, and whether or not Townsend killers were en route, she knew Gentry had overcome Townsend men before and escaped to kill again.
Ruth decided she would not leave the surveillance to them. The takedown? Of course, as much as she would like to wrap her own hands around his throat and choke the life from him, she knew that would not happen. When Beaumont and his men got here, she would get out of the way.
But until then, she wasn’t getting off this damn train until Court Gentry did.
FORTY-THREE
Court sat in the fourth car on the train, a second-class coach only half full with passengers. He’d boarded without a ticket, but that was not uncommon in Sweden. He purchased a full-fare ticket when the conductor passed, telling the woman in German that his final destination would be Hamburg.
He had no idea if he would stay on the train all the way to its terminus; he’d feel out the situation as the day went on, but he was hoping to put as many miles as possible between Stockholm and himself.
As he sat with his head against the window and his hood up, his phone began vibrating in his backpack in the rack above his head. He stood up and dug it out, and decided to answer it in case Whitlock had intel about the hunt for him.
