by Mark Greaney
Down the hall a baby cried, but he did not think the cries had roused him.
He sat up from his mattress on the floor and rubbed his eyes. Reached for his cell phone to check the time.
Four A.M.
He put the phone back on the floor and dropped back onto his back, still staring at the ceiling.
The sounds and the smells of the tenement building were pervasive—there must have been fifty or sixty people living just on the second floor of this building—but Gentry had spent a significant percentage of his nights during the past five years in places just like this, and the rustling and crying babies and arguing in incomprehensible languages had long since ceased to bother him.
The other renters were all immigrants. Poles or Turks or people from the Balkans. Most of the rest of the single units were occupied by families; there were kids all over the place, and they’d been running up and down the halls during the early evening.
But now, other than a crying baby, it was quiet.
And the kid wasn’t keeping him from sleeping. No, that was not it.
It was the phone call to Whitlock. Russ had not said anything that made him nervous or concerned about his PERSEC. No, on the contrary, the guy had made something of a case for himself by pointing out that if he wanted Court dead, Court would already be dead.
That was true, Gentry conceded as he lay there and thought about it, but it wasn’t the airtight case Whitlock made it out to be. People change, as do their motivations, their desires, their orders. Court could rattle off a list of names of men he’d known who had not wanted him dead, until the day they suddenly did want him dead.
Court’s life was funny that way.
But even though Gentry still considered Whitlock a potential threat, Whitlock himself was not Gentry’s main concern. It was the technology itself. The MobileCrypt. Court did not trust technology he did not fully understand, and he was going to have to accept that technology out there was improving in many ways, and very few of these ways gave him an advantage.
Most of the advantages went to those chasing him.
Court worried he was not changing with the times. He was still walking around looking back over his shoulder and attaching strands of hair to his door frame to see if anyone had entered his room. Meanwhile, Whitlock had told Court that Townsend had compromised him with a fucking flying robot.
He had to get out of this game. The rules were changing, they were weighed more and more against him, and he saw it as inevitable someday soon he would zig when he should have zagged, and he would get his ass killed all because of some technology that he’d never even fucking heard of.
All that said, he didn’t know where he would go to be any safer than he was now. He liked Stockholm so far. He liked his chances here, moving around with his face covered. He did not want to leave, to run away from unknown and possibly imagined space age forces hunting him.
Stockholm wasn’t the problem.
But the phone call and vulnerability that it placed him in was the problem. He decided right then that he would not call Russ back, and he would relocate somewhere else in the city this morning.
The resolution of thought relaxed him somewhat, but still he couldn’t sleep.
THIRTY-TWO
Ruth woke at four A.M. She’d slept less than four hours, a fact her body made clear to her before she’d even had time to pick up her phone to check the time.
Right now Mike would be huddling for warmth on a bench about eighty yards away from the target’s location on Radmansgatan, tucked into a covered bus stop in the dark and away from any line of sight on the windows of the building. Ruth had to get up and go relieve him for three hours, and then Laureen would come and relieve her.
Ruth pushed her team hard, she knew it, but it was the only way to avoid a repeat of what had happened the previous spring in Rome.
In Rome her intelligence had been perfect; she and her team had tracked a Hezbollah gunman to a home in the Monte Sacro district of the city, and their surveillance determined that he would attempt to strike Ehud Kalb at an upcoming climate conference.
Ruth passed her information on to Metsada, along with a request for a few more days’ surveillance to get better visibility inside the Monte Sacro home.
But she was vetoed, and Mossad leadership ordered an immediate raid. An internal report issued after the fact suggested that an increased Special Operations funding request in the Knesset the following week was the cynical impetus behind the order for immediate action.
Whatever the reason, Metsada hit the house, ignoring the request of the targeting officer on sight.
Five innocent people were killed. A father, a mother, and three children. The Hezbollah assassin had kidnapped them and kept them prisoner in case he needed a bargaining chip. When the commandos burst through the front door of the home, he pushed the family down a staircase; the Israelis mistook the rushing falling figures in their weapon lights as threats, and they gunned them all down before exchanging fire with and killing the Hezbollah terrorist.
Ruth was a basket case after the catastrophe. But she was almost immediately cleared of any wrongdoing, and she demanded to go back to work. Yanis had pushed back against this; he forced her to spend some time in counseling. But, damaged or not, she was damned proficient at her job, and there were many threats to Prime Minister Kalb, so she was cleared for duty within days, and she had been working twice as hard ever since.
Ruth rubbed her eyes and checked the local temperature on an app on her phone, and she rubbed them again, making sure she was seeing the screen correctly.
Out loud she groaned, “Three degrees Fahrenheit? Really?”
As she rolled out of the warm bed she heard noises in the living room of the safe house. Male voices. At first she thought it was just Carl and Lucas in conversation, which surprised her, considering the hour. But within a few seconds she was certain there were new speakers in the mix.
Next to where Ruth had been sleeping in the queen-sized bed, Laureen did not stir.
“Who the hell is that?” It was Aron asking from the bed on the far side of the room.
Ruth did not answer; she headed out of the bedroom, slipping her glasses on, and fumbled her way up the hall in the dark, toward the bright lights of the living room.
The voices were louder as she approached, and she also heard the thumping and slamming of equipment being moved around. She began to suspect she knew what was happening even before she saw it for herself.
Oh no.
Ruth walked into a room full of men, ten in all, including Lucas and Carl, who themselves had clearly only just awakened moments before.
She did not know the new guests, but Ruth didn’t need thirteen years working in the intelligence field to determine she was looking at the Townsend kill team.
“Mornin’,” a burly and bearded American man in a knit cap and a ski jacket said in a gravelly southern twang. He talked and moved like he was in charge of this entourage, and he crossed the room to her like he owned the place. “John Beaumont. You must be Ruth.”
She shook his hand, but it was a gesture of obligation, not amicability. “Don’t tell me you are planning a raid on that tenement.”
“I go where they send me, ma’am. Do what they tell me. Just the same as you, I’ll bet.”
She shook her head violently. Ruth liked to be in control, and she felt the growing panic of losing control. “We don’t know anything about the positioning of the target inside the building. What room he’s in, how many others are in there. We know there are families. Kids. It’s way too early for action.”
“We’re hitting it at oh six hundred, which is late in my book, but first light ’round here isn’t till oh nine twenty-five.”
Ruth’s panic grew. “No! You’ve got to give us more time. At least half a day.”
Beaumont pulled a tin of dip from his back pocket and began a snapping motion with his hand to tamp it down inside the can. “I don’t work for you, honey, so I ain’t
gotta do shit.”
“Excuse me?”
“You need to chill out. We aren’t going to shoot any kids. Look, I’d like a better picture of the interior layout of that place myself, but we’ll just have to adapt and overcome. We’ll be going in light, civilian dress.” He smiled a crooked grin. “We’ll be super friendly to everybody who stays the fuck out of our way.” Beaumont put a pinch of dip in his mouth and winked at her.
A couple of his men chuckled behind him. She looked at the others and saw the weapons for the first time. Micro Uzis, a small sub gun of Israeli manufacture, and pistols that she did not recognize in holsters festooned with extra magazines. Ruth herself had been trained on weaponry, of course, but she did not carry firearms in the field, nor did she have any desire to.
“You’re going in with Uzis? Yeah, that’s friendly.”
“I’m about to make breakfast,” he said. “I’m thinking about an omelet. You know what they say about how to make an omelet?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Ruth was lost.
One of his other men answered the question by raising his Uzi. “You gotta break some eggs, boss.”
“That’s right. Now, sweetie, we’re going to do our best to avoid civilian casualties. Seriously. But we damn well will neutralize Court Gentry in that building at oh six hundred.”
“You’re a prick.”
Beaumont ignored her; he’d tried his hand at international diplomacy and failed. He turned away and began helping his team with the equipment.
This felt like Rome all over again, and Ruth had to find a way to stop this. She turned to Lucas and Carl. The two men looked small and out of place in this room full of snake eaters. They did not seem happy about the new guests in their living room, but they certainly did not air any objections.
She rushed to her room and yanked her phone off the end table. Her first thought was to call Yanis in Tel Aviv, but instead she dialed Babbitt in D.C., where it was just after eight in the evening.
She started the conversation in the softest tone she could muster. “Mr. Babbitt, I am begging you to give us a few hours to continue surveillance.”
“Why would we do that? Lucas says you know where he is. He says you’ve got an operative watching his place right now.”
“Outside, yes. It would be idiotic to do surveillance inside the location now.”
“No need for that. All we have to do is go in and get him.”
“Kill him, you mean.”
“That’s up to him; however, I will say this. He murdered several of our people the other day, so I’ve ordered my direct action team to take no unnecessary chances.”
Ruth was certain their plan was to kill Gentry, and there was no plan whatsoever to bring him in, but she did not make the accusation. Instead she pressed on with her campaign to get Townsend to wait. “At open of business today I’ll send one of my guys into the building to rent a room, and with a little luck we’ll have a live covert feed from in there by noon.”
“I trust you’ve met Jumper Actual?”
“Beaumont? Yes.”
“Well, he’s my guy, and I’m sending him in there this morning. They aren’t going to get video, they aren’t going to rent a room. They will simply move through the property, locate the target, and neutralize him by whatever means are most expedient.”
She said, “You know there are kids in there. Immigrant families, probably packed in like cordwood. There will be illegals; they’ll scramble when they see white guys with guns. It could become a bloodbath if Gentry starts moving through all that!”
“We can’t lose the target again. It’s as simple as that.” He added, “Beaumont and his team are quite good. This is how your Metsada operators do it.”
“Metsada goes in only after I provide them all the information they need to do their job without collateral.”
“Like in Rome, Ms. Ettinger?”
Ruth forced herself to take a deep breath. “Rome was a mistake. Honorable people can make a mistake. Metsada has honor. American SF soldiers have honor, too. I’ve worked with them before. But these guys of yours? Who the hell are they? They act like a posse heading out on the prairie to collect Indian scalps. You can’t just run through a capital city with your guns blazing! This isn’t the Wild West!”
“I beg to differ. These times are difficult. America’s enemies are certainly more far-flung than they were back in the Old West and, I would argue, the threats are more pervasive and their impact more profound on my nation than anything that went down back then. But our mind-set here at Townsend is very similar to the deputized lawmen of that day and age.”
It sounded to Ruth like Babbitt was reading from a bronze plaque on the wall at Townsend House. She said, “I have a feeling you don’t even know what Court Gentry did to earn the shoot-on-sight. Whether you know or not, I am certain that you do not care.”
“I have to go now, Ms. Ettinger. You and your team can feel free to stand down from this operation if you don’t feel comfortable with it. We thank the Mossad for your help in this matter.”
“I’m calling Carmichael. I’ll put a stop to your operation right now.”
“Ms. Ettinger, I seriously doubt you have the clout to get Denny on the phone, but assuming you do, I will save you some trouble and frustration. Carmichael has almost single-handedly carried the banner on the Gentry operation for the past five years. Whatever the fuck Gentry did—I am speaking about what he did previous to killing his field team—it was clearly something very personal to Denny Carmichael. If you call him right now and tell him you need Team Jumper to stand down ninety minutes before they neutralize Court Gentry, either he will laugh in your face or, and this is what worries me, he will call me and ask me to have Mr. Beaumont hog-tie you and your team so that you don’t get in the way of their operation.”
Ruth Ettinger fumed.
Babbitt let out a long, audible sigh that sounded to Ruth about as phony as his company’s pseudo-cowboy image. He then said, “It’s an ugly thing that’s about to happen there, Ruth.” He paused. “Let’s not make it any uglier.”
THIRTY-THREE
In the past thirty minutes it had become clear to Ruth Ettinger that even with all the layers she wore—every bit of her own cold-weather gear and even the extra jacket she made Laureen take off her own body and give her before Laureen climbed into the warm Skoda and returned to the safe house—the bottoms of her boots were composed of only a rubber sole and thin insoles. Even with her thick socks, the frozen ground transferred its cold into her feet and legs. After just a half hour out here in the dark, it felt like the bones in her lower legs, all the way up to her knees, were beginning to freeze solid.
She stamped her feet, sat down on the cold bench at the bus stop occasionally and lifted them off the ground, but there was really no way for her to get warm outside when it was only three degrees.
Of course things were going to heat up soon, in a figurative sense anyway. In less than an hour a goon squad of American gunmen would roll up the street, enter the door of the apartment building eighty yards from where she now stood, move up the flight of stairs, and then train their guns on dozens of people on the second and third floor. The Americans would find their man, who was himself a very violent individual, and then it would go downhill from there.
Ruth had called Yanis Alvey to complain, of course. As she drove through the dark city in the embassy Skoda, she woke him up from a deep sleep in Tel Aviv and angrily told him she did not get into this business to help private American bounty hunters set up a half-assed and ill-conceived raid on a house full of children to kill a man who had committed many heroic acts in his career, and who she suspected was being unjustly pursued by American intelligence.
She did not mention Rome. She did not have to. Yanis knew what she was thinking.
Yanis did what he always did when Ruth got angry. He listened politely, made gentle and reasoned counterpoints, and then he asked Ruth if she wanted to drop the operation and co
me home.
She said no; she always said no. She also always found a way to complete her objective, and for this reason Yanis Alvey indulged his extremely hotheaded but also extremely brilliant targeting officer.
This time was different, however, in that this time he told her in no uncertain terms that Mossad leadership had ordered him to provide the Americans any assistance they required on this operation.
Ruth was incensed by this, but she did not take it out on her boss. If Yanis’s hands were tied, she wouldn’t waste her breath complaining to him. But she was puzzled by what he told her. Mossad leadership had always stayed out of her investigations in the past. Yes, in Rome they had pushed to have the operators move in, but that was only after Ruth and her team had been satisfied of the threat.
Why the hell were they now second-guessing her on Gentry?
Sitting in the covered bus stop, she took her eyes off the building up the street for a moment, but only a moment. She looked back up to the building and, just as she did so, the door opened and a single man walked out. A streetlight shone on the sidewalk near the door, and as he passed under it she saw the black coat with the hood, the blue jeans, and the black backpack in his hand.
It was him. He looked up and down the street, slung his pack on his shoulder, and headed off down Sveavagen toward the south in the direction of the river.
Ruth was hidden in the dark at the bus stop, but she stood now, backing deeper out of his line of sight.
He’d left the building; Jumper could take him right now on the street. And she knew that when she called they would do just that. Beaumont and his men would race up in a van and riddle Gentry with submachine gun rounds, drop him in the snow, and then race off.
She reached for her phone, ready to call Aron back at the safe house so he could let the Jumper team know that the target was on the move, but she stopped herself suddenly.
She found herself facing a dilemma the gravity of which she had never experienced. Nothing about this operation smelled right. She thought about the Gray Man, the operations he had undertaken on his own initiative. The man fading from the gas lamplight ahead of her had personally done more against America’s enemies, enemies that Ruth and her nation shared with her birth nation, than anyone Ruth had ever known.