Dead Eye

by Mark Greaney

  Despite deep reservations, he pressed the send button.

  Russ Whitlock sat on the floor of his room at the Grimaldi. In front of him, the Blaser sniper rifle lay in pieces. He’d spent the past half hour taking it apart and putting it back together. First slowly and carefully. Then quickly, as if under stress. The next time he put it together normally but disassembled it only employing his right hand, simulating an injury to his left arm or hand. Then he tried the same trick with his left hand, which took considerable time.

  Next to him on the floor, a tray of artisan cheeses and an iced open bottle of Lenoble Grand Cru Blanc du Blanc sat ignored. He wanted to put the weapon together and disassemble it a few more times before he rewarded himself with the luxurious indulgence.

  He’d had a busy day, spent in intense preparation for his planned Saturday late-morning assassination of Amir Zarini. He’d taken a train to his planned area of execution and then surveyed the surroundings and the target location to determine both the ingress and egress points. He’d made it back to his hotel in the early evening, taken off all his clothes, and then removed the blood-and-pus-soaked bandages on his hip.

  When he was finished undressing his wound he stood there nude in front of the full-length dressing mirror examining the holes, caked over with scabs, and the black bruising around them. His eyes lifted from the injury, taking in the rest of his body slowly and with no small amount of appreciation. He began a martial arts kata, never taking his eyes off his own face and body while he exercised. His hip burned and sweat began to flow within minutes. His face became a mask of intensity and even fury as he punched and kicked, performed throws and elbow strikes designed to break bones.

  It took him several minutes to come down from the angry high of the simulated fight; his hip began bleeding freely and the pain was excruciating.

  After his exercise Russ showered and changed and by now he was famished, but he imposed more discipline on himself by ordering food and drink and then letting it sit while he worked with the rifle, steeling both his mind and his body to as much hardship as he could generate in a four-star hotel on the French Riviera.

  Russ had a lot of experience with sniper rifles, but little experience with the Blaser. As a scout sniper in the Marine Corps he had been issued the M40, and he loved the weapon. For the sake of familiarity he would have preferred an M40 for this job, or its civilian equivalent, the Remington 700. But, he had to admit, Gentry had chosen well with the R93. The German rifle had a straight pull-back bolt that allowed for slightly faster follow-on shots, faster than the M40 although certainly not as fast as a semiauto rifle. Still, Russ imagined he could empty the weapon’s four-round box magazine quickly and accurately at the distances he had planned, even without spending much time at the firing range with this particular weapon.

  He had just begun reassembling the gun for another left-hand-only takedown when his earpiece chirped on the floor next to him. His phone was on the desk across the room, so he just put his Bluetooth set into his ear and tapped a button to answer the call.

  “Go.”

  “Hello.”

  It was Gentry. Russ bolted up from the floor and pumped his fist in the air. He composed himself quickly and spoke in a relaxed tone. “I was just thinking about you.”

  “Sorry about not calling the other night.”

  “Not a problem, brother. I didn’t expect you to call for a few days.” It was a lie, but he wanted to seem nonchalant about the conversation.

  “Why not?”

  “I know you, dude. I know how you think.”

  “Why is it I don’t know how you think?”

  “What do you mean by that?” Russ pulled the bottle of Lenoble from the ice and took a sip. It was time to celebrate.

  “I don’t understand what your game is.”

  “No game, Court. I just want to help. Why can’t you believe that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I’ll answer that question for you. You have been dicked around and lied to by everyone you ever worked with at CIA. Carmichael, Hightower, Hanley—”

  “How is Hanley?”

  “You mean since you shot him in Mexico City?”

  “You do know everything.”

  Russ swigged champagne. This conversation was going just the way he wanted it. “Matt Hanley’s okay. He’s back at Langley. Getting shot by the Gray Man is a career builder, I guess.”

  “Speaking of gunshot wounds, how’s the hip?”

  “It hurts,” responded Whitlock.

  “Yeah, they have a tendency to do that.”

  Russ asked, “Any trouble getting out of Tallinn?”

  “You tell me. What do your friends at Townsend say? Is there any heat on me I haven’t noticed?”

  Russ lied again. He’d heard nothing at all from Townsend for a couple of days, but he needed to keep his value high in Gentry’s eyes. “They said they might have a target for me very soon. They did not elaborate. Wherever you are, stay there, but you might want to check back with me sooner rather than later.”

  After a pause Court said, “Okay. What about you? No problems with fallout from them after what happened the other day?”

  “I told you, I can handle them.” Russ took a long swig of champagne. “This other opportunity I told you about is coming up pretty soon. Have you thought any more about our conversation the other night?”

  “About you wanting to go freelance?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Help me understand just why you want to do that.”

  “I want to be my own boss.”

  Court chuckled. “Working freelance means you have more bosses, not fewer. I never would have had to hit that dacha west of St. Petersburg if I didn’t have trouble with my employers. You can’t trust anyone in this line of work.”

  “Thanks for the tip.”

  Court replied, “If you are taking career advice from me, then you are an idiot.” He added, “Guys like us are better off alone.”

  “I disagree, Court, because there are no guys like us. There is only us. We’re the last two. We should stick together.”

  “The last two?”

  “Nineteen men entered the Autonomous Asset Development Program. The oldest was Joseph Pelton, at twenty-eight. The youngest was Courtland Gentry, at nineteen. I was twenty-five when I got in.”

  “And?”

  “Four died in training.”

  “Can’t say that surprises me. I almost died a couple times.”

  “Me, too. Eight died in the field working in AAP. Five more died during subsequent work, either in CIA, high-risk private sector security postings, or suicide.” Russ drank from the champagne bottle. “And that, my friend, leaves Gentry and Whitlock, alone in the world.”

  “Shit.”

  “Hey, it’s not so bad. If there were more of us, we’d be less valuable.”

  “Higher value just means a bigger target on your head.”

  “It means a bigger payday if you are freelance,” countered Whitlock.

  Court asked, “Do you ever wish, sometimes, that you could go back to the way you were before?”

  Russ asked, “Before what?”

  “Before we got trained? Before we were made.”

  Russ swigged again. “No. Hell no. Never.”

  Court said nothing.

  “You do, I take it,” said Whitlock.

  “Just sometimes,” admitted Court.

  “You should appreciate what you are.” He paused. “You should appreciate it a lot more than you do. You have a skill set that, arguably, only one other person on the planet has.”

  “You?”

  “Yeah, me. Like I said the other night, I’ve studied your ops. Down to the letter, everything you’ve done, I would have done exactly the same way.”

  “How about that,” Court muttere
d, a little sarcasm in his voice.

  “Yep.” After a slight hesitation, Russ said, “Of course, the only one that has me stumped is Kiev. I sure wish I knew how you pulled that off.”

  “Again with Kiev?”

  Russ drank his champagne. A few days earlier he thought he would need all the details of the Kiev op to secure the Kalb contract from the Iranians. But he’d bluffed his way past this gap in his knowledge and cajoled them with the promise of the Zarini hit, and now the details of Kiev were no longer so important. Still, he was genuinely curious. He said, “Some day, Court, I’ll get it out of you.”

  The line was silent for several seconds, and then Gentry said, “I’ve got to go.”

  “You have a hot date?”

  “No. I need to get back to my place and set up a barricade in case you can trace this call and you plan on sending another crew of shooters my way.”

  “Court, use your brain. If I wanted you dead all I had to do was stay in my bunk Monday night and let the Townsend gunners kill you. You might have all sorts of good reasons to be paranoid, but in this case you aren’t being logical. I’m a friend. Not an enemy. We are one, you and me. Sooner or later you are going to realize that. We would make one hell of a team.”

  To this Court just said, “I’ll check with you tomorrow.”

  “I hope you do, for your sake. Townsend might have a fix on you. Help me help you.”

  “Tomorrow. No bullshit this time. I’ll call.”

  The line went dead, and Russ sat on the edge of his big bed with the bottle of cold champagne in his lap. He would have liked to string Gentry along a little further, pulled him deeper into his plan, but tonight’s baby step forward was much better than no step at all.

  The dumb son of a bitch had made contact, and that was key. And when Court realized that no one was going to attack him after this conversation, well, Russ concluded, that poor lonely sad sack Court Gentry would probably start calling him every motherfucking night.

  Ruth and Aron had spent the afternoon and early evening walking the choke points of the city within a two-kilometer diameter of the electronics shop where Gentry bought his computer. At eight P.M. they grabbed carryout Indian food for themselves and the UAV team and took it back to the safe house. As the two climbed up the stairs to the fourth-floor flat, Laureen and Mike were heading down the stairs, ready for three or four hours of manhunting in the evening snow.

  In the safe house Ruth passed the food out to the three men and sat with them at the laptop control center for the UAVs. Carl was flying a Sky Shark over the Gamla Stan, the Old Town portion of Stockholm, but while he flew he was able to one-hand a few bites of naan dipped in sauce and wash it down with beer.

  Lucas reported that in their seven hours of near-constant flying, they’d had more than sixty possible sightings, each one of which had to be manually ruled in or ruled out by the UAV team by looking at images on the laptop.

  Lucas and Carl had eliminated them all.

  “Still,” Lucas said, “it’s only the first day. Parks will probably have us keep the coverage up for three or four days more unless the facial recog software they are using on all the hacked cameras around the area turns up something somewhere else.”

  “He’s here,” Ruth said. “I can smell him.”

  Carl and Lucas exchanged a look but did not respond.

  Ruth and Aron finished their meal and headed to their room to get some sleep; they’d planned to hit the streets before first light the next morning. The Townsend UAV technicians decided to make one last slow track over a heavily trafficked pedestrian-only street before bringing their drone home for the evening.

  Fifteen minutes later Ruth brushed her teeth in the bathroom wearing only shorts and a tank top. She thought she heard someone calling out, so she turned off the tap.

  “Aron? Did you say something?”

  But it was Lucas who had shouted, and now he repeated himself, this time louder. “We got a hit!”

  THIRTY

  Ruth raced into the living room in her shorts and tank top; she’d taken out her contacts, so she fumbled to get her glasses on, and her bare feet slapped the wooden floor as she approached. “Are you sure?”

  Lucas said, “I’m not, but the computer is. Well, relatively sure. We’ve been tracking a guy for about two minutes. He’s turned back twice to look behind him, which kind of looks like tradecraft to me. More importantly, the facial recog software puts his periocular region at 73 percent chance of a match.”

  Ruth looked past Lucas’s shoulder to the screen and saw a greenish image of dozens of pedestrians moving along in the dark in both directions through an outdoor mall. A lone individual in the crowd walked through the snow and slush wearing a hooded black three-quarter-length coat. He or she faced away from the camera. Ruth would not have known which person to focus on in the scene except the figure in the dark coat was framed by a superimposed red square.

  “That’s him?”

  “Watch him for a second. He’ll look back.”

  Ruth did as Lucas suggested, but while she waited for him to check his six, a thought occurred to her. She asked, “How is it that no one is noticing the UAV? You are pretty low.”

  Carl had been quietly piloting the Sky Shark, but he answered now, his face remaining a mask of concentration as he spoke. “It’s a little trick. You fly about four stories up, moving along as close to the wall of the buildings as possible. During the day the gray and black UAV isn’t silhouetted in front of the sky, it just blends in with all the concrete and glass and metal. But at night you are above the streetlights, so it’s even more invisible.”

  Lucas swiveled his chair quickly over to another laptop on the rack, and he began feverishly manipulating the mouse and clicking keys.

  “What are you doing?” Ruth asked.

  “I’m setting the computer to record his gait so we can track him. The human gait is actually quite unique. Once it has a good reading of Gentry’s particular walking pattern, we can find him and track him automatically when he’s on foot. It’s not the best biometric identifier, but if it’s him, it will be a cinch to get a usable reading to narrow him down in a crowd later.”

  “If it’s him,” Ruth added.

  Just then the figure moved out of the flow of foot traffic and closer to the building on his right. He slowed and looked into a shop window. He stopped fully now, people passed by, and he turned and looked back up the street.

  On the computer in front of Ruth the image zoomed automatically on the man’s face. The resolution was surprisingly good, though the face was green because of the night vision optics.

  Ruth said, “It might be him. I still can’t—”

  Just then Lucas, who was in front of the other laptop, said, “Recog has bumped probability up to 90 percent.”

  “Well, then,” said Ruth. “I guess we’ve got the bastard!”

  Ruth and Aron quickly rushed back into the bedroom to dress for the cold. Sixty seconds later they rushed back into the living room.

  “Where is he?” Ruth asked Lucas as she pulled her boots on.

  “He’s on . . . shit.” Lucas struggled to read the Swedish name on the moving map display on the laptop. “Drottningatten? However you pronounce it, it’s about twenty minutes from here on foot. He’s headed north, away from us.”

  “We’ll take the car.” She put her phone’s receiver in her ear. “Call us with updates.”

  Ruth put her hood up on her coat and followed Aron out the door.

  Ten minutes later Ruth parked the embassy Skoda next to Tegnerlunden Park, and she and Aron began walking briskly through the snow shower, following Lucas’s instructions coming through their earpieces. They’d also called in Laureen and Mike, who would soon approach on foot from the south.

  “Listen up,” Lucas said over the team comms. “He’s a couple minutes ahead of you on . . . Radman
sgatan, if I’m saying that right.”

  “Understood,” Ruth said. “We can track him. You make sure your drone is out of sight.”

  “No worries.”

  “I worry, Lucas. Tell your partner to keep the Sky Shark back.”

  After a quick pause he replied. “Lady, how ’bout you do your job and you let us do ours? He won’t see the Sky Shark, but he might see you guys.”

  Ruth sighed, expelling a long plume of vapor from her body.

  Before she could say anything else, the American sensor operator spoke again. “Bingo! He just went inside a building. Made a beeline right for it; I think he knew exactly where he was heading.”

  “What building?”

  “Wait one.” There was a pause while Lucas waited for Carl to get his drone in position to see the address and any signage. While they waited, Ruth and Aron picked up the pace even more. If he was inside now, he wouldn’t see them unless they got too close to the building.

  As they walked, Mike Dillman and Laureen Tattersal folded in behind them on the sidewalk. The two couples did not acknowledge each other at all. They just walked on in the same direction, some hundred feet or so apart.

  “He’s on the southwest corner of Radmansgatan and . . . shit, how the fuck do you pronounce this?”

  Ruth barked at him. “Sound it out, Lucas! Hurry!”

  Slowly he said, “Sveavagen, or something like that. Just two blocks west of the intersection is an outdoor pedestrian space that’s higher than the road below. There is a staircase with a pretty good overlook on the building the target entered. There’s no cover there, but you should be able to see the entrance without having to get any closer.”

  Ruth and her team arrived at the overlook as he finished describing it.

  “Got it,” she said.

  “All right. He’s in the building down there on your right. Forty yards away.”

  “What is that place?”

  Lucas typed the address into a computer, then said, “There is a steakhouse on the ground floor, but he did not go in that entrance. He took the staircase next to it up to the second floor. It’s cheap rental apartments. Immigrants. Families. That’s Gentry’s MO. He likes staying in low-rent tenements. I’ll wager that’s where he’s living while here in town.”