“Just explaining why I do it.”
Court said, “I’m not your mom.” It was still in the dark and dusty pub for a moment. Finally he said, “I’ve got a lot more questions.”
To this Russ nodded. “I bet your head is spinning with them.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Russell Whitlock.” He looked Gentry over with a searching gaze. “Mean anything to you at all?”
Court shook his head. “Should it?”
A shrug. “Doesn’t hurt my feelings.”
“You called me Violator back there.”
“I did.”
“You are Agency?”
“Used to be.” Russ sipped some more whiskey from the little glass, the movement of his shifting in the vinyl seat providing most of the noise in the room now. Russ reached out a hand. “Code name, Dead Eye.”
The men shook hands.
“Never heard that one either, have you?” asked Russ.
“No.”
Russ smiled. “We weren’t supposed to know about each other. OPSEC and PERSEC and just good manners to mind our own busi-ness.”
“But you know me.”
“I know everyone.”
Court did not press. Instead, he said, “The team that hit us this morning. They were Agency assets?”
“No.”
“Then who?”
“Townsend Government Services.”
“And that is… what exactly?”
“Private contractor. Bounty hunters, basically.”
“How did they find me here in Tallinn?”
“They had a UAV on station over Sid’s compound. It tracked you to the Helsinki Polaris. Townsend assets hit the Polaris the night before last, but you’d already sneaked off. I was the one waiting for you to turn up here, and when you did, I tailed you to the hotel, then called in Townsend’s strike team.”
Court put his half-empty glass of Irish whiskey down slowly. “You?” His right hand slid to the pistol under the table between his knees, and he took it and pointed it at the man across the table.
“Yeah. I probably should have told you.” He cleared his throat and looked down at his hip for a moment, then said, “I work for Townsend.”
Russ heard a muted click under the oak table now. He identified the sound easily; it was the hammer of a SIG Sauer pistol being pulled back, readying the gun to fire with only slight pressure on the trigger. He said, “Let me guess. You’ve got another gun pointed at my dick.”
“Tell me more about Townsend.”
“Privately held. Been around forever. Ten twenty-four contract. Paid by CIA with black fund money.”
“What’s their mission?”
“Brother, right now, you are their mission.”
“And they sent you to kill me?”
“They sent me to find you. The direct action team was supposed to kill you. The goons who hit the hotel tonight, Trestle Team, has been in St. Petersburg for sixty days, waiting for you to stick your neck out at Sid’s place. There is another team, run by a guy called Jumper. He’s in Berlin. A third unit, Dagger, is back in the States. I expect they’ll be cycling over here to Europe before long.”
Court lowered the pistol under the table but kept his finger ready over the trigger guard. “Who’s in charge?”
“The guy after you is Leland Babbitt. He’s about fifty. Ex-military, Air Force, then a civilian at DIA for a while. He moved over to FBI counterintel. He got drummed out of the Hoover Building for his methods, strong-arm shit that was getting cases tossed on grounds of civil liberty abuses.”
“He runs Townsend?”
“Affirmative. His number two is Jeff Parks. All-American-looking prick. He was a case officer at Langley, tossed during the harsh interrogation pogroms a few years back. The rest of Townsend is mostly ex-agency folks. Midlevel bureaucrats. Not seventh-floor material, for one reason or another.
“Townsend has been doing government-contracted dirty work since the 1800s. They were in the Indian wars, and in the Philippines when that blew up. They killed a Supreme Court nominee in the fifties. Rumor has it that James Earl Ray, the dude who shot Martin Luther King, was a Townsend asset. They whacked Olaf Palme, prime minister of Sweden, a shitload of human rights lefties in Latin America. Most anybody the administration in power didn’t like but couldn’t be caught targeting, Townsend got the call.”
This sounded, to Court, like a load of horseshit. He’d done his own share of denied black ops. He’d never got wind of a commercial enterprise doing the same sort of thing, especially an enterprise that had been in existence over several generations. “Are you going to tell me that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Townsend man?”
Dead Eye shook his head. “Negative. Oswald was just a narcissistic prick with a bolt-action rifle and an entry-level job that gave him line-of-sight on POTUS’s open-faced limo.”
Court knew this to be true. He was relieved to see that Dead Eye was not too far off into fantasyland.
Russ continued. “Townsend does other stuff as well. Training and security and investigations and arrests and renditions. They work for American concerns in industry, not just the Agency or the White House. But the feds like to use them as a proxy force for untouchable ops. They worked for Noriega back when he was our guy, and they were involved with bringing him in when he wasn’t our guy anymore.”
Court had been around too long to be surprised by much of anything, but this was all news to him. “What else?” he asked.
“They did CIA-supported hits for Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the apartheid government in South Africa in the eighties, for Mubarak and the Croatians in the nineties. After 9/11, Townsend worked with Afghan warlords that the CIA wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.”
“That’s saying something.”
Russ pressed down on his bandage with one hand and waved the other in the air. “Look, Court, you probably should spend less time worrying about Townsend’s old contracts, and instead concern yourself with their present-day target.”
“Me.”
“Yeah.”
Court said, “Okay. But before we get to me, what’s your story?”
Russ sipped. Said, “Thirty-four years old, born and raised in Washington State. Little town outside Olympia called Sequoia Park.”
Court reached across the table with his left hand and poured himself another shot. “And you like unicorns and long walks on the beach.”
“Who doesn’t?”
Court said, “Everything I saw you do tonight. It was like looking in a mirror.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“I mean to say I can tell you are a solo operator. We were in the same program?”
Russ nodded. “The Autonomous Asset Development Program. I was recruited out of the Marine Corps. A two-year workup, marathons in combat boots, scuba training, flight training, sniper craft, tradecraft, Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, language immersion, alpinist work in Wyoming, desert survival and land nav in the Mojave. All the same fun and games you went through, I guess.”
“I was in the Sonora.”
“Mexico? Ha, you old-timers were hard-core.”
Court did not smile.
“Anyway, I was approved for operational status, activated, and then I moved around the next several years, mostly in the Middle East and North Africa.”
Court thought this over. His career with the Autonomous Asset Program had primarily taken place in the former Soviet Union, but he’d done time in the Middle East as well. More when he joined the Goon Squad. He wondered if he and Russ had run around the same AOs at the same times through the years.
“And then you left CIA?”
“Moved over to Townsend a year ago. Better pay and less bureaucracy. Really, other than the fact they target American heroes like you for termination, it’s not such a bad gig.”