Dead Eye (42 page)

Ruth was brought to the Rue Kelle safe house at twelve
P.M.
She had been treated professionally by the Jumper men, although they’d taken her phone and her Mace and they searched her thoroughly in the van on the way.

She’d protested angrily and demanded to speak to Babbitt, but then sat quietly for the rest of the drive.

She passed through the door and into the great room at the front of the flat, and was led by the arm toward Parks and Babbitt, who sat on wingback chairs facing away from her. Two Jumper cowboys stood next to the sofa, blocking her view of a man seated there facing the Townsend execs, so it was not until she was just feet away that she found herself face-to-face with the seated man. He was fit and rugged looking, but not particularly tall or overly muscular. His hands were behind his back.

She looked him over even closer now. His eyes looked exactly like Court’s. They were mature and searching; they flitted around the room at first, but when they locked on hers she knew the brain behind them was reading every aspect of her person, taking in all the data and measuring her as a threat.

“You’re Whitlock,” she said.

“You’re Ettinger,” he replied, and he started to stand, but one of the Jumper men pushed the barrel of his gun into the side of his head.

He sat back down and the guard pulled his weapon back.

“Excuse me if I don’t get up,” Russ said.

Ruth turned to Babbitt now. “You
are
aware you just kidnapped a Mossad officer, are you not?”

Lee shook his head and leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs. “We did nothing of the sort. Time was growing short while we watched you wander the city. You had no intention of bringing Gentry here for a trade. I realize that. So we just invited you back here to speed up the process.”

Ruth said nothing.

“But now we have Dead Eye and, most awkwardly, but perhaps also more importantly, we have you. You will call Gentry, give him this address—33 Rue Kelle—and then we will wait for him to come save you and kill Dead Eye.”

Russ stood up from the couch again. “I think we can all come to an—”

The other Jumper man guarding him shoved his gun barrel against the side of Whitlock’s head, and Russ sat back down, his hands still tight behind his back. He leaned back on the sofa, facing Babbitt and Parks, who were seated in front of him, and Ettinger, who stood next to Beaumont and the two Townsend execs.

Just then Parks took a call from Dagger Team. He put it over the speaker on the table holding the UAV gear.

Dagger Actual said, “We’re two minutes from the safe house. The UAV team there isn’t answering the radios.”

“Roger that, Al,” said Parks, and then he looked to Babbitt. “If Gray Man found the UAV station at the Overijse farmhouse, then we can end this right now.”

From his seat on the sofa Russ Whitlock said, “I think it is a very safe bet Court did, in fact, find the UAV station.”

Babbitt asked, “What makes you say that?”

“
That
makes me say that.” Whitlock nodded toward the large bay windows across the room. Ruth, Babbitt, Parks, and Beaumont all turned to it.

A Sky Shark drone hovered at eye level, just a foot from the window. Its camera was trained through the glass at everyone in the room.

“Jesus!” Parks lurched back in surprise as if Gentry himself stood there, on the other side of the glass.

Whitlock laughed from his position on the sofa. “Calm down, Parks. It’s not weaponized. He’s not going to launch a Hellfire.”

But even Babbitt was shaken up by the realization that Gentry was watching his every move from a distance of no more than ten feet. “Everyone remain calm,” he said. The phone on his belt rang and he jumped slightly.

From his position on the sofa, Russ Whitlock seemed to retain the most control of anyone in the room. He said, “Answer your phone, Lee. Say hi to Court, and wave for the camera.”

FIFTY-FOUR

Before Babbitt answered he glanced to Parks. Softly he said, “Have Dagger hit the location the second they get there.”

“Yes sir,” he said, and he stepped out of the living room.

Babbitt answered his phone. “Who is this?”

After a short pause he heard, “You know who this is.”

“Gentry?”

Court all but growled. “Babbitt.”

“What happened to my UAV team?”

“I persuaded them to work for me.”

Babbitt cleared his throat nervously, and he struggled to force an air of authority in his voice. “Yes. Well, as . . . as you can plainly see, we have Dead Eye here.”

“I see that. I want to see every son of a bitch in that room with a gun on Dead Eye. He can disarm those two idiots standing next to him in under a second.”

But Babbitt was not going to let Gentry order his men around. He told the six other Jumper men in the room to stay where they were.

Next he glanced to his left, beyond the view of the camera looking in the window. Parks was there, and the younger man held up a single finger. “Ten seconds,” he mouthed.

Lee looked back to the drone’s camera. “Now, Court. You have all the advantages here. What can we do to rectify this situation?”

“You let Ruth go, and I come in.”

“We are taking good care of Ms. Ettinger.” He glanced to his left at Parks, who stood out of view in the dining room. Parks held a phone to his ear, and his other hand up with five fingers extended, then four, then three, then two.

Babbitt smiled into the drone camera now, but he did not reply.

Parks shouted, “Executing now!”

Ruth pushed away from Beaumont and ran toward the bay window. “Run!”

At the Townsend safe house in Overijse, the eight-man Dagger team breached at four different entry points, using explosives on the front and back doors and smashing through floor-to-ceiling windows in the front living room and a smaller window in an upstairs bedroom.

The four two-man teams raced quickly through the property, working their way from all compass points toward the UAV table in the center.

“Clear!” came the call from the front-door entry team.

“Clear!” The upstairs team found the second floor to be a dry hole, as well.

The living room team cleared the kitchen and the living room. “Clear.”

And the back-door team moved to the table on which the laptops and flight control equipment for the UAVs had been positioned.

There was blood on the floor, but the table was empty. The gear was gone.

“Clear,” Dagger Actual reported. “Negative target.”

Court Gentry sat in the back seat of a minivan with his pistol pointed at the back of Lucas’s head. The sensor operator drove the vehicle toward the Rue Kelle safe house while Carl operated the drone with one hand and held his other hand tight on his right butt cheek, having to lie on his side in the back of the van to avoid putting too much painful pressure on the gunshot wound.

Court looked at the laptop and the surprisingly clear picture of the living room of the safe house on Rue Kelle. His headset in his ear afforded him fair audio coverage of the room via Babbitt’s mobile phone.

Babbitt had been looking off to the side for the last thirty seconds or so, suddenly uninterested in his conversation with Court. Court assumed this was because a takedown of the farmhouse had just begun, and soon enough the men hitting the property would realize their target had gone mobile with the UAV team.

Ten minutes earlier Court had ordered the drone operators to load up the van. They took their laptops and piled into the vehicle. Court was about to climb in with them, but as he crossed the driveway he noticed all the footprints in the snow leading to a horse trailer next to a barn. He brought the two men out with him as he shot the lock off the trailer, and inside he found a huge weapons cache.

Court pilfered several items from the cache. A Glock 19 pistol and several magazines, a sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun and a box of shells, a pair of hand grenades, and a Kevlar vest.

He threw them into the back of the van and then he, Lucas, and Carl left the property, with Lucas behind the wheel and under Gentry’s gun. Seconds behind them, the half-charged UAV in the backyard launched and began racing toward the Rue Kelle safe house.

Now Court saw the confusion and dejection in the face of Babbitt as it became clear that the Townsend shooters had found nothing at the safe house. At the same time he saw enormous relief in the eyes of Ruth Ettinger. Beaumont had pulled her back near the wingback chairs, and just past her, sitting on the couch between the two armed guards, Dead Eye himself looked at first relieved, and then immediately lost in thought.

Slowly Babbitt brought the phone back to his ear.

“Well, well, well, Mr. Gentry. Once again, you remain one step ahead.”

“Put me on speaker. I want to talk to Dead Eye. If I can get him to stand down for today, and you release Ruth Ettinger, I will come in to you.”

Babbitt turned the phone to its speaker setting, but he said, “Court, nothing has changed; you must come here.”

Ruth said, “Do not come here, Court. Let them sit and stew. They have Whitlock; he can’t get to Kalb as long as he’s right here.”

“I understand,” he said.

Whitlock sat on the sofa, his hands behind him. He said, “Lee, why are you talking to him? I don’t have time for this shit.”

Babbitt looked away from the hovering drone camera and back to his prisoner. “You don’t still seriously think you are going to walk out of here and kill Ehud Kalb?”

“Of course I do.”

Beaumont turned away from Ruth and shouted at the much smaller man on the couch, “You’re a crazy fuck, aren’t you? The only way you’re leaving here is in a body bag!”

Russ ignored Beaumont, continuing to address Babbitt. “Lee, your plan is not working. You want Court to come rescue Ettinger. But I know something you don’t.”

Babbitt cocked his head to the side. “And what is that?”

“Court does rescue. He’s proven himself to be good at it. But there is something Court does even better. Even faster, even more assuredly.”

“What?”

He looked into the camera outside the window, and he gave it a wink. With a smile he said, “He does revenge.” Dead Eye started to stand for the third time, and again the man on his right pressed the gun barrel of his Uzi to the side of his head, but this time Whitlock leapt to his feet and, in a blindingly quick move, his hands fired out from behind his back; he snatched the barrel with his right hand and pivoted the short butt stock with his left hand, facing the weapon’s business end away from him and toward Ruth and Babbitt. He yanked the Uzi now and the Jumper man was pulled off balance by the gun’s sling around his neck.

Before anyone in the room could react, Whitlock had his finger on the trigger, and he fired a long fully automatic burst. Smoke and fire and noise filled the living room, ejected cartridges arced away from the gun and bounced off the walls. He then spun to his left, pulling the Jumper operator in front of him and, at the same time, aiming the barrel at the face of the guard on his left. He pulled the trigger again and the man’s face exploded in a burst of dark red, blasting brain matter on the ceiling as the body fell onto the white sofa.

A Jumper man across the room got his gun up and fired, but Russ shifted to the right and squatted down, putting as much of his body as he could behind the falling Jumper operative caught in the Uzi’s sling, and the rounds hit the guard’s back, killing him instantly.

Babbitt crouched low, covering his head in a primal reaction to get out of the line of fire. Whitlock used the quick release on the Uzi’s sling to remove it from the neck of the dead man, all the while shifting fast and hard and low to his right across the room. He put himself between the other Jumper men and Lee Babbitt, and then he launched out of his crouch and grabbed Babbitt, putting him in a headlock. The hot tip of the Uzi burned into Lee’s sweaty corpulent neck, and Russ shouted at the men in the room in front of him.

“Get back! Get back!”

Russ dragged Babbitt back into the corner of the room with him, making sure that no one could get behind him.

Beaumont and his operatives held their weapons on Whitlock, but they could not engage with the director of their organization in the line of fire.

Leland Babbitt slowly opened his eyes, struggled weakly against the man holding him by the throat, and took in the scene in front of him. On the far side of the room, slightly hazy through the faint gun smoke hanging in the air, at the entrance to the dining room and the front door, Jeff Parks, John Beaumont, and five more Jumper operatives all stood with pistols or submachine guns pointing in his direction.

In front of them, two Jumper men lay dead; one facedown in the wreckage of the shattered glass coffee table, and the other nearly decapitated on the white sofa.

Both of Babbitt’s UAV operators were also dead, slumped over their smashed laptops on the table next to the bay window. Blood dripped off their equipment and glistened in the glow from the electronics.

Babbitt looked down to his feet slowly.

There, on the hardwood floor, Ruth Ettinger lay on her back, two bullet holes in the center of her chest.

Her brown eyes were open in death.

Babbitt’s voice cracked. “Oh fuck.” His body shook. “Oh fuck!” He shouted it now. “Oh fuck! You killed a Mossad officer!”

Behind him, Russell Whitlock looked on the scene before him with wild, intense eyes. He jacked his head to his right, toward the lens of the camera hanging below the drone hovering outside the window. “You understand, Court. She was the loose end. She had to go.”

In the back of the van less than four miles to the east of the Rue Kelle safe house, Court Gentry hung his head in his hands, the side of the SIG Sauer pistol pressed against his forehead.

Tears tried to form in his eyes; but he pressed them tighter to fight them off. “Ruth,” he whispered to himself.

After a moment he had a distinct sensation that Carl was reaching for something in the back of the van, and Court realized there was no time to grieve for Ruth. He was only partially aware of Carl’s actions at first, but when he heard something dragging slowly across the floor, he recognized it as the sawed-off shotgun he’d picked up at the Townsend cache at the Overijse farmhouse.

Without opening his eyes Gentry said, “Carl, do you want to die? Because I really feel like killing somebody right now.”

The wounded drone operator let go of the shotgun and lifted his hands in the air.

Now Court tapped Lucas on the back of his head with the barrel of his pistol. “Pull over.”

Lucas pulled to the side of the road. When the minivan stopped, Court ordered Lucas to put it in park. Still nearly overcome by Ruth’s death, Court fought to keep his head clear and on mission.

“I want to see the inside of your pockets.” Both men emptied the pockets of their coats and pants, tossing mobile phones, keys, wallets, and other small items on the floorboard of the van. When they were finished, Court had them climb out of the vehicle and stand by the side of the road. Court climbed behind the wheel and began programming the address he’d read on the door of the safe house into the GPS unit fastened to the windshield. As he did this he addressed Lucas, who stood outside the open passenger door. “You need to get your buddy to a hospital a lot more than you need to link up with Babbitt. Are you following me?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you. I want you to know there was nothing personal in any of this. We were just doing our—”

Court sped off in the van, pulling the door shut with his actions and leaving the two Americans alone on an empty street.

In the backyard of the Rue Kelle safe house, Whitlock walked Babbitt backward through fresh snow, the barrel of the Uzi still pressed to the man’s neck and the six surviving Jumper men still in slow pursuit, their guns high as they trudged through the snow.

Jeff Parks moved along with the operators; he had his small silver automatic pistol leveled in Whitlock’s direction. Upon noticing this, Babbitt yelled for his number two to be careful where he pointed his damn gun.

As he pulled his former employer through the snow, Whitlock spoke softly into Babbitt’s ear. “Let me explain how this is going to play out. You are going to send your men out front to the cars, and they are going to load up, because Gentry will be here in a few, and he will be in a very foul mood.”

“What about you?”

“I’d love to stick around, but I have made other plans.”

“You’re going to kill Kalb?”

“Nah. I’m on the next train out of town. Gentry’s right. I’m burned.”

Babbitt knew he was lying, but he felt it prudent to refrain from leveling any accusations at the man with an automatic gun held to his neck.

Russ said, “Gentry’s coming here, right now, so you’d better run. Live to fight another day and all that shit. If you send your guys after me at the cemetery you won’t have the forces you need to engage him.”

Babbitt nodded a little, and he shivered in the cold.

“Send Beaumont and the other knuckle-draggers to the cars. Do it now.”

Babbitt shouted. “Everybody go. Get in the cars. We’re getting out of here.”

Beaumont said, “I’m not leaving you back here with his crazy ass!”

“That’s a goddamned order!”

The backyard cleared out moments later, and Whitlock let Babbitt out of the headlock.

He faced him with the little submachine gun held up at eye level. “This is a good plan, Lee. Smarter than any shit you or Parks could have come up with.”

Babbitt only nodded, his eyes locked on the gun. “Yes. Yes, it was.”

“You will tell Mossad it was Gentry who killed the girl, not me. Then they won’t hunt me down after this is over, and I won’t come back to D.C. and kill you and your entire family.”

“
Jesus
, Russell.”

“You scratch my back, I don’t scratch your eyes out. Deal?”

Babbitt nodded. “I’ll do as you say. I swear.”

“Good. Now, you and your goons just have to kill Gentry for me, and I’ll be back on track.”