by Mark Greaney
On the fifth-floor rooftop of an office building directly on the opposite side of the Dambovita River from Lipscani, a man lay prone behind a Knight’s Armament SR-25 sniper rifle. He peered through his weapon’s optics, centering his crosshairs on the back of a man’s head, just visible through sheer silk curtains, two hundred twenty meters away.
The sniper’s nine-power scope showed him everything he needed to see. In a fifth-floor luxury apartment on Splaiul Independentei, the heavyset man, well into his sixties, stood in his bedroom in his underwear and socks, slowly and ceremoniously undressing a much younger woman, a girl, really, who stood obediently in front of the bed, her eyes fixed to a point somewhere out the window.
The sniper’s target was supposed to be alone, but either the target or his security detail had ordered a teenaged prostitute, and she was throwing a wrench into the sniper’s plan.
This was not optimal, the man behind the SR-25 concluded.
The girl would see the muzzle flash, and the girl would point to the rooftop upon which the sniper had set up his hide, and the target’s security would run to the window, scanning for the sniper, and then they would rush down to the streets, cutting off the sniper’s escape.
They would call the police, as well, and roadblocks would be set up and patrol cars would start pulling over anyone driving around at four in the morning.
The sniper wanted to wait until the girl turned away, but his target was taking his sweet time, and the sniper knew that at any moment, the man’s bodyguards in the next room might come to the window there and gaze out, putting even more eyes on his position.
No, this hit was not optimal. Not optimal at all.
But it was doable.
The sniper decided to proceed. He would send a round into the back of his target’s head.
And then he would shoot the hooker.
Quickly the sniper scanned the bedroom, determining where the girl would go after her john’s brains blew all over her naked body. Most likely, he decided, she would just stand there in shock, giving the sniper plenty of time to line up a second 220-meter shot with his semiautomatic rifle. He’d need no more than a second for this, and he expected the girl would not process the danger in so little time.
But if she did drop to the ground, or move left or right, the sniper saw that she had no cover that would protect her from a .556 copper-jacketed bullet.
The girl was not his target, but killing the girl was necessary for a smooth egress from the target area, so he gave it no more thought.
Satisfied that he had prepared for any eventuality, the sniper recentered the crosshairs on the back of the man’s head, thumbed the safety off his rifle, then placed his finger on the trigger. He slowed his breathing, even exerted control over the beating of his heart by consciously relaxing his blood pressure.
A beep in his left ear caused the sniper to blow out the air in his lungs in a soft sigh. He allowed himself a moment to regain his normal breath; his fingertip left the trigger and rested on the trigger guard, and his left hand moved out from under the weapon. He touched the button on his Bluetooth earpiece.
Softly he said, “Go.”
“This is Metronome.”
“Bad timing,” the sniper muttered. And then, “Say iden, Metronome.”
“Two, seven, seven, four, nine, two, four, three, eight.”
“Iden confirmed. This is Dead Eye.”
“Say iden, Dead Eye.”
“Four, eight, one, oh, six, oh, five, two, oh.”
After a quick pause on the other end, the man on the roof heard, “Good evening, Whitlock.”
“It might be evening where you are, Parks, but it’s four A.M. here.”
There was no response to this. Instead Parks said, “Execute immediate stand down. We need to get you moving to the airport.”
The man prone on the rooftop kept his eye in the glass a moment more; he watched the man kneel down and begin pulling off the girl’s panties. But the sniper did not continue to watch. Why should he? His mission was over. He rolled away from the gun, crawled back a few feet, and dragged the weapon back to him by the butt stock. He closed the bipod, unloaded the rifle, and began dismantling it. While he did this, executed with efficiency gained from many years of practice, he said, “Only one reason you would pull me right now.”
As a confirmation Parks said, “The primary target has been located.”
The sniper smiled, but his smile did not carry over into the tenor of his voice. He kept it clipped and professional. “At Sid’s palace in Rochino.”
“Affirmative.” A pause. “You were right, Whitlock.”
Whitlock continued breaking down his weapon as he said, “Of course I was right. You have real-time viz?”
“He is inside the main house now. We’ll have eyes on via the ScanEagle when he comes out.”
“Understood. Is the audio equipment picking up anything?”
“Quiet as a tomb.”
The sniper was pleased for many reasons. He opened a black Pelican case and placed the disassembled rifle in it. He kept his voice soft, though he was alone on the rooftop and the offices below him were vacant. “Expect that to change. He won’t get out of there without it going loud.”
Parks said, “We are moving you to St. Petersburg this morning. Get to the airport; we’ll have the plane prepped and ready by the time you arrive.”
Quickly Dead Eye entered the stairwell and began descending swiftly and silently in the dark, a penlight in his left hand leading the way forward and his Pelican case in his right. “Why would I go to St. Petersburg? Gentry isn’t going to St. Petersburg.”
“Probably not, but we need to get you into the area. St. Petersburg is closest. We can update the flight plan while you are in the air if we track him somewhere else.”
“Is Jumper on alert?”
“Negative. Trestle is the alert team. They are in St. Pete. Heading to the X now. Jumper will come up from Berlin, if necessary, to back them up.”
“Bad idea, Parks. Both strike teams need to stay out of sight until Gentry goes to ground after the operation. Keep the ScanEagle overhead and lead me into his path; I will surveil and then set up the strikers once I’m on station.”
Parks replied dismissively. “I will pass on your thoughts to Babbitt. For now, Russ, just get moving. Graveside out.”
Russell “Dead Eye” Whitlock tapped his earpiece and continued down the stairs. He was disappointed about his mission tonight. He’d been working on this Bucharest op for weeks. In theory he could have gone ahead, shot the target and then shot the girl, and in so doing achieve his objective here in Romania, but this would have slowed his ability to get out of town quickly and cleanly, and that was paramount.
Court Gentry was one hundred times more important than this Muslim Brotherhood terrorist. Moreover, someone else from Townsend Government Services would show up here, in a few days or in a few weeks, to finish the job.
It did not matter to Dead Eye. He was a prideful man, but in his eyes, he’d long since outgrown ops like tonight. To him there was no real challenge in this hit, which meant there was no real pride in this hit. A two-hundred-twenty-meter shot through window glass into the heads of an unsuspecting tango and his teenaged hooker.
So fucking what?
Dead Eye was out for big game.
Hard targets.
And very soon it would be time to go after the hardest target on earth.
On the ground floor of the darkened office building he passed a security guard sprawled on the floor, arms and legs askew, his eyes wide open in death. Dead Eye shined his penlight over the body quickly as he headed for the exit and saw the rich bruising around the neck, a single band of color from a garrote’s bite.
Dead Eye regarded the wound as he passed, acknowledging a job well done. The guard never saw him coming.
&n
bsp; But as he reached the lobby door, he allowed himself no more time to think of tonight’s action. There was much work to do in the days ahead, and he needed to focus all his attention on his new mission.
Back on the street now, Russ Whitlock climbed into his BMW after tossing his Pelican case in the trunk. He drove off through the cool, dry morning, heading toward Borg El Arab airport. There would be a Townsend jet there ready to take him to St. Petersburg.
But Dead Eye would not be boarding the airplane. He would, instead, take a domestic flight to Berlin, and from there he’d catch a second plane heading north. Lee Babbitt and Jeff Parks and the other Townsend suits would be pissed, but Dead Eye did not give a damn.
Russ Whitlock, like his primary target, Court Gentry, was a singleton asset, and singletons did things their way.
FIVE
Gregor Ivanovic Sidorenko sat at his desk, hard at work, even now at four in the morning. He was a night owl, partly due to natural tendencies and partly due to the large quantities of barbiturates he took for his various physical maladies, all of which—both the maladies and the pills to combat them—affected his mood and sleep patterns. He often did not go to bed until after breakfast, and then he remained there through most of the daylight hours.
Behind his back, the young skinheads who worked for him called him vampir, “vampire,” a moniker that also took into account his pasty white skin and sunken dark eyes.
Sid’s office here at his Rochino palace was a large open room with wooden flooring and high ceilings of smooth plaster. The bare floor looked like it would be more suitable for dance parties than mob business. It was half the size of a basketball court and had the acoustics to match, but Sid liked the regal feel of large open spaces. The echoes of the room were only partially muted by bloodred curtains on the wall to his right, and a large crackling fireplace on his left kept his end of the room not warm, but bearable.
Sid’s massive desk was centered at the back wall, facing the door to the hallway across the room. Another door was behind him, and this led to his sleeping chambers.
A large incense burner was perched on the desk near his laptop computer. These items, along with a telephone and a cup of tea, sat amid reams of paper, and Sid read through page after page of the document pile with only the light of the fireplace and the ambient glow of his laptop.
A portrait of Joseph Stalin hung from the wall behind his desk; the dark eyes of Uncle Joe seemed to look over Sid’s shoulder while he worked.
And Sid had been working since early evening. Though his home had been the site of a party tonight, Sid had not even gone downstairs; instead he took his meal here at his desk. The skinheads—he didn’t call them that, he called them “his boys”—threw their wild celebrations on the first floor and outside in the snow; they brought girls and booze and often a little coke, and they had a hell of a time, but Sid did not partake. He wasn’t like them, and they weren’t like him.
That was not to say he was bothered by the festivities. Much to the contrary, his boys could party at his place every night as far as he was concerned. He liked the fact that some fifty or sixty feared and loathed men, all of whom worked for him in one form or another, were here on the grounds. It made him feel safe, up on the fourth floor with only his extended family, his sister and her kids, and his cousins living up here with him. They avoided the freak show on the weekends as well, staying up here away from the skinheads.
Despite the slight inconvenience, Sid knew that no one would dare attack him with a small army of soldiers at the ready—well, sort of ready—to respond to any threat.
Sidorenko enjoyed spending his time at his desk counting his money. He had entered the underworld originally as an accountant for a large crime boss in the early nineties before taking over the reins of his own Bratva a few years later, and he still spent his days, or more precisely his nights, looking over the meticulously maintained ledgers of his various enterprises.
He slurped a sip of his sugary-sweet tea, and then, with a reed-thin finger, he scanned down a printout ledger showing receipts from his prostitution and human trafficking concerns in the Czech Republic.
The phone on his desk rang and he answered it, not surprised at all to receive a call at four in the morning, as he had employees all over the world who knew Sidorenko could be reached throughout the night St. Petersburg time.
“What?” Sid asked distractedly, the index finger of his right hand still skimming a balance sheet stacked on hundreds of others.
“Sir. Ivan at the north gate.”
Sid’s finger stopped moving and his eyes narrowed with concern.
“What’s wrong?”
“Probably nothing, sir. I almost did not call. But it is strange.”
“Well talk, damn you!” Sid shouted as he stood from his chair. He was a paranoid man, and it was a short trip for him to switch from comfortable relaxation to shaking terror. He was well on his way from the former to the latter; only his security man’s indecision kept him from bolting the door and reaching for his shotgun.
“Uh . . . A hang glider just crashed in the forest about twenty-five meters from the north wall. No one is with it.”
Sid cocked his head, his birdlike features pinched tighter in confusion.
“A hang glider?”
Ivan said, “We have two men searching the larch to see if a body—”
“It’s him!” Sid interrupted, his voice tight with tension. “It’s Gray. He’s here. Get everyone to the house! Send men to my office. A lot of men. Everyone else will search this building. You have to find him before he comes upstairs!”
“Sir, he did not pass the gate. I would have seen him. He must still be out—”
“Listen to me! He’s in the—”
Sid stopped speaking when he heard it: the slow creaking of old hinges, the sound of the heavy door to the hallway opening. He could not see the door across the room, as the light from the fireplace did not reach more than fifteen feet past the front of his desk. Normally when the door opened he knew it instantly, as there was a light in the hallway, and a long shaft of light across the cold hardwood floor accompanied the creaking hinges.
But not now. Clearly the hall light had been disabled.
Panic washed over his body; his knees weakened. He fought a wave of nausea and then croaked softly into the phone, “Hurry.” He placed the handset back in the cradle with a trembling hand and sat back down.
Sidorenko had thought of this moment for a long time. It was at the center of his every nightmare, true, but he had also taken the time when awake to put his mind to the situation. If, somehow, all his defensive measures came to nothing and it was down to Court and him, alone in a room somewhere, he had a plan.
Sid’s right hand wrapped around the cold grip of a double-barreled shotgun attached to a swivel hanger on the underside of the desk. He rotated the weapon’s business end to the left, toward the doorway, but he could see nothing past the firelight’s glow around his desk.
He heard no footsteps, but he knew the Gray Man was out there, approaching in the impenetrable darkness.
When Court entered the big dark room he saw the man standing at the desk at the far end in front of the Stalin portrait, illuminated by the light of the big fireplace. The man hung up a telephone and sat down slowly, clearly aware now that he was not alone.
The man looked like Sidorenko, but the distance and a long shadow cast by a chair in front of the fireplace made positive identification impossible.
Court shifted swiftly to his left and then began approaching up the wall along the curtains on Sid’s right, moving through black shadow on the opposite wall from the fireplace.
He saw the man peer into the dim in front of him, his right hand slipping casually under the desk.
Below the desk Gregor Sidorenko’s swivel-mounted shotgun scanned slowly to the left and to the right, searching for a target
, belying the calm appearance he attempted to portray with his upper body. His face affected an air of nonchalance; he even smiled a little as he looked into the darkness before him.
And while his eyes searched for a target his mind raced. Sixty seconds, he told himself. Surely the men positioned on the second-floor landing had already heard from the north guard shack and were on their way, and it should not take them more than a minute from receiving the alarm before they came bursting through the door.
Sid knew he needed to find Court downrange of his shotgun and put two barrels of lead into him, or else keep him busy for just a minute more.
The Russian relaxed a little. He could do this. He knew he could.
With a wider smile now he spoke to the darkness. “I knew you would come. It was inevitable.” A nervous chuckle. “I have been anxiously awaiting this moment. That might surprise you, but just listen. You will be glad to know that an opportunity has arisen, something I am certain you will find impossible to—”
A figure in black, a face obscured with a ski mask, moved into the glow of the crackling firelight by the curtains, far to Sid’s right in front of the desk. The figure held a suppressed pistol at the end of an outstretched arm; the long silencer was pointed directly at Sidorenko’s face. A tubular night vision device protruded from the figure’s forehead.
Though Sid could not see the man’s face, there was no question but this was Court Gentry. Sid was surprised by how silently the American had approached. Court was not three meters from him now. It would be impossible to miss with the shotgun; he just had to swivel the weapon all the way to the right and wait for the man to move a foot or two closer to place himself in the line of fire. Sid made no sudden move; he squeezed the grip tighter and slowly rotated the gun to the right while he spoke.
Sid said, “There is a mission only you could possibly achieve. By your actions tonight I am even more certain that you are the right man for the—”
