“Denny, can’t you see what’s happening? Whitlock has been using us. He’s planning on killing the prime minister of Israel! He’s protected Gentry so he can be around to take the fall for the hit!”
“I know this, and I feel certain we can avoid that. I want you to find Dead Eye in Brussels, put surveillance on him, and watch him until Gentry turns up.”
Babbitt could not believe what he was hearing. “You want to use the prime minister of Israel as bait?”
“No, I do not. I want to use a rogue, off-reservation, ex-agency asset as bait to catch an even worse rogue, off-reservation, ex-agency asset. You have sanction to eliminate Whitlock as well as Gentry, but your primary target remains Gentry. We don’t lay a finger on Dead Eye until Gray Man is dead.”
Babbitt leaned forward on his desk and ran his hand over his face. “Christ, Denny.” Even for an operations veteran like Lee Babbitt, this was a deep and murky bit of intrigue.
Denny picked up on the reticence. “Settle down. Desperate measures for desperate times. We clean up both messes at once. Got it? We will wrap this up before the PM is in any danger.”
“You keep saying we. Are you sending CIA assets?”
“Good lord, no! Of course not. This is too sensitive to directly involve the CIA.”
Babbitt thought that was pretty rich, as it came from one of the heads of the CIA.
Carmichael added, “I want you to go personally to Brussels. Take every available direct action asset you have, get over there, and find Dead Eye. He’ll lead you to Gentry.”
“What about the Mossad?”
“I spoke with Menachem Aurbach, head of their op wing, and I convinced him that his woman, Ms. Ettinger, is wrong about Gentry. I explained to him that Russell Whitlock is, in fact, one of Gentry’s aliases. They think their young officer, a woman who was deeply damaged by the Israeli debacle in Rome last year, simply went off the rails after the death of her man in Stockholm. She is being duped by Gentry, allowing herself to be so because of confirmation bias. Quite simply, she wants to believe she was right about him all along.”
Babbitt replied, “What you are asking us to do… There are a lot of dangers brought on by the narrow time frame, the large size of the operation, the—”
Carmichael seemed ready for the pushback. “Lee. Your cost-plus billing will not be audited.”
Babbitt’s eyebrows rose. He was being offered a blank check.
Slowly, and with some internal reservations, he said, “We’ll be on our way within the hour.”
“Good. I thank you, and our nation thanks you.”
“Denny. We will do the job. As quickly and cleanly as we possibly can. But I don’t believe any more.”
Carmichael’s tone turned guarded. “Don’t believe what?”
“I don’t believe killing Court Gentry has anything to do with America.”
After a long pause Carmichael said, “Just kill him. Kill him and Townsend Government Services will avoid the fate suffered by so many defense and intelligence contractors during this time of harsh budget cuts.”
A threat, Lee thought, but did not say. How fucking typical. He pushed his anger aside and said, “All right, Denny. I’ll saddle up my boys and head out. I’ll call you from Brussels.”
John Beaumont, the Townsend operator also known as Jumper Actual, had spread his team of eight operators all over the ferry docks at the port in Travemünde, Germany, waiting for the seven P.M. ferry to arrive from Denmark. He had no specific intelligence indicating Gentry would be on board, but he and his team had arrived on the five P.M. ferry, and they had searched the vessel from top to bottom and turned up nothing.
It had been a frustrating day for the Jumper team. They began the morning by striking out at the bus terminal, and then they caught the bad news from Washington a few hours later that their target had fled the city. Their rushed helo flight to Malmö had been a waste of time as well, as they’d boarded the train from Stockholm to Copenhagen only to find it, just like the bus terminal, to be a dry hole.
They’d remained in the station in Copenhagen for a few hours, climbing on and off as many passing trains as they could for quick and perfunctory searches, but someone had called the local cops, asking them to come find out what the hell the tough-looking American guys were up to, so the Townsend men then boarded an express train to Hamburg. The train rolled aboard a massive Scandlines ferry for the forty-five-minute crossing of the Baltic, and then it docked here in the small seaside town of Travemünde.
Travemünde was an extremely popular beach resort in the summer months, but now it was a gray, frozen still life, virtually deserted of people other than those heading north to Copenhagen or farther up into Scandinavia on the ferries, or those who worked the fishing boats at the marina or the restaurants along the promenade.
Beaumont had received a call from Babbitt an hour earlier stating that he and Parks and the Dagger team at Townsend House were now on their way to Brussels. Jumper would link up with them when they arrived in the morning, but before heading south, Beaumont decided he’d set his men up for an in extremis operation here to watch those departing the next ferry coming in.
Upon arrival here in Travemünde he sent some men to rent a couple of vans, and after they returned, Carl and Lucas, the UAV team, set up a drone ground control station in the back of one of them. They launched a Sky Shark drone from the terminal parking lot and now it loitered over the area, monitoring the boats as they docked in the marina while waiting for the ferry’s arrival.
As the ferry came into dock, Carl piloted the UAV to the south over the marina to check a yacht that he’d noticed moving toward a little slip. He zoomed in on two passengers leaving the boat and walking along the dock. Almost immediately a red square appeared around one of the distant moving figures, indicating a possible gait pattern match with the target.
Lucas lunged for the radio on the floor of the van. “Sensor operator to Jumper Actual. We’ve got a possible sighting, polling 55 percent. We’re moving in to get visual now and will advise.”
Beaumont was a half mile away, standing in a nearly full parking lot near the ferry dock. In his low southern drawl Beaumont replied, “The hell you talking about? The ferry hasn’t even started offloading yet.”
“He wasn’t on the ferry. Two pax disembarked a yacht. One male, one female. They are now walking along the promenade north of your pos, over.”
Beaumont immediately said, “I’m sending two on foot to check it out. Vector them in to the subjects.”
“Roger that.”
Beaumont radioed Jumpers Seven and Eight, who were just a few hundred yards south of the marina, and he sent them toward the promenade.
Court Gentry and Ruth Ettinger shivered in a freezing wind rolling in from the Baltic Sea as they walked along the Travemünde promenade. Court could imagine this path full of summer vacationers when the weather was some sixty degrees warmer, but now only a very few hearty souls were out. He asked a man struggling to stay on top of his bicycle in the snow for directions to the train station, and the man pointed up the road, explaining in German that the Bahnhof was less than a kilometer away.
Court and Ruth walked in silence, each alone with their thoughts, Ruth only now thinking about the repercussions she would face for going offline from Alvey, and Court thinking about Dead Eye and his revelation that Court had been selected for admittance to the CIA’s Autonomous Asset Development Program for reasons other than his reflexes and intelligence.
Neither felt much like talking now.
As Gentry and the Israeli American woman trudged up a hill past a cluster of small fish restaurants and coffee shops, he noticed two men skulking up a darkened alleyway from the southern portion of the docks. A minute later he used the reflection in a hotel window to confirm that the men had fallen in behind him and Ruth, some forty or fifty yards back.