He had just begun reassembling the gun for another left-hand-only takedown when his earpiece chirped on the floor next to him. His phone was on the desk across the room, so he just put his Bluetooth set into his ear and tapped a button to answer the call.
“Go.”
“Hello.”
It was Gentry. Russ bolted up from the floor and pumped his fist in the air. He composed himself quickly and spoke in a relaxed tone. “I was just thinking about you.”
“Sorry about not calling the other night.”
“Not a problem, brother. I didn’t expect you to call for a few days.” It was a lie, but he wanted to seem nonchalant about the conversation.
“Why not?”
“I know you, dude. I know how you think.”
“Why is it I don’t know how you think?”
“What do you mean by that?” Russ pulled the bottle of Lenoble from the ice and took a sip. It was time to celebrate.
“I don’t understand what your game is.”
“No game, Court. I just want to help. Why can’t you believe that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ll answer that question for you. You have been dicked around and lied to by everyone you ever worked with at CIA. Carmichael, Hightower, Hanley—”
“How is Hanley?”
“You mean since you shot him in Mexico City?”
“You do know everything.”
Russ swigged champagne. This conversation was going just the way he wanted it. “Matt Hanley’s okay. He’s back at Langley. Getting shot by the Gray Man is a career builder, I guess.”
“Speaking of gunshot wounds, how’s the hip?”
“It hurts,” responded Whitlock.
“Yeah, they have a tendency to do that.”
Russ asked, “Any trouble getting out of Tallinn?”
“You tell me. What do your friends at Townsend say? Is there any heat on me I haven’t noticed?”
Russ lied again. He’d heard nothing at all from Townsend for a couple of days, but he needed to keep his value high in Gentry’s eyes. “They said they might have a target for me very soon. They did not elaborate. Wherever you are, stay there, but you might want to check back with me sooner rather than later.”
After a pause Court said, “Okay. What about you? No problems with fallout from them after what happened the other day?”
“I told you, I can handle them.” Russ took a long swig of champagne. “This other opportunity I told you about is coming up pretty soon. Have you thought any more about our conversation the other night?”
“About you wanting to go freelance?”
“Yeah.”
“Help me understand just why you want to do that.”
“I want to be my own boss.”
Court chuckled. “Working freelance means you have more bosses, not fewer. I never would have had to hit that dacha west of St. Petersburg if I didn’t have trouble with my employers. You can’t trust anyone in this line of work.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
Court replied, “If you are taking career advice from me, then you are an idiot.” He added, “Guys like us are better off alone.”
“I disagree, Court, because there are no guys like us. There is only us. We’re the last two. We should stick together.”
“The last two?”
“Nineteen men entered the Autonomous Asset Development Program. The oldest was Joseph Pelton, at twenty-eight. The youngest was Courtland Gentry, at nineteen. I was twenty-five when I got in.”
“And?”
“Four died in training.”
“Can’t say that surprises me. I almost died a couple times.”
“Me, too. Eight died in the field working in AAP. Five more died during subsequent work, either in CIA, high-risk private sector security postings, or suicide.” Russ drank from the champagne bottle. “And that, my friend, leaves Gentry and Whitlock, alone in the world.”
“Shit.”
“Hey, it’s not so bad. If there were more of us, we’d be less valuable.”
“Higher value just means a bigger target on your head.”
“It means a bigger payday if you are freelance,” countered Whitlock.
Court asked, “Do you ever wish, sometimes, that you could go back to the way you were before?”
Russ asked, “Before what?”
“Before we got trained? Before we were made.”
Russ swigged again. “No. Hell no. Never.”
Court said nothing.
“You do, I take it,” said Whitlock.
“Just sometimes,” admitted Court.
“You should appreciate what you are.” He paused. “You should appreciate it a lot more than you do. You have a skill set that, arguably, only one other person on the planet has.”
“You?”
“Yeah, me. Like I said the other night, I’ve studied your ops. Down to the letter, everything you’ve done, I would have done exactly the same way.”
“How about that,” Court muttered, a little sarcasm in his voice.
“Yep.” After a slight hesitation, Russ said, “Of course, the only one that has me stumped is Kiev. I sure wish I knew how you pulled that off.”
“Again with Kiev?”
Russ drank his champagne. A few days earlier he thought he would need all the details of the Kiev op to secure the Kalb contract from the Iranians. But he’d bluffed his way past this gap in his knowledge and cajoled them with the promise of the Zarini hit, and now the details of Kiev were no longer so important. Still, he was genuinely curious. He said, “Some day, Court, I’ll get it out of you.”
The line was silent for several seconds, and then Gentry said, “I’ve got to go.”
“You have a hot date?”
“No. I need to get back to my place and set up a barricade in case you can trace this call and you plan on sending another crew of shooters my way.”
“Court, use your brain. If I wanted you dead all I had to do was stay in my bunk Monday night and let the Townsend gunners kill you. You might have all sorts of good reasons to be paranoid, but in this case you aren’t being logical. I’m a friend. Not an enemy. We are one, you and me. Sooner or later you are going to realize that. We would make one hell of a team.”
To this Court just said, “I’ll check with you tomorrow.”
“I hope you do, for your sake. Townsend might have a fix on you. Help me help you.”
“Tomorrow. No bullshit this time. I’ll call.”
The line went dead, and Russ sat on the edge of his big bed with the bottle of cold champagne in his lap. He would have liked to string Gentry along a little further, pulled him deeper into his plan, but tonight’s baby step forward was much better than no step at all.
The dumb son of a bitch had made contact, and that was key. And when Court realized that no one was going to attack him after this conversation, well, Russ concluded, that poor lonely sad sack Court Gentry would probably start calling him every motherfucking night.
Ruth and Aron had spent the afternoon and early evening walking the choke points of the city within a two-kilometer diameter of the electronics shop where Gentry bought his computer. At eight P.M. they grabbed carryout Indian food for themselves and the UAV team and took it back to the safe house. As the two climbed up the stairs to the fourth-floor flat, Laureen and Mike were heading down the stairs, ready for three or four hours of manhunting in the evening snow.