by Mark Greaney
The job that had encompassed her every waking moment for the past six weeks had been the hunt for a pair of Palestinian brothers who had learned the art and science of bomb making in the territories, then detonated explosives in Afghanistan to hone their craft. As awful as this was, it was not, in and of itself, enough to garner the dogged focus of Mossad’s top headhunter. But when the two brothers masked their faces and appeared on Lebanese television proclaiming themselves to be the men who would bring Israel to its knees, Ruth was given the job of looking into their bold claim to see if there was anything behind their braggadocio. She tracked them from Beirut to Ankara to Madrid and then, finally, to Faro, and here she found them amassing chemicals and timers and researching the travel plans of the Israeli prime minister. Kalb was due at an economic conference in London the following week, and the two bomb brothers had booked ferry tickets to the United Kingdom.
Ettinger and her team determined that this was, in fact, a credible threat on their PM, so they called in Yanis and his kill/capture crew from Metsada, and then Ruth and her team were ordered to stay the hell away from the target location while the hard men from Tel Aviv swooped in to end the threat.
But now Ruth sat less than a hundred yards from the action, sipping espresso in the cool shade.
She was not worried about her colleagues in Metsada. The bomb brothers had been mixing chemicals and constructing timers for the past eighteen hours and they were sound asleep, and the cameras her team had passed through the ventilation ducts in the apartment across the street confirmed that the front door to their flat was not booby-trapped. She knew the Israeli operatives would burst through the door with orders to capture the men if it was feasible to do so. But she also knew the two men in that flat had exactly one Kalashnikov rifle, and it was staged on the floor directly between their two beds, and they would both wake, both reach for it, and both fumble it.
And the Metsada officers would make the decision in a single heartbeat to shoot the two young men with their silenced pistols.
And then they would back up through the door and leave not a trace of their act behind other than the bloody bodies and a few untraceable shell casings.
Across the street the Toyota had stopped honking. One of the operatives in the blocking van climbed out and, in halting Portuguese, explained to the Toyota driver that his friend was having trouble with his van’s transmission and, if the man in the Toyota could just give them a moment, they would push the vehicle out of the way. The Toyota driver complied, perhaps recognizing that the polite foreigner was doing his best to rectify the situation, and perhaps also noticing that the polite foreigner had a hard and formidable look about him, and it might be best not to piss him off.
There was a brief screech of tires now. Ruth and Yanis watched as the two carloads of Mossad operators backed out off the alley, stopping behind the Toyota. The blocking van rolled off to the west, the Toyota pulled into the street and turned to the east, and the two cars then executed perfect three-point turns in the narrow alley and followed the van to the west.
No one sitting at the outdoor café around them had any idea they were witnessing the ending of the perfectly choreographed assassination across the street.
Yanis Alvey said, “And . . . scene.”
“Never gets old,” Ruth said, no happiness or levity in her voice now. Yanis noticed this.
“You hate when it’s over.”
She corrected him. “I love when it’s over. As long as we have done our jobs correctly, and there is no collateral.”
Unlike Rome, Yanis thought, but did not say.
Ruth added, “What I hate is the day after. When I don’t have anything to do.”
“Dinner tonight?” Yanis asked, sounding a little more hopeful than he would have liked.
Ruth finished her espresso. “Sorry. I have to sanitize the safe house.”
He nodded, careful to affect an air of nonchalance. He wasn’t surprised, really. “Not a problem. I imagine you wouldn’t be much company. You get incredibly disagreeable and difficult to be around when you don’t have a head to hunt.”
Ruth stood, then knelt back down, speaking softly into Alvey’s ear. “I can only hope someone proclaims their intention to kill our prime minister in the next few days so that I can have a raison d’etre.”
She drifted away through the bistro tables, and Yanis reached for his wallet to pay her tab. He was not offended by her brush-off. It was part of her show, her faux tough exterior. He knew this, and he also knew what lay beneath.
She was brave and proud and smart and competent. But she was also vulnerable.
Yanis Alvey was glad for her success today in bringing down the Palestinian bomb brothers cleanly and quietly. But as she walked off he thought, not for the first time, that one more Rome just might destroy her.
NINE
At oh one hundred hours the Helsinki Polaris and the two tiny vessels chasing it converged in the black waters of the Baltic Sea, twenty miles due south of Helsinki.
The eight Townsend operators of Trestle Team rode in the two black Zodiac MK2s, powered by beefy but quiet motors that allowed them to cut through the cargo ship’s wake and advance on the stern unnoticed but with commanding speed.
The Zodiacs had one man at the helm, while the three others on each boat held on to rope handles on the craft’s inflatable rubber walls. The two small rubber boats separated behind the cargo ship, with one heading to the starboard side and the other to port. They came abreast of the Polaris simultaneously, and telescoping climbing poles with padded hooks at their tips were raised and hung over the railing of the main deck. Within sixty seconds the first two men were up the poles, over the railing, and lowering a rope ladder so the poles could be removed and the second and third men on each Zodiac could climb more quickly and more safely. After another minute the rope ladders were unhooked from the railing and stored on the deck, and the six men concealed themselves from anyone awake above on the bridge who decided to gaze back to stern.
Within two minutes of arriving alongside the cargo ship, the six-man boarding party was moving up the deck with their Heckler & Koch MP7s held at the high ready.
In the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the entire staff of the signal room watched the giant screen in front of them. It displayed the action via a ScanEagle UAV flying overhead. The drone had been deployed from the backyard of a safe house in Helsinki and operated by the same team who, only twenty hours earlier, had been working from a safe house near Gregor Sidorenko’s dacha.
The direct action team searched the vessel, staying low profile, using their night vision equipment to move in the shadows and soft communications over their headsets to remain in contact with one another while moving through the cargo ship’s labyrinthine passageways.
Twenty-six minutes after boarding, Trestle Actual entered the captain’s cabin and knelt down over the captain’s bunk. He placed his gloved hand over the silver-haired Russian’s mouth and, shining a tactical flashlight in his eyes, woke the man with a hard shake.
“G’de Americanskiy?” Where is the American?
The man’s eyes were wide, the pupils pinpricks in the bright light. He tried to turn away from the beam but the hand held him firm. The light burned through his lids as he squeezed them shut.
“G’de Americanskiy?”
The gloved hand let go of the face and the captain spoke hesitantly.
“The passenger? He said he was German.”
“That doesn’t matter. Where is he now?”
“He disembarked.”
“When?”
“Wha—what time is it?”
“It’s one thirty.”
“About midnight, I think.”
“How did he leave the ship?”
“A boat came for him. It must have been prearranged. We were not told about it until it appeared. On the radio th
ey said it had come for the passenger. He was already on the deck waiting for it.”
“What kind of boat?”
“A Bayliner, I think. White. Canvas canopy.” The man shook his head. “Just a regular little twenty-footer.”
“What language did the man on the radio speak?”
“Russian.”
“Where did it take him?”
“I . . . I don’t know. Helsinki, maybe? It was the closest port. Forty kilometers from our position at the time. Must have been going to Helsinki.”
Trestle Actual evaluated the captain’s responses and deemed him credible. He seemed entirely too bewildered and terrified to attempt to deceive the armed men in black over him.
The lead Townsend commando looked over his shoulder and reached back a hand, and a teammate placed a syringe in it. He popped the cap of the needle with his mouth, held it there between his lips, and reclamped his hand over the captain’s mouth, just as the man started to scream and thrash, the fear of what was about to happen engulfing him.
The black-clad commando jabbed the needle into the captain’s neck and pressed the plunger down, and the man in the bunk went still.
It was Versed, a powerful muscle relaxer. The captain would not die, but he would be out for hours. Though his memory of what had happened the previous evening would likely be fuzzy, the aim was not to wipe away the appearance of the commandos. It was to keep the captain from raising the alarm until long after Trestle piled into their Zodiacs and left the boat.
Five minutes later the Zodiacs reappeared alongside the Helsinki Polaris, and the six-man boarding party descended into the two boats via the climbing poles. When everyone was back on board the Zodiacs, both craft turned to the north, leaving the cargo ship to continue on to its destination in Mariehamn.
In Washington, D.C., the signal room had been watching the drone feed of the non-event on the main monitor, but it remained Trestle Actual’s duty to call Babbitt on the sat phone and fill him in once they were clear of their target.
Trestle had to all but shout over the Yamaha outboard motor that churned the water just feet behind him. “Negative contact. The target has been off the boat over an hour. Left on a white Bayliner with a canopy. Destination unknown.”
“Understood,” Babbitt replied. “Head back to Helsinki. We’ll check radar data and determine where he went, but it might take a few hours.”
“Helsinki it is. Trestle out.”
TEN
Snow had fallen overnight in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, but the morning sky was crisp and blue with only a few puffs of white. Monday road traffic was heavy; tires turned the streets to slush, and coughing exhaust pipes blackened the ice and snow on the roadside.
Thirty-four-year-old American Russell Whitlock sat on a park bench high on a hill, breathed vapor, ignored the stinging cold on his exposed cheeks, and sipped glogg, a spiced wine consumed in plentiful quantities in the Baltic during the winter.
He looked past the road below him and out to the sea beyond.
Russ had come to Tallinn not because he had been ordered here by his employer, Townsend Government Services, but rather because he’d made an educated guess. He’d arrived late the evening before; taken a cab from the train station to a three-star hotel on Toompea, the Cathedral Hill; thrown his luggage on his bed; and then immediately headed out into the light snowfall to scout a perfect location for his work the next morning.
It took him less than an hour to find this bench and then make it back to the warmth of his room, and he’d returned here at first light, equipped with food and a thermos full of glogg provided by the hotel restaurant. His spot was high on a hill along a thin band of park that ran with the northern portion of the medieval city wall that circled the Old Town and Cathedral Hill. Just behind him was the Oleviste Church and one of the city’s twenty conical-roofed wall towers, built in the 1400s when Tallinn was a wealthy Hanseatic League capital.
From this hilltop position he could see the length of the Port of Tallinn below him, and this was what made the location perfect for his needs.
His backpack sat next to him on the bench. In his lap lay a powerful pair of 20 × 80 Steiner binoculars. He also wore a Canon camera around his neck, just another tourist shooting pictures of the town and the ships in port below him from his high vantage point. He wore a black down coat that he’d purchased in Berlin the day before, and this kept him warm, though the sips of hot spiced wine certainly didn’t hurt in this regard.
A car ferry the size of a small shopping mall was in its berth by the terminal at the mouth of the port, and farther along to the east, dozens of smaller boats were docked. Most large cargo ships were moored offshore in the Bay of Tallinn, but more than a dozen midsized cargo ships were closer to land, their tenders occasionally offloading men and goods.
There was also a constant influx of even smaller watercraft, tiny fishing vessels returning with the morning’s catch.
He lifted his Steiner binoculars to his eyes and checked out to sea, monitoring the small vessels as they came in, and then he shifted them back to a spot a half mile below his position. At the mouth of the port near the massive Tallink Ferry terminal was a choke point that anyone who had disembarked from a vessel in the port would need to pass on the way into town, and this was the main focus of Whitlock’s attention. Most people leaving the docks did so in groups, clusters of three to ten men, heavily bundled in coats and hats to protect them from the cold sea air. They would then head to buses or cars and trucks in one of the parking lots in the area.
Russ ignored these groups; he was on the lookout for a loner.
Although he had not checked in with his masters at Townsend House in well over a day, he was reading the secure messages about the target and the status of the hunt for him that they sent to his mobile. From this data he knew the Helsinki Polaris had been a dry hole, and this had not surprised him in the least. Russ did not think for a moment that Court would sit on that boat and wait to get sold out by the Russian mob or tracked by boarding parties sent to conduct underway assaults on all ships in the Gulf of Finland near the Sidorenko hit.
Court was too smart for that, and Russell Whitlock gave him full credit for being so. Court would have arranged a third party to collect him from the boat, someone not aligned with the Russians and not aware of any part of Gentry’s mission in Rochino.
That was what Whitlock would have done, so, he decided, that was what Gentry would do.
Russ took a short break to finish his glogg and eat a few bites of an egg sandwich he’d made himself from the offerings at the breakfast buffet in the hotel, and then he brought the binos back to his eyes. He waited for the vapor in the air around his mouth to clear, and then he noticed a small white craft pulling up to a pier midway between the western and eastern sides of the port. He thought it possible he was looking at a twenty-foot Bayliner runabout, though there was no canvas top visible. He knew his target might have had the top removed during the journey to Tallinn, and almost immediately he saw a lone man stepping onto the dock without glancing back to the captain. He had with him only a single black backpack, and he slung this over his shoulder and trudged purposefully up the dock toward the exit of the port. Whitlock followed him for several yards with his twenty-power lenses, then checked the area quickly for other possibles before returning his attention to the only solo traveler in sight.
The individual left the port, walked past the taxis waiting for fares, passed the bus stop, and then turned to the southwest. He was moving in Whitlock’s general direction now, walking up a snow-covered sidewalk along a busy road leading toward Old Town Tallinn.
Whitlock continued tracking him through his binoculars. With the magnification of the Steiners the individual appeared to be only fifteen yards away from Whitlock’s position, but Russ still could not identify his target. The man wore the hood up on his black coat and a wool scarf over his nos
e and mouth, and this made a positive ID impossible, irrespective of the distance.
But Russ had a feeling. “That you, Court?” he asked aloud.
Russ put the rubber lens covers back on his binoculars, then slid them and his Canon camera into his backpack along with his thermos. He slung his pack over his back and began heading toward the entrance to the Old Town, more hopeful than confident that he had found his man.
The confidence came fifteen minutes later. Whitlock had positioned himself at a table on the second floor of a small restaurant near the Viru Gates, the main entrance through the walls of the Old Town. Below him he watched the man from the port moving up the cobblestone street. The man’s face was still obscured by the scarf and the hood of his black coat, but Whitlock could judge height and build, and it matched what he knew about his target. He lifted his Steiners and locked them on the face of the individual. At this distance the eyes filled the lenses, and Whitlock felt his heart rate increase; it seemed as if the two men were standing only inches apart.
The eyes of the man were intense, searching.
Whitlock was certain. Those were the eyes of the Gray Man.
Russ had spent hours staring into those eyes. Lee Babbitt had sent him every photo the CIA had of the man. They were all old; most showed him wearing some sort of disguise, for either a passport picture or a visa application, but Court could not change his hard and piercing eyes.
Russell Whitlock turned away from the window, his heart pounding with excitement.
“I’ve got you. I’ve fucking got you.” He left the table before the waitress arrived to take his order, descended the restaurant’s staircase, and headed back outside into the cold.
The target moved through the crowd with his head down. In the space of a two-minute tail, Russ watched Gentry raise and lower the hood of his coat, then put a black watch cap over his brown hair and take it off again. All these changes, each one done with supreme nonchalance, made tailing him from a distance nearly impossible.
