by Mark Greaney
Aron was one of three on Ruth’s team; the other two, also posing as a couple, sat on the far side of the path just outside the entrance of the Central Park Zoo. Mike Dillman and Laureen Tattersal were both in their early thirties, both nice looking but not distractingly so, and they were also spending their time kissing on a bench, thirty yards up the path. Like their senior officer, Mike, Aron, and Laureen were all Israeli citizens who had emigrated from the United States, and they all looked perfectly at home here in New York City.
Directly between the two sets of fake lovers, an Arab man sat with his wife on a park bench, their baby in a stroller in front of them. The father rolled the stroller back and forth while he and his wife talked.
Laureen had a long, narrow, directional microphone that just jutted out of a small hole in the side of her oversized purse, and with it she and Mike were able to pick up the vast majority of the conversation between the man and his wife. The audio was piped into their tiny Bluetooth earpieces; both of them spoke Arabic fluently and, in the past twenty minutes of surveillance here in the park, they had covertly listened in on a long conversation about diapers and baby shit. It was an argument hinging on how he was not pulling his share of the diaper duties and, as far as Laureen was concerned, the wife seemed to be making a lot of good points.
While they sat on the park bench Mike and Laureen enjoyed spicing up their sweet nothings, just like Aron up the path. Sometimes Laureen giggled, leaned into Mike’s ear, and whispered obscenities. Mike never blushed, never reacted with surprise or distaste; instead he gave as good as he got, replying softly with his own crude comments.
In contrast to her team, Ruth was all business in times like this. She stayed in character with her body language, but her whispered voice remained on task, discussing the technical or logistical minutiae of surveillance work. She allowed her junior officers latitude to be silly, if they had nothing important to say, but she had done this long enough that she no longer felt any awkwardness in locking lips with her subordinate when in close foot follow or static watch.
Ruth and Aron scooted close together on the bench again, combating the December chill that filtered through the quilting of their heavy coats. They kissed again. “I’d rather make out with Mike,” Aron said.
Ruth stopped talking about parabolic audio equipment and said, “I can arrange that next time.”
Aron laughed at this.
Despite these brief moments of levity, they were hard at work now, just hours after arriving in the United States. They had been in Faro, cleaning up a few loose ends after the operation that led to the death of the two bomb-making brothers targeting Prime Minister Ehud Kalb, when Ruth received the order to fly with her team to New York City. Here in Manhattan, a thirty-five-year-old schoolteacher and father of a newborn had been under surveillance by the FBI for his recent purchase of a large quantity of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that also served as a key component in a potent explosive.
The FBI found the purchase curious but not strictly illegal, so they began what Ruth Ettinger considered a painfully slow and underwhelming investigation. That the professor was Palestinian and related by marriage to a midranking Hamas functionary in Gaza piqued the interest of the Mossad, and, because Prime Minister Ehud Kalb was scheduled to speak here in Manhattan at the United Nations in a few weeks, Ruth and her team rushed from Faro to Manhattan without delay to begin their own accelerated investigation.
She did not mind coming back to the States, although she knew she’d feel guilty if she didn’t drop by her mom’s house in Brooklyn before it was all said and done, and she really would much rather chase blood-soaked terrorists than sit at her mom’s kitchen table over beef brisket or matzo ball soup.
Aron put his hand on her knee while he leaned into her face. He smiled as he spoke, but the jokes were over for now. “Initial impressions?”
Ruth smiled back and shook her head, then whispered, “This guy is not a threat.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Look at him.”
Aron did so, discreetly, then looked back to his “girlfriend.” “Terrorists don’t take their kids to the park?”
“This is no terrorist. I can smell a terrorist.”
Aron conceded this point. “I won’t argue with you on that. You do seem to have a nose for the worst of them.”
Ruth took his hand and held it through her mittens. “This one feels like a complete waste of time, and I fucking hate wasting time.”
She turned her attention back to the Palestinian couple, watching them take turns rocking the stroller as their low-intensity argument continued.
Ruth was bored, but she was accustomed to the boredom. She could not help feeling that she and her team were overqualified for this assignment, but she did have to admit that her close knowledge of the area and her ability to weed out the real terrorists from the wannabes and nobodies made hers the perfect team to send. Despite the light banter of the junior officers, all four members of this team were exceedingly professional, and they took their work seriously. The psychiatrists who worked for the Mossad told Ruth she took things too seriously, but she found their supposedly learned opinions to be nothing more than government-funded guesswork bordering on quackery.
Ruth was fine, she’d told everyone, and she was most fine when she was out in the field and hard at work.
Her phone rang in her purse and she snatched it up, knowing it would be Yanis Alvey, her superior. He’d promised to call her with more information on the subject.
“Hello?”
“Ma nishma?” What’s up? Yanis always broke protocol and spoke in Hebrew when he called from Tel Aviv.
She answered back in English with her native Brooklyn accent. “Hi, Jeff. How are things?”
By calling him Jeff, she was reminding him to speak English. Of course it was unlikely that any subject she might be tracking could hear the man talking to her through her telephone, but it would be easier for her to slip up and start speaking Hebrew if the other party’s end of the conversation was in the foreign tongue.
Yanis answered back. “Your subject is clean. The purchase he made was benign.”
“In what way?”
“He is a high school teacher, true, but he also recently became a member of an agricultural co-op in Sullivan County, Pennsylvania. His crop is beans and figs, but the co-op grows all sorts of things. They are small scale; one of the farmers purchases equipment, another seeds, another fertilizers, and it all is pooled into the resources of the co-op.”
She looked around and then whispered, “And he bought the ammonium nitrate for farming?”
“Hard to believe. But yes.”
“And the FBI didn’t know this?”
“They still don’t. We hacked his banking records and saw that he was reimbursed by the co-op for the same amount he spent on the fertilizer. We checked them out; they’ve been around for years, and they farm acreage that corresponds to the amount of ammonium nitrate they purchased. We’ll keep an eye on them, but it looks kosher.”
She rolled her eyes at his use of the phrase, coming from a Jew born in Rashlatz but delivered like an American.
She said, “So . . . he is about as harmless as he looks.”
“It appears so,” Yanis said.
“All right. We’ll shut it down here.”
“You sound crestfallen. Once again, Ruth, you seem disappointed that we don’t have more imminent dangers against our nation’s leadership.”
“I like to work, Yanis.”
He hesitated before saying, “It’s more than that. You take too much on your shoulders.”
“Since Rome, you mean.”
“Since Rome.”
“The increase in my operational tempo since Rome has been driven by the increasing enthusiasm of our prime minister’s enemies, not by any overzealous desire on my part to atone for
mistakes.”
“I did not mean to suggest otherwise. And Ruth, you made no mistakes.”
She did not respond to this directly. “Maybe if Kalb stopped pissing people off I could sit at home and raise orchids or something.”
“Well, there’s not much chance of that. I’ll find you some trouble to get into before long. Don’t worry. I’m sure something terrible is just around the corner.”
“Funny.”
“Send your team back here, but you take a couple of days to see your mom.”
“That’s not the trouble I’m looking for. I can come back with the others.”
“That’s an order.”
She groaned inwardly. “Okay, Yanis, but I want hazard-duty pay.”
He laughed as he hung up.
It had been a wasted day. A wasted trip. Making out with Aron Hamlin wasn’t the worst way to spend her time, she admitted to herself, but she was hungry for her next target, and sitting in Central Park watching a Palestinian family man who had done nothing but buy some chemicals to help his pistachios grow had done nothing to make her prime minister safer.
She decided she would call her mom, tell her she’d just gotten off the plane, and invite her to brunch the next morning. Two or three hours listening to her mom drone on always seemed to go by a little faster when the Bloody Marys flowed.
Russell Whitlock trudged through the snow along a long row of drab apartment blocks in the Estonian city of Paldiski, some thirty miles west of Tallinn on the coast of the Baltic Sea. It was midafternoon; half a foot of powdery accumulation had been dumped here in the past twenty-four hours, but the puffy gray clouds above had stopped their onslaught for the time being, and the temperature was in the low thirties, balmy for this time of year.
He stopped in front of a tiny inn; it was dirty and basic and as far off the beaten path as one could imagine, but Russ decided it would do for a night. Russ much preferred five-star accommodations, but right now he couldn’t indulge himself. He needed a quiet out-of-the-way place to treat his gunshot wound, to wait for Gentry to call, and to spend a safe night.
This town was no tourist destination. It had been a closed city during the cold war, used as a massive Soviet nuclear submarine training center, a city encased in barbed wire.
Two decades later, Russ Whitlock found the city nearly as uninviting as it must have been back then.
Dead Eye sat in his hotel room as the afternoon turned to evening and the light through the window dimmed and extinguished completely. He’d found a pharmacy near the hotel, and next door a liquor store. Russ saw the placement of the two establishments as serendipity. He returned to his room, disinfected his wound and changed his bandages, and then opened a bottle of vodka and took a long swig.
He waited nearly ten hours to call in to Townsend House, but he was finally ready. He hoped all the action had been quick and confused enough to where no one on Trestle Team had reported his treachery against his employer, but the only way to find out for sure was to report in himself.
He pressed the speed-dial button on his phone that connected him to Babbitt’s line at Townsend House.
After a hurried identity check, Babbitt said, “We thought you were dead.”
“I made it out,” Russ replied. “But all the rest are fucking toast, sir.”
“What the hell happened?”
“I wish I could tell you, but I was ordered to sit in my damn hotel room while your boys hit the target. Gentry definitely fired first; I heard his G19 open up before any return fire came from the suppressed MP7s. Other than that, I can’t really re-create the action to help you figure out what went wrong.”
It was silent for a moment until Babbitt said, “I understand.” He cleared his throat. “You called in during the attack, said you were going to engage.”
“Yeah. I wish I could have done something, but I wasn’t read in on the op, and it went tits up before I got involved. I tried to play catch-up, but I was too far behind Gentry. I only saw him for an instant. Unfortunately he saw me first and tagged me.”
Babbitt almost shouted in astonishment. “Do you mean to say he shot you?”
Russ lay back on his little bed as he answered, moving gingerly to avoid putting pressure on his left hip. “Yes.”
“You’re injured?” Babbitt seemed to have trouble taking this in.
“I’ll live. I dumped a couple of rounds his way. May even have hit him, although I don’t know for sure. The point is, if you had let me do this my way from the beginning, I would have slipped a stiletto into Gentry’s spine the minute he got off the boat yesterday morning, and you wouldn’t have eight dead operators and an escaped target.”
“Seven dead operators,” Babbitt replied.
Whitlock bolted upright on the bed. “Seven?”
“One member of Trestle survived. Somehow Trestle Seven was caught in an avalanche or something, buried under snow. We are still trying to get the full story on that. He was pulled out by the locals with a broken vertebra in his neck and four broken ribs, but he’s going to pull through.”
Russ took a couple of slow breaths. Anger began to well up in him, stiffening his body and clenching his muscles. “That’s good news, Lee.”
“Well, he may wish he’d stayed under the snow. He’ll be spending some time in Estonia as a guest of their penal system, even when he does get out of the hospital.”
“Do you want me to do something about that?” Russ asked. The insinuation would be clear to Babbitt. Russ was asking if he should kill the survivor to keep him from talking. Russ had no idea how he’d do it, but he had his own motivation. He knew Trestle Seven might have seen him with Gentry, and he certainly did not need that making its way back to Townsend.
Babbitt hesitated before replying. “For now, no.”
Russ pushed this new problem out of his mind. There was nothing he could do about it. He said, “This whole thing was a mess, sir. Unprofessional.”
Whitlock knew Babbitt would admit no wrongdoing. He was an executive; he would remain aloof and above any repercussions of his decision making. He did exactly what Russ thought he would do. He changed the subject. “We’ve got to get you back to the States. You’re hurt and that AO is too hot to have you running around in it after what happened this morning. Do I need to send a doctor to you to get you ready to travel?”
“I’m not coming back to the States. I’m going after Gentry.”
“Negative, Russell. I can’t have you getting picked up right now. Listen, we’ve got brand-new facial recognition suites running on our servers, taking in every camera within a hundred klicks of Tallinn. We’ve sent advanced microdrones to the UAV team so they can hunt him in urban environments. We’ll widen the search if we don’t get a ping by midnight local time there. I want you to stand down, at least for a couple of days.”
Russ knew it was useless to fight. “Fine. But I want any intel you have pushed to me immediately.”
“Agreed.”
“And Lee, I’ll take a couple of days to stay below radar, but I’m not standing down for long. It’s in your best interests to have me involved. Your UAV guys and your direct action assets don’t know Gentry like I do.”
“I understand. Just get somewhere safe and tend to your injury. We’ll work on locating him in the meantime.”
Russ said, “Dead Eye is out.”
Lee Babbitt put the phone down, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. What a fucking disaster. Of course he was annoyed with Dead Eye for taking his time in checking in, but more than anything he was relieved his solo asset was still alive. And he sure as hell wasn’t mad at him for what happened in Tallinn. On the contrary, as far as Babbitt was concerned, that freak Russ Whitlock was the only Townsend employee who’d done his fucking job.
He knew the next days and weeks were going to be a clusterfuck dealing with all the fallout from the Tallin
n op. CIA would step in; they would smooth things over with the Estonians, but they would not do it without taking a pound of flesh from Babbitt for Townsend’s failure.
But he could not worry about that now. He had to find Gentry and put him in the dirt before he could concentrate on anything else. He knew he couldn’t let his injured, insubordinate, and half-crazy solo operator continue the search now while all of European law enforcement was aware of what had happened in Tallinn.
He also knew if Townsend’s signal room continued to push intel to Russ, then Russ would continue to act on that intel. Babbitt decided he would tell his people to stop sending information to the singleton’s phone. If they were lucky enough to have a sighting of Gentry in the next couple days, he couldn’t risk having Dead Eye rush to the scene and get himself picked up in the process.
Lee ran his fingers through his hair and rubbed his eyes. What a fucking disaster.
NINETEEN
Court Gentry stood outside the Tallink Ferry terminal building at five P.M. It was dark outside the huge terminal except for the lights from passing cars on the street and moored boats in the harbor, but Court didn’t mind the dimness—he used it to disappear in a corner by the front wall. He had changed every scrap of his clothing, shaved off his scruffy beard, and approached the area in a cab from across town to avoid walking the streets that he and others had thoroughly shot up early that morning.
Still, he was closer to the location of the action than he would like. He’d reluctantly dumped his pistol in the bay just a half hour earlier. He knew he couldn’t run the risk of being caught with the gun, but he knew he was in danger here, back in the city center. Just as he climbed out of his cab a government Lynx helicopter landed up the hill near the Old Town, no doubt delivering investigators or government officials or someone else who needed to see the site for himself or herself. Even now, some thirteen hours after the action, the crime scene would be intact, although the bodies had probably been bagged and carted off to the morgue. Court had no idea how many had died during the action, but figured it must have been at least four or five.
