Gentry met his extraction an hour before dawn, after nearly three hours of trudging, running, tripping, and falling in the snow. He’d heard vehicles on the road and he’d heard the shouts of men and he’d heard the barking of dogs, but the only direct threat to him had been frostbite. He’d kept moving, kept his body temperature up, and he knew he’d thaw out once he got to where he was going.
The truck that came to pick him up was driven by a local who’d been hired by the Moscow Bratva. The man only knew that his job entailed collecting an individual in the forest just before nine A.M., when the skies were still pitch-black, and then driving him twenty kilometers to an inlet where a speedboat would be waiting. This part of Gentry’s exfil went off without a hitch. There were no words between the two men; the driver had, on his own initiative, brought Court a thermos of tea. Court held it in his hands to warm them, and he held it to his face so that the heat would thaw his nose, but he did not drink even a sip.
Court appreciated the gesture, but he didn’t know this bastard. For all he knew the tea was pure poison.
Gentry was not the trusting type.
As the sun grayed the low clouds over the Gulf of Finland, Gentry found himself on his extraction boat. The term speedboat didn’t really fit. It was a fourteen-foot tender with an underpowered engine and a captain who looked like he might have been all of seventeen years old. But they cut through the glassy water of the gulf easily enough, and shortly before noon he was brought alongside the Helsinki Polaris, a Russian-flagged dry-store cargo hauler on its way to Finland.
As he left the tender the captain reached under a seat and handed Gentry a backpack and a small knapsack. Court took them without a word. The backpack was his; he’d packed it himself in Moscow, filling it with things he would need to go on the run after the Sidorenko operation. A new pistol, a trauma kit, clothes, and a few other odds and ends. And the knapsack contained two hundred fifty thousand euros in bundles of one hundred euro notes. This was operating money he’d been promised for his getaway, and he imagined he would need much or all of it to adequately disappear.
By noon he stood in his small quarters in the rear of the ship; he’d consolidated the money into the backpack and the pockets of his heavy coat and now he stood naked in front of a grimy mirror, examining his bruises and scrapes from the activity of the morning. He was beat-up to be sure, but in better condition than he expected to find himself at the end of this ride. More importantly, he’d done it. He’d ended Sid Sidorenko and removed the most passionate and headstrong of those hunting him. It was a good day’s work, and now he was looking forward to melting away for a while, living off grid and biding his time until he figured out where he would go from here.
The Townsend Government Services ScanEagle drone had remained overhead throughout Gentry’s extraction. Babbitt decided to stand down his strike team within minutes of Gentry’s entering the forest. Sid had too many goons out and about; the eight members of Trestle could have handled themselves against any three dozen Russian skinheads, but their objective was to kill Gentry, and Gentry was safely under surveillance. Trestle could easily wait for him to get clear of the Russians and then hit him later when he was alone.
The ScanEagle tracked its target to the truck, and then the first UAV switched out with a second, which followed the truck to the fourteen-foot boat and remained high overhead as the tender came along a ship sailing west in the Gulf of Finland. The camera onboard the drone picked up the name of the ship—Helsinki Polaris. The Townsend investigators ran the name of the boat through Vesseltracker, a database of the world’s ships, and this showed the Helsinki Polaris’s details and scheduled course, and from this they learned the ship was an 1,800-ton dry-goods cargo hauler and though Helsinki was its home port, it was Russian owned and Antigua and Barbuda flagged. It was on its way to deliver a shipment to Finland and would be calling in Mariehamn at eight A.M. the following morning.
“We’ve got him,” Babbitt said to Parks when everything was confirmed. “We’ll take him right there on the ship. Alert Trestle, let him know they will be doing an underway.”
“Yes, sir. We have the fast boats and all the equipment necessary for a marine assault in the port of St. Petersburg. We’ll fly them to Helsinki and get ahead of the Polaris.”
“Good.”
Parks asked, “What about Dead Eye? Should I stand him down?”
“Negative. Have him proceed to Mariehamn. I want him waiting at the port in case something goes wrong.”
The phone on Jeff Parks’s hip rang; he put it on speaker and took the call from one of his signal room’s communications staff.
“Go for Jeff.”
“Jeff, the pilot of the Beechcraft assigned to Dead Eye just called. The asset’s a no-show. He was supposed to be at the airport two hours ago. The pilot wants to know how long he should wait for him.”
Parks turned to Babbitt, who was already looking up at the ceiling in a show of frustration.
“I hate singletons,” Babbitt groaned. “Call him. He won’t answer, but do it anyway. I want everyone in the signal room to keep pushing data about the operation to Dead Eye’s phone. Even if he won’t talk to us, I want him to know what’s happening with the hunt.”
“And then?” asked Parks.
“And then we wait for Dead Eye to turn up in the AO. He wants Gentry as bad as we do. He’ll be there. He just won’t follow our game plan.”
Parks shook his head as he disconnected the call. “Prick.”
Babbitt said, “Part of managing individualists like Whitlock is knowing when to back off. Let him think he’s the brains of this operation; I don’t give a shit. The only thing I care about is getting a picture of Court Gentry’s ugly mug in a pine box when this is all said and done.”
EIGHT
The woman was pretty, although she looked a little sad. She sat there, alone, deep in the shadows of a potted orange tree at a table in the outdoor café, ignoring the patrons sitting in the sun as all but a few of the men there ignored her. Her face was half-hidden behind her huge designer sunglasses, and her head hung over the demitasse of espresso nested in her hands on the bistro table. Occasionally she appeared to gaze out across the street in front of her, past four lanes of moderate traffic and toward an alley that ran behind a four-story apartment building and a parking garage.
It was a perfect December afternoon in Faro, Portugal, with sunny skies and temperatures in the midfifties. And although this was certainly not an intersection with a scenic view, nor did this urban neighborhood possess any tourist value whatsoever, the tables that poured onto the sidewalk from the café were more than half occupied, mostly by afternoon shoppers and locals from the nearby middle-class apartment building and the alley behind it.
But the woman under the orange tree just sat by herself, far away from the rest of the patrons, nursing her espresso. She flicked her midlength brown hair out of her face and glanced again to the apartment building.
A text appeared on the iPhone lying next to her purse on the table. She picked up the phone and glanced at it.