by Mark Greaney
“Nothing,” Court repeated.
Just then something occurred to her. “Court, look straight above my pos.”
“Above the department store?”
“Yes.”
“You said it would be moving alongside the building.”
“Think about it—they will need to cover all the exits in case I slip out the back. They can’t do that unless it’s directly above.”
“Okay,” Court said, and he began scanning the blue sky, looking left and right above the department store. “Still nothing.”
“Keep looking.”
Just then, almost exactly where he’d focused his attention above the department store, he saw a small black object moving across the sky. It was easily three hundred feet in the air, and it was little more than a speck from Court’s position several blocks away. He never would have noticed if it had remained stationary.
“Got it,” he said. “It’s leaving.”
It flew closer to Court, and a second craft slipped silently into a hovering position near the first.
“Wait,” he said. “A second drone just appeared from the southeast. They must have their mobile truck parked somewhere in that direction.”
Ruth said, “Start heading that way. I’ll keep moving closer and we can find it.”
Court climbed onto his BMW bike and headed off after the drone. He’d hoped to discover a van with the UAV team parked just around the corner, but instead he followed the black speck for a half mile and then he lost it, finding himself out of Etterbeek and closer to the southeastern edge of town. He pulled into a grocery store parking lot, hid himself with his bike under cover of a covered parking lot, and then directed Ruth to a bus stop just a hundred yards from his position.
Ruth arrived on a bus minutes later, and Court scanned the skies for the UAV. He found it this time only fifty feet in the air; it hovered confidently a block from the bus stop.
Court checked his watch a few minutes later and, like clockwork, at the half-hour mark the drones switched out again. The first UAV peeled off, again flying toward the southeast, and Court entered traffic behind it.
Soon he found himself on the A4 highway doing his best to keep his eyes on a tiny speck of black a hundred yards off his right shoulder and slightly ahead of him. Twice he almost wrecked the bike as he struggled to keep the object in sight and negotiate traffic, and all the while he was on guard, ready for the UAV to land next to a car or a truck somewhere along the roadside.
Instead the UAV left the path of the highway and entered a little village. He saw it descending between two hills, and then it was gone.
“Ruth. I lost it.”
“Shit.”
“We’re going to have to wait another half hour.”
“Dammit! That takes us past noon. That’s not enough time to get to the cemetery if this doesn’t work.”
Court yelled back at her. “I’m close! Next time the UAV leaves this village and the other comes back I’ll be right on top of the ground control station.”
He raced into the village of Overijse, found high ground in a copse of trees just to the east of town, and then parked his bike. They were running out of time, but for now there was nothing he could do but wait.
FIFTY-THREE
Ruth took a bus that led her in the same general direction as the UAV, but she climbed out after only two stops, not wanting to reveal that she knew which village Townsend was operating from. She stood along the side of the road, killing time until the next UAV changeover.
Her phone chirped in her ear. “Yes?”
“It’s Babbitt. Why haven’t you called?”
She knew he was watching her, or at least he was being informed of her odd movements. She said, “I’m in contact with Gentry; he’s leading me around to make sure I’m not being followed.”
“It’s almost noon; he better hurry it up or Kalb is a dead man.”
“I know. It won’t be long. Do you have Dead Eye?”
“When you have Gentry in pocket, call me back. We know where Whitlock is, and I will tell you where to send Gentry.”
“Very good,” she said, and she disconnected the call.
But it was not “very good.” She knew Babbitt was stringing her along. There would be no meeting between Gentry and Whitlock at the end of this trip. No, as soon as the Townsend UAV tracked her to Gentry the Townsend men would pounce.
She climbed on the next bus heading in the opposite direction from Court. It was time to lead Jumper Team away from him.
Russ Whitlock had spent the morning preparing his escape from Brussels after his act. He staged an automobile north of town and reserved a hotel room in Amsterdam for that evening. From there he would play it by ear. He knew with certainty that his new documents received from the CIA the previous evening would be less than worthless; he would have to go to ground here in the EU and find some forged credos. This would take time and money, but Russ was comforted by the fact that, after one P.M. this afternoon, he would have a great deal of both.
He positioned himself in his rented ground-floor flat in the Brussels neighborhood of Saint Pieter Woluwe. He knew the area because the flat was in a building that also contained a Townsend safe house, a top-floor unit that Russ had used once in the past. He steered clear of the safe house unit because he thought it might have been bugged, and he knew Townsend might have been targeting him at this point along with Gentry.
He wanted to take an Adderall to amp up his reaction times and awareness, but he knew he’d have to make a plus one-thousand-yard shot, which would be impossible with the amped-up heart rate and blood pressure the drug would cause.
But this was of no great concern, because Russ knew his almost euphoric mood would take the place of the psychostimulant. He felt amazing about today, about his plan, his future.
It was just before noon now. He had fifteen minutes to kill before returning to his hide east of Dieweg Cemetery. He decided he would quickly clean and rebandage his weeping hip wound.
As he stood to head to the bathroom, his earpiece chirped.
“Go.”
“It’s Babbitt.”
Russ chuckled. “What? No identity check?”
“You are no longer an employee of Townsend Government Services. There is nothing official to this call.” He paused. “We’re just two guys, having a man-to-man chat.”
Russ’s ebullient mood continued. He joked, “You can’t fire me, because I quit.”
Babbitt wasn’t laughing. “I’m here in Brussels.”
Russ shrugged to himself in the quiet flat. “You? Out here in the field? Don’t tell me you brought Parks along with you?”
“Jeff is here, yes.”
“Oh no.” Russ’s tone was sarcastic. “The sheriff and his deputy have come to bring me in.”
Lee said, “If it were up to me I would do just that. But Denny Carmichael is ordering us to continue on with the Gentry mission.”
“Good ol’ Denny. He is an old single-minded, grudge-holding motherfucker, isn’t he?”
Babbitt cleared his throat. “I have been in contact with the woman from Mossad. She is here in Brussels and working with Gentry. They are trying to track you down.”
“They won’t find me.”
“She wants to exchange Gentry for you.”
Whitlock whistled. “Poor Court. He never met a friend who didn’t stab him in the back.”
“True.”
“Well, I’m not turning myself over to Mossad, and I’m not turning myself over to you.”
“Of course you aren’t.”
“Then what is it you want from me, Babbitt?”
“I want your trust.”
Russ cocked his head. Where was this going? “What do you mean?”
“I want you to just listen to what I have to say without reacting.” Before Russ responded, Babbitt said, “I thought it was likely you would use one of our mothballed safe houses as your base of operations, so I sent a UAV to check out all the locations you
knew about. You were seen on Rue Kelle, and now John Beaumont and his team are right outside your door. Myself as well. We want to come in and talk. We have no mandate or sanction to do anything to you, we just need you to help us get Gentry.”
Russ leapt to his feet and reached for the Glock pistol on his hip, just as the living room door flew open and three men entered with their guns high. Russ dove out of the room and rushed toward the back of the property but here three more armed Townsend operatives entered through the back door and rushed toward him with their sub guns held high. He looked down and saw dancing laser dots moving around his chest as a half-dozen laser targeting systems attached to short-barreled submachine guns found their target.
Whitlock raised his hands in surrender. Beaumont stormed up the narrow hallway, then quickly brought his right knee up, hard, slamming it into the ragged infected gunshot wound on Whitlock’s left hip.
Russ fell to the floor.
Minutes later Dead Eye’s hands had been zip-tied behind his back, and he sat on the couch in the living room. Two Townsend men were tasked with keeping their Uzis pointed at his head, and the rest of the Townsend men moved around the property, mostly helping the UAV team move their ground control station from the van outside to a long table next to a bay window in the front of the living room. As the two UAV operators, a pilot named Joe and a sensor operator named Keith, set up their gear, they glanced his way. Russ smiled at the two young men. Matter-of-factly he said, “I’m going to kill you both.”
They looked to Beaumont with panic-stricken looks.
Beaumont said, “Don’t listen to him, boys. He’s just a little grumpy. When we busted through that door he lost twenty-five million bucks.”
Babbitt and Parks entered the living room and sat down in wingback chairs across from Russ. Beaumont remained across the room, leaning against the wall with his Uzi slung across his chest.
Leland Babbitt addressed Whitlock. “Here’s how it’s going to play out. The Israeli woman will make contact with Gentry and then she will call me. I will have her send Gentry here. When he arrives we kill him, and then we sit here until Kalb leaves the city.
“Then we release you, and everyone goes their separate ways.”
Whitlock wasn’t buying it. “You are as full of shit as ever. Once Gentry is dead, no one at CIA will have incentive to keep me alive. You are going to kill me.” He motioned to Beaumont with his forehead. “Scratch that. You will have one of your apes do it for you.”
Parks and Beaumont exchanged a grin.
“Not true,” said Babbitt, but he did not try terribly hard to keep up the ruse.
Whitlock leaned back on the couch. His face revealed a man defeated, but behind his back, he’d torn part of the zipper from one of the sofa cushions. His fingertips bled from the difficult task, but now he’d run the zipper through the flexi-cuffs, and he used his fingers to work it slowly back and forth, only a quarter of an inch movement for each stroke, like a tiny dull wire saw.
He’d done this before, and he knew he’d cut through the bindings in about two minutes. At that point he knew he could make it over the coffee table and onto Babbitt in less than a second.
Sure, the Jumper men would kill him, but he weighed this against the satisfaction of digging his hands into the throat of Lee Babbitt, and he was having trouble talking himself out of a course of action that would turn him into a bullet-ridden carcass on the floor.
But another thought entered his mind. He kept sawing behind his back, revealing nothing of the pain in his shredded fingertips or the soreness in the muscles of his wrists and forearms. He looked to Babbitt. “Your drone found me, but it didn’t find Gentry? Is that curious to you?”
Keith said, “Not really. He could be inside some location where we don’t have coverage.”
“Or he could be running countermeasures to defend against UAV tracking.”
Parks smiled. “I doubt that.”
“He’s working with Ettinger, right? Do you know where she is?”
“She’s running all over the city right now. We are tracking her, in case she tries to trick us.”
Russ laughed. “She’s already tricking you. She’s leading you on a wild-goose chase. She knows about the UAV coverage, which means Gentry knows about the coverage. Right now Gentry is with her, watching from a distance, trying to track the UAV back to its home base.”
Parks said, “You just sit there and shut the fuck up, Whitlock. You are done.”
But Babbitt turned to him. “Why do you say that, Russell?”
“That’s what I would do, so that’s what he’s doing.”
Babbitt thought it over. He turned to Parks. “That would explain why she went almost all the way toward the farmhouse, and then started moving in the other direction.”
Whitlock said, “There is a solution, of course.”
“I’m listening.”
“Court is loyal as a puppy. Just grab the Mossad girl, bring her here, a place where you control the territory, and have her call Gentry. He will come running to save her.”
Babbitt looked to Beaumont. Babbitt was an executive; he did not like having his labor, especially his ex-employee, giving him ideas, but he clearly thought it to be a good idea. “Pick up Ettinger. Bring her here. We’ll do this the old-fashioned way.”
“You got it, boss.”
“And tell Dagger Team to double-time it to the farmhouse to pick up Lucas and Carl. Tell them to watch their asses. Gentry is out there somewhere.”
Court sat on his BMW bike in a lot by a flower shop, shivering in the cold as he scanned the rooftops of the little village in the valley below him. By his watch exactly half an hour had passed since he’d lost sight of the last drone. If the Townsend UAV team stayed on the same schedule, within moments he would see—”
There. A small black speck rose from a cluster of homes on the eastern edge of the village. Court could not tell which property it had taken off from, but he had it narrowed down to one particular street, with no more than four or five farmhouses on it. He fired up the bike and raced down toward the neighborhood.
He parked at the top of the street; now he was positioned between two recycling bins, and he took off his helmet to try to listen for any buzzing overhead. He fought the urge to look down at his watch. He knew the clock was ticking on this op, but he also knew that glancing away from the sky for even a few seconds could cause him to miss the returning UAV.
It took less than five minutes for the returning drone to arrive back in Overijse. As it passed over the village it came closer and closer to Gentry, then slowed and settled down behind a farmhouse not fifty yards from where he had positioned himself.
There was no mistaking it now. He knew the location of the Townsend UAV team.
Court began walking his bike to the farmhouse, not running the engine so he could remain perfectly silent. As he did so he called Ruth.
The phone rang, but there was no answer.
What the hell?
Carl and Lucas were almost done for the day, and they could not be happier. They had been working nearly nonstop for days, and they, as well as their equipment, had been pushed to the breaking point.
Twenty minutes earlier they had watched the Sky Shark feed on their monitors as their target, Ruth Ettinger, stepped off a bus in the Brussels neighborhood of Sterrebeek. As soon as the bus rolled away from the stop, a white van pulled up and members of the Townsend Jumper team leapt out, handguns drawn, and they forced Ettinger into the back.
The UAV team did not understand why the Mossad woman had been snatched, but they were not analysts or operators, they were techs, so they pushed their concerns out of their minds and went about their work. Parks had instructed them to break down their operation as fast as possible, because men from Team Dagger would be swinging by the farmhouse in minutes to pick them up.
As soon as the Sky Shark landed in the backyard, Lucas finished the powering-down process on his laptop and headed out back to retrieve it.
As he opened the door a man dressed head to toe in a black leather motorcycle outfit appeared in front of him. Before he could react the biker punched him in the jaw, knocking him back onto the tile floor of the living room of the farmhouse.
Carl saw the man in black enter over Lucas’s sprawled body. He leapt to his feet and reached across the table for an Uzi submachine gun lying next to one of the computers.
Court calmly drew his SIG and shot the UAV pilot in the ass. Carl fell to the floor, writhing in pain. Court now grabbed Lucas by his hair and dragged him back to the table in front of the ground control station. Once he was in his seat it was Carl’s turn. Court forced him back onto his chair and onto his wounded ass.
Court looked both men over quickly. “I have a personal rule that I don’t kill nerds unless I really have to. I don’t like it.” He slid his gun into his waistband. “Don’t make me. You boys are going to show me how all this groovy shit works, okay?”
“Yes, sir,” Lucas said, and Carl nodded.
“Good. I want you to fly this drone to wherever Dead Eye is. Right the fuck now.”
Lucas said, “We . . . we don’t know where he is.”
Court looked at Carl. “You’ll bleed to death within the hour. You aren’t getting a hospital till I get what I want, so you better hop to it.”
Carl composed himself quickly and began preparing the system for immediate takeoff. “I . . . I might be able to find him.”
Gentry said, “I have faith in you.”
Ruth was brought to the Rue Kelle safe house at twelve P.M. She had been treated professionally by the Jumper men, although they’d taken her phone and her Mace and they searched her thoroughly in the van on the way.
She’d protested angrily and demanded to speak to Babbitt, but then sat quietly for the rest of the drive.
She passed through the door and into the great room at the front of the flat, and was led by the arm toward Parks and Babbitt, who sat on wingback chairs facing away from her. Two Jumper cowboys stood next to the sofa, blocking her view of a man seated there facing the Townsend execs, so it was not until she was just feet away that she found herself face-to-face with the seated man. He was fit and rugged looking, but not particularly tall or overly muscular. His hands were behind his back.