Dead Eye (39 page)

Babbitt said, “We don’t want Ettinger. We want Gentry. Right now we have technical surveillance over several known associates of his in the city. It is just a matter of time before we find him. If Ettinger is with him, we will use our utmost care to keep her safe.” He paused. “Our two organizations should be able to avoid one another on this operation.”

Yanis Alvey said, “If Ruth is hurt I will hold you personally responsible.”

“Mr. Alvey, I am on an aircraft over the Atlantic right now. You have more control over that situation than I do. Keep your people away from my people, and you can avoid a disaster.” He paused a beat. “Like the one you suffered in Rome last year.”

Alvey disconnected the call and looked back out the window.

FIFTY

A few hundred yards east of the Hamburg
Hauptbahnhof
in the district of St. George, Court Gentry walked alone through darkness, shifting to stay out of the glow of streetlights and shop windows as he did so. He passed a phalanx of hookers on a street corner, working outside even on this evening with temperatures in the low twenties, and he negotiated his way around drug dealers who stood like traffic cones in his path trying to get him to buy hash or pills or needles filled with heroin.

Court had worked in Hamburg a few years earlier on a solo op. At the time his handler, Sir Donald Fitzroy, had equipped him with a long-range rifle to assassinate a wealthy Serbian businessman working here who, in a past life, had been a war criminal in Bosnia. But when the weather forecast changed for the date of the hit, Court realized the conditions would be too foggy to see his target through a scope at five hundred yards. So he changed his operation midstream and decided to do the job up close and personal, and to do this he needed a handgun. He spent two full days in the seedy bars and back alleys of Hamburg’s St. George district, knowing the area to be rife with foreign gangs with access to weapons.

He finally made a connection with a middle-aged Turk named Ozgur who sold him a Walther P99 handgun. It was an excellent weapon, exactly what he needed for the op, and it came in handy when he killed the Serb with a bullet through the back of the head in the portico of his luxury condo.

Now Court hoped like hell Ozgur was still around and ready to make a quick and easy few thousand euros before bedtime.

He found the decrepit building and walked past the elevators to a poorly lit stairwell in the back that smelled like someone regularly used it as a latrine. He climbed up the metal staircase to the fifth floor of the seven-story building, and then made his way down a long narrow hallway.

When he had been here a few years earlier, Ozgur had kept a lookout in the hallway, just a Turkish boy with a cell phone, but now the hall was empty other than bags of trash and cheap bicycles.

Court found the apartment and knocked on the door.

He heard shuffling inside, and he expected a long battery of suspicious questioning through the door.

But instead it opened quickly.

Ozgur stood there in a white tank top; he held a baby in his arm and a phone to his ear. His eyes widened a little when he saw Court, and then he said something in Turkish into the phone that did not sound alarmed or threatened.

Court imagined it was something along the lines of
I’ll call you back
.

“Guten Abend,”
he said after he hung up the phone. He bounced the baby on his forearm, a little boy with a shock of black hair, and Court immediately realized that the child’s eyes were much more curious about Court than were Ozgur’s.

“Do you remember me?” Court asked in German.

“Aber sicher. Was wollen Sie?” Of course. What do you want?

“If you remember me, then you
know
what I want.”

A woman appeared behind Ozgur. She was obviously not Turkish; her hair was dirty blond and her eyes were blue. Court took her as a Pole, as Polish immigrants were common in Germany. Ozgur handed the baby off to the woman; she took the boy and gave Court an unwelcoming look.

Ozgur stepped outside into the hall and shut the door behind him.

He switched to English. “A gun? Are you serious? I don’t deal in weapons anymore.”

Court wasn’t in the mood to be jacked around by someone trying to make a few extra euros by hyping up the scarcity of his product.

“I’ve got money, Ozgur. What I don’t have is time. Name your price, but do it now.”

“It’s not a game, man. I don’t have no gun. I sell you something else, maybe? A cell phone?”

“Look. I’ve come a long way, and I’ve had a rough day. I know you are the man around here who can get me what I need.”

Far off in the distance Court registered the thumping beat of a helicopter, but it did not seem out of the ordinary in the center of Germany’s second-largest city.

One of the Metsada operators called Yanis Alvey over to his seat on the port side of the Sikorsky and pointed out the window next to him.

In the distance Alvey watched the Townsend Eurocopter descend to just above the train tracks a quarter mile from the
Hauptbahnhof
.

“Somebody get me some binos!”

A pair of binoculars was put in his hands seconds later. He looked through them in time to see two men fast-roping from the chopper down to the tracks, twenty feet below. Soon they were running up an embankment, and seconds later they disappeared into the tight streets of the St. George neighborhood.

The Eurocopter climbed back up into the sky, then headed over St. George and began circling around an apartment building.

Alvey watched through the binos and spoke into his microphone. “They’re going to fast-rope onto a building over there. Those first two were a ground-floor blocking force.” He looked at the men around him. “They’ve found Gentry.” He hurried up to the cockpit. “Pilot? How close can you get to that neighborhood without alerting that helo?”

The pilot immediately began descending and closing on the area. “Several blocks to the north there is a park by the Kennedy bridge over Lake Aussenalster. I can come in low over the water when he banks to the south. I’ll land right next to the bridge, and you can all go on foot.”

“Do it. We’re all going to disembark, but I’m going on alone.”

“What are you doing?” One of the targeting officers was listening in on the transmission from the rear of the cabin.

“I can’t risk having a dozen men enter that building without knowing what the hell is going on. Especially with the Townsend gunmen hitting it at the same time. I’ll go in alone, stay low profile and assess the situation. I’ll call in the team once I have Ettinger.”

After another minute of prodding, Court still had gotten nowhere with Ozgur, but he wasn’t ready to give up. “If you direct me to someone who can get me what I need, I’ll happily pay you a finder’s fee.”

Ozgur said, “You don’t listen, man. I’m out of that. I went to prison, got out, and just want to live a normal life. Not have to deal with crazy bastards like you showing up at my door, scaring my kid and my wife. I want no part in you anymore. Just leave—”

The Turk stopped talking and looked up. The thumping of the helicopter outside the building increased.

Court could tell it was hovering just above the roof. “Is that normal?” he asked.

Ozgur looked back at the man in the dark hallway. “You see? You just bring trouble! I don’t want no trouble!”

Court grabbed Ozgur by the collar of his T-shirt and shoved him up against the wall. “I need a
fucking
gun!”

“I don’t have no gun! None! Zero! Let go of me and get out of here, you crazy American fuck!”

Gentry slammed the Turk once more against the wall in frustration, turned, and sprinted toward the stairwell.

The Sikorsky landed next to light eleven
P.M.
bridge traffic, and the twelve-man team climbed off, along with Yanis Alvey. The Metsada operators wore their handguns only, as their rifles would not go unnoticed in the thick urban neighborhood. As the helo turned and skimmed the water of the lake, departing to the north, Alvey instructed the younger men to disperse themselves quietly throughout the St. George neighborhood around the target building, and to keep comms open between themselves. Alvey had his mobile phone and would contact the Metsada assault team leaders if he had a target for them.

Gentry made it down two flights of stairs before he heard a noise far below him at the ground floor. Men had entered the stairwell; he thought he heard at least two, but he could not be certain, because above him now he heard more men, coming into the stairwell from the seventh floor.

Court left the stairs on the third floor, opening the door to find the space totally involved with construction. It was dark, a warren of half-formed rooms and open ceilings exposing metal girders and insulation. Building material and equipment were positioned all around.

The door behind him shut with a loud click.

Court stopped and looked around. There were good places to hide, but Court knew time was against him. He had to get out of the building before his opposition had a chance to seal off the exits and begin a comprehensive search.

He moved forward, into the dark, wishing like hell he had a fucking gun.

Yanis Alvey headed south through St. George. For the first minute or two he received a few open stares from passersby and shopkeepers who’d seen him climb out of a huge helicopter, a novel enough occurrence around here, but soon he was blocks away and he’d melted into the foot traffic in the seedy district. Drug dealers openly offered to sell him their wares, prostitutes bundled against the cold stood in stoops and called out to him as he passed, and Middle Eastern thugs eyed him as a potential mugging victim as he made his way confidently and unafraid, causing them to look elsewhere for easy prey.

His thoughts were focused on Ruth Ettinger. He had no idea if she was here or not, but he was operating under that assumption. Clearly Townsend suspected Gentry was here, and Yanis worried that Ruth would not extricate herself safely from an altercation between a crew of gunmen and the most infamous freelance assassin on the planet. He was not sure he would be able to rectify the situation with merely his presence, but coming alone had been an easy decision for him.

He was certain he did not want to add one more ingredient to the dangerous concoction by calling in a dozen more gunmen just yet.

Jumpers Seven and Eight had been set as a blocking force on the ground floor of the building, and originally they had planned to stay in the lobby, but the noise of the door clicking shut came from the stairwell near the lobby, and this sent them in search of their target. After peering into the first– and second-floor hallways and finding them to be quiet, they entered the third floor of the apartment building and found it to be an unlit construction area.

“Jumper Seven to Jumper Actual.”

“Go.”

“We’re going to clear the third floor. It’s open construction. No locked doors. We’ll keep the stairwell under observation.”

“Roger that. Seventh floor is clear and the helo is watching street level. I’ll send two more your way via the southeast stairwell.”

Seven turned back to Eight and whispered, “I don’t think he had time to get too deep back there. Cover me from here, but keep a lookout on the stairs in case he’s not here.”

Eight nodded, and Seven shined his light on the end of his pistol and began searching the area.

He saw a complicated framework of metal beams, plumbing pipes, and heating ducts. The entire floor was a large skeleton, free of wallboard and full of dark recesses. He sniffed the air for a hint of another human’s presence, but his nostrils only filled with the scent of plaster and dust. He moved slowly in a firing stance, listening closely for noise, but heard nothing but the sound of his own heart.

Eight called over the interteam radio. “I can’t see you. Come on back and wait for the rest of the team.”

Seven did not reply; he just moved deeper into the darkness. He stepped quickly around a pallet of building materials, shining his light on the empty space behind.
Where the fuck is he?
He jacked his pistol away from the floor and back up the hallway. He took one more step forward and concentrated his attention on the far reaches of his light, an unfinished flat at the end of the hall.

With neither sound nor warning a black form swept in front of his face. Close, not two feet from the tip of his nose. His pupils all but spun to change focus from lighted distance to darkened closeness, but before he could identify what had fallen from the ceiling he felt an impact on his hands. He lost his grip on the pistol as something slammed against his wrists. The dark figure had swept through the air from above, swinging from his left to his right. The pistol flew across the room and out of sight, the tactical light going dark as his forefinger came off the pressure switch.

The dark movement whipped back in front of his eyes again, this time from right to left. He heard a
whoosh
and felt another impact, just a soft tugging below his chin. He lurched back, away from the moving shadow, and reached up to put his hand to his throat.

Jumper Seven felt the spray of his own blood before his fingertips were within a foot of his neck. The figure appeared again, and he saw it was a man, hanging upside down by the knees from a crossbeam. He righted himself nimbly and silently, and he dropped to the ground.

Seven wanted to call out to Eight behind him, but he could not make a sound. He took one more step back, away from the target, but slipped in his blood and fell on his back. Then the target disappeared in the dark. Seven looked to the ceiling and tried to understand what was happening to him; soon he realized he had not taken a breath in several seconds, tried to, and choked on a mouthful of blood.

His brain did not want to accept the fact that the Gray Man had just slit his throat and walked away.

After five minutes walking through the darkened streets, Yanis Alvey made his way to the downstairs entrance to the Bremer Haus Apartments. He found the door open, and it led into a dark and dirty ground-floor lobby that smelled like rotten food. To Alvey the feel of the place was more Tunisian ghetto than German, and he suspected the majority of the inhabitants of the building were indeed Middle Eastern or North African. For a Jew, especially a Jew who worked for Mossad, it was not a terribly inviting atmosphere.

He bypassed the bank of dodgy-looking elevators and found a stairwell on the southeastern corner of the building. Once inside, he looked up. Each landing had a small bare bulb high on the wall above it, but the stairs themselves were unlit. The stairs were also metal, so Alvey slipped off his shoes and carried them in his hands so as not to make noise as he began ascending. He kept his pistol in his shoulder holster, as he knew there was a good chance he would run into Townsend men or civilians, and he needed to remain low profile.