Ettinger and her team determined that this was, in fact, a credible threat on their PM, so they called in Yanis and his kill/capture crew from Metsada, and then Ruth and her team were ordered to stay the hell away from the target location while the hard men from Tel Aviv swooped in to end the threat.
But now Ruth sat less than a hundred yards from the action, sipping espresso in the cool shade.
She was not worried about her colleagues in Metsada. The bomb brothers had been mixing chemicals and constructing timers for the past eighteen hours and they were sound asleep, and the cameras her team had passed through the ventilation ducts in the apartment across the street confirmed that the front door to their flat was not booby-trapped. She knew the Israeli operatives would burst through the door with orders to capture the men if it was feasible to do so. But she also knew the two men in that flat had exactly one Kalashnikov rifle, and it was staged on the floor directly between their two beds, and they would both wake, both reach for it, and both fumble it.
And the Metsada officers would make the decision in a single heartbeat to shoot the two young men with their silenced pistols.
And then they would back up through the door and leave not a trace of their act behind other than the bloody bodies and a few untraceable shell casings.
Across the street the Toyota had stopped honking. One of the operatives in the blocking van climbed out and, in halting Portuguese, explained to the Toyota driver that his friend was having trouble with his van’s transmission and, if the man in the Toyota could just give them a moment, they would push the vehicle out of the way. The Toyota driver complied, perhaps recognizing that the polite foreigner was doing his best to rectify the situation, and perhaps also noticing that the polite foreigner had a hard and formidable look about him, and it might be best not to piss him off.
There was a brief screech of tires now. Ruth and Yanis watched as the two carloads of Mossad operators backed out off the alley, stopping behind the Toyota. The blocking van rolled off to the west, the Toyota pulled into the street and turned to the east, and the two cars then executed perfect three-point turns in the narrow alley and followed the van to the west.
No one sitting at the outdoor café around them had any idea they were witnessing the ending of the perfectly choreographed assassination across the street.
Yanis Alvey said, “And… scene.”
“Never gets old,” Ruth said, no happiness or levity in her voice now. Yanis noticed this.
“You hate when it’s over.”
She corrected him. “I love when it’s over. As long as we have done our jobs correctly, and there is no collateral.”
Unlike Rome, Yanis thought, but did not say.
Ruth added, “What I hate is the day after. When I don’t have anything to do.”
“Dinner tonight?” Yanis asked, sounding a little more hopeful than he would have liked.
Ruth finished her espresso. “Sorry. I have to sanitize the safe house.”
He nodded, careful to affect an air of nonchalance. He wasn’t surprised, really. “Not a problem. I imagine you wouldn’t be much company. You get incredibly disagreeable and difficult to be around when you don’t have a head to hunt.”
Ruth stood, then knelt back down, speaking softly into Alvey’s ear. “I can only hope someone proclaims their intention to kill our prime minister in the next few days so that I can have a raison d’etre.”
She drifted away through the bistro tables, and Yanis reached for his wallet to pay her tab. He was not offended by her brush-off. It was part of her show, her faux tough exterior. He knew this, and he also knew what lay beneath.
She was brave and proud and smart and competent. But she was also vulnerable.
Yanis Alvey was glad for her success today in bringing down the Palestinian bomb brothers cleanly and quietly. But as she walked off he thought, not for the first time, that one more Rome just might destroy her.
NINE
At oh one hundred hours the Helsinki Polaris and the two tiny vessels chasing it converged in the black waters of the Baltic Sea, twenty miles due south of Helsinki.
The eight Townsend operators of Trestle Team rode in the two black Zodiac MK2s, powered by beefy but quiet motors that allowed them to cut through the cargo ship’s wake and advance on the stern unnoticed but with commanding speed.
The Zodiacs had one man at the helm, while the three others on each boat held on to rope handles on the craft’s inflatable rubber walls. The two small rubber boats separated behind the cargo ship, with one heading to the starboard side and the other to port. They came abreast of the Polaris simultaneously, and telescoping climbing poles with padded hooks at their tips were raised and hung over the railing of the main deck. Within sixty seconds the first two men were up the poles, over the railing, and lowering a rope ladder so the poles could be removed and the second and third men on each Zodiac could climb more quickly and more safely. After another minute the rope ladders were unhooked from the railing and stored on the deck, and the six men concealed themselves from anyone awake above on the bridge who decided to gaze back to stern.
Within two minutes of arriving alongside the cargo ship, the six-man boarding party was moving up the deck with their Heckler & Koch MP7s held at the high ready.
In the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the entire staff of the signal room watched the giant screen in front of them. It displayed the action via a ScanEagle UAV flying overhead. The drone had been deployed from the backyard of a safe house in Helsinki and operated by the same team who, only twenty hours earlier, had been working from a safe house near Gregor Sidorenko’s dacha.
The direct action team searched the vessel, staying low profile, using their night vision equipment to move in the shadows and soft communications over their headsets to remain in contact with one another while moving through the cargo ship’s labyrinthine passageways.
Twenty-six minutes after boarding, Trestle Actual entered the captain’s cabin and knelt down over the captain’s bunk. He placed his gloved hand over the silver-haired Russian’s mouth and, shining a tactical flashlight in his eyes, woke the man with a hard shake.
“G’de Americanskiy?” Where is the American?
The man’s eyes were wide, the pupils pinpricks in the bright light. He tried to turn away from the beam but the hand held him firm. The light burned through his lids as he squeezed them shut.
“G’de Americanskiy?”
The gloved hand let go of the face and the captain spoke hesitantly.
“The passenger? He said he was German.”
“That doesn’t matter. Where is he now?”
“He disembarked.”
“When?”
“Wha — what time is it?”
“It’s one thirty.”
“About midnight, I think.”
“How did he leave the ship?”
“A boat came for him. It must have been prearranged. We were not told about it until it appeared. On the radio they said it had come for the passenger. He was already on the deck waiting for it.”
“What kind of boat?”
“A Bayliner, I think. White. Canvas canopy.” The man shook his head. “Just a regular little twenty-footer.”
“What language did the man on the radio speak?”
“Russian.”
“Where did it take him?”
“I… I don’t know. Helsinki, maybe? It was the closest port. Forty kilometers from our position at the time. Must have been going to Helsinki.”
Trestle Actual evaluated the captain’s responses and deemed him credible. He seemed entirely too bewildered and terrified to attempt to deceive the armed men in black over him.