Dead Eye (33 page)

“Fuck you, Whitlock. I do what I do because I have to.”

“Bullshit, Court. You could have escaped after the shoot-on-sight and disappeared anywhere in the world. You could have left the game, but you didn’t want to drive a taxi or gut fish. You wanted to kill people. Just because you justify your bloodlust by only targeting bad guys is irrelevant. You do that to make yourself feel better, not because you are some kind of hero. Trust me, if you run out of bad guys, the goal posts will just move, and you’ll start killing people who are more and more marginal.”

Gentry wanted to write off Whitlock’s assertions as nothing more than the fantasies of a maniac, but the truth was, Russ seemed like he knew what he was talking about.

Court said, “You’ve wanted me to stay in touch with you. Why?”

“You don’t like our little chitchats?”

“You are stringing me along. Trying to get me to join you. This isn’t just about framing me. You
need
me for something. For what, I don’t know.”

“I don’t need you,” Russ said, but Court could hear consternation in his voice.

Gentry said, “I’m not going to play into your plan. I am hanging up now, and I’m tossing this phone.”

Quickly, Whitlock said, “No! I can still help you.”

“How?”

“I’m going to blame the Kalb hit on you, but how is that really going to affect your day? One more country is after you? Big deal. Once you lose those people on you now, then you’ll be fine. Go back to South America, or Southeast Asia, or try the outback. Go off grid and stay off grid. When I’m done with my op, say three or four weeks from now, I’ll contact you again, and I’ll give you all the information on the shoot-on-sight sanction CIA put on you five years ago. I owe you that.” He laughed into the phone. “You are, after all, helping me make twenty-five mill, even if it is unwittingly.”

Court shook his head. “I’m done with you.”

“Court. Listen to me. You need to think very carefully—”

“You aren’t controlling me, Dead Eye. I am starting to wonder if you can even control yourself.”

Court disconnected the call and took the battery out of the phone. He put both pieces in his backpack and planned on destroying the phone when he got off the train and found a quiet place to do so.

He slung his backpack and coat back over his shoulder and left the rear cabin. The train would be in Copenhagen soon, and then it would cross the Baltic Sea on a ferry and roll on to Hamburg.

Court wanted to remain on board for the entire journey, but he needed to keep an eye out for any of the rapidly expanding number of threats against him.

FORTY-FOUR

Ten minutes after she left the bathroom, Ruth Ettinger found Gentry in the fourth car from the end of the train. She saw only the back of his head, but she recognized his nondescript black coat and the nondescript black backpack in the rack above him. Even though she felt like her disguise was as good as she could possibly make it, she knew she benefited from the fact that her target was seated facing away from her.

He sat alone, looking out the window at the foggy morning whipping by at high speed, and although he did not seem to be particularly on guard, she turned out of the carriage after a few seconds and returned to her seat in first class.

For the first time in her career she wished she carried a firearm. She had no doubt in her mind that if she had a gun in her purse she would pull it out right now, walk down the aisle of the train car, and empty it into the Gray Man’s body as she drew level with him.

But she did not have a gun, and now she did not even have targeting responsibility for a unit of Metsada Special Operations officers. She felt helpless without the power to call in a crew of shooters, knowing that a dangerous threat sat just yards away.

A few minutes later the train made a stop in Hässleholm. As she had done at each stop, she made her way to the door at the rear of the train and leaned out, keeping her eyes up the cars in case Gentry disembarked. By now she expected him to travel all the way to Malmö at least, and perhaps even on to Copenhagen, so she was surprised when she saw him climb off the train four cars up, his coat on and his pack on his back.

She ran back to her seat, grabbed her things from the rack above it, and then followed Gentry off the train into a pelting shower of sleet.

Ruth moved behind a small group of pensioners walking along the track toward the central station, craning her head over them to keep Gentry in her sights. She lost him for a moment but picked him out as he walked up the platform toward an intercity train parked under the covered tracks closer to the station.

He climbed aboard near the front of the train, and Ruth jumped onto the last car as the conductor blew his whistle.

The intercity was bound for Helsingborg, on the southern tip of the Swedish peninsula. She found a seat near the rear. As the train left the station she asked a passing conductor for a ticket, and she paid in cash.

The train headed west, making frequent stops. At each station along the route Ruth looked out the window, but within an hour she had the sense Gentry was heading all the way to Helsingborg. It was a port city just across the Øresund Strait from Denmark. From here Ruth knew Court could take a quick ferry across the water and avoid the route from Sweden to the European mainland: a long ferry crossing over the Baltic Sea to the south, which Townsend would surely have covered.

Certain she knew where he was heading now, she pulled her phone out of her purse to call Yanis. But just as she did this she looked up and realized she was just feet away from the man who had murdered Mike Dillman hours earlier. Gentry walked up the center aisle of the train, then glanced away and continued on, out of the car and into the next.

Her heart pounded. He’d passed by without giving her a second glance, and she felt reasonably sure her own face had remained impassive during the eye contact. She did not think he’d recognized her in her heavy disguise, but she would not leave it to chance. She got out of her seat and headed for the bathroom in the opposite direction of her target.

Ruth moved all the way to the very rear of the train and then stepped into the bathroom and removed her black wig. She’d go with her natural chestnut hair now, as Gentry had already seen her as both a blonde and a brunette.

She wished she had her team with her. By any normal standard of her tradecraft, she was burned; she would not show herself to Gentry again, even with a new disguise. But she was on her own, and she had to do her best to completely change her look.

She took off her tortoiseshell-framed glasses, pulled her hair back in a ponytail, and removed every bit of her makeup with makeup remover and a small washcloth she kept in her purse for just such emergencies. She also took off her black sweater and exchanged it for a thin but warm dark green Patagonia base layer, transforming her look from business traveler on an international-bound train into an athletic-looking young woman commuting from one town to another.

Satisfied with her new look, she put her makeup remover and her clothing back in her bag, then unlocked the door and opened it and began to step into the gangway.

Suddenly a man spun into the open space in front of her, put his hand in her face, and shoved her back inside the little bathroom. He forced his way in with her and smashed her hard against the wall, shutting the door behind him.

She tried to scream, but his hand pushed against her mouth and cut off all but a small fraction of the sound. She fell back to her left, her body half over the little sink and the back of her head pressed against the cold mirror. She heard her attacker lock the door behind him, and she fought in the confined space to get her Mace out of her purse. His free hand pulled her purse away and shoved it behind his body where she could not reach it.

She knew who he was, of course, even before her eyes could focus on his face.

It was Gentry.

He relaxed his hold over her mouth slightly, and she took advantage of this. She jutted her face forward and bit down hard on the soft space between his thumb and forefinger. Gentry stifled a scream and his free hand rose to punch her in the jaw, but he stayed himself and just yanked his hand away from her gnashing teeth.

“Stop!” he said, but she had created space now, enough to get a hand wrapped around a metal soap dispenser on the wall. She pulled it free and swung it at him, but he got his head back and out of the way just in time, and the dispenser slammed into the little window just to the left of him.

“Stop!” he said again, but now she had her right hand free and she swung at his face. Her fist half-connected with his chin, but he managed to grab both her hands and restrain them against the wall above her head. He pressed his body hard into hers, pinning her back over the sink, and he used his own forehead to hold hers immobile. “Listen to me! Just listen!”

Ruth started to scream again, but Court let go of her right arm and slammed it back over her mouth. She immediately began punching him in the side and back with her free hand, but she could not get her arm back far enough in the confined area to do any real damage. Simultaneously she tried to knee him in the groin, but he locked her legs down with his own.

As she hit him over and over he said, “Stop! Just listen to me for one fucking minute!”

She stopped throwing short left-handed punches, but her hand reached down to his waist and she felt around, clearly trying to find the knife he’d threatened her with the previous evening.

But Gentry had prepared for this by sliding the sheathed blade into his boot before confronting the Mossad woman.

Ruth gave up the fight. She dropped her arm to her side and went limp, breathing heavily from the effort of the fight.

Court himself was breathing hard from the exchange. “I know what it looks like—it looks bad. But I didn’t kill your man in Stockholm. It wasn’t me. There is another guy out there. He is using me. Framing me.”

“Bullshit!”

“If I killed your friend, why would I deny it? Why wouldn’t I just kill you now?”

Through labored breaths she said, “Because you want to convince me you are no threat, so I will go back to my leadership and tell them to stand down on the hunt.”

“If you guys stay on me, then Kalb will die, because the man who killed your agent has a plan to kill Kalb. Believe me, he knows what he is doing.”

Ruth did not believe. As she looked at Gentry, their eyes not six inches apart, she could see only Mike Dillman’s glazed eyes, open in death.

“You killed Mike.”

Court shook his head. “He was killed by a man named Russell Whitlock. He’s the one you should be after.” He added, “He’s ex-Agency. Now he’s a Townsend asset.”

Ruth cocked her head. “Townsend?”

“Yes. They used him to track me, but he’s gone off reservation. He’s accepted a contract from the Iranians to kill your prime minister. He’s planning to kill Kalb and frame me for it, but there is more to this I don’t understand.”

“You are lying. I don’t believe you.”

“You need to try. Because he is out there, and he will kill Kalb, and you are making it really fucking easy for him by concentrating your people on me.”

She took a moment, still breathing hard, but thinking over what he was saying. Looking him in the eyes she saw an earnestness that she did not expect, and his tone was certainly convincing.

“How do you know all this?” she asked. “About Whitlock?”

“Because he told me.” Court relaxed his grip on the woman, but not completely. “Townsend came after me in Estonia, and Russ fought alongside me. He told me he could help me get away from them, so I stayed in contact with him. I knew he had some agenda, but it wasn’t until last night when you told me about Zarini and the contract on Ehud Kalb, and today when he told me he killed your man so I could get clear, that I put it together.”

Ruth wanted to believe Gentry. If he was telling the truth, then it meant she had been right all along. Gentry was not the threat.

And Mike’s death was not her fault.

She wanted to believe him because it helped her; she knew that. She also knew Gentry might be lying to protect himself. But this second rogue assassin story, as far-fetched as it sounded, was the only scenario that made any sense to her. He had not convinced her, not yet, but she was well on her way to believing.

“Whitlock is in Sweden?” she asked.

“I don’t know where he is now. I guess he’s going wherever Ehud Kalb is.” Court looked at Ruth. “Where is your PM?”

With an incredulous tone she said, “I’m not going to tell you the travel plans of my prime minister.”

Court rolled his eyes. “He’s going to New York next week. I saw that on TV. But if Russ is going to frame me, he won’t do it in New York.”

Ruth understood. “Because you are a target of the U.S., and
you
can’t go to New York.”

“Yeah. I guess he could do it in Tel Aviv,” Gentry said. He found himself using his own thought process to determine the actions of someone else. “But I’m sure he’d rather do it outside Israel, get him on some neutral ground.”

Ruth spoke softly. “London.”

“Kalb is going to London?”

She hesitated a moment, then said, “It’s public knowledge. He’ll be there the day after tomorrow.”

“That’s it, then,” Court said. “Russ must be planning on hitting him there.”

“It’s a Pan-European trade conference,” she said. “Dozens of world leaders will attend. Do you have any idea how tight security measures will be?”

“Trust me. Russ and I had the same training.” He looked into her eyes. “I could do it.
He
could do it.”

Ruth found herself believing him.

Court said, “I just did you a favor with that information. Agreed?”

“If it’s true.”

“It’s true. You’ve got to get him to cancel his trip. Now, I need you to do me a favor.”

“What favor?”

“Tell me who will be waiting for me in Helsingborg.”

“No one. I have not called anyone.”

Court looked at her a long time, evaluating her nonverbal clues to gauge the veracity of her answer.

“Good.”

“But this new intel. You have to let me call this in.”

“Not until I’m off this train.”

“Please, there is no time to waste.”

But Court held firm. “You have two days. That’s plenty of time for Kalb to cancel his plans.”

Ruth said nothing, although she worried she did not, in fact, have two days.