“I believe you.”
“All right, Ruth. I hope you will tell your leadership that I wasn’t involved with what happened in Nice.”
“They aren’t listening to me. They want you off the map, Gentry, and I’m not going to be able to change that.”
Court said, “Then I guess I’d better get moving.” He turned toward the kitchen access, and Ruth followed along with him.
“I see any Townsend cowboys or Mossad ninjas, I’m going to know you lied to me.”
“There aren’t any,” she said.
Without another word Court turned away, stepped behind the bar, and moved into the kitchen. The two bartenders did not even notice him pass.
Ruth put her hands out on the bar to steady herself, and Aron came up beside her. “You okay?”
She nodded distantly. After a few more seconds to compose herself, she headed for the front door and Aron followed.
Moments later, the four Mossad officers were back in Ruth’s room at the Gamla Stan Lodge. As Ruth took off her coat and did her best to calm her nerves with slow deep breaths, she had to endure a barrage of questions from her team that was peppered with none-too-subtle expressions of their opinions.
Laureen asked, “What the hell were you doing?”
“Having a drink with a knife held to my rib cage.”
“What did he say?” Mike asked.
“He knew about us. About Townsend. He said he doesn’t want to kill Kalb.”
“Sounds like what someone would say if they did want to kill Kalb.”
“Right, but it’s also what someone would say if they did not. I believe him.”
Mike said, “We can call Townsend, see if the UAV has located him.”
Laureen said, “Or maybe you two can just meet for drinks again tomorrow and we can pick him up then.”
Ruth wasn’t in the mood for the sarcasm, or to be lectured by her team. “It didn’t go down the way I planned it, no. But I believe the guy. He’s not after Kalb and he wasn’t in Nice. I’m not telling Townsend that there has been a sighting; they’ll just kill him.”
“So?” asked Mike. “What do we do?”
“I’m going to call Yanis, and probably hear more of the same from him that I just heard from you three.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Court walked quickly but calmly through Stockholm’s central train station, his hood up, his knit cap low, and his scarf high. It was almost midnight; the grand waiting hall of the station had at most a hundred people milling around in an area that could easily accommodate twenty times that number. And Gentry looked at each and every person as he walked along near the wall, because each and every person was a potential threat.
He knew he was also under surveillance by security cameras now, and although he was confident he could avoid any facial recognition pings due to his obscured face, he also was pretty sure anyone looking for him by this point would know what his coat looked like and what his backpack looked like and could therefore make a pretty good guess that the man trudging alone through the station was probably the same guy they’d been chasing through Stockholm.
There wasn’t a thing he could do about this; he knew he’d be seen and he knew assholes with guns would descend on the train station in minutes, but he hoped to be long gone by the time they got here.
But not on a train. Court wasn’t here to get on a train.
Not right now, anyway.
No, this was a surveillance detection run, albeit an SDR with a dual purpose.
His main purpose here at the train station was to survey the building, to find the security cameras and to evaluate the police presence. He had a plan to come back, and when he did, he wanted to move through the building as if invisible.
He passed a small police station there in the building; the officers behind the glass were in deep conversation and did not look his way.
Court then focused on the security cameras, his greatest hazard here in the building. He noted their number and position high on the walls in the main hall. He knew they would be there, and he could have guessed where they would be and how to avoid them without coming here tonight, but he needed to be thorough, and he was well aware that there would be other cams placed throughout the building he would have to avoid.
He saw two ATM machines near the food court on the main floor, and both of these would have security cams that looked out to a distance five yards or so across the floor. Both machines, conveniently for Gentry’s needs, were on the same side of the room. He also found a camera above a self-service food stand.
He detected twelve electric eyes in all, just here in the waiting hall, and each one, he assumed, was sending his face at this moment to a server somewhere, maybe in D.C., or Colorado or Silicon Valley, and there the bits and bytes that made up all the data points of his face would be run, automatically of course, because there were millions of faces going through the same process.
He descended an escalator and entered a brightly lit passage, and here he saw a camera high over a Burger King on his right. As he passed through a doorway leading to the unheated platform hallway, he saw another cam, but this one was down beyond the first platform, so he made a hard left and went up the stairs.
Up by the tracks he saw one camera on each platform, and he recognized the model of the unit and knew that although it contained a built-in panning motor that could be controlled by an operator, the lens itself only had a sixty-degree field of view, and he could avoid being captured by it if he moved along the left edge of the platform as he passed.
His entire survey of the central station took less than five minutes, and when he finished he walked far down a platform, past the high covered roof and into the darkness, and then he climbed down and began walking up the snow-covered tracks of a commuter line.
Twenty minutes later he’d climbed aboard a train that ran to a town twenty minutes outside Stockholm, and there he jumped a late-night bus that would take him a little farther still. As he rode he kept his face covered and his backpack on his lap, and he laid his face on it, knowing that he was as safe now as he could be.
For a few hours, anyway.
He considered staying outside the city for a day or two but quickly vetoed the idea. Even though the men and women watching for him would certainly be located in the capital, the crowds and clutter of the urban world were the safest place for Court to hide. If he wandered around a suburb or a village someplace he’d draw more attention, and if he accidentally tripped a security camera and his face brought gunmen down on the area, his escape and evasion options would be next to nil.
No, Court knew he could shoot out to the ’burbs for a few hours at most, but he had to get back into the city before he could slip away to the next big city.
Ruth Ettinger sat with her team in her hotel room, talking over their next move. She’d just gotten off the phone with her supervisor, Yanis Alvey, who was not pleased with her, to say the least. Although he neither yelled nor fumed — that was not his way — he made it clear he felt she’d shown incredibly poor judgment in engaging her target in conversation. He suggested it might be best for everyone if he replaced her and her team with a new set of targeters, but in the end he backed off.
Ruth won the argument, barely, although she made no ground in her insistence to Alvey that it was highly unlikely Gentry was involved in the Amir Zarini assassination. Not surprisingly, Gentry’s own words carried little weight with him.