by Mark Greaney
Court answered his phone. “Hey.”
“You okay, brother?”
He spoke softly, although there was no one close by. “I saw the Mossad woman again this morning, but I think I got away from her. What do you hear from your friends?”
After a slight pause, Whitlock said, “I’m off the op.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m not getting intel from Townsend House at the moment.”
“Well, that sucks for me, doesn’t it?” Court growled. “I gave up Kiev and now you are saying you can’t help me? You don’t know if they are tailing me now?”
“Last I heard Jumper was looking for you at the bus terminal.”
Court nodded, pleased that the ruse had drawn any surveillance from the train station, but also aware that this misdirection would have expired the moment the bus to Gothenburg left the station without Gentry on board.
Whitlock added, “The Mossad did have static coverage on the train station.”
Court cocked his head. “What train station?”
“The train station where you caught the oh five fifty to Hamburg.”
Fuck. Court leapt out of his seat, grabbed his bag from the rack over him, and began walking to the back of the train. If he was under threat here on board, he would rather be at one end of the train or the other so he would not have to defend in both directions.
As he began moving, Russ said, “Settle down. Nobody at Townsend knows. Only me.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I saw you. I didn’t see which train you got on, but there were only four that left around the time you left, and three went either north or west. I figure you’d want to head south; you’ll want to ditch Scandinavia totally at this point with all the heat on you so you can get back on the Continent and melt away.” He added, “That’s what I’d do. So that’s what you’re doing.”
Court moved through the gangway between two cars, entered a dining car, and continued on toward the rear. “Why were you at the station?”
“I told you. Townsend is suspicious of me, and they’ve cut me out of the op.”
“So?”
“So . . . I had to find another way to help you out.”
Court felt a cold unease welling up inside him. Something about the tone of the man’s voice, something about the realization that Dead Eye had been watching him. Something about Court’s more than intimate knowledge of the training, skills, and abilities of a man with Dead Eye’s background, all led to this sense of foreboding.
He passed through the second-to-last car now and asked, “How, exactly, did you help me?”
The dread he felt in the answer manifested itself into bile burning in his stomach.
“That’s irrelevant, Violator. You’re clear, and that’s all you need to—”
In a harsh whisper Court barked, “What the hell did you do?”
Ruth had spent the last ten minutes in the bathroom in the back of the rear car disguising herself so she could move through the train to find Gentry. She had slipped on a short black wig and put on even more dramatic makeup than she’d been wearing the evening before when she’d been face-to-face with him at the bar. She put on tortoiseshell eyeglasses, the frames uncorrected, and they added a studious, almost mousy quality to her disguise.
She also removed her coat. She’d worn the reverse side this morning, switching it from black to gray, but she knew a man with Gentry’s training would have probably noticed this feature to her coat, and he’d be on the lookout for both colors.
Finding Court on board without him seeing her would be a difficult task. Both the first– and second-class cars were divided with half the seats facing one way and the other half facing the other, with the dividing line in the center of the car. This meant each time she stepped into a new carriage there existed a fifty-fifty chance Gentry would be facing her direction, although if he were it would also mean he was at least forty feet away.
She put her hand on the door lever from the gangway to the first carriage and looked up through the glass, and there, on the far end of the car, Gentry approached, a mobile phone in his hand. He wore a black thermal undershirt and blue jeans, with his backpack slung over his shoulder and his coat lashed to it.
Ruth spun away, hoping like hell he either did not see her at all or only saw her short black hair and movement through the Plexiglas doorway.
She quickly stepped back into the bathroom, shut the door behind her, and locked it.
Just then, outside the door to the bathroom, she heard the unmistakable sound of the carriage door opening and closing. A moment later she heard the low mumbling of a male voice, and although she could not make out a word of it, she could tell Gentry was standing in the gangway, right outside her door, talking on his phone.
She fought a wave of panic. The man who had just killed Mike Dillman stood feet from her now. She did not think he knew she was in here—it seemed unlikely he would continue on with his call if he did—but she worried he would stand there for some time, see the OCCUPIED sign on the door, and begin to wonder why the person inside did not leave.
She reached into her purse for her Mace, although she had no real belief that she could incapacitate the legendary Gray Man with an aerosol spray.
Gentry leaned against the wall in the gangway of the rear train car, keeping his eyes on the passenger carriage in front of him in case any threats approached. He kept his voice down because someone was in the bathroom next to him.
“I’m not going to ask you again. What happened in Stockholm?”
Russ had been cagey, but with a long sigh he relented. “It was Mossad, dude. They weren’t going to let you just hop on a train and roll out of there.”
“And?”
“And there was one guy between you and freedom.” A short pause. “I neutralized him.”
“Killed him?”
“Only way, Court. I know that probably violates your weird moral code and fragile sensibilities, but he was as big a threat to you, more of a threat to you, in fact, than any of the Townsend guys or the Sidorenko guys you killed last week.”
Court slammed the back of his head against the wall of the train car in frustration.
“You murdered an Israeli intelligence officer? You stupid fuck!”
“Watch your tone, Violator! I saved your life. Just like I did in Tallinn. You should be kissing my ass for all I’ve done for you.”
Court understood now. Not everything, but enough. Russ wanted Gentry alive, because Russ needed Gentry alive. “This is about Kalb, isn’t it?” There was no answer, and Gentry banged the back of his head against the wall again. “It’s you. You’re the one after Kalb.”
After a short pause, Russ’s voice darkened as he replied, “I guess you and your Jew girlfriend had quite a conversation last night.”
“That was you in Nice, wasn’t it? You smoked Amir Zarini.”
“It wasn’t me, Court. Ask around. Ask anyone.” He laughed, then said, “It was you.”
“That was your plan?”
With a little chuckle he said, “Affirmative.”
“Why?”
“Think about it, genius.”
Court did, and it did not take long. “You want to kill Kalb. You needed my name to get the contract. And then to survive after the fact, you need me to take the fall.”
Russ said, “I thought I had myself a bulletproof plan. But it only works as long as you remain alive. Frankly, Violator, you have been the weak link in this whole thing. I guess I shouldn’t have believed all the hype about you. You’ve got the shakes, you’re talking about retirement, there are so many people following you right now it must look like you’re leading a Mardi Gras parade down the motherfucking street. The Gray Man legend is a goddamned joke.”
“What’s keeping me from calling the CIA, or Mossad, or Townsend, and telling them about this plot of yours?”
“Go ahead. I’m still going to get to Kalb, so you won’t prevent that. Sure,
CIA might take me off their Christmas card list, but it’s not going to help your situation with them. Mossad won’t believe you; I’ve planted too many trackbacks to you, to where you can’t just call them up and say you’re an innocent bystander. And Townsend will be pissed, but they get paid to kill you, not me, so they’re still coming at you with everything they have.”
“Is all this just about money?”
Russ laughed out loud. “Ha! That’s pretty funny, coming from the most infamous killer-for-hire on the planet. Of course it’s about money.”
Court did not believe him. There was something more. There had to be. This guy was unstable. “How did you slip through the cracks? How did you make it through the AADP and into active duty with the agency? Did the standards drop after I went through?”
“What do you mean?”
“They had me take a bunch of tests to make sure I was mentally competent. I passed them all.”
“I took the same tests.”
“So how did you get recruited?”
Russ took his time responding. Court looked out the window. The morning had brightened to a gray day, revealing a frozen landscape of forest zooming by at 125 miles per hour. Finally Russ said, “In the Corps I spent two years in Iraq, had the fortune of being involved in twenty-two combat engagements. Fallujah, Sadr City. All the fun spots.
“Then it was Afghanistan. My company had more than five hundred contacts in eleven months. I was wounded twice, but I dished out a hell of a lot of death to the enemy.
“Then one day they pulled me back to J-Bad, then back to the States. They told me I was such a badass they were looking at me for SOF.”
“SOF?”
“Special Operations Forces.”
“I know what that means, dickhead. Didn’t they give you a psych eval?”
“Yes, they did.”
Court looked past the bathroom to the window on the door to the train. Snow-covered hills rolled past in a blur. “Let me guess the next part. Your psych eval was . . . questionable.”
“Negative, it was not questionable in the least. As a matter of fact, it answered their questions nicely. The tests determined I was—”
“A sociopath?”
“Wrong again.”
Court closed his eyes. Jesus. “You are a psychopath, aren’t you?”
The delay in Whitlock’s response told Court he’d hit the nail on the head. Finally Russ said, “I tried to argue that it was nurture, not nature. Twenty-four months in the sandbox followed by a year at a FOB in Kunar Province can skew a psych eval if it’s not taking into account the realities I had to face—each and every fucking day it was kill or be killed.”
“But the shrinks wouldn’t listen to your explanation.”
“They are paid to talk, not to listen to some jarhead just back from Asscrackistan.”
“So no SOF for you.”
“No SOF for me.”
Court watched the frozen landscape pass by, his mind on his own past with the CIA. He knew the next chapter of Whitlock’s story as if it had happened to himself. Court said, “And then the CIA dropped in. Patted you on the head and said they understood.”
“Of course they did. There were still tests to take, and I took them, but for a sharp tack like me, with a little forewarning about what was expected, gaming the tests was no big deal. There were the agency shrink interviews, but there again, I was smarter than any of those fucks evaluating me. A smart enough psychopath can easily appear only sociopathic with a little effort. Then the CIA recruiters sat me down. I’m sure you got the same spiel. They said, ‘We can make your life amount to something, but once you say yes, you belong to us.’”
Court remembered the moment it happened to him. He’d been pulled out of prison in Florida, facing a life sentence for shooting three Colombian enforcers. He was driven to a nice home in Kendall—a CIA safe house, he later determined—and run through days of meetings and tests. Push and pull. They made him feel like Superman, and then they made him feel like shit on their shoes. It was recruitment and assessment at the same time.
“But they let you in even though they thought you were sociopathic?”
Russ paused again before saying, “Court, I hate to break it to you . . . That was a prerequisite.”
“It was a prerequisite to be nuts?” Gentry shook his head in disbelief. “When did that change?”
“It didn’t.”
Russ was right. Court did not understand.
“Are you fucking blind, Court? We were all picked for AADP because the shrinks determined we were the right psychological fit. Remorseless loners.”
“That’s . . . that’s not true. I’m not a sociopath.”
“You’re a borderline sociopath. It’s in your unredacted file. Give me your address, I’ll send you a copy.”
Softly Gentry said, “I’m not.”
“That’s what the Autonomous Asset Program was all about. Taking misfits with nothing to lose, young men with the physical and psychological raw materials to make efficient killing machines, then building them and training them and programming them to follow orders, and finally sending them out into the world like goddamned robots to melt into foreign lands and do the dirty work without questioning the orders or building relationships or associations of a personal nature.”
“That’s not me. I’m not crazy.”
Russ laughed. “Sure, Court. You are the one Tootsie Roll in the box of turds, right? How many people have you killed over the years? Think about that. Does that sound like the life of a well-adjusted individual?”
“Fuck you, Whitlock. I do what I do because I have to.”
“Bullshit, Court. You could have escaped after the shoot-on-sight and disappeared anywhere in the world. You could have left the game, but you didn’t want to drive a taxi or gut fish. You wanted to kill people. Just because you justify your bloodlust by only targeting bad guys is irrelevant. You do that to make yourself feel better, not because you are some kind of hero. Trust me, if you run out of bad guys, the goal posts will just move, and you’ll start killing people who are more and more marginal.”
Gentry wanted to write off Whitlock’s assertions as nothing more than the fantasies of a maniac, but the truth was, Russ seemed like he knew what he was talking about.
Court said, “You’ve wanted me to stay in touch with you. Why?”
“You don’t like our little chitchats?”
“You are stringing me along. Trying to get me to join you. This isn’t just about framing me. You need me for something. For what, I don’t know.”
“I don’t need you,” Russ said, but Court could hear consternation in his voice.
Gentry said, “I’m not going to play into your plan. I am hanging up now, and I’m tossing this phone.”
Quickly, Whitlock said, “No! I can still help you.”
“How?”
“I’m going to blame the Kalb hit on you, but how is that really going to affect your day? One more country is after you? Big deal. Once you lose those people on you now, then you’ll be fine. Go back to South America, or Southeast Asia, or try the outback. Go off grid and stay off grid. When I’m done with my op, say three or four weeks from now, I’ll contact you again, and I’ll give you all the information on the shoot-on-sight sanction CIA put on you five years ago. I owe you that.” He laughed into the phone. “You are, after all, helping me make twenty-five mill, even if it is unwittingly.”
Court shook his head. “I’m done with you.”
“Court. Listen to me. You need to think very carefully—”
“You aren’t controlling me, Dead Eye. I am starting to wonder if you can even control yourself.”
Court disconnected the call and took the battery out of the phone. He put both pieces in his backpack and planned on destroying the phone when he got off the train and found a quiet place to do so.
He slung his backpack and coat back over his shoulder and left the rear cabin. The train would be in Copenhagen soon, and then it wo
uld cross the Baltic Sea on a ferry and roll on to Hamburg.
Court wanted to remain on board for the entire journey, but he needed to keep an eye out for any of the rapidly expanding number of threats against him.
FORTY-FOUR
Ten minutes after she left the bathroom, Ruth Ettinger found Gentry in the fourth car from the end of the train. She saw only the back of his head, but she recognized his nondescript black coat and the nondescript black backpack in the rack above him. Even though she felt like her disguise was as good as she could possibly make it, she knew she benefited from the fact that her target was seated facing away from her.
He sat alone, looking out the window at the foggy morning whipping by at high speed, and although he did not seem to be particularly on guard, she turned out of the carriage after a few seconds and returned to her seat in first class.
For the first time in her career she wished she carried a firearm. She had no doubt in her mind that if she had a gun in her purse she would pull it out right now, walk down the aisle of the train car, and empty it into the Gray Man’s body as she drew level with him.
But she did not have a gun, and now she did not even have targeting responsibility for a unit of Metsada Special Operations officers. She felt helpless without the power to call in a crew of shooters, knowing that a dangerous threat sat just yards away.
A few minutes later the train made a stop in Hässleholm. As she had done at each stop, she made her way to the door at the rear of the train and leaned out, keeping her eyes up the cars in case Gentry disembarked. By now she expected him to travel all the way to Malmö at least, and perhaps even on to Copenhagen, so she was surprised when she saw him climb off the train four cars up, his coat on and his pack on his back.
She ran back to her seat, grabbed her things from the rack above it, and then followed Gentry off the train into a pelting shower of sleet.
Ruth moved behind a small group of pensioners walking along the track toward the central station, craning her head over them to keep Gentry in her sights. She lost him for a moment but picked him out as he walked up the platform toward an intercity train parked under the covered tracks closer to the station.
