Dead Eye (23 page)

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 come 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.

And now she found herself at the center of a frantic campaign to kill him, run by people she did not trust, people for whom, she had seen firsthand, collateral damage seemed to be of tertiary concern, well behind dropping their target and protecting their own asses.

She’d read all about the Tallinn fiasco. Two cops killed, a civilian killed. In none of the Mossad data on known Gray Man ops in the past five years had any noncombatants been wounded by the assassin.

Why this time?

She thought it was a hell of a lot more likely that the Townsend men, guys like that asshole Beaumont, had killed the cops and the bystander. Killing noncombatants was not Gentry’s MO. Avoiding them was clearly not Townsend’s MO.

Ruth pulled her hand away from her phone. She would not be a part of this. She had never forgiven herself for not fighting more forcefully against the attack in Rome. Even though she was cleared by Mossad leadership, she knew the truth.

Rome was her fault.

This time she would do what she had to do.

She called no one. Not the UAV team, not Beaumont, not even Aron.

No, she would find a way to get Townsend out of the picture, and then she would call in Metsada. Sure, they might still kill Gentry, but they would give her the opportunity to investigate further, not turn her operation into a precursor for a massacre.

She stood in place at the bus stop for three minutes, enough time for the Gray Man to disappear several hundred yards ahead of her. Then she hurried over to the front of the tenement building. The fresh snowfall and the virtually empty streets and sidewalks at five fifteen in the morning made tracking his footprints easy. She followed them south for ten minutes; they stayed on Sveavagen, although once they crossed to the other side of the street, and once it was clear that he tried to cover his tracks by walking along inside the tracks from a truck that she had seen passing by in the distance. But she picked the trail back up when the truck turned and the fresh prints continued on.

She could also see places where his gait changed, times when he’d slowed to look back over his shoulder, and each time she saw these she stopped herself, took her time shivering and waiting, making sure he was far enough ahead that there was no way he could be waiting for her to catch up to him.

The tracks turned and turned again on Drottningatten, the shopping street where the UAV team had first found him the previous evening. On this street several people were walking around, those unlucky ones who had to be at work by six
A.M.
As a result of the other pedestrians she found it harder and harder to track his prints, but she picked them up for a short time just before the end of the street, along the banks of the Norrstrom River. The footprints went onto the small bridge that crossed the river to the Gamla Stan, a tiny island in the center of the river and the location of Old Town Stockholm.

Ruth did not get on the bridge. She’d walked this area the day before and knew that the roads and passages on the island were narrow and tight. She would have no way to follow him now covertly; he could be waiting around any corner, so she backed off.

She’d lost him, and she wondered now what she had done.

Waves of self-doubt crashed on her, and twice she almost called in to Aron to tell him to get Jumper here on the double because he was getting away.

But she stayed herself.

If Gentry was leaving town he would have gone to the train station, or climbed into a cab for the airport, or headed to the docks. He’d done none of these things. He was staying in Stockholm.

She’d find him again. She had to.

She turned around and headed back to retake her watch over the tenement building, even though her target was long gone from the scene.

Jumper team hit the tenement at oh six hundred. Ruth had returned to the safe house to pack up with the rest of her team, and she and the three other Israelis took a break from packing to stand behind the UAV team while they piloted their drone through the predawn sky above the building on the southwest corner of Radmansgatan and Sveavagen.

Of course she knew Jumper would not find Gentry there, although her concerns remained that noncombatants could be killed or injured during the hit. Twice while the Americans were en route to the target location she spoke into the microphone on the table, reminding Beaumont and his team that they were likely to encounter central Europeans wary of police or government officials, and they might try to run or resist, even though they had no relationship with or knowledge of the target.

The first time she made the point, Beaumont responded with, “This ain’t exactly my first rodeo, lady,” which the Brooklyn-born Ettinger translated to mean he was aware of the potential for noncombatants in the line of fire.

The second time she reminded Beaumont and his men to keep their fingers off their triggers until they were certain they had the Gray Man in their sights, the big American responded tersely. “Lucas, I want that woman off my commo net!”

Lucas pulled the microphone away from Ruth.

And then Jumper Actual initiated the raid.

The American contractor’s radio headset communications came through the speakers on the table. Ruth heard shouting men, then screaming women and children and what sounded like breaking doors or furniture.

Jumper team was not subtle in their tactics, but, Ruth did have to admit, they were mercifully speedy. Within five minutes Beaumont barked angrily into his mic. “Negative contact! His room is empty. Looks like he cleared out.”

Ruth pulled the microphone back from Lucas. “Did you ask the manager what time he left?”

“He didn’t know. Either he slipped past your team or he was never here to begin with.”

Lucas said, “He was there.”

“He might have sneaked onto the roof,” suggested Ruth. “We only had coverage from distance. Not a perfect sight line.” She wondered if she’d overbaked her explanation, but she did not detect any suspicion from either those around her or the American team leader at the target location.

“Are we going to assume he’s left town?” Carl asked. “I mean, why just reposition in the city when you don’t know anyone has a fix on you?”

Jumper replied, “He’s probably flown the coop, but we’ll stay here and keep looking till Townsend House gets a hit on facial recog. They have everything covered for a couple hundred miles; he’s not going to go far.”

“Roger that.”

“Fishing boats,” Ruth said over the mic.

“What about them?”

“It’s his MO. He likes to hire fishing boats to take him out to freighters. He’s worked with the Russian mob to get passage on Russian-flagged haulers.”

After a short hesitation Beaumont said, “Yeah. She’s right. I guess we’ll run down to the docks and sniff around.”

She did not feel bad about sending Jumper off on the wrong scent. She hoped they searched the waterways all day long.

Ruth and her team finished packing; she told Carl and Lucas that they would be in touch, but for now the Mossad would do their own recon. She hated to lose the intel from the UAV; she wouldn’t have found the Gray Man in less than a day in Stockholm without the work of Lucas and Carl and their Sky Shark. But she knew if the drone got another ping on the target they would just recall Beaumont and his cowboys, and they would be right back on the verge of another catastrophe, and Ruth did not want to be involved in that.

She decided she and her team would do it the old-fashioned way. They would head to where she last saw him, and then they would branch out and search until they found him.

She did not tell her team she had lied about seeing him leave the building earlier. She knew they would back her, but there was no need for them to be implicated if Yanis Alvey found out the truth and recalled or even fired her for her insubordination.