The confidence came fifteen minutes later. Whitlock had positioned himself at a table on the second floor of a small restaurant near the Viru Gates, the main entrance through the walls of the Old Town. Below him he watched the man from the port moving up the cobblestone street. The man’s face was still obscured by the scarf and the hood of his black coat, but Whitlock could judge height and build, and it matched what he knew about his target. He lifted his Steiners and locked them on the face of the individual. At this distance the eyes filled the lenses, and Whitlock felt his heart rate increase; it seemed as if the two men were standing only inches apart.
The eyes of the man were intense, searching.
Whitlock was certain. Those were the eyes of the Gray Man.
Russ had spent hours staring into those eyes. Lee Babbitt had sent him every photo the CIA had of the man. They were all old; most showed him wearing some sort of disguise, for either a passport picture or a visa application, but Court could not change his hard and piercing eyes.
Russell Whitlock turned away from the window, his heart pounding with excitement.
“I’ve got you. I’ve fucking got you.” He left the table before the waitress arrived to take his order, descended the restaurant’s staircase, and headed back outside into the cold.
The target moved through the crowd with his head down. In the space of a two-minute tail, Russ watched Gentry raise and lower the hood of his coat, then put a black watch cap over his brown hair and take it off again. All these changes, each one done with supreme nonchalance, made tailing him from a distance nearly impossible.
Gentry entered the Town Hall Square, the center of activity in the medieval portion of the city. A winter market was under way, and dozens of morning shoppers strolled through wooden kiosks set up to sell food and drink and handicrafts. The smell of grilled sausage, hot chocolate, and glogg was in the air, but Whitlock watched Gentry pass it all by, ignoring the happy sights and sounds and smells of the holidays, as he stayed rooted to his mission.
His mission to stay alive.
He stopped suddenly, crossed the street toward a bakery, and looked in the window glass.
Whitlock turned his head down to the cobblestones in front of his shoes and kept walking until he turned the corner, leaving his target behind.
He picked him up again a minute later, just by chance really, in the winding and narrow Old Town streets. As Russ tried to move on a street parallel to Gentry, he found himself folding in fifty feet behind him. Court crossed the street again, just ahead of an SUV that rumbled slowly on the icy cobblestones, and he began climbing steps through a medieval archway, leading up the Cathedral Hill.
Whitlock watched Gentry disappear up the snowy stone staircase, and he did not follow. His quarry was highly skilled, and he was conducting an SDR, a surveillance detection run. He would begin a complicated ballet of subterfuge, ducking into shops, leaving through random exits, turning in different directions and generally making himself impossible to follow without his tail losing him or revealing himself. Dead Eye could stick behind a lot of seasoned pros as they carried out SDRs and remain invisible doing so. But not Court. Russ knew the only way to keep the Gray Man in sight was to get close to him and stick like glue, and if Russ did that, the Gray Man would immediately light on to the fact he was being followed.
And that would be that.
So Russ let him go. He returned to the Town Hall Square and purchased a cup of glogg from a kiosk, and he sipped it slowly while he stood, watching the shoppers move from stand to stand. Women pushed prams or pulled their children along behind them on sleds; men stood in small groups talking or walked hand in hand with their wives. He pulled a folded map out of his coat pocket and began studying it, orienting himself and determining where he’d last seen Court, walking up the steps. Russ decided he would pick out a high-probability choke point and head there to wait for his target to pass.
His phone chirped in his ear, just as it had every three or four hours during the past day. He had ignored all incoming calls since Bucharest, but he was ready to talk now. He tapped the receiver, opening the call and connecting it through his Bluetooth device.
“Go.”
“This is Graveside.” Lee Babbitt’s code name was Graveside, and Whitlock recognized Babbitt’s voice over the satellite connection, but there was a protocol to follow nonetheless.
“Say iden,” Whitlock said while still looking over the map in his gloved hand and sipping his hot wine.
“Iden key eight, two, four, four, niner, seven, two, niner, three.”
“Iden confirmed. This is Dead Eye. Iden four, eight, one, oh, six, oh, five, two, oh.”
“Identity confirmed. Hello, Russell.” Babbitt’s voice was taciturn, but Whitlock imagined his employer must be furious with him for going off on his own script over the past thirty hours.
“Hi, Lee.”
Babbitt was all business. “I trust you got the data we pushed about the underway assault last night?”
“Dry hole.” Russ said it flatly.
“Yes, but I think we’re back on track. My analysts went through several hours of sat feeds. They picked up a vessel fitting the description of the one described by the Polaris’s captain. It docked in Tallinn, Estonia, forty minutes ago. I need you to head to Tallinn and we’ll update you as soon as we can get more intel to pinpoint the target.”
Whitlock sipped his glogg and began walking, still studying the map in his hand. He headed out of the square and toward Castle Hill, his boots crunching the snow. “A step ahead of you, boss. I’m on scene.”
There was a pause on Babbitt’s end. Finally, he replied, “You are in Tallinn?”
“Affirmative.”
“What are you doing?”
“I am conducting surveillance on the target.”
Whitlock knew that would take a moment to sink in. He took another sip of his glogg and walked.
“You have eyes on Gentry?”
“I tracked him from the port. He’s conducting an SDR at present, which I expect to continue well into the afternoon. I’ve pulled back from him, but I’m not far behind.”
There was another pause that lasted precisely as long as Whitlock expected. He imagined what would be running through Babbitt’s mind. Excitement tempered with no small measure of confusion and even suspicion, but Babbitt was an exec, which meant, to Whitlock, that more than anything Babbitt’s brain would be focusing on concocting a way to show that he remained in control of a situation he clearly did not understand.
On cue the man in Washington asked, “How did you know he would go to Estonia?”
Whitlock took another sip of the mulled wine. He luxuriated in the flavor, just as he savored the explanation of his accomplishment. “I solved the equation.”
“The equation?”
“Yes. I determined what his best course of action would be, taking into account all of his training. I decided he wasn’t going to sit on that boat for two days for reasons of PERSEC. I knew he’d get off somehow, and I figured he’d do it as soon as it got dark, which meant he’d be closest to Tallinn to the south or Helsinki to the north. He could have gone either direction, but I leaned toward Tallinn. He doesn’t speak Estonian, but he knows Russian, and you can get by in Estonia in Russian. Less easily so in Finland.” Whitlock added, “And I knew he wasn’t going back to Russia; that was a given.”
Babbitt asked, “What’s keeping him from leaving Tallinn immediately?”
“He will like it here. He’ll see the crowds, the tourists, the negligible police presence, the abundance of little places to sleep and eat, the plentiful transport options out of town via rail, road, and sea, and he’ll park his ass right here for a couple of days. That’s what I’d do, so that’s what he’ll do.”