Ali Hussein did not understand. “Please make your conditions clear, Mr. Gentry.”
“Simply put, I will need to go to ground after this. You may hear that I have been killed. Of course it is possible that I won’t survive my attempt on Prime Minister Kalb, but more likely what you see on the news will be well-orchestrated disinformation.”
“I see.”
“Your organization will be tempted to keep the money owed me.” He paused a long time before saying, “That would be a mistake.”
“I understand. Be assured. Inshallah, when you fulfill your obligations in the contract, we will fulfill ours. Whether you are around to withdraw the money from the account or not, the money will be there.”
“Very good, Ali Hussein. I will text you the account number,” he said, and he ended the call.
FORTY
The signal room at Townsend House operated twenty-four hours a day during hunts run on the scale of the Gentry operation. Technicians, communications specialists, analysts, information technology experts, and other staffers, all wired via secure comms to the UAV and direct action teams in the field, had been searching throughout the night, local time, for their quarry for months.
Earlier in the day an analyst monitoring gait-pattern and physical pattern-recognition software had gotten a hit from several camera feeds pulled from Stockholm’s central train station. It was nothing conclusive; during the busiest parts of the day this new technology found on average one false positive a minute from cameras in the city, but the late-night walk through the station by the lone man wearing a coat and pack similar to those of their target and possessing a similar gait was enough to spin up Jumper team and call the Sky Shark from another part of the city.
By the time the UAV arrived there was no sign of the man outside the station, and Jumper was recalled to their safe house.
Jeff Parks had slept on the sofa in his office, right off the signal room, every night since Gentry had been sighted flying his microlight over the Gulf of Finland a week earlier. He’d just kicked his shoes off and put his feet up for a couple hours of shut-eye when his desk phone rang with the distinctive ring indicating an inbound encrypted satellite call.
He walked barefoot across the floor and answered with his code name. “This is Metronome.”
“Dead Eye here.” Parks was surprised to hear from Whitlock; he’d been trying to reach him for over twenty-four hours. Parks had not spoken to him personally since the shoot-out in Tallinn.
They went through their identity check, and then Russ told Parks he was in the city center.
“Why haven’t you answered your phone?”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Fieldwork. You know how it is, right?” Parks presumed this to be some sort of slight, insinuating that Parks himself had no field experience. The second in command of Townsend sat down at his desk and considered reciting the list of third-world postings he’d served in with CIA all over the globe, but then he decided against it. Individualist NOC operators like Dead Eye and Gray Man thought everyone who wasn’t like them, meaning those who did not walk the earth with a gun and a knife and a kill mission in hand, was a lightweight. Even though Parks had been a case officer in the Directorate of Operations, that wouldn’t earn him the respect of a lone-wolf kook like Russ Whitlock.
Parks let it go and just said, “What do you need?”
“Have you found Gray Man?”
“Negative. We know he’s in Sweden, might still be in Stockholm, but that’s it for now.”
“When and where was the last sighting?”
“If you are there in Stockholm, why are you calling me? Why don’t you coordinate with Jumper and the UAV team?”
“Because the last time I tried to coordinate with your team on site, they got dead, I got shot, and Gentry got away.”
“I’m pushing you the safe house address. You need to go there. Jumper and his men aren’t surveillance experts. They could use your help.”
“Sure,” Whitlock said. “I’ll head over there and pull off their ball caps so they don’t look like Americans. What about the Mossad?”
“Unknown. We are not in contact with the targeting team in Stockholm. Apparently the chick running the show for them didn’t like the looks of Beaumont and his boys, so she broke off the relationship.”
Interesting, Russ thought, but he didn’t really have time to delve into the ins and outs of U.S.-Israeli intelligence coordination at the moment. He had another problem.
He could hear it in Parks’ voice. A hesitation. A more standoffish tone. It seemed as if Parks wasn’t buying what Whitlock was saying, and this uneased Whitlock.
What did Townsend know?
There was only one way for Whitlock to find out.
He’d go meet with Jumper.
Just after five A.M. Whitlock knocked on the door to the Townsend safe house. A few seconds later the door opened, and he nodded to a bearded operative wearing a ball cap and a leather jacket. Russ didn’t know the man’s name, but he recognized him from the Jumper team.
The man just called back to the room behind him. “Beaumont? The singleton is here.”
Russ did know John Beaumont, however. He stuck a hand out to the big southerner as he entered the dark living room of the large flat, and he nodded to Carl and Lucas at the UAV station at the same time.
“How’s the hunting?” Whitlock asked.
Beaumont did not extend his own hand.
“Is there a problem?”
“I just got off the phone with Babbitt,” the big bearded man said. The other guys in the room were mostly just tying up their bedrolls and drinking coffee. A couple of guys sat behind the UAV desk, where they had been watching Carl fly the Sky Shark, but now all eyes were turned toward the two men in the center of the room.
“Yeah? What about?”
“About Joel Lawrence.”
“Who?”
Beaumont spit tobacco juice into a plastic cup he carried in his hand. “Trestle Seven.”
Russ kept his face impassive, covering a slight concern about where this conversation was heading. “How’s he doing?”
“He’ll recover. Broken bones and shit like that. He’s gonna do some time over there, but not much. CIA is greasing palms in the Estonian justice system to get him a year, tops.”
“That’s good.”
After another spit Beaumont said, “Babbitt got one of his attorneys in to talk to Joel in Tallinn. He’s in the hospital, under guard, but the lawyer was able to interview him about what happened during the Gentry dustup the other night. I gotta tell you, man. Joel is saying things that don’t make a lick of sense.”
Fuck, Russ thought. Quickly he did a head count in the room, in case things turned violent. There were eight Jumper men and the two UAV geeks. Russ immediately discounted Carl and Lucas, determined he was up against eight real threats, and scanned the men for weapons. They all carried pistols on their hips. He could see their Uzis lined up on cases along the wall, and other crates nearby held grenades, shotguns, and body armor that they would use for a higher-profile takedown.
Russ had weapons on him, his stiletto and his garrote. But no firearms.
Nonchalantly Russ asked, “What did he say?”
“He says you reported there was no attic access from the third floor of the hotel.”
Russ nodded. “That’s right.”
“He says there was a pull-down staircase on the east side of the third-floor hallway.”
“Must have missed it.” Whitlock shrugged. “I can’t fucking do everything.”
“Hmm,” Beaumont said, and he looked at his team. A couple of guys started moving in closer, but it was too early for Russ to determine if they were doing anything more than trying to intimidate him.