By now Ruth was concerned. She stepped over the caution tape and into the darkened closed-off area. “Mike, I want you to break off survey and communicate right now.”
Laureen came over the net from her position upstairs. “I’ve got eyes on target, say again, eyes on. Gentry is at platform level; I’m watching him from the mezzanine.”
“Is Mike tailing him?” Ruth asked.
“Negative. I don’t see him.”
Aron said, “I’m en route to the station.”
Ruth arrived at the service elevator, then pushed the button to call the car, thinking perhaps she’d lost comms with her junior officer because of poor mobile coverage.
But as she waited to go up to the main hall, she looked around, saw the construction materials, saw the Dumpster along the wall, and she saw a pair of boots sticking out from behind it.
For an instant she thought it might have been a homeless person sleeping in the station. There were homeless all over Europe, after all. But something about the way the boots were positioned, facing up, made her grab her flashlight from her purse and snap it on.
She recognized the boots now. A small gasp came from her lungs and then she ran forward, moved around the Dumpster, and found Mike Dillman. Her light reflected off his open glassy eyes and the glistening blood around his neck. She dropped to the floor and began checking him.
In her earpiece she heard Laureen. “The subject is at platform twelve, say again, one two.”
Aron said, “Ruth, you want me with you or on the target?”
Ruth did not respond. Tears welled in her eyes and she stifled a cry as she began checking Dillman’s vital signs.
“Ruth? Respond, please.”
But Ruth did not respond. She did not make a sound. She sat down on the floor slowly, avoiding a wide smear of blood next to Mike’s body, and she put her face in her hands.
There was no question in her mind as to what had happened. Gentry had come across Mike and somehow killed him so he could get away clean. She did not understand it; it went counter to every piece of psychological and historical data she’d collected on her target in the past days, but there was no doubt. What other explanation could there possibly be?
She had been wrong. Gentry was a threat, a threat to her PM, a threat to her own personnel.
Her mind seemed to slow, to regain its ability to calculate, and she realized that she could not tell her two other team members. Not yet. They had to stay on mission, they had to track Gentry out of town; if she told them that Mike was lying here, faceup, dead next to a pile of garbage, they would lose all mission focus.
Aron called over the net. “Ruth?”
She reached into his coat and took his wallet, then pulled his phone. She found his earpiece on the floor, and she picked it up and pocketed it with the other items.
Laureen transmitted now, concern in her voice. “Ruth? Mike?”
Ruth hated herself right now; she detested whatever cold, calculating recess of her brain allowed her to fight off all emotions and to stay on mission.
Aron said, “Ruth, I’m heading downstairs. There in two minutes.”
She could grieve later, yes, but she already knew she would only hate herself more later, when she reflected back on what she had done.
She fought to deliver the next transmission cleanly and without any hint as to the horror she felt right now. “Negative. Stay on the target. I’m coming up.”
“What about Mike?”
She closed her eyes and tears streamed down her face. She bit her lip hard, lifted her chin, and said, “Mike’s comms are down. I’m sending him back to the car to get another headset.”
“Roger that,” said Aron. “Heading to platform twelve.”
Ruth left Mike’s body behind, then began rushing to the escalator that led up to the platform level of the station.
Platform twelve was crowded with passengers due to the fact that long twelve-car international-bound trains were parked on both sides.
Ruth had just climbed the stairs to the platform when Laureen came over the net. She had been watching the target from the mezzanine above and behind Ruth’s position.
“Gentry is on the train on platform twelve-A. I’m checking the board up here. It’s headed to Oslo, and it is leaving immediately.”
“Aron, where are you?” Ruth asked, her voice not as commanding as normal, though she hoped with the adrenaline rush of the close foot pursuit, her two junior officers would not detect anything amiss.
“I’m boarding the train now, front car,” Aron said. He was fifty yards ahead of her, and she began pushing to get herself to the train before it left the station. “Are you on board?” he asked.
“Negative. Thirty seconds.”
A conductor blew a whistle at the front of the train.
“You’d better hurry,” Aron said.
Mercifully, a lane formed in the crowd in front of her and she rushed forward, squinting in the vapor of a hundred mouths breathing frozen air, trying to keep her forward progress going before the doors closed and the train took off for Oslo.
Just then she saw a man wearing a dark coat and carrying a backpack climb off the second to last car of the Oslo-bound train. His hood was up and she could not see his face, but she thought it might have been Gentry. He crossed the platform quickly and stepped aboard an SJ express train facing in the other direction.
Ruth stopped in her tracks. “Is that him?” she said into her mic. “Laureen? Did he get off the train?”
“No,” came the reply. And then, “I don’t know, I didn’t see anyone leave, but there are a dozen cars and a ton of people.”
The electronic sign over the platform next to the second train said HAMBURG and the departure time was imminent. The conductor at the far end of the train blew his handheld whistle. “Shit!” Ruth said, unsure which train to climb aboard.
Ruth had no time to make a decision. The doors closed on the Oslo train and it began moving slowly away. She wasn’t getting on that one. It was either stay here in Stockholm or take a chance that her target was on the Hamburg train.
She leapt aboard the last car of the SJ express train. Within seconds this train began to move as well.
She stayed where she was in the rear of the train in a first-class car, her eyes fixed on the door ahead that led to the gangway connection between the cars. If she saw any movement in the gangway she was ready to shoot up and head to the restroom in the rear of her car.
She sat quietly for a few minutes while she waited for Aron to slowly and carefully walk the length of the Oslo-bound train. While she waited, she gazed out to the blackness of the early morning, and she thought of finding Mike, stripping him of anything that could identify him or indicate what kind of work he was doing, and then leaving him there. She thought of her mission, a mission in which she had already failed by getting one of her men killed because of her assuredness that her target posed no threat.
It wasn’t assuredness, she told herself now. It was incompetence.
She thought of Rome.
She’d come out of Rome smelling like a rose; the Mossad commended her actions for trying to warn operations that the surveillance wasn’t complete, but she had always known she had not deserved to walk away with her career intact. She could easily think back to the times when she could have forcefully spoken up and stopped the Metsada hit that killed the innocent civilians. Not an e-mail to her superior in Tel Aviv saying she wanted more time to build the target pictures. But a full-throated protest of the impending attack. Screaming across departments and disciplines, standing in the way of the kill/capture unit, even tipping off the occupants of the house and giving them time to flee.
But she had not done any of that, for one simple reason.