Dead Eye

by Mark Greaney

  Gentry entered the Town Hall Square, the center of activity in the medieval portion of the city. A winter market was under way, and dozens of morning shoppers strolled through wooden kiosks set up to sell food and drink and handicrafts. The smell of grilled sausage, hot chocolate, and glogg was in the air, but Whitlock watched Gentry pass it all by, ignoring the happy sights and sounds and smells of the holidays, as he stayed rooted to his mission.

  His mission to stay alive.

  He stopped suddenly, crossed the street toward a bakery, and looked in the window glass.

  Whitlock turned his head down to the cobblestones in front of his shoes and kept walking until he turned the corner, leaving his target behind.

  He picked him up again a minute later, just by chance really, in the winding and narrow Old Town streets. As Russ tried to move on a street parallel to Gentry, he found himself folding in fifty feet behind him. Court crossed the street again, just ahead of an SUV that rumbled slowly on the icy cobblestones, and he began climbing steps through a medieval archway, leading up the Cathedral Hill.

  Whitlock watched Gentry disappear up the snowy stone staircase, and he did not follow. His quarry was highly skilled, and he was conducting an SDR, a surveillance detection run. He would begin a complicated ballet of subterfuge, ducking into shops, leaving through random exits, turning in different directions and generally making himself impossible to follow without his tail losing him or revealing himself. Dead Eye could stick behind a lot of seasoned pros as they carried out SDRs and remain invisible doing so. But not Court. Russ knew the only way to keep the Gray Man in sight was to get close to him and stick like glue, and if Russ did that, the Gray Man would immediately light on to the fact he was being followed.

  And that would be that.

  So Russ let him go. He returned to the Town Hall Square and purchased a cup of glogg from a kiosk, and he sipped it slowly while he stood, watching the shoppers move from stand to stand. Women pushed prams or pulled their children along behind them on sleds; men stood in small groups talking or walked hand in hand with their wives. He pulled a folded map out of his coat pocket and began studying it, orienting himself and determining where he’d last seen Court, walking up the steps. Russ decided he would pick out a high-probability choke point and head there to wait for his target to pass.

  His phone chirped in his ear, just as it had every three or four hours during the past day. He had ignored all incoming calls since Bucharest, but he was ready to talk now. He tapped the receiver, opening the call and connecting it through his Bluetooth device.

  “Go.”

  “This is Graveside.” Lee Babbitt’s code name was Graveside, and Whitlock recognized Babbitt’s voice over the satellite connection, but there was a protocol to follow nonetheless.

  “Say iden,” Whitlock said while still looking over the map in his gloved hand and sipping his hot wine.

  “Iden key eight, two, four, four, niner, seven, two, niner, three.”

  “Iden confirmed. This is Dead Eye. Iden four, eight, one, oh, six, oh, five, two, oh.”

  “Identity confirmed. Hello, Russell.” Babbitt’s voice was taciturn, but Whitlock imagined his employer must be furious with him for going off on his own script over the past thirty hours.

  “Hi, Lee.”

  Babbitt was all business. “I trust you got the data we pushed about the underway assault last night?”

  “Dry hole.” Russ said it flatly.

  “Yes, but I think we’re back on track. My analysts went through several hours of sat feeds. They picked up a vessel fitting the description of the one described by the Polaris’s captain. It docked in Tallinn, Estonia, forty minutes ago. I need you to head to Tallinn and we’ll update you as soon as we can get more intel to pinpoint the target.”

  Whitlock sipped his glogg and began walking, still studying the map in his hand. He headed out of the square and toward Castle Hill, his boots crunching the snow. “A step ahead of you, boss. I’m on scene.”

  There was a pause on Babbitt’s end. Finally, he replied, “You are in Tallinn?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I am conducting surveillance on the target.”

  Whitlock knew that would take a moment to sink in. He took another sip of his glogg and walked.

  “You have eyes on Gentry?”

  “I tracked him from the port. He’s conducting an SDR at present, which I expect to continue well into the afternoon. I’ve pulled back from him, but I’m not far behind.”

  There was another pause that lasted precisely as long as Whitlock expected. He imagined what would be running through Babbitt’s mind. Excitement tempered with no small measure of confusion and even suspicion, but Babbitt was an exec, which meant, to Whitlock, that more than anything Babbitt’s brain would be focusing on concocting a way to show that he remained in control of a situation he clearly did not understand.

  On cue the man in Washington asked, “How did you know he would go to Estonia?”

  Whitlock took another sip of the mulled wine. He luxuriated in the flavor, just as he savored the explanation of his accomplishment. “I solved the equation.”

  “The equation?”

  “Yes. I determined what his best course of action would be, taking into account all of his training. I decided he wasn’t going to sit on that boat for two days for reasons of PERSEC. I knew he’d get off somehow, and I figured he’d do it as soon as it got dark, which meant he’d be closest to Tallinn to the south or Helsinki to the north. He could have gone either direction, but I leaned toward Tallinn. He doesn’t speak Estonian, but he knows Russian, and you can get by in Estonia in Russian. Less easily so in Finland.” Whitlock added, “And I knew he wasn’t going back to Russia; that was a given.”

  Babbitt asked, “What’s keeping him from leaving Tallinn immediately?”

  “He will like it here. He’ll see the crowds, the tourists, the negligible police presence, the abundance of little places to sleep and eat, the plentiful transport options out of town via rail, road, and sea, and he’ll park his ass right here for a couple of days. That’s what I’d do, so that’s what he’ll do.”

  Whitlock polished off the rest of his hot glogg with a long gulp and crushed the cup in his gloved hand, throwing it in a can on the street corner. He arrived at a staircase that would take him up the hill through a pedestrian tunnel, and he began ascending.

  Babbitt said, “I’ll have Trestle moved into the area. They can fly over from Helsinki and be there before Jumper can move up from Berlin.”

  Whitlock said, “Do what you have to do, but keep them far back out of the way until I call them to the target. Gray Man will find a place to stay tonight, and I’ll find it. There is no reason to bring Trestle and his boys in too close. I’ve got everything under control.”

  “Very well.”

  “Of course,” Russ added, “if you like, I can just go ahead and take care of this. No sense in spinning everyone up. I’ll do it myself.”

  Babbitt responded in a stern voice. “You are not to take him down on your own. The word from the Russians is Gentry killed eight men at Sid’s house. Wounded several more. As impressive as that is, there were fifty-some-odd armed personnel on the property.”

  Russ sighed and made sure Babbitt heard it through the satellite connection. “I understand. I’ll just keep tabs on the target and provide the strike team whatever support they require. Trestle will do the deed.”

  “Good.” And then, “If you are waiting for me to say I am impressed with your ability to discern his every move, I am.”

  “Gentry is easy for me to read. He and I are one in the same.”

  Lee seemed confused by the remark, and he had no direct response. Instead he said, “I’ll put you in touch with Trestle Actual when he gets to Tallinn.”

  “Roger that.”r />
  Now Babbitt’s tone turned fatherly. “Obviously your handlers here would like a little more communication from you, but I’m not going to read you the riot act. I know you are accustomed to a certain amount of operational flexibility, and I can respect that.”

  “But?”

  “But the one thing I will not be flexible with is the takedown. That will be done by the direct action team. I want you out of the way when the time comes.”

  “Message received. I’ll help Trestle get into position, and then I’ll get out of the way.”

  Babbitt let Dead Eye’s compliant comment hang for a moment. Finally he said, “Very well. Graveside out.”

  ELEVEN

  Court walked the streets of Tallinn for hours, then spent another hour shopping for a hotel that suited a laundry list of needs. The one he settled on was a three-story stone building on Kooli Street built into a long row of buildings, all running along the fifteenth-century city wall that partially circled the Old Town. Court’s tiny room was cold and damp due to the fact that it shared a stone wall with the town’s ancient battlements. The room did not, however, have much else going for it. Just a bed on a low platform off the floor, a tiny desk, a toilet, and a small window that looked through the stone wall and out to a park to the north.

  But the room was perfect for him; it was at the end of a hall full of creaky floorboards, and he knew if he was attacked, he would hear anyone approaching, and he could quickly get out the window and descend to the ground, using the rope he’d already tied to the leg of his twin bed and stashed under it.

  He took a long hot shower down the hall, soaking his bruises and sore joints picked up from slamming his body around Sidorenko’s property. After he redressed himself and put his boots back on, he packed his backpack up with all his belongings and secured his heavy coat between the straps. When Court was operational, his training taught him to sleep with his clothes on and keep everything he owned ready to snatch and run if he had to bug out at a moment’s notice. And since Court was virtually always operational, he had been living this way for years.

  He sat at the little desk in the room and ate a can of beans and a tin of salmon he’d bought at a market during his SDR, washing it down with a large bottle of A. Le Coq, the local beer. He would have preferred heading out to a little bar for a drink and a hot meal, but he liked to take a day or two in a new place before venturing out. This first night he would remain in his room, listening to the sounds of the hotel, getting a feel for the normal action around him.

  He sat on the bed and turned the TV on to CNN. There was no news about the action near St. Petersburg, but that was no surprise. Mob shootouts in Russia only received international coverage if there was gripping video to play along with the reportage, and although Gentry assumed there were CCTV cameras all over Sid’s place, he was equally certain that whoever was running Sid’s Bratva now would have no interest in releasing that video to the public.

  Court flipped through the channels as he lay in bed. He hoped to relax now; this was his first real downtime in weeks.

  It felt good to get the Russian mafia off his ass; it let him concentrate on the main threat to him. The United States of America. For five years Court had been on the run from the CIA after a shoot-on-sight order was placed on him by his Langley masters. He did not know why they wanted him dead; he only knew they had sent wave after wave of men after him, and he did not expect that to change any time soon.

  The CIA’s manhunt for him had kept him out of the USA for the past half decade, living off the net, in the third world mostly, taking contracts for hire to fund his run. He’d worked for a string of handlers and benefactors over the years, from a venerable British spymaster who’d double-crossed him, to Sid, the Russian mobster whom Court had double-crossed and now killed. He’d also double-crossed a Mexican drug cartel boss along the way.

  Court had developed a habit of subverting the goals of the men who paid him in order to achieve a greater good.

  Gentry didn’t feel bad about fucking over his employer when his employer was scum of the earth. But achieving these little victories had never been his ultimate goal. Court wanted, more than anything else in this world, to return to the USA. To be free of the CIA’s shoot-on-sight sanction.

  But for now he was a man without a country, an expatriate assassin for hire.

  He flipped channels on the television in the dark, found a French comedy, and despite the persistent worries hanging heavily over him, he started to laugh at the absurdity of the story.

  Outside gentle snowflakes began drifting in the breeze, and two floors below him, another solitary traveler entered the tiny lobby of the hotel.

  It took hours of hunting, but Russ Whitlock hit pay dirt on his fourth try.

  At one hotel he had trouble getting information about the other guests, so he went ahead and rented a room, then learned from the innkeeper that he was the first new guest of the day. He went up to his room, unmade the bed, and then immediately slipped away out the back. At the second location he learned the only other guests were a group of Asians in town for a boat show, so he politely demurred at the nightly rate, making his apologies and leaving before the woman behind the counter could offer a negotiated price.

  A third location also turned into a dry hole.

  It was dark by the time he found the fourth hotel that had everything he would look for if he were the man on the run after an op. It was in the Old Town, the touristy part of the city, which meant a steady influx of foreigners and strangers, but it was small and out of the way at the northern tip of the quarter, which meant it was quiet enough at night, and anyone entering the building might be noticed.

  The windows in front overlooked an open parking lot that was surrounded on three sides by other buildings, making a small square open space in front of the hotel that amplified the echoes of approaching vehicles and shouted voices.

  He walked around back to find a park, and here he saw that the wood-and-stone building was built along the wall that had surrounded this part of the town for six centuries. A large circular stone tower, peaked with a conical wooden roof, was attached to it, and there were windows in the stone wall that must have led to the hotel rooms in the back of the building.

  Yeah, Russ thought. This looks right.

  He entered the lobby, asked the girl behind the desk for a room, and then looked down at the ledger.

  Someone had taken room 301 just an hour earlier. Russ saw the signature, just a scratch of a pen on a line. He did not expect it to say Court Gentry and it did not, but the timing was right. He was sure it was his man.

  The girl wanted to put him on the third floor as well, but he told her he had hurt his knee falling on the ice and asked if she had anything lower. She complied with a sympathetic smile, giving him room 201, directly below his target.

  He paid in euros for three nights; she asked to see his passport and he slipped it out confidently. Russ knew his paperwork was solid, thanks to the document people at Townsend. Their special relationship with the CIA allowed Townsend personnel to operate with credentials that came directly from a program the Agency operated with the Department of State.

  Whitlock, unlike Gentry, could go wherever he wanted in the world, and he knew his credos would hold up to scrutiny.

  After heading upstairs and dropping his backpack, he walked around the hotel for several minutes more to take a mental picture of the layout of the building. He then zipped up his coat and returned outside into the cold air. Snow fell steadily now, blowing in the breeze under an overcast sky. He entered the neighboring buildings, still creating a mental map of his surroundings. Then he moved around back to the park that ran along the city wall and determined which window corresponded to Gentry’s room. Once finished with his recon, he headed back to the town square for dinner.

  He called in to Townsend, reported that he had located the target, and asked to be
put in touch with the leader of the strike team as soon as he arrived.

  Just south of Old Town he enjoyed a meal of elk stew and a bottle of red wine; he ate and drank slowly, sitting alone in a dark corner of the restaurant. While he dined he used his smart phone to study the greater neighborhood around his new hotel, adding a bird’s-eye-view perspective to the area he had seen with his eyes. When he had completed this task, he pulled up a map of the country and traced several routes along train lines and highways that would get him out of town quickly and easily.

  A call came through his headset when he was almost finished with his meal.

  “Go,” he said, speaking softly.

  “Trestle Actual here.”

  “Say iden,” Russ instructed, and then he picked his last bite of soda bread off his plate, dipping it in the elk stew before popping it in his mouth.

  “Iden key, niner, three, three, oh, eight, seven, two, five, niner.”

  “Confirmed. Dead Eye here. Iden number four, eight, one, oh, six, oh, five, two, oh.”

  “I’m at the airport. Will be in the AO in an hour. Have you located the target?”

  “Of course I have.”

  “All right. We can meet at twenty-two hundred.”

  Russ pulled his paper map of the city from his pocket and looked it over for a few seconds. “Open your map. You’ll need to write this down.”

  TWELVE

  Whitlock walked alone with his hands in his pockets and his head down, making his way through a steady snow shower across Freedom Square, a large plaza illuminated by the floodlights of St. John’s Church. Light traffic rumbled by on the streets, but there were few pedestrians passing through the square or walking along the sidewalks at this time of night.

  He crossed the street and entered a park, left the path, and walked through the trees, trudging up a hill, his boots gripping the frozen ground below the fresh snowfall. He saw no one around save for the light traffic on Falgi Tee and a few people waiting at a bus stop at the edge of the park. He gave them a wide berth and moved deeper into the woods, finally making his way to a ring of park benches on the top of a little hill.