Court spoke softly. “Those your guys?”
“Who?”
“We’ve picked up a tail.”
She knew better than to turn around to look. “Are you sure? I didn’t see anyone.”
“You follow people. I get followed. I’m kind of an expert on the subject. I need you to tell me if they are Mossad or not.”
They kept walking. They could see the Bahnhof now, just ahead on their right.
“To do that I’m going to have to look back,” Ruth said.
“No. Wait till we turn to go up the steps to the station and then glance to the right, but do it quickly and make it natural. They are forty yards back. If we speed up a little we can time the turn to catch the two guys in the streetlight we’re under now.”
“You’ve got this down to a science, don’t you?”
“Stick with me,” he quipped. “I’ll teach you how the other half lives.”
They picked up the pace and then turned at the entrance to the Bahnhof. Court did not look to his right, but Ruth glanced that way. She said nothing until they were well inside the station.
“Shit. They are Townsend men. Part of the direct action team that was in Stockholm. And I’m pretty sure they just made me.”
There were no trains at the platform now, but a light crowd of people stood around in the cold waiting on the seven-ten to Hamburg. Court took Ruth by the hand and led her quickly through the passengers. She marveled at the way he slipped between people effortlessly, remained in low light, and kept his head down as he walked. He even made it look natural as he bypassed security cameras positioned above a kiosk in the center of the room.
They exited the building on the far side, then crossed the tracks away from the lights of the station, entering first a small copse of trees and then a residential neighborhood. They walked briskly down a lighted street and then cut through two backyards, exiting onto a small cul-de-sac.
Ruth had no idea where they were going, and she doubted Gentry did either, but she had read enough of the unredacted portions of his file to know this was a man who knew how to slip away from danger.
Although this was clearly a valuable skill for a man like Gentry to possess, she could not help but find it sad to imagine him spending his life skulking alone through strangers’ backyards like a low-end cat burglar or picking his way through wooded areas in pitch-black darkness, trying to stay ahead of hunters on his tail, as if he were a fox being chased by hounds on his scent.
Ruth much preferred the role of hound herself.
“Okay,” Court said as they left the cul-de-sac and began walking up a street lined with zero-lot homes. “I think we’ve lost them for now.”
Something occurred to Ruth and she immediately looked up. “They have a drone.” The sky was black and the streetlights made it hard to see anything above them.
Court looked up himself. “I don’t see anything.”
“You won’t see it. It’s small, and nearly silent.”
“How small?”
“I’d say no bigger than a pizza box.”
Court sighed frozen vapor. “Now I’m being chased by a pizza.” He thought it over for a moment, then passed a house with a Volkswagen GTI in the driveway and, next to it, a small two-wheel trailer with a covered motorcycle lashed to it.
He stopped.
“What?” Ruth asked.
Court headed up the little drive, tore off the tarp, and unlashed the motorcycle. It was a Kymco Pulsar 125, a nice enough low-end bike.
In seconds he was wheeling it quietly down the residential street, with Ruth following along. He said, “If there is a drone, we can’t hide from it. All we can do is put as much space as possible between ourselves and the men with the guns, so the drone can’t lead them to us. Make sense?”
She was confused. “But you don’t have a key for the bike.”
Court dropped the kickstand and knelt in the street. “Oh, please.” In the low light from the streetlamp above he felt along the ignition wires, following them to the engine, where they terminated in a plastic coupler. He popped off the coupler, exposing three loose wires, then twisted two of the three together and let the third hang free.
He reached up and started the bike’s electronic ignition.
The entire process took less than thirty seconds.
Court climbed onto the bike and Ruth climbed on behind him. He looked back to see if she was ready, and he noticed long shadows moving in his direction. He focused up the street and saw the two men who had tailed them to the station. They were still fifty yards back, but now they were running in Court’s direction.
“Hold on!” Court shouted, and he revved the engine. They fishtailed on the icy street as they took off.
FORTY-EIGHT
“Sensor operator to Jumper Actual. Subjects heading east on the Morreder Strasse.”
“Vector me to them!” Jumper shouted. He sat in the front passenger seat of the lead van while Jumper Two drove. Behind them, Jumpers Five and Six sat in the back. The other van held the UAV team and Jumpers Three and Four, but it was well behind the chase now as it stopped to pick up Seven and Eight.
From the back of the rear van, Carl and Lucas kept the drone after the target two hundred feet above. With the visual coverage they were able to keep everyone informed on the target’s movements.
“Right turn,” Lucas called over the radio. He was able to see both the motorcycle and the lead van, just a kilometer behind its target.
“Roger that,” said Beaumont. “Can the UAV keep up with the bike?”
“Negative. We can stay on him for a few miles, at most. We’ll lose him after that.”
“Keep up with him as long as you can,” Beaumont ordered.
“Roger that. He just turned left on Wedenberg Strasse. You’ll hit the intersection in sixty seconds.”
“Where’s he going?”
Lucas looked at his other laptop. On it, a moving map display showed him the area in wider relief. He said, “I think he’s just running. As long as he keeps heading north, his options will diminish. He’s going to get pinned in by the sea to the east, and the west is just farmland.” He laughed in surprise into the mic as he looked over the map. “There’s not much up there at all. I think he fucked up.”
Court was starting to think he might have fucked up. He knew Townsend was in hot pursuit; he’d seen a white van racing out of Travemünde behind him a few minutes ago. He’d opted to head north, to race along the coast, but as he left the town he saw the terrain turn to open farmland, with no place to hide.
The Baltic Sea was on his right, and to his left he saw nothing but low fields and the occasional little village. He wasn’t sure where he was going, and without even a handgun he had no prayer of fighting back. He was in escape-and-evade mode now, and this was complicated greatly by the possibility that a UAV was somewhere overhead tracking his every move.
Just then a small aircraft passed him low on the left heading south, its lights illuminating light snowfall in front of it as it ascended.
There was an airport just up ahead; he assumed it would be a tiny little landing strip, as the largest sizable town in the area, Lubeck, was well to the south of his location.
He tried to force the throttle open further to get a few more horsepower from the little bike.
Five minutes later he pulled hard to the left and raced up a gravel road, stopping the bike just outside the open gates of Sierksdorf Airport, a tiny grass runway field with a single hangar and a terminal building no larger than a fast-food restaurant. He and Ruth left the bike behind and began running through the snow in the dark toward the lights of the terminal.