The windows in front overlooked an open parking lot that was surrounded on three sides by other buildings, making a small square open space in front of the hotel that amplified the echoes of approaching vehicles and shouted voices.
He walked around back to find a park, and here he saw that the wood-and-stone building was built along the wall that had surrounded this part of the town for six centuries. A large circular stone tower, peaked with a conical wooden roof, was attached to it, and there were windows in the stone wall that must have led to the hotel rooms in the back of the building.
Yeah, Russ thought. This looks right.
He entered the lobby, asked the girl behind the desk for a room, and then looked down at the ledger.
Someone had taken room 301 just an hour earlier. Russ saw the signature, just a scratch of a pen on a line. He did not expect it to say Court Gentry and it did not, but the timing was right. He was sure it was his man.
The girl wanted to put him on the third floor as well, but he told her he had hurt his knee falling on the ice and asked if she had anything lower. She complied with a sympathetic smile, giving him room 201, directly below his target.
He paid in euros for three nights; she asked to see his passport and he slipped it out confidently. Russ knew his paperwork was solid, thanks to the document people at Townsend. Their special relationship with the CIA allowed Townsend personnel to operate with credentials that came directly from a program the Agency operated with the Department of State.
Whitlock, unlike Gentry, could go wherever he wanted in the world, and he knew his credos would hold up to scrutiny.
After heading upstairs and dropping his backpack, he walked around the hotel for several minutes more to take a mental picture of the layout of the building. He then zipped up his coat and returned outside into the cold air. Snow fell steadily now, blowing in the breeze under an overcast sky. He entered the neighboring buildings, still creating a mental map of his surroundings. Then he moved around back to the park that ran along the city wall and determined which window corresponded to Gentry’s room. Once finished with his recon, he headed back to the town square for dinner.
He called in to Townsend, reported that he had located the target, and asked to be put in touch with the leader of the strike team as soon as he arrived.
Just south of Old Town he enjoyed a meal of elk stew and a bottle of red wine; he ate and drank slowly, sitting alone in a dark corner of the restaurant. While he dined he used his smart phone to study the greater neighborhood around his new hotel, adding a bird’s-eye-view perspective to the area he had seen with his eyes. When he had completed this task, he pulled up a map of the country and traced several routes along train lines and highways that would get him out of town quickly and easily.
A call came through his headset when he was almost finished with his meal.
“Go,” he said, speaking softly.
“Trestle Actual here.”
“Say iden,” Russ instructed, and then he picked his last bite of soda bread off his plate, dipping it in the elk stew before popping it in his mouth.
“Iden key, niner, three, three, oh, eight, seven, two, five, niner.”
“Confirmed. Dead Eye here. Iden number four, eight, one, oh, six, oh, five, two, oh.”
“I’m at the airport. Will be in the AO in an hour. Have you located the target?”
“Of course I have.”
“All right. We can meet at twenty-two hundred.”
Russ pulled his paper map of the city from his pocket and looked it over for a few seconds. “Open your map. You’ll need to write this down.”
TWELVE
Whitlock walked alone with his hands in his pockets and his head down, making his way through a steady snow shower across Freedom Square, a large plaza illuminated by the floodlights of St. John’s Church. Light traffic rumbled by on the streets, but there were few pedestrians passing through the square or walking along the sidewalks at this time of night.
He crossed the street and entered a park, left the path, and walked through the trees, trudging up a hill, his boots gripping the frozen ground below the fresh snowfall. He saw no one around save for the light traffic on Falgi Tee and a few people waiting at a bus stop at the edge of the park. He gave them a wide berth and moved deeper into the woods, finally making his way to a ring of park benches on the top of a little hill.
He stood by a bench, waiting in the cold, watching his breath fog the air in the faint light from the street that reached this deep into the park. The sounds of millions of snowflakes hitting the ground made a noise like soft static.
Whitlock waited a few seconds to be polite, then cleared his throat. “Where are the rest of you?”
There was no answer.
With a sigh he added, “I don’t have a tail. Cut the crap.”
After a few more seconds a voice in the trees behind him said, “No one likes a show-off, Russ.” Soon the crunching of three pairs of boots came from behind as well, just audible over the snowfall. Russ turned to face three men, all in their thirties, all wearing high-tech winter gear.
The same man who’d spoken before said, “We flew in. The rest of the team is coming over water with our equipment. They will be in the city by oh two hundred.” He stuck out a hand. “How’s it going, Russ?”
“Nick,” Whitlock said, and he nodded to the other two.
Nick was Trestle Actual, team leader of Trestle. Russ had worked with all the strike teams involved in the Gentry operation in his year working for Townsend. To Whitlock’s thinking, all the men were excellent shooters and door kickers, but he knew they could not spend any time at all in Court Gentry’s area of operations without Court picking up their scent. These guys weren’t low profile. They wore Oakley specs and Woolrich Elite pants and G-Shock watches and Salomon boots, efficient gear for combat ops, but too high profile for Russ’s tastes. Russ knew that even though Nick and his dudes could double-tap Court’s brain pan as well as anybody else on the planet, Court would see these guys coming a mile away if Russ wasn’t there to set the whole op up first.
Whitlock grabbed a pen and a notepad from one of the Trestle men and then took a knee in the snow. Under the beam of a tactical flashlight he drew a quick rendition of the hotel, indicating the exits, stairwells, and Gentry’s room at the end of the hall on the third floor. The diagram was passed around among the three men standing in the snow, and they looked it over.
“What about access to the roof?” Trestle Actual asked.
“I scouted the third floor and the adjacent properties. No way upstairs from the hallway at all. The attic is space that belongs to the apartment building next door, not part of the hotel.”
“You’re certain?”
Russ nodded. “No access above the third floor of the hotel without blasting a hole in the ceiling.”
Trestle Actual made a note on his own pad.
Russ added, “One other thing. That hallway outside the target’s door is creaky as hell. Old loose floorboards. Suggest you start the assault from back at the stairs, just up the hall from the target’s room, because there is no way you can hit that door without him hearing you coming. Just move dynamically up the hall and take the door down.”
“Understood.”
Russ looked around at the snow. It was blowing around now; it had picked up even since he’d arrived in the park. “You’re going to have a problem with this weather if he makes it outside.”
“Roger that,” said Nick. “Latest meteorological report says we’ll be in a blizzard by oh three hundred. We won’t get UAV support tonight. We didn’t even bother to bring the team over with us from Finland.”