Ruth called in to Yanis to let him know they were up and running here in Sweden.
“How are the Americans treating you?”
“Like we’re part of the team. CIA is desperate to get this guy.”
Yanis heard something in her voice. “You are, too, right?”
“So far, I’m more curious. It’s obvious the Americans want us to help, but it is not obvious at all to me that Gentry has any interest in taking out the PM. I can’t stop thinking about all the good this man has done, on his own initiative, while on the run.”
“Good guys do bad things. No reason bad guys can’t do good things once in a while, too.”
“I guess so. I’ve got an open mind on this, but I’m not sharpening my dagger just yet.”
Yanis said, “This is time critical. The likelihood of any danger to Kalb right now is only increased by the fact that he will be more vulnerable over the next two weeks during his travel. You don’t have the luxury of spending too much time on building a perfect target folder. I need you to find him, identify him, and monitor the Townsend people to make sure they stay on target. If they want to send their hitters to go in and kill him, they have their reasons, and you stand back and let them do it. Whether he’s a threat to Ehud Kalb will become a moot point if the Americans eliminate him.”
“I understand, Yanis,” she said, but still, there was reticence in her voice. “But when did we become the hunting dogs for the CIA?”
“When the fox started sniffing around our hen house, Ruth.”
“Right,” Ruth said.
“Get to work, but be careful. CIA conducted a teleconference briefing with us this morning about the Gentry case. He is a slick bastard, well trained to spot a tail. Find him, but stay loose.”
“Thanks for the concern, Yanis, but I’ll be fine.”
“Of course you will.”
TWENTY-NINE
Court had spent the day in his room, mostly surfing innocuous travel websites about Stockholm on his laptop. He also spent an hour and a half on a punishing series of bodyweight-only exercises. Push-ups and jackknives and handstand press-ups against the wall, enjoying the workout even less than normal because his body was still banged up after the operation in the forest near St. Petersburg and then the ambush in Tallinn two days later.
After a shower to ease his tired and sore muscles and an hour lying on the bed flipping channels on the tiny TV, he sat at the little table in the corner and ate a dinner of cold salmon out of a can and cold rice from a microwavable bag.
He drank a beer with his meal, all the while thinking he would rather be sitting in a dark, out-of-the-way bar somewhere in the neighborhood.
Not tonight — he had other plans for his evening.
When he was finished with dinner he went to the window and spent a few minutes looking through a narrow partition in the curtains, taking his time to check for cars or trucks that looked out of place and to follow passersby with his eyes, watching one person at a time as they strolled by on the sidewalk one floor below him. He scanned for faces he had seen before, though he felt confident he had made his escape from the Baltic without anyone tailing him here to Scandinavia.
After spending thirty minutes watching the flow of vehicles and pedestrians outside, he shut the curtains and sat down on his bed. After a slight hesitation he picked up his mobile phone and the scrap of paper with the phone number written on it.
He began to dial Whitlock, but he changed his mind. He had read everything he could find on the Internet about how secure the MobileCrypt application was, satisfying himself that using the app to obtain information about the Townsend men hunting for him was worth the risk, but Court was still a careful man. He put on his coat and slipped his earphones into his ears, then headed out of his flat and down to the street.
He’d make the call, just not from here.
Fat snowflakes floated and swirled under a streetlamp in Tegnerlunden Park, just a few minutes west of Gentry’s rented room. Court stood there under the light for a moment to read the number off the paper, holding his phone in his hand. He wore wired headphones with a built-in microphone under the hood of his coat. He dialed the number through the MobileCrypt app, but he did not press the send button. Not yet. He began walking, away from the park and toward the west, hoping that if all the information he read was somehow wrong, and it was, in fact, possible to trace the call, he would be harder to pinpoint if he was on the move.
Am I really doing this? he asked himself. Court did not seek out conversations with others; he did everything he could to avoid them. He preferred to order food from machines, buy train tickets from automated kiosks, and obtain information necessary for his missions from online searches at Internet cafés. In the past five years Court had, several times, gone weeks without talking to another human being other than an occasional two— or three-word exchange, usually in the form of a cash transaction at a market or directions for a cabdriver.
Tonight, in contrast to years of self-imposed solitude, he would actually reach out.
He told himself he had to do it but he worried, maybe, he just wanted to do it.
“Don’t you fucking go soft, Gentry.” He said it softly, admonishing himself for what he was about to do.
Despite deep reservations, he pressed the send button.
Russ Whitlock sat on the floor of his room at the Grimaldi. In front of him, the Blaser sniper rifle lay in pieces. He’d spent the past half hour taking it apart and putting it back together. First slowly and carefully. Then quickly, as if under stress. The next time he put it together normally but disassembled it only employing his right hand, simulating an injury to his left arm or hand. Then he tried the same trick with his left hand, which took considerable time.
Next to him on the floor, a tray of artisan cheeses and an iced open bottle of Lenoble Grand Cru Blanc du Blanc sat ignored. He wanted to put the weapon together and disassemble it a few more times before he rewarded himself with the luxurious indulgence.
He’d had a busy day, spent in intense preparation for his planned Saturday late-morning assassination of Amir Zarini. He’d taken a train to his planned area of execution and then surveyed the surroundings and the target location to determine both the ingress and egress points. He’d made it back to his hotel in the early evening, taken off all his clothes, and then removed the blood-and-pus-soaked bandages on his hip.
When he was finished undressing his wound he stood there nude in front of the full-length dressing mirror examining the holes, caked over with scabs, and the black bruising around them. His eyes lifted from the injury, taking in the rest of his body slowly and with no small amount of appreciation. He began a martial arts kata, never taking his eyes off his own face and body while he exercised. His hip burned and sweat began to flow within minutes. His face became a mask of intensity and even fury as he punched and kicked, performed throws and elbow strikes designed to break bones.
It took him several minutes to come down from the angry high of the simulated fight; his hip began bleeding freely and the pain was excruciating.
After his exercise Russ showered and changed and by now he was famished, but he imposed more discipline on himself by ordering food and drink and then letting it sit while he worked with the rifle, steeling both his mind and his body to as much hardship as he could generate in a four-star hotel on the French Riviera.
Russ had a lot of experience with sniper rifles, but little experience with the Blaser. As a scout sniper in the Marine Corps he had been issued the M40, and he loved the weapon. For the sake of familiarity he would have preferred an M40 for this job, or its civilian equivalent, the Remington 700. But, he had to admit, Gentry had chosen well with the R93. The German rifle had a straight pull-back bolt that allowed for slightly faster follow-on shots, faster than the M40 although certainly not as fast as a semiauto rifle. Still, Russ imagined he could empty the weapon’s four-round box magazine quickly and accurately at the distances he had planned, even without spending much time at the firing range with this particular weapon.