Whitlock polished off the rest of his hot glogg with a long gulp and crushed the cup in his gloved hand, throwing it in a can on the street corner. He arrived at a staircase that would take him up the hill through a pedestrian tunnel, and he began ascending.
Babbitt said, “I’ll have Trestle moved into the area. They can fly over from Helsinki and be there before Jumper can move up from Berlin.”
Whitlock said, “Do what you have to do, but keep them far back out of the way until I call them to the target. Gray Man will find a place to stay tonight, and I’ll find it. There is no reason to bring Trestle and his boys in too close. I’ve got everything under control.”
“Very well.”
“Of course,” Russ added, “if you like, I can just go ahead and take care of this. No sense in spinning everyone up. I’ll do it myself.”
Babbitt responded in a stern voice. “You are not to take him down on your own. The word from the Russians is Gentry killed eight men at Sid’s house. Wounded several more. As impressive as that is, there were fifty-some-odd armed personnel on the property.”
Russ sighed and made sure Babbitt heard it through the satellite connection. “I understand. I’ll just keep tabs on the target and provide the strike team whatever support they require. Trestle will do the deed.”
“Good.” And then, “If you are waiting for me to say I am impressed with your ability to discern his every move, I am.”
“Gentry is easy for me to read. He and I are one in the same.”
Lee seemed confused by the remark, and he had no direct response. Instead he said, “I’ll put you in touch with Trestle Actual when he gets to Tallinn.”
“Roger that.”
Now Babbitt’s tone turned fatherly. “Obviously your handlers here would like a little more communication from you, but I’m not going to read you the riot act. I know you are accustomed to a certain amount of operational flexibility, and I can respect that.”
“But?”
“But the one thing I will not be flexible with is the takedown. That will be done by the direct action team. I want you out of the way when the time comes.”
“Message received. I’ll help Trestle get into position, and then I’ll get out of the way.”
Babbitt let Dead Eye’s compliant comment hang for a moment. Finally he said, “Very well. Graveside out.”
ELEVEN
Court walked the streets of Tallinn for hours, then spent another hour shopping for a hotel that suited a laundry list of needs. The one he settled on was a three-story stone building on Kooli Street built into a long row of buildings, all running along the fifteenth-century city wall that partially circled the Old Town. Court’s tiny room was cold and damp due to the fact that it shared a stone wall with the town’s ancient battlements. The room did not, however, have much else going for it. Just a bed on a low platform off the floor, a tiny desk, a toilet, and a small window that looked through the stone wall and out to a park to the north.
But the room was perfect for him; it was at the end of a hall full of creaky floorboards, and he knew if he was attacked, he would hear anyone approaching, and he could quickly get out the window and descend to the ground, using the rope he’d already tied to the leg of his twin bed and stashed under it.
He took a long hot shower down the hall, soaking his bruises and sore joints picked up from slamming his body around Sidorenko’s property. After he redressed himself and put his boots back on, he packed his backpack up with all his belongings and secured his heavy coat between the straps. When Court was operational, his training taught him to sleep with his clothes on and keep everything he owned ready to snatch and run if he had to bug out at a moment’s notice. And since Court was virtually always operational, he had been living this way for years.
He sat at the little desk in the room and ate a can of beans and a tin of salmon he’d bought at a market during his SDR, washing it down with a large bottle of A. Le Coq, the local beer. He would have preferred heading out to a little bar for a drink and a hot meal, but he liked to take a day or two in a new place before venturing out. This first night he would remain in his room, listening to the sounds of the hotel, getting a feel for the normal action around him.
He sat on the bed and turned the TV on to CNN. There was no news about the action near St. Petersburg, but that was no surprise. Mob shootouts in Russia only received international coverage if there was gripping video to play along with the reportage, and although Gentry assumed there were CCTV cameras all over Sid’s place, he was equally certain that whoever was running Sid’s Bratva now would have no interest in releasing that video to the public.
Court flipped through the channels as he lay in bed. He hoped to relax now; this was his first real downtime in weeks.
It felt good to get the Russian mafia off his ass; it let him concentrate on the main threat to him. The United States of America. For five years Court had been on the run from the CIA after a shoot-on-sight order was placed on him by his Langley masters. He did not know why they wanted him dead; he only knew they had sent wave after wave of men after him, and he did not expect that to change any time soon.
The CIA’s manhunt for him had kept him out of the USA for the past half decade, living off the net, in the third world mostly, taking contracts for hire to fund his run. He’d worked for a string of handlers and benefactors over the years, from a venerable British spymaster who’d double-crossed him, to Sid, the Russian mobster whom Court had double-crossed and now killed. He’d also double-crossed a Mexican drug cartel boss along the way.
Court had developed a habit of subverting the goals of the men who paid him in order to achieve a greater good.
Gentry didn’t feel bad about fucking over his employer when his employer was scum of the earth. But achieving these little victories had never been his ultimate goal. Court wanted, more than anything else in this world, to return to the USA. To be free of the CIA’s shoot-on-sight sanction.
But for now he was a man without a country, an expatriate assassin for hire.
He flipped channels on the television in the dark, found a French comedy, and despite the persistent worries hanging heavily over him, he started to laugh at the absurdity of the story.
Outside gentle snowflakes began drifting in the breeze, and two floors below him, another solitary traveler entered the tiny lobby of the hotel.
It took hours of hunting, but Russ Whitlock hit pay dirt on his fourth try.
At one hotel he had trouble getting information about the other guests, so he went ahead and rented a room, then learned from the innkeeper that he was the first new guest of the day. He went up to his room, unmade the bed, and then immediately slipped away out the back. At the second location he learned the only other guests were a group of Asians in town for a boat show, so he politely demurred at the nightly rate, making his apologies and leaving before the woman behind the counter could offer a negotiated price.
A third location also turned into a dry hole.
It was dark by the time he found the fourth hotel that had everything he would look for if he were the man on the run after an op. It was in the Old Town, the touristy part of the city, which meant a steady influx of foreigners and strangers, but it was small and out of the way at the northern tip of the quarter, which meant it was quiet enough at night, and anyone entering the building might be noticed.