He had to get out of this game. The rules were changing, they were weighed more and more against him, and he saw it as inevitable someday soon he would zig when he should have zagged, and he would get his ass killed all because of some technology that he’d never even fucking heard of.
All that said, he didn’t know where he would go to be any safer than he was now. He liked Stockholm so far. He liked his chances here, moving around with his face covered. He did not want to leave, to run away from unknown and possibly imagined space age forces hunting him.
Stockholm wasn’t the problem.
But the phone call and vulnerability that it placed him in was the problem. He decided right then that he would not call Russ back, and he would relocate somewhere else in the city this morning.
The resolution of thought relaxed him somewhat, but still he couldn’t sleep.
THIRTY-TWO
Ruth woke at four A.M. She’d slept less than four hours, a fact her body made clear to her before she’d even had time to pick up her phone to check the time.
Right now Mike would be huddling for warmth on a bench about eighty yards away from the target’s location on Radmansgatan, tucked into a covered bus stop in the dark and away from any line of sight on the windows of the building. Ruth had to get up and go relieve him for three hours, and then Laureen would come and relieve her.
Ruth pushed her team hard, she knew it, but it was the only way to avoid a repeat of what had happened the previous spring in Rome.
In Rome her intelligence had been perfect; she and her team had tracked a Hezbollah gunman to a home in the Monte Sacro district of the city, and their surveillance determined that he would attempt to strike Ehud Kalb at an upcoming climate conference.
Ruth passed her information on to Metsada, along with a request for a few more days’ surveillance to get better visibility inside the Monte Sacro home.
But she was vetoed, and Mossad leadership ordered an immediate raid. An internal report issued after the fact suggested that an increased Special Operations funding request in the Knesset the following week was the cynical impetus behind the order for immediate action.
Whatever the reason, Metsada hit the house, ignoring the request of the targeting officer on sight.
Five innocent people were killed. A father, a mother, and three children. The Hezbollah assassin had kidnapped them and kept them prisoner in case he needed a bargaining chip. When the commandos burst through the front door of the home, he pushed the family down a staircase; the Israelis mistook the rushing falling figures in their weapon lights as threats, and they gunned them all down before exchanging fire with and killing the Hezbollah terrorist.
Ruth was a basket case after the catastrophe. But she was almost immediately cleared of any wrongdoing, and she demanded to go back to work. Yanis had pushed back against this; he forced her to spend some time in counseling. But, damaged or not, she was damned proficient at her job, and there were many threats to Prime Minister Kalb, so she was cleared for duty within days, and she had been working twice as hard ever since.
Ruth rubbed her eyes and checked the local temperature on an app on her phone, and she rubbed them again, making sure she was seeing the screen correctly.
Out loud she groaned, “Three degrees Fahrenheit? Really?”
As she rolled out of the warm bed she heard noises in the living room of the safe house. Male voices. At first she thought it was just Carl and Lucas in conversation, which surprised her, considering the hour. But within a few seconds she was certain there were new speakers in the mix.
Next to where Ruth had been sleeping in the queen-sized bed, Laureen did not stir.
“Who the hell is that?” It was Aron asking from the bed on the far side of the room.
Ruth did not answer; she headed out of the bedroom, slipping her glasses on, and fumbled her way up the hall in the dark, toward the bright lights of the living room.
The voices were louder as she approached, and she also heard the thumping and slamming of equipment being moved around. She began to suspect she knew what was happening even before she saw it for herself.
Oh no.
Ruth walked into a room full of men, ten in all, including Lucas and Carl, who themselves had clearly only just awakened moments before.
She did not know the new guests, but Ruth didn’t need thirteen years working in the intelligence field to determine she was looking at the Townsend kill team.
“Mornin’,” a burly and bearded American man in a knit cap and a ski jacket said in a gravelly southern twang. He talked and moved like he was in charge of this entourage, and he crossed the room to her like he owned the place. “John Beaumont. You must be Ruth.”
She shook his hand, but it was a gesture of obligation, not amicability. “Don’t tell me you are planning a raid on that tenement.”
“I go where they send me, ma’am. Do what they tell me. Just the same as you, I’ll bet.”
She shook her head violently. Ruth liked to be in control, and she felt the growing panic of losing control. “We don’t know anything about the positioning of the target inside the building. What room he’s in, how many others are in there. We know there are families. Kids. It’s way too early for action.”
“We’re hitting it at oh six hundred, which is late in my book, but first light ’round here isn’t till oh nine twenty-five.”
Ruth’s panic grew. “No! You’ve got to give us more time. At least half a day.”
Beaumont pulled a tin of dip from his back pocket and began a snapping motion with his hand to tamp it down inside the can. “I don’t work for you, honey, so I ain’t gotta do shit.”
“Excuse me?”
“You need to chill out. We aren’t going to shoot any kids. Look, I’d like a better picture of the interior layout of that place myself, but we’ll just have to adapt and overcome. We’ll be going in light, civilian dress.” He smiled a crooked grin. “We’ll be super friendly to everybody who stays the fuck out of our way.” Beaumont put a pinch of dip in his mouth and winked at her.
A couple of his men chuckled behind him. She looked at the others and saw the weapons for the first time. Micro Uzis, a small sub gun of Israeli manufacture, and pistols that she did not recognize in holsters festooned with extra magazines. Ruth herself had been trained on weaponry, of course, but she did not carry firearms in the field, nor did she have any desire to.
“You’re going in with Uzis? Yeah, that’s friendly.”
“I’m about to make breakfast,” he said. “I’m thinking about an omelet. You know what they say about how to make an omelet?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Ruth was lost.
One of his other men answered the question by raising his Uzi. “You gotta break some eggs, boss.”
“That’s right. Now, sweetie, we’re going to do our best to avoid civilian casualties. Seriously. But we damn well will neutralize Court Gentry in that building at oh six hundred.”
“You’re a prick.”
Beaumont ignored her; he’d tried his hand at international diplomacy and failed. He turned away and began helping his team with the equipment.
This felt like Rome all over again, and Ruth had to find a way to stop this. She turned to Lucas and Carl. The two men looked small and out of place in this room full of snake eaters. They did not seem happy about the new guests in their living room, but they certainly did not air any objections.