In the safe house Ruth passed the food out to the three men and sat with them at the laptop control center for the UAVs. Carl was flying a Sky Shark over the Gamla Stan, the Old Town portion of Stockholm, but while he flew he was able to one-hand a few bites of naan dipped in sauce and wash it down with beer.
Lucas reported that in their seven hours of near-constant flying, they’d had more than sixty possible sightings, each one of which had to be manually ruled in or ruled out by the UAV team by looking at images on the laptop.
Lucas and Carl had eliminated them all.
“Still,” Lucas said, “it’s only the first day. Parks will probably have us keep the coverage up for three or four days more unless the facial recog software they are using on all the hacked cameras around the area turns up something somewhere else.”
“He’s here,” Ruth said. “I can smell him.”
Carl and Lucas exchanged a look but did not respond.
Ruth and Aron finished their meal and headed to their room to get some sleep; they’d planned to hit the streets before first light the next morning. The Townsend UAV technicians decided to make one last slow track over a heavily trafficked pedestrian-only street before bringing their drone home for the evening.
Fifteen minutes later Ruth brushed her teeth in the bathroom wearing only shorts and a tank top. She thought she heard someone calling out, so she turned off the tap.
“Aron? Did you say something?”
But it was Lucas who had shouted, and now he repeated himself, this time louder. “We got a hit!”
THIRTY
Ruth raced into the living room in her shorts and tank top; she’d taken out her contacts, so she fumbled to get her glasses on, and her bare feet slapped the wooden floor as she approached. “Are you sure?”
Lucas said, “I’m not, but the computer is. Well, relatively sure. We’ve been tracking a guy for about two minutes. He’s turned back twice to look behind him, which kind of looks like tradecraft to me. More importantly, the facial recog software puts his periocular region at 73 percent chance of a match.”
Ruth looked past Lucas’s shoulder to the screen and saw a greenish image of dozens of pedestrians moving along in the dark in both directions through an outdoor mall. A lone individual in the crowd walked through the snow and slush wearing a hooded black three-quarter-length coat. He or she faced away from the camera. Ruth would not have known which person to focus on in the scene except the figure in the dark coat was framed by a superimposed red square.
“That’s him?”
“Watch him for a second. He’ll look back.”
Ruth did as Lucas suggested, but while she waited for him to check his six, a thought occurred to her. She asked, “How is it that no one is noticing the UAV? You are pretty low.”
Carl had been quietly piloting the Sky Shark, but he answered now, his face remaining a mask of concentration as he spoke. “It’s a little trick. You fly about four stories up, moving along as close to the wall of the buildings as possible. During the day the gray and black UAV isn’t silhouetted in front of the sky, it just blends in with all the concrete and glass and metal. But at night you are above the streetlights, so it’s even more invisible.”
Lucas swiveled his chair quickly over to another laptop on the rack, and he began feverishly manipulating the mouse and clicking keys.
“What are you doing?” Ruth asked.
“I’m setting the computer to record his gait so we can track him. The human gait is actually quite unique. Once it has a good reading of Gentry’s particular walking pattern, we can find him and track him automatically when he’s on foot. It’s not the best biometric identifier, but if it’s him, it will be a cinch to get a usable reading to narrow him down in a crowd later.”
“If it’s him,” Ruth added.
Just then the figure moved out of the flow of foot traffic and closer to the building on his right. He slowed and looked into a shop window. He stopped fully now, people passed by, and he turned and looked back up the street.
On the computer in front of Ruth the image zoomed automatically on the man’s face. The resolution was surprisingly good, though the face was green because of the night vision optics.
Ruth said, “It might be him. I still can’t—”
Just then Lucas, who was in front of the other laptop, said, “Recog has bumped probability up to 90 percent.”
“Well, then,” said Ruth. “I guess we’ve got the bastard!”
Ruth and Aron quickly rushed back into the bedroom to dress for the cold. Sixty seconds later they rushed back into the living room.
“Where is he?” Ruth asked Lucas as she pulled her boots on.
“He’s on… shit.” Lucas struggled to read the Swedish name on the moving map display on the laptop. “Drottningatten? However you pronounce it, it’s about twenty minutes from here on foot. He’s headed north, away from us.”
“We’ll take the car.” She put her phone’s receiver in her ear. “Call us with updates.”
Ruth put her hood up on her coat and followed Aron out the door.
Ten minutes later Ruth parked the embassy Skoda next to Tegnerlunden Park, and she and Aron began walking briskly through the snow shower, following Lucas’s instructions coming through their earpieces. They’d also called in Laureen and Mike, who would soon approach on foot from the south.
“Listen up,” Lucas said over the team comms. “He’s a couple minutes ahead of you on… Radmansgatan, if I’m saying that right.”
“Understood,” Ruth said. “We can track him. You make sure your drone is out of sight.”
“No worries.”
“I worry, Lucas. Tell your partner to keep the Sky Shark back.”
After a quick pause he replied. “Lady, how ’bout you do your job and you let us do ours? He won’t see the Sky Shark, but he might see you guys.”
Ruth sighed, expelling a long plume of vapor from her body.
Before she could say anything else, the American sensor operator spoke again. “Bingo! He just went inside a building. Made a beeline right for it; I think he knew exactly where he was heading.”
“What building?”
“Wait one.” There was a pause while Lucas waited for Carl to get his drone in position to see the address and any signage. While they waited, Ruth and Aron picked up the pace even more. If he was inside now, he wouldn’t see them unless they got too close to the building.
As they walked, Mike Dillman and Laureen Tattersal folded in behind them on the sidewalk. The two couples did not acknowledge each other at all. They just walked on in the same direction, some hundred feet or so apart.
“He’s on the southwest corner of Radmansgatan and… shit, how the fuck do you pronounce this?”
Ruth barked at him. “Sound it out, Lucas! Hurry!”
Slowly he said, “Sveavagen, or something like that. Just two blocks west of the intersection is an outdoor pedestrian space that’s higher than the road below. There is a staircase with a pretty good overlook on the building the target entered. There’s no cover there, but you should be able to see the entrance without having to get any closer.”
Ruth and her team arrived at the overlook as he finished describing it.
“Got it,” she said.
“All right. He’s in the building down there on your right. Forty yards away.”
“What is that place?”
Lucas typed the address into a computer, then said, “There is a steakhouse on the ground floor, but he did not go in that entrance. He took the staircase next to it up to the second floor. It’s cheap rental apartments. Immigrants. Families. That’s Gentry’s MO. He likes staying in low-rent tenements. I’ll wager that’s where he’s living while here in town.”