She looked around and then whispered, “And he bought the ammonium nitrate for farming?”
“Hard to believe. But yes.”
“And the FBI didn’t know this?”
“They still don’t. We hacked his banking records and saw that he was reimbursed by the co-op for the same amount he spent on the fertilizer. We checked them out; they’ve been around for years, and they farm acreage that corresponds to the amount of ammonium nitrate they purchased. We’ll keep an eye on them, but it looks kosher.”
She rolled her eyes at his use of the phrase, coming from a Jew born in Rashlatz but delivered like an American.
She said, “So… he is about as harmless as he looks.”
“It appears so,” Yanis said.
“All right. We’ll shut it down here.”
“You sound crestfallen. Once again, Ruth, you seem disappointed that we don’t have more imminent dangers against our nation’s leadership.”
“I like to work, Yanis.”
He hesitated before saying, “It’s more than that. You take too much on your shoulders.”
“Since Rome, you mean.”
“Since Rome.”
“The increase in my operational tempo since Rome has been driven by the increasing enthusiasm of our prime minister’s enemies, not by any overzealous desire on my part to atone for mistakes.”
“I did not mean to suggest otherwise. And Ruth, you made no mistakes.”
She did not respond to this directly. “Maybe if Kalb stopped pissing people off I could sit at home and raise orchids or something.”
“Well, there’s not much chance of that. I’ll find you some trouble to get into before long. Don’t worry. I’m sure something terrible is just around the corner.”
“Funny.”
“Send your team back here, but you take a couple of days to see your mom.”
“That’s not the trouble I’m looking for. I can come back with the others.”
“That’s an order.”
She groaned inwardly. “Okay, Yanis, but I want hazard-duty pay.”
He laughed as he hung up.
It had been a wasted day. A wasted trip. Making out with Aron Hamlin wasn’t the worst way to spend her time, she admitted to herself, but she was hungry for her next target, and sitting in Central Park watching a Palestinian family man who had done nothing but buy some chemicals to help his pistachios grow had done nothing to make her prime minister safer.
She decided she would call her mom, tell her she’d just gotten off the plane, and invite her to brunch the next morning. Two or three hours listening to her mom drone on always seemed to go by a little faster when the Bloody Marys flowed.
Russell Whitlock trudged through the snow along a long row of drab apartment blocks in the Estonian city of Paldiski, some thirty miles west of Tallinn on the coast of the Baltic Sea. It was midafternoon; half a foot of powdery accumulation had been dumped here in the past twenty-four hours, but the puffy gray clouds above had stopped their onslaught for the time being, and the temperature was in the low thirties, balmy for this time of year.
He stopped in front of a tiny inn; it was dirty and basic and as far off the beaten path as one could imagine, but Russ decided it would do for a night. Russ much preferred five-star accommodations, but right now he couldn’t indulge himself. He needed a quiet out-of-the-way place to treat his gunshot wound, to wait for Gentry to call, and to spend a safe night.
This town was no tourist destination. It had been a closed city during the cold war, used as a massive Soviet nuclear submarine training center, a city encased in barbed wire.
Two decades later, Russ Whitlock found the city nearly as uninviting as it must have been back then.
Dead Eye sat in his hotel room as the afternoon turned to evening and the light through the window dimmed and extinguished completely. He’d found a pharmacy near the hotel, and next door a liquor store. Russ saw the placement of the two establishments as serendipity. He returned to his room, disinfected his wound and changed his bandages, and then opened a bottle of vodka and took a long swig.
He waited nearly ten hours to call in to Townsend House, but he was finally ready. He hoped all the action had been quick and confused enough to where no one on Trestle Team had reported his treachery against his employer, but the only way to find out for sure was to report in himself.
He pressed the speed-dial button on his phone that connected him to Babbitt’s line at Townsend House.
After a hurried identity check, Babbitt said, “We thought you were dead.”
“I made it out,” Russ replied. “But all the rest are fucking toast, sir.”
“What the hell happened?”
“I wish I could tell you, but I was ordered to sit in my damn hotel room while your boys hit the target. Gentry definitely fired first; I heard his G19 open up before any return fire came from the suppressed MP7s. Other than that, I can’t really re-create the action to help you figure out what went wrong.”
It was silent for a moment until Babbitt said, “I understand.” He cleared his throat. “You called in during the attack, said you were going to engage.”
“Yeah. I wish I could have done something, but I wasn’t read in on the op, and it went tits up before I got involved. I tried to play catch-up, but I was too far behind Gentry. I only saw him for an instant. Unfortunately he saw me first and tagged me.”
Babbitt almost shouted in astonishment. “Do you mean to say he shot you?”
Russ lay back on his little bed as he answered, moving gingerly to avoid putting pressure on his left hip. “Yes.”
“You’re injured?” Babbitt seemed to have trouble taking this in.
“I’ll live. I dumped a couple of rounds his way. May even have hit him, although I don’t know for sure. The point is, if you had let me do this my way from the beginning, I would have slipped a stiletto into Gentry’s spine the minute he got off the boat yesterday morning, and you wouldn’t have eight dead operators and an escaped target.”
“Seven dead operators,” Babbitt replied.
Whitlock bolted upright on the bed. “Seven?”
“One member of Trestle survived. Somehow Trestle Seven was caught in an avalanche or something, buried under snow. We are still trying to get the full story on that. He was pulled out by the locals with a broken vertebra in his neck and four broken ribs, but he’s going to pull through.”
Russ took a couple of slow breaths. Anger began to well up in him, stiffening his body and clenching his muscles. “That’s good news, Lee.”
“Well, he may wish he’d stayed under the snow. He’ll be spending some time in Estonia as a guest of their penal system, even when he does get out of the hospital.”
“Do you want me to do something about that?” Russ asked. The insinuation would be clear to Babbitt. Russ was asking if he should kill the survivor to keep him from talking. Russ had no idea how he’d do it, but he had his own motivation. He knew Trestle Seven might have seen him with Gentry, and he certainly did not need that making its way back to Townsend.
Babbitt hesitated before replying. “For now, no.”
Russ pushed this new problem out of his mind. There was nothing he could do about it. He said, “This whole thing was a mess, sir. Unprofessional.”
Whitlock knew Babbitt would admit no wrongdoing. He was an executive; he would remain aloof and above any repercussions of his decision making. He did exactly what Russ thought he would do. He changed the subject. “We’ve got to get you back to the States. You’re hurt and that AO is too hot to have you running around in it after what happened this morning. Do I need to send a doctor to you to get you ready to travel?”