Dead Eye (13 page)

“I’ll be fine. And in order to keep you safe from them, I’ve got to work within the system. They are going to be after you with a bunch of bodies and a ton of high-tech shit. You check in with me and I’ll keep you informed on their hunt.”

Court almost yelled his next question. “Why? Why are you making it your job to protect me?”

“Because very soon I’m going to leave Townsend. I have something on the horizon, something big, and it does not involve them. I could use your help, and it’s your kind of job.”

Court’s eyebrows rose. “Ah. Now comes the sales pitch.”

Whitlock said, “Yes. I do have a sales pitch for you. Let’s work together. You and me. Fucking unstoppable.”

“I retired after the Sidorenko hit.” Court wanted to immediately quell Dead Eye’s enthusiasm for this stupid idea.

“Bullshit. That’s just nerves talking. You’re a little burned out, but you won’t leave the game until you make peace with CIA or catch a round to the brain stem, whichever comes first. No, this is in your blood, same as me.

“Let me ask you something. You ever feel like you’re swimming against the tide?”

Yes,
Court thought. That was exactly how he felt.

“Go on.”

“You’ve made more enemies in the past couple of years as a freelancer than you ever did working for Langley. But what you’re doing is important. I know you are looking for the next righteous op. I know your objective is to do good. To fight the good fight.” Russ put his hand over his heart. “That’s
me
, too. I want to be a part of that.”

Court remained cynical. “And we split the take? No thanks.”

Russ shook his head adamantly. “Don’t bullshit me, dude. You aren’t in this for the money, and neither am I. We can do good, man. Twice as much as you could alone. We need to stick together.”

Court rolled his eyes. “Like Batman and Robin?”

Russ snapped back angrily, “I’m not talking about some Batman and Robin shit. We operate independently, of course. I am just talking about coordination. We can watch out for each other, help each other.”

Court did not respond.

Russ said, “Anyway, call me tomorrow when you’re clear. We’ll talk about details. You owe me that.”

Court took out the paper with the phone number on it for a moment, then slid it into his fleece. “Fair enough.”

Whitlock eyed Gentry’s face long and hard. Looking for any signs of deception. He smiled a little, then stuck out his hand, and Court shook it.

Both men were back out in the snow a few minutes later, separating in the dark, running away from a dawn and a manhunt that was only just beginning.

EIGHTEEN

Mossad targeting officer Ruth Ettinger turned away from the path in front of her and leaned her face close to the face of the man sitting next to her on the park bench. He moved in as well, and their lips closed to within a half-inch separation. She shut her eyes and brushed her lips against his playfully, and they kissed, lovers accustomed to each other’s every move and every thought. Her tongue reached out and brushed the inside of his mouth before she pulled away an inch, slid her fingers into the hair behind his neck, and opened her eyes with a soft smile.

The man kissed her back and then smiled at her. “Ruth, my darling. Have I told you that you are getting fat?”

She smiled at this, kissed his mouth again, and spoke with his lips so close to hers he felt the warm breath of each syllable. “The new parabolic mics only have a three-band equalizer. I’m going to call technology to see if we can switch out the EQs on the new mics for the old five-channel ones. We’ll get better midrange vocals at distance that way.”

They kissed again. Embraced lovingly through the thickness of their down ski jackets. The man said, “Would it kill you to take a shower once in a while? You smell like a goat.”

And to this she replied, “If Technology won’t let us use the five-channel EQ, I’ll see if there is something we can do in the software to boost midrange. That might help us during replay, but it won’t do anything in real time to isolate vocals from background noise.”

“I love it when you talk dirty.”

Smiling the smiles of lovers who’d suddenly realized the extent of their public display of affection, they both sat back straight on the park bench, and Ruth grabbed the bag of warm honey cashews she’d bought at the Nuts4Nuts cart next to the ice-skating rink. She popped a cashew into her mouth and offered the bag to Aron, her younger lover, or at least the twenty-eight-year-old man posing as her lover for today’s surveillance in Central Park.

Aron was one of three on Ruth’s team; the other two, also posing as a couple, sat on the far side of the path just outside the entrance of the Central Park Zoo. Mike Dillman and Laureen Tattersal were both in their early thirties, both nice looking but not distractingly so, and they were also spending their time kissing on a bench, thirty yards up the path. Like their senior officer, Mike, Aron, and Laureen were all Israeli citizens who had emigrated from the United States, and they all looked perfectly at home here in New York City.

Directly between the two sets of fake lovers, an Arab man sat with his wife on a park bench, their baby in a stroller in front of them. The father rolled the stroller back and forth while he and his wife talked.

Laureen had a long, narrow, directional microphone that just jutted out of a small hole in the side of her oversized purse, and with it she and Mike were able to pick up the vast majority of the conversation between the man and his wife. The audio was piped into their tiny Bluetooth earpieces; both of them spoke Arabic fluently and, in the past twenty minutes of surveillance here in the park, they had covertly listened in on a long conversation about diapers and baby shit. It was an argument hinging on how he was not pulling his share of the diaper duties and, as far as Laureen was concerned, the wife seemed to be making a lot of good points.

While they sat on the park bench Mike and Laureen enjoyed spicing up their sweet nothings, just like Aron up the path. Sometimes Laureen giggled, leaned into Mike’s ear, and whispered obscenities. Mike never blushed, never reacted with surprise or distaste; instead he gave as good as he got, replying softly with his own crude comments.

In contrast to her team, Ruth was all business in times like this. She stayed in character with her body language, but her whispered voice remained on task, discussing the technical or logistical minutiae of surveillance work. She allowed her junior officers latitude to be silly, if they had nothing important to say, but she had done this long enough that she no longer felt any awkwardness in locking lips with her subordinate when in close foot follow or static watch.

Ruth and Aron scooted close together on the bench again, combating the December chill that filtered through the quilting of their heavy coats. They kissed again. “I’d rather make out with Mike,” Aron said.

Ruth stopped talking about parabolic audio equipment and said, “I can arrange that next time.”

Aron laughed at this.

Despite these brief moments of levity, they were hard at work now, just hours after arriving in the United States. They had been in Faro, cleaning up a few loose ends after the operation that led to the death of the two bomb-making brothers targeting Prime Minister Ehud Kalb, when Ruth received the order to fly with her team to New York City. Here in Manhattan, a thirty-five-year-old schoolteacher and father of a newborn had been under surveillance by the FBI for his recent purchase of a large quantity of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that also served as a key component in a potent explosive.

The FBI found the purchase curious but not strictly illegal, so they began what Ruth Ettinger considered a painfully slow and underwhelming investigation. That the professor was Palestinian and related by marriage to a midranking Hamas functionary in Gaza piqued the interest of the Mossad, and, because Prime Minister Ehud Kalb was scheduled to speak here in Manhattan at the United Nations in a few weeks, Ruth and her team rushed from Faro to Manhattan without delay to begin their own accelerated investigation.

She did not mind coming back to the States, although she knew she’d feel guilty if she didn’t drop by her mom’s house in Brooklyn before it was all said and done, and she really would much rather chase blood-soaked terrorists than sit at her mom’s kitchen table over beef brisket or matzo ball soup.

Aron put his hand on her knee while he leaned into her face. He smiled as he spoke, but the jokes were over for now. “Initial impressions?”

Ruth smiled back and shook her head, then whispered, “This guy is not a threat.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Look at him.”

Aron did so, discreetly, then looked back to his “girlfriend.” “Terrorists don’t take their kids to the park?”

“This is no terrorist. I can smell a terrorist.”

Aron conceded this point. “I won’t argue with you on that. You do seem to have a nose for the worst of them.”

Ruth took his hand and held it through her mittens. “This one feels like a complete waste of time, and I fucking
hate
wasting time.”

She turned her attention back to the Palestinian couple, watching them take turns rocking the stroller as their low-intensity argument continued.

Ruth was bored, but she was accustomed to the boredom. She could not help feeling that she and her team were overqualified for this assignment, but she did have to admit that her close knowledge of the area and her ability to weed out the real terrorists from the wannabes and nobodies made hers the perfect team to send. Despite the light banter of the junior officers, all four members of this team were exceedingly professional, and they took their work seriously. The psychiatrists who worked for the Mossad told Ruth she took things
too
seriously, but she found their supposedly learned opinions to be nothing more than government-funded guesswork bordering on quackery.

Ruth was fine, she’d told everyone, and she was
most
fine when she was out in the field and hard at work.

Her phone rang in her purse and she snatched it up, knowing it would be Yanis Alvey, her superior. He’d promised to call her with more information on the subject.

“Hello?”

“Ma nishma?” What’s up?
Yanis always broke protocol and spoke in Hebrew when he called from Tel Aviv.

She answered back in English with her native Brooklyn accent. “Hi, Jeff. How are things?”

By calling him Jeff, she was reminding him to speak English. Of course it was unlikely that any subject she might be tracking could hear the man talking to her through her telephone, but it would be easier for her to slip up and start speaking Hebrew if the other party’s end of the conversation was in the foreign tongue.

Yanis answered back. “Your subject is clean. The purchase he made was benign.”

“In what way?”

“He is a high school teacher, true, but he also recently became a member of an agricultural co-op in Sullivan County, Pennsylvania. His crop is beans and figs, but the co-op grows all sorts of things. They are small scale; one of the farmers purchases equipment, another seeds, another fertilizers, and it all is pooled into the resources of the co-op.”

She looked around and then whispered, “And he bought the ammonium nitrate for
farming
?”

“Hard to believe. But yes.”

“And the FBI didn’t know this?”

“They still don’t. We hacked his banking records and saw that he was reimbursed by the co-op for the same amount he spent on the fertilizer. We checked them out; they’ve been around for years, and they farm acreage that corresponds to the amount of ammonium nitrate they purchased. We’ll keep an eye on them, but it looks kosher.”

She rolled her eyes at his use of the phrase, coming from a Jew born in Rashlatz but delivered like an American.

She said, “So . . . he is about as harmless as he looks.”

“It appears so,” Yanis said.

“All right. We’ll shut it down here.”

“You sound crestfallen. Once again, Ruth, you seem disappointed that we don’t have more imminent dangers against our nation’s leadership.”

“I like to work, Yanis.”

He hesitated before saying, “It’s more than that. You take too much on your shoulders.”

“Since Rome, you mean.”

“Since Rome.”

“The increase in my operational tempo since Rome has been driven by the increasing enthusiasm of our prime minister’s enemies, not by any overzealous desire on my part to atone for mistakes.”

“I did not mean to suggest otherwise. And Ruth, you
made
no mistakes.”

She did not respond to this directly. “Maybe if Kalb stopped pissing people off I could sit at home and raise orchids or something.”

“Well, there’s not much chance of that. I’ll find you some trouble to get into before long. Don’t worry. I’m sure something terrible is just around the corner.”

“Funny.”

“Send your team back here, but you take a couple of days to see your mom.”

“That’s not the trouble I’m looking for. I can come back with the others.”

“That’s an order.”

She groaned inwardly. “Okay, Yanis, but I want hazard-duty pay.”

He laughed as he hung up.

It had been a wasted day. A wasted trip. Making out with Aron Hamlin wasn’t the worst way to spend her time, she admitted to herself, but she was hungry for her next target, and sitting in Central Park watching a Palestinian family man who had done nothing but buy some chemicals to help his pistachios grow had done nothing to make her prime minister safer.

She decided she would call her mom, tell her she’d just gotten off the plane, and invite her to brunch the next morning. Two or three hours listening to her mom drone on always seemed to go by a little faster when the Bloody Marys flowed.

Russell Whitlock trudged through the snow along a long row of drab apartment blocks in the Estonian city of Paldiski, some thirty miles west of Tallinn on the coast of the Baltic Sea. It was midafternoon; half a foot of powdery accumulation had been dumped here in the past twenty-four hours, but the puffy gray clouds above had stopped their onslaught for the time being, and the temperature was in the low thirties, balmy for this time of year.

He stopped in front of a tiny inn; it was dirty and basic and as far off the beaten path as one could imagine, but Russ decided it would do for a night. Russ much preferred five-star accommodations, but right now he couldn’t indulge himself. He needed a quiet out-of-the-way place to treat his gunshot wound, to wait for Gentry to call, and to spend a safe night.

This town was no tourist destination. It had been a closed city during the cold war, used as a massive Soviet nuclear submarine training center, a city encased in barbed wire.

Two decades later, Russ Whitlock found the city nearly as uninviting as it must have been back then.

Dead Eye sat in his hotel room as the afternoon turned to evening and the light through the window dimmed and extinguished completely. He’d found a pharmacy near the hotel, and next door a liquor store. Russ saw the placement of the two establishments as serendipity. He returned to his room, disinfected his wound and changed his bandages, and then opened a bottle of vodka and took a long swig.

He waited nearly ten hours to call in to Townsend House, but he was finally ready. He hoped all the action had been quick and confused enough to where no one on Trestle Team had reported his treachery against his employer, but the only way to find out for sure was to report in himself.

He pressed the speed-dial button on his phone that connected him to Babbitt’s line at Townsend House.

After a hurried identity check, Babbitt said, “We thought you were dead.”

“I made it out,” Russ replied. “But all the rest are fucking toast, sir.”

“What the hell happened?”

“I wish I could tell you, but I was ordered to sit in my damn hotel room while your boys hit the target. Gentry definitely fired first; I heard his G19 open up before any return fire came from the suppressed MP7s. Other than that, I can’t really re-create the action to help you figure out what went wrong.”

It was silent for a moment until Babbitt said, “I understand.” He cleared his throat. “You called in during the attack, said you were going to engage.”

“Yeah. I wish I could have done something, but I wasn’t read in on the op, and it went tits up before I got involved. I tried to play catch-up, but I was too far behind Gentry. I only saw him for an instant. Unfortunately he saw me first and tagged me.”

Babbitt almost shouted in astonishment. “Do you mean to say he
shot
you?”

Russ lay back on his little bed as he answered, moving gingerly to avoid putting pressure on his left hip. “Yes.”