He’d left the building; Jumper could take him right now on the street. And she knew that when she called they would do just that. Beaumont and his men would race up in a van and riddle Gentry with submachine gun rounds, drop him in the snow, and then race off.
She reached for her phone, ready to call Aron back at the safe house so he could let the Jumper team know that the target was on the move, but she stopped herself suddenly.
She found herself facing a dilemma the gravity of which she had never experienced. Nothing about this operation smelled right. She thought about the Gray Man, the operations he had undertaken on his own initiative. The man fading from the gas lamplight ahead of her had personally done more against America’s enemies, enemies that Ruth and her nation shared with her birth nation, than anyone Ruth had ever known.
And now she found herself at the center of a frantic campaign to kill him, run by people she did not trust, people for whom, she had seen firsthand, collateral damage seemed to be of tertiary concern, well behind dropping their target and protecting their own asses.
She’d read all about the Tallinn fiasco. Two cops killed, a civilian killed. In none of the Mossad data on known Gray Man ops in the past five years had any noncombatants been wounded by the assassin.
Why this time?
She thought it was a hell of a lot more likely that the Townsend men, guys like that asshole Beaumont, had killed the cops and the bystander. Killing noncombatants was not Gentry’s MO. Avoiding them was clearly not Townsend’s MO.
Ruth pulled her hand away from her phone. She would not be a part of this. She had never forgiven herself for not fighting more forcefully against the attack in Rome. Even though she was cleared by Mossad leadership, she knew the truth.
Rome was her fault.
This time she would do what she had to do.
She called no one. Not the UAV team, not Beaumont, not even Aron.
No, she would find a way to get Townsend out of the picture, and then she would call in Metsada. Sure, they might still kill Gentry, but they would give her the opportunity to investigate further, not turn her operation into a precursor for a massacre.
She stood in place at the bus stop for three minutes, enough time for the Gray Man to disappear several hundred yards ahead of her. Then she hurried over to the front of the tenement building. The fresh snowfall and the virtually empty streets and sidewalks at five fifteen in the morning made tracking his footprints easy. She followed them south for ten minutes; they stayed on Sveavagen, although once they crossed to the other side of the street, and once it was clear that he tried to cover his tracks by walking along inside the tracks from a truck that she had seen passing by in the distance. But she picked the trail back up when the truck turned and the fresh prints continued on.
She could also see places where his gait changed, times when he’d slowed to look back over his shoulder, and each time she saw these she stopped herself, took her time shivering and waiting, making sure he was far enough ahead that there was no way he could be waiting for her to catch up to him.
The tracks turned and turned again on Drottningatten, the shopping street where the UAV team had first found him the previous evening. On this street several people were walking around, those unlucky ones who had to be at work by six A.M. As a result of the other pedestrians she found it harder and harder to track his prints, but she picked them up for a short time just before the end of the street, along the banks of the Norrstrom River. The footprints went onto the small bridge that crossed the river to the Gamla Stan, a tiny island in the center of the river and the location of Old Town Stockholm.
Ruth did not get on the bridge. She’d walked this area the day before and knew that the roads and passages on the island were narrow and tight. She would have no way to follow him now covertly; he could be waiting around any corner, so she backed off.
She’d lost him, and she wondered now what she had done.
Waves of self-doubt crashed on her, and twice she almost called in to Aron to tell him to get Jumper here on the double because he was getting away.
But she stayed herself.
If Gentry was leaving town he would have gone to the train station, or climbed into a cab for the airport, or headed to the docks. He’d done none of these things. He was staying in Stockholm.
She’d find him again. She had to.
She turned around and headed back to retake her watch over the tenement building, even though her target was long gone from the scene.
Jumper team hit the tenement at oh six hundred. Ruth had returned to the safe house to pack up with the rest of her team, and she and the three other Israelis took a break from packing to stand behind the UAV team while they piloted their drone through the predawn sky above the building on the southwest corner of Radmansgatan and Sveavagen.
Of course she knew Jumper would not find Gentry there, although her concerns remained that noncombatants could be killed or injured during the hit. Twice while the Americans were en route to the target location she spoke into the microphone on the table, reminding Beaumont and his team that they were likely to encounter central Europeans wary of police or government officials, and they might try to run or resist, even though they had no relationship with or knowledge of the target.
The first time she made the point, Beaumont responded with, “This ain’t exactly my first rodeo, lady,” which the Brooklyn-born Ettinger translated to mean he was aware of the potential for noncombatants in the line of fire.
The second time she reminded Beaumont and his men to keep their fingers off their triggers until they were certain they had the Gray Man in their sights, the big American responded tersely. “Lucas, I want that woman off my commo net!”
Lucas pulled the microphone away from Ruth.
And then Jumper Actual initiated the raid.
The American contractor’s radio headset communications came through the speakers on the table. Ruth heard shouting men, then screaming women and children and what sounded like breaking doors or furniture.
Jumper team was not subtle in their tactics, but, Ruth did have to admit, they were mercifully speedy. Within five minutes Beaumont barked angrily into his mic. “Negative contact! His room is empty. Looks like he cleared out.”
Ruth pulled the microphone back from Lucas. “Did you ask the manager what time he left?”
“He didn’t know. Either he slipped past your team or he was never here to begin with.”
Lucas said, “He was there.”
“He might have sneaked onto the roof,” suggested Ruth. “We only had coverage from distance. Not a perfect sight line.” She wondered if she’d overbaked her explanation, but she did not detect any suspicion from either those around her or the American team leader at the target location.
“Are we going to assume he’s left town?” Carl asked. “I mean, why just reposition in the city when you don’t know anyone has a fix on you?”
Jumper replied, “He’s probably flown the coop, but we’ll stay here and keep looking till Townsend House gets a hit on facial recog. They have everything covered for a couple hundred miles; he’s not going to go far.”
“Roger that.”
“Fishing boats,” Ruth said over the mic.
“What about them?”
“It’s his MO. He likes to hire fishing boats to take him out to freighters. He’s worked with the Russian mob to get passage on Russian-flagged haulers.”
After a short hesitation Beaumont said, “Yeah. She’s right. I guess we’ll run down to the docks and sniff around.”
She did not feel bad about sending Jumper off on the wrong scent. She hoped they searched the waterways all day long.
Ruth and her team finished packing; she told Carl and Lucas that they would be in touch, but for now the Mossad would do their own recon. She hated to lose the intel from the UAV; she wouldn’t have found the Gray Man in less than a day in Stockholm without the work of Lucas and Carl and their Sky Shark. But she knew if the drone got another ping on the target they would just recall Beaumont and his cowboys, and they would be right back on the verge of another catastrophe, and Ruth did not want to be involved in that.