“I can’t just follow this man around and wait for the Americans to exterminate him.” She stood and turned on the light, pulled a blond wig and a wig cap out of her bag, and rushed to the mirror.
Aron stood by the door. “Can I speak with you privately, Ruth?”
Ruth pulled her brown hair back and slipped it all inside the wig cap. “Just say what you want to say, Aron.”
He did so. “This is because of Rome.”
Ruth shook her head angrily, her blond locks drooped into her eyes for an instant before she brushed them back. “This is because of right here, right now. If I had fought harder against the system in Rome, then five innocents would not be dead. I will not make that mistake again.”
“But—”
Ruth cut him off. “I’m going into that bar, and I will decide how to proceed from there.”
“You aren’t going to bump him, are you?”
She walked over to her makeup case on the desk. “I don’t know. You are welcome to come in and watch over me, but don’t get in my way.”
A few minutes later the three junior Mossad officers watched from the window as Ruth Ettinger crossed the square.
“This is a bad idea,” Laureen said, and neither of her colleagues argued the point.
THIRTY-SIX
Ruth found the bar mostly full, but there was an open stool along the L-shaped wooden bar near the door, likely, she assumed, because every time the door opened the arctic air poured in. She stayed in her coat and took a seat next to a blond-haired couple in their twenties. Careful not to look around at first, she fiddled with her mobile phone for a moment, then shouted over loud rock music to order a Falcon Pilsner on draft.
As she looked away from the bartender she glanced the length of the room and picked Gentry out around the turn of the L-shaped bar and almost at the far end. Though they were easily twenty-five feet apart, this was the closest she had been to the Gray Man. She stole glances at him as she brought her beer to her lips. He had a bottle of beer in front of him, and his head hung over it. A black knit cap covered his head, and he wore his coat unzipped. Days of rough stubble peppered his cheeks and chin, dark brown with a few flecks of gray.
He leaned over his bottle, seeming to not notice anyone or anything around him, but Ruth realized she could not accurately gauge his level of awareness, as she only glanced at him once every minute or so.
She had no illusions that she would see her target sitting next to a known Iranian intelligence officer, receiving a suitcase full of hundred-dollar bills, but she felt like she needed to get this close to get some measure of this man. From the very beginning of this operation she’d been bothered by the official version of this man’s biography, and she realized she was desperately reaching out to try to find some understanding of his motivations. Something that would either rule him in as a threat, or rule him out.
But there wasn’t much going on in here. She finished her beer after ten minutes or so and ordered another, and she thought now Aron might have been correct. There might be need for surveillance tomorrow, and even though she had disguised herself with a wig and more makeup than she would normally wear, she would have to exclude herself from any close foot-follow, because she could not rule out the possibility that he might remember her from the bar.
If he was as good as his reputation, he would damn sure remember her face despite her best attempts at disguise.
She looked down, ran her finger along the rim of her beer glass, and quickly flitted her eyes up in his direction.
Gentry stared right back at her.
Ruth was burned and she knew it. She looked away quickly, not casually enough, she was certain, so she went in the opposite direction with her plan. She looked back, hoping to catch his eye again. She thought there was a chance she could make him think she was only eyeing him because she was attracted to him.
It took several seconds, but soon enough Gentry’s eyes met hers again. She could tell he was fully alert now, wondering why the woman across the bar was locked onto him, but all she could do now was pass her actions off as flirtation.
She smiled at him and looked down and away. Internally her senses were on fire. She had no idea how he would react.
She glanced again toward him, and he looked away. Shit, she thought to herself. He’s not buying it.
The door opened behind her, and a moment later Aron passed behind her and kept walking around the L-shaped bar to the tables along the far wall of the room. They were all packed, but he moved into a group of college students and started chatting with them like he’d known them for years.
Ruth looked up to Gentry and noticed he was still looking down. She thought, at first, that he was concentrating on the bottle in front of him. But to her surprise, he pulled out a mobile phone, dialed a number with his thumb, and placed it to his ear.
Russ Whitlock’s plane had just landed at Stockholm Arlanda airport, and he walked with the other passengers from his flight toward the baggage carousel.
He checked his phone and saw that he had no new intel pushes from Townsend House, which he took as an indication that the noose had not yet closed around Gentry. He planned to grab his bag and then jump in a taxi for the city center, and along the way call Parks to see what was going on.
As he put his phone back in his coat it rang. The call was coming through his MobileCrypt app so he could not see the phone number. Quickly he checked the time. It was a little after nine here. Gentry had promised to call, so he hoped like hell it was him.
“Go.”
Russ first heard background noise over the line. Music, perhaps, as well. Then Court Gentry spoke, softly, and with stress in his voice. “Anything new you want to tell me about?”
Yes! Russ had to stop himself from pumping a fist in the air, and he struggled to keep his reply low-key. “I wish you’d called me earlier. I got intel right after I talked to you last night. Townsend Group is in Stockholm. They thought they had you located in a tenement building, and they hit it this morning. A team with submachine guns, just like the other night in Tallinn. I don’t know how you did it, but you gave them the slip.”
“Who’s the girl?”
“The girl?”
“C’mon, man. The girl making goo-goo eyes at me right now. Who is she?”
“I don’t know. She might be on the surveillance detail.”
Court looked up again at the attractive blonde sitting on the other side of the bar; she concentrated on her beer glass for a moment, then glanced his way. Her eyes lingered on him a moment, then they moved on. She was good, he had to admit. She seemed relaxed, just a lonely girl on holiday with a couple of beers in her.
“Any chance you can find out for sure?”
“Of course I can. Where are you?”
“In a bar in the Gamla Stan.”
“Okay. Give me your cell number and I’ll call you back.”
Court just said, “I’ll just call you back in five.”
“It might be more than five. Dammit, Court. A private kill team has got you fixed, you are convinced there is surveillance on you right now, and you are worried that the guy who has already saved your life might trace your fucking phone number? Are you serious?”
Court conceded the point by reading the number off his cell phone.
Ruth had a running count going of the number of times she and her target had locked eyes. At five, she decided she had no choice. He was suspicious, and the only way she could keep from spooking him further was to go over there and hit on him. She felt like she could get him to relax a little, to accept the fact that the girl with the elevator eyes was just lonely or horny, and no threat to him. And if she played her cards right, she told herself, she might even learn something more about the man and his intentions.