by Mark Greaney
Once completed, he reached into the case again and pulled out a Leupold Mark 2 scope, and he snapped it into place on the rail at the top of the rifle. He reached once more into the satchel and produced a box magazine, loaded with four rounds of .300 Winchester magnum ammunition.
He snapped the magazine into the mag well and handed the weapon up to the American.
“The zero?” the man in the ski mask asked as he took it and looked it over.
“As you requested, it is ranged for one hundred meters.” Brecht looked up and winked. “It will do the job.”
After a few quiet moments where the masked man examined the weapon professionally, opening the bolt and looking through the optics, he handed it back to the Austrian.
“Pack it back up.”
The Austrian knelt down, did as instructed, and then stood back up.
“Fifty rounds of ammunition in the case as well. Will you require anything else, sir?”
“No. You may leave now.”
“With your permission, I would like to say something first.”
“Okay.”
Brecht smiled a little. “I only know of one man who requests the collapsible Blaser rifle in .300 Win Mag ammunition.”
The man in the ski mask did not reply to this.
Brecht added, “Two and a half years ago I procured a similar weapon for you. I did not speak with you directly. Another man ordered it, but I knew this other man worked for Sir Donald Fitzroy, your handler. I delivered the weapon to Italy. I saw soon after that a human trafficker in Greece, a man responsible for bringing many women from Europe and selling them into servitude, was killed by a single round of .300 Win Mag, right between the eyes, at a range of seven hundred meters.” Brecht grinned excitedly. “My contacts in the business began whispering the name of the Gray Man.”
Brecht puffed out his chest and said, “I was proud to play a small role in that operation.”
Again, the man in the ski mask did not say a word, and Brecht took note of his silence.
“It is no problem,” a slight touch of nerves in his voice now. “I am discreet, of course, and I would not normally mention I am aware of the identity of a customer. It’s just that . . . well . . . in this business, one does not have a chance to work with people of such impeccable character.
“I am a businessman; I don’t care what one does with my products. But it is nice to know today my tool is put in the hands of a good man who will use it for good. I want you to know that I remain at your service for any needs you might have in the future.”
Russ Whitlock fought a smile, though he doubted it would hurt his cover much to show a stupid grin to this man. Gray Man would probably eat up such platitudes.
Russ had chosen this arms trader, for three reasons. One, he was reliable enough. Russ had known of him for years. He had access to quality guns and he delivered the guns quickly.
Two, Russ had read in Gentry’s dossier that he had obtained a sniper rifle from Reinhold Brecht once in the past. Brecht would, of course, remember the sale and he would, of course, know that the Gray Man had been the killer of the Greek pimp and human trafficker.
And three, despite Brecht’s claim that he was discreet, he was anything but. From time to time he took money from the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies in exchange for information he picked up plying his trade. Russ knew the Austrian would not keep his damn mouth shut about supplying the Gray Man, and that was exactly what Russ was counting on. A successful execution of this phase of the operation depended on the loose lips of Reinhold Brecht.
“Thank you,” Russ said. “I hope to work with you again.”
“It would be an honor.” And then Brecht actually bowed.
What a fucking suck-up, Russ thought. He wanted to draw his Glock and pistol-whip the motherfucker to the ground. Instead he just nodded back at the man, stood there, and waited for him to climb into his vehicle and drive away.
When the Range Rover had rolled off into the night, Russ hefted the leather satchel with the Blaser rifle, walked back to the light switch, and flicked it down, returning the entire scene to darkness.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Ruth Ettinger and her three-person team of targeting officers met at the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm, borrowed a black four-door Skoda from the Mossad motor pool, and then drove together to the Townsend safe house just set up on Sankt Ericksgaten Street. They parked their car in a snow-covered lot, slung their luggage over their shoulders, and headed up four flights of stairs.
The only two occupants of the flat were a two-man Townsend UAV team who had themselves only just arrived: a drone pilot named Carl and a sensor operator named Lucas who stopped unpacking their equipment just long enough to introduce themselves.
Ruth, Aron, Laureen, and Mike all moved into a large bedroom at the back of the flat, while the drone operators pulled mattresses off beds in another bedroom and dragged them into the living room so they could stay close to their gear at all times.
And they had a lot of gear. While the Townsend men got set up, Ruth and her team watched them install four laptops on tabletop rack mounts, attach and calibrate flight control joysticks, uncoil microphone headsets, and finally unpack three identical UAVs. They were microdrone quadcopters, an X-shaped design with a small enclosed rotary wing topping each of the four arms, and a bulb-shaped center that held the power, brains, and cameras. The three identical devices were only sixteen inches in diameter and each unit weighed less than five pounds.
Mike Dillman whistled. “We’ve got some cool stuff, but we don’t have those.”
Lucas put one of the devices on a charging station on the floor. “Cutting edge. We’ve played around with these back in the States, but we’ve never fielded this model before. No one has. It’s called the Sky Shark. Got it from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the folks that build all the latest and greatest gadgets. They gave it to us to field-test it in an urban environment.”
“Sweet,” said Mike.
Laureen asked, “You plan to just fly this around downtown Stockholm and hope no one will see it?”
Carl answered this. “This thing is damn near silent, but it’s not invisible. We have some techniques to employ to keep it out of sight. Obviously we fly as high as we can, but this isn’t a Reaper or a ScanEagle where you can cruise at eight or nine miles up. With these you have to stay within a couple hundred feet of the target in a moving surveillance, so we fly behind the target in most cases, and we can use the sun, when there is sun around here to be had, so that our target won’t know he is being watched.”
Lucas added, “In the dark it’s better. The camera has night vision, of course.” He smiled. “Nobody’s going to detect this baby at night.”
Ruth asked to see the video the Townsend facial recognition software had identified as Court Gentry, and Carl brought up a still photo on one of the rack-mounted laptops. He explained that the image had been taken the previous day at an electronics store a few kilometers from where they now sat. The still photo was taken from the clearest image from the quick snippet of video.
Ruth leaned close to look at it, then raised an eyebrow. Townsend analysts had provided images of Gentry to her and all her team, and she called up a picture on her smart phone. She looked over a photo of Court Gentry wearing a suit and eyeglasses, then looked up to check the video still again. “Certainly not definitive.”
Carl shook his head, but said, “We put it at 60 percent prob.”
“How so? The photo isn’t clear and you can only see about two thirds of the face.”
“True, but the camera captured the periocular region, the area around the eyes, which actually has more biometrically identifiable features than fingerprints. And from the photographs of him we have on file we have built a virtual 3-D model of his face, and the reconstructed periocular region on that is close enough to this guy here t
o make the 60 percent assessment.”
This technology was not new to Ruth in theory—she tracked people for a living, after all—but she had never seen periocular data pulled from such a grainy, off-center image in the field.
The rest of her team looked at the photo on the laptop and compared it to the photos of Gentry on their smart phones. Aron and Mike thought they were looking at the same person, but Laureen and Ruth remained doubtful.
Ruth asked, “What’s your plan to find him, if he is in fact here?”
Lucas took his cue and said, “Babbitt wants you folded into our search, so this might be a good time to show you how we do it.”
Carl took one of the Sky Shark drones to the balcony and returned a moment later without it. He sat down at the flight controls while Lucas worked the laptop next to him for a moment.
“Ready.”
The drone took off from the balcony, lifting a few feet into the air and then drifting sideways. It climbed again, out of sight, and then Ruth and her team moved behind the two American UAV operators to watch several live images on the laptops. One of the cameras was positioned on the drone to show a straight-ahead view; a second was the rear view. A third camera was obviously below the craft, and it could be turned and zoomed by a toggle on the sensor operator’s console.
They watched the screens as the drone flew over the buildings in the neighborhood, made a series of turns, and then descended between two buildings to hover over a pedestrian shopping street. The sensor operator picked out a young woman strolling along; she wore a fur coat and a matching mink hat, and her arms were laden with shopping bags.
While they worked, Lucas said, “As technology improves, it gets harder and harder for runners like Court Gentry to hide.”
“Because of biometrics?” Ruth asked.
“Exactly. It’s a biometric ID world now. Just a few years ago facial recognition software was nonexistent or unreliable. But as it improves, guys like Gentry are dinosaurs, waking up to the cold.
“The biometric database for CIA employees is quite extensive now, but Gentry was lucky to get out before most of it started being harvested. There is no soft biometric profile, which is his gait, the way he stands, stuff like that. All we have is an iris scan and fingerprints on file for him, which is useless in this situation. But the facial recog we are using should get the job done.”
Carl spoke now as he flew the UAV with the joystick and toggle throttle. “From the cam image in the electronics shop we know what he is wearing: the coat, the hat, the shades. We know how tall he is and how much he weighs. All that goes into an algorithm, and the Sky Shark camera goes out and records everyone it sees moving on the street and passes the images back to these computers. The software can evaluate over two hundred individuals a minute—”
Lucas spoke up here. “When it’s working right.”
“Yeah,” Carl allowed, “when it’s working right. Ninety-nine percent of the individuals are going to get tossed out immediately. Wrong height, wrong weight, different coat, female form, whatever. But anytime the computer finds someone that needs a second look it will let the drone know, and the drone will take another shot. The second look will go back to the computer for evaluation, as well. And a third look, to narrow it down more.”
“After that?” Aron asked.
“After that any image that is deemed a possible match will pop up on the screen. Those have to be weeded out manually.”
Lucas said, “I do that while Carl concentrates on not slamming the Sky Shark into a wall.”
Ruth said, “And if you find him? What then?”
Carl answered. “That’s another cool part. If I see him in one of the images, I just tell the computer to let the drone know we have a match. At that point the Sky Shark goes from hunting mode to tracking mode. It remembers where the individual was, goes back and relocates him, and locks on like a dog on a scent.”
“This is impressive,” Ruth admitted. “What are the drawbacks?”
Carl had an answer ready. “The electric engines use a ton of juice. Sky Shark can loiter only about a half an hour before we have to bring it back for a recharge. It shouldn’t be too much of a problem; we’ve got three, so we can keep circulating them.”
As the Townsend UAV team began what they freely admitted could be a lengthy hunt, Ruth sent Mike and Laureen to the electronics store where Gentry bought the computer. They would interview the salesman, branch out and check hotels nearby, and keep their eyes peeled.
Ruth called in to Yanis to let him know they were up and running here in Sweden.
“How are the Americans treating you?”
“Like we’re part of the team. CIA is desperate to get this guy.”
Yanis heard something in her voice. “You are, too, right?”
“So far, I’m more curious. It’s obvious the Americans want us to help, but it is not obvious at all to me that Gentry has any interest in taking out the PM. I can’t stop thinking about all the good this man has done, on his own initiative, while on the run.”
“Good guys do bad things. No reason bad guys can’t do good things once in a while, too.”
“I guess so. I’ve got an open mind on this, but I’m not sharpening my dagger just yet.”
Yanis said, “This is time critical. The likelihood of any danger to Kalb right now is only increased by the fact that he will be more vulnerable over the next two weeks during his travel. You don’t have the luxury of spending too much time on building a perfect target folder. I need you to find him, identify him, and monitor the Townsend people to make sure they stay on target. If they want to send their hitters to go in and kill him, they have their reasons, and you stand back and let them do it. Whether he’s a threat to Ehud Kalb will become a moot point if the Americans eliminate him.”
“I understand, Yanis,” she said, but still, there was reticence in her voice. “But when did we become the hunting dogs for the CIA?”
“When the fox started sniffing around our hen house, Ruth.”
“Right,” Ruth said.
“Get to work, but be careful. CIA conducted a teleconference briefing with us this morning about the Gentry case. He is a slick bastard, well trained to spot a tail. Find him, but stay loose.”
“Thanks for the concern, Yanis, but I’ll be fine.”
“Of course you will.”
TWENTY-NINE
Court had spent the day in his room, mostly surfing innocuous travel websites about Stockholm on his laptop. He also spent an hour and a half on a punishing series of bodyweight-only exercises. Push-ups and jackknives and handstand press-ups against the wall, enjoying the workout even less than normal because his body was still banged up after the operation in the forest near St. Petersburg and then the ambush in Tallinn two days later.
After a shower to ease his tired and sore muscles and an hour lying on the bed flipping channels on the tiny TV, he sat at the little table in the corner and ate a dinner of cold salmon out of a can and cold rice from a microwavable bag.
He drank a beer with his meal, all the while thinking he would rather be sitting in a dark, out-of-the-way bar somewhere in the neighborhood.
Not tonight—he had other plans for his evening.
When he was finished with dinner he went to the window and spent a few minutes looking through a narrow partition in the curtains, taking his time to check for cars or trucks that looked out of place and to follow passersby with his eyes, watching one person at a time as they strolled by on the sidewalk one floor below him. He scanned for faces he had seen before, though he felt confident he had made his escape from the Baltic without anyone tailing him here to Scandinavia.
After spending thirty minutes watching the flow of vehicles and pedestrians outside, he shut the curtains and sat down on his bed. After a slight hesitation he picked up his mobile phone and the scrap of paper with the phone number writt
en on it.
He began to dial Whitlock, but he changed his mind. He had read everything he could find on the Internet about how secure the MobileCrypt application was, satisfying himself that using the app to obtain information about the Townsend men hunting for him was worth the risk, but Court was still a careful man. He put on his coat and slipped his earphones into his ears, then headed out of his flat and down to the street.
He’d make the call, just not from here.
Fat snowflakes floated and swirled under a streetlamp in Tegnerlunden Park, just a few minutes west of Gentry’s rented room. Court stood there under the light for a moment to read the number off the paper, holding his phone in his hand. He wore wired headphones with a built-in microphone under the hood of his coat. He dialed the number through the MobileCrypt app, but he did not press the send button. Not yet. He began walking, away from the park and toward the west, hoping that if all the information he read was somehow wrong, and it was, in fact, possible to trace the call, he would be harder to pinpoint if he was on the move.
Am I really doing this? he asked himself. Court did not seek out conversations with others; he did everything he could to avoid them. He preferred to order food from machines, buy train tickets from automated kiosks, and obtain information necessary for his missions from online searches at Internet cafés. In the past five years Court had, several times, gone weeks without talking to another human being other than an occasional two– or three-word exchange, usually in the form of a cash transaction at a market or directions for a cabdriver.
Tonight, in contrast to years of self-imposed solitude, he would actually reach out.
He told himself he had to do it but he worried, maybe, he just wanted to do it.
“Don’t you fucking go soft, Gentry.” He said it softly, admonishing himself for what he was about to do.