He placed his earpiece in his ear. “Go.”
“Graveside.”
It was clearly Babbitt, but Russ kept to the protocol. “Proceed with iden.”
“Identity key eight, two, four, four, niner, seven, two, niner, three.”
“Dead Eye here. Four, eight, one, oh, six, oh, five, two, oh.”
“Iden confirmed. How are you feeling, Russell?”
“I’m recovering.”
“Good. Where are you?”
Russ knew he could not reveal he was in Nice. Instead he said, “Frankfurt.”
“Are you ready to get back to work?”
Not exactly. Russ turned on the balcony and began heading back into his room. He said, “Of course.”
“Head to Stockholm.”
Whitlock stopped suddenly. Huh? “Okay. Why?”
“We’ve identified the target. We have surveillance on him now.”
Fuck! A pause. “That’s good news,” Russ said, although it was anything but. “Where is he?”
“He’s rented a flat on Radmansgatan Street, right in the city center. Get into town and we’ll lead you in, unless we don’t need you there anymore by the time you make it.”
“What does that mean?”
“Jumper will act at first opportunity.”
“Jumper is on him now?” Shit. Shit. Shit!
“Negative, but they will be there within a few hours. He was ID’d by our UAV surveillance, and there is a small unit of Mossad officers keeping an overnight watch.”
Veins in Whitlock’s neck began to throb. “Wait. What? Mossad? How do you know Mossad is after the Gray Man?”
“We are liaising with a targeting team from their Collections Department.”
Whitlock’s jaw flexed now. He controlled his anger well enough to ask, “Why am I just now hearing about this?”
“I needed you to stand down after Tallinn. I told the signal room to cease all intel pushes to you for a few days so you didn’t throw yourself back into the mix before I thought it was safe or prudent for you to do so.”
Whitlock fought to keep his voice calm. “And what is Mossad’s interest in Gentry?”
“They received a tip that he accepted a contract to assassinate Ehud Kalb.”
Russ dropped down on the bed and put his face in his hands. The swollen and torn flesh on his left hip screamed at him for the thoughtlessness of his move, but he ignored the pain and fought to keep the tone of his voice measured. “Lee… I find it very hard to believe Gentry would target Israel’s PM.”
“We do, too. Our analysts don’t see Kalb as a likely Gray Man target.”
“So… Why are we involving Mossad in our operation?”
“Carmichael at Langley mandated it. Between you and me, he is punishing us for Tallinn, and just using them as oversight on our op. Making us coordinate with them, knowing they will complain directly to him if there is something in our op they don’t like.”
“Too many cooks, Lee.”
“I hear you. I do. But my hands are tied. The four-person Mossad team is already there, already integrated with our UAV crew on site, and I’ll expect you to liaise with them when you get there. I can send an aircraft to Frankfurt, but if you want to make your own arrangements, that will be fine.”
Russ wasn’t listening; he’d dropped back on the huge bed, and he stared at the ceiling. The Iranians have a mole in Beirut. What did they know?
In the long term he wanted the world to think Kalb had been killed by the Gray Man. But that was after the fact. Now it only served to turn up the heat on Gentry, to send Mossad after him just when Whitlock needed Gentry to fly under the radar.
“Russell? You there?”
Russ sat up. There was nothing he could do but continue to play his part and hope Gentry could defy the odds one more time in his career and slip the noose tightening around him. “Yes. I will make my own way to Stockholm. I will contact you when I get there.”
Babbitt said, “Hurry. If Jumper has a delay, or screws up in any way, there is the possibility that Mossad will send its own people in to take care of Gentry.”
“Metsada,” Russ said, and his face darkened even more. He stood and began pacing back and forth in his suite. “That’s a problem,” he said, more to himself than to Babbitt.
“You’re damn right it’s a problem! Jumper needs to act before the Israelis get even more involved. We’re running out of time here. I need the target eliminated within the next twelve hours.”
“Roger that.” Russ ended the call, but he kept pacing for a moment.
He was angry at Gentry most of all. The supposed world’s greatest operative had gone and gotten himself compromised by facial recognition, ID’d by a drone, and tailed by Mossad targeters, and within hours, he would be surrounded by a cordon of armed killers.
And Russ was fifteen hundred miles away, unable to control things. Yes, he could warn Gentry, if he called in the next few hours, but they had just spoken, so he saw no chance he would hear from him for twenty-four hours or more.
Court was on his own now, and Russ could do nothing but hope the obviously highly overrated jackass escaped on his own.
If Gentry died before Kalb died, then Whitlock’s master plan would fall apart.
He screamed aloud in his hotel room. “Gentry!” And he punched a fist against the wall, bruising and scraping his knuckles.
Court opened his eyes quickly and looked left and right, searching in the darkness.
Down the hall a baby cried, but he did not think the cries had roused him.
He sat up from his mattress on the floor and rubbed his eyes. Reached for his cell phone to check the time.
Four A.M.
He put the phone back on the floor and dropped back onto his back, still staring at the ceiling.
The sounds and the smells of the tenement building were pervasive — there must have been fifty or sixty people living just on the second floor of this building — but Gentry had spent a significant percentage of his nights during the past five years in places just like this, and the rustling and crying babies and arguing in incomprehensible languages had long since ceased to bother him.
The other renters were all immigrants. Poles or Turks or people from the Balkans. Most of the rest of the single units were occupied by families; there were kids all over the place, and they’d been running up and down the halls during the early evening.
But now, other than a crying baby, it was quiet.
And the kid wasn’t keeping him from sleeping. No, that was not it.
It was the phone call to Whitlock. Russ had not said anything that made him nervous or concerned about his PERSEC. No, on the contrary, the guy had made something of a case for himself by pointing out that if he wanted Court dead, Court would already be dead.
That was true, Gentry conceded as he lay there and thought about it, but it wasn’t the airtight case Whitlock made it out to be. People change, as do their motivations, their desires, their orders. Court could rattle off a list of names of men he’d known who had not wanted him dead, until the day they suddenly did want him dead.
Court’s life was funny that way.
But even though Gentry still considered Whitlock a potential threat, Whitlock himself was not Gentry’s main concern. It was the technology itself. The MobileCrypt. Court did not trust technology he did not fully understand, and he was going to have to accept that technology out there was improving in many ways, and very few of these ways gave him an advantage.
Most of the advantages went to those chasing him.
Court worried he was not changing with the times. He was still walking around looking back over his shoulder and attaching strands of hair to his door frame to see if anyone had entered his room. Meanwhile, Whitlock had told Court that Townsend had compromised him with a fucking flying robot.