“Of course I’m sure. Laureen picked him up thirty minutes ago.”
“But you’ve had no visibility on him all day, is that correct?”
“Correct. But we’ve got him now. We think we know where he’ll stay the night, and we’ll move into a place a couple blocks away.”
“You lost coverage last night at… ten P.M.?”
Ruth was confused by the questioning. “Around that, I guess. Maybe nine thirty. Why?”
Yanis said, “Because your target went to the south of France and killed a man. If you are certain he is there now… you are certain?”
“Back up. What do you mean he killed a man in France?”
“Amir Zarini was murdered this morning.”
“Oh shit,” she said. Then quickly she added, “But not by Gentry.”
“We just got off a conference call with Langley. They say all their preliminary intel indicates Amir Zarini was gunned down by none other than Court Gentry. He must have flown down from Stockholm last night. I can get you airline manifests, but for anything chartered, you’re better off going yourself to the fixed-base operators at Stockholm Arlanda and talking to them directly.”
“He did not go to Nice. That’s impossible.”
“Why is it impossible? You lost him for twenty-four hours. It’s not only possible, it’s perfect. He left Stockholm last night, did the hit this morning, and arrived back this afternoon or this evening. You guys picked him right back up. Nice work.”
Ruth knew Gentry had been in Stockholm that morning; she’d seen him herself. But letting Alvey know she’d purposefully short-circuited the Townsend attack in violation of her orders would get her pulled off the case and recalled to Tel Aviv.
She said, “Send me everything you have on the Zarini assassination.”
“What we have is preliminary. Hell, it was only nine hours ago. But CIA is working with French federal police and they—”
“Just send me everything. Now, please.”
The Mossad team moved into two rooms at the Gamla Stan Lodge, a small hotel in the Gamla Stan that looked out over a tiny cobblestone square. Across the street a bar popular with students and other patrons of the cheap hotels and hostels in the area was in full swing; young men and women moved across the snowy open space heading to and from the bar’s bright entrance in a steady stream.
While Mike parked the car at a neighboring lot and Aron and Laureen unpacked, Ruth sat at a little desk and read everything Yanis had sent her about the assassination in Nice. Ruth also scanned online news reports of the hit on the websites of CNN and the BBC.
When Mike returned, they turned on the TV hoping to find more information on the attack. The lodge’s satellite broadcaster received France 2, and the state-owned station showed a lengthy story on the attack, with footage from the scene. Twisted wreckage, bodies covered in yellow tarps, incongruous in front of a backdrop of azure water dotted with pleasure craft. As she watched the news, the others read the CIA info sent by Yanis. When they were finished Ruth said, “You guys have read the after-action reports from the operations Court Gentry has pulled off?”
Everyone had read the Mossad files, and Ruth had filled them in on the dossier she was allowed to see at Townsend House.
“Then you see this is bullshit. This operation in Nice does not fit the Gray Man pattern at all.”
Aron disagreed. “The rifle used in the Zarini hit was a Blaser R93, a favorite of the Gray Man. A weapons smuggler in Austria identified the Gray Man as the purchaser of said rifle. Witnesses at the scene described the Gray Man. Zarini was a known target of Iran, which has also been linked to the Gray Man, just in the last week.” He shrugged. “Sure, certain aspects do not fit, and I can’t deny that, but most of the details do fit, and you should not deny that either.”
Ruth countered. “There are a lot of white guys with brown hair in their thirties. Anyone can use a particular weapon. But the target, the collateral damage… the killing of the police officer. That is not Gentry.”
Mike said, “He got sloppy. He missed the target and hit the driver, and that caused the collision. After that his operation went tits up, and the cop had time to close in on him, so he didn’t have any options. He took him out.”
“Missed his target? The Gray Man doesn’t miss his target!”
“Listen to yourself,” Aron said. “You sound like you are infatuated by a myth.”
“It’s not a myth. He’s that skilled. And that principled. He doesn’t shoot innocent cops.”
“You told us yourself that he killed his own field team.”
“I told you the CIA says he killed his own field team.”
“And you don’t believe them?”
Ruth hesitated. “I think that if he killed those guys, he had a reason.”
Aron said, “Well, the timeline doesn’t rule him out of the Zarini hit. Nice is fifteen hundred miles away. Four hours flying time tops with a small corporate jet. Add an hour each way in a turbo prop. That is more than enough time for him to fly to Nice, whack Zarini, and then get back to Stockholm.”
Ruth couldn’t argue with this, because she did not want to reveal to her team that she’d seen Gentry that morning.
Mike Dillman had been standing by the window. He looked out, then quickly moved to the overhead light switch. He flicked it off and said, “Speak of the devil.”
Ruth leaned away from her desk to take a look into the little square. Within a half second she shot back straight up, removing herself from the window. Quickly she turned off the TV with the remote, enshrouding the room in complete darkness.
“Is that him?”
“Yep,” said Mike.
She looked again now and saw a lone man heading toward the lights of the little bar on the other side of the courtyard. She would be invisible up here in the dark from this distance, but still she felt his eyes on her as he glanced around.
After he entered the bar Laureen said, “I guess he doesn’t want to drink alone tonight,” she said.
“Sad life this guy lives,” Dillman said. “No wonder jackasses like him go out to kill people. They get trained, the humanity is drained out of them, and they don’t know how to do anything else.”
Ruth disagreed. “If there were no humanity in the man, his career as an assassin would be very different. He would take money and kill people, no questions asked.”
Aron said, with no small amount of frustration in his voice, “He’s taking money to kill Ehud Kalb. Are you okay with that?”
“We don’t know that.” After another moment she said, “And we aren’t going to find out sitting here.” Ruth stood. “I am going in.”
“You’re joking,” Laureen protested. “You can’t go in there. He’ll make you.” And then she added, “He’s a killer, unless you forgot.”
“There is nothing in his file that gives me any indication he will shoot a woman in the head if she sits down in the same bar as him.”
Aron was against it as well. “Way too risky. You might need to get close to him in another environment. Don’t blow your cover then by your actions now.” He talked to her the way she lectured her team about tradecraft and operational security, and Ruth knew he was right, but she knew something he did not. Gentry had not been involved in a massacre that day in Nice. Someone was railroading him into taking the fall for that, and Ruth wanted answers. She was willing to gamble on pushing this investigation by getting closer to her target.
To justify herself she said, “Is he in there meeting with the Iranians? How the hell are we going to know what he’s up to if we don’t press this?”
Aron looked at her like she was crazy. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say he’s not having a powwow with the Iranians in a Swedish pub.”