Quickly he dialed a number stored in his satellite phone. In moments it was answered on the other end, but the reception was poor and crackling.
“This is Babbitt.”
“Mr. Babbitt, Yanis Alvey here.”
“How can I help you, Mr. Alvey?”
“You have an operation over central Hamburg.”
“I am not at liberty to—”
“That wasn’t a question, Mr. Babbitt. I want you to know that we are here, as well. I have a team of direct action assets and, as far as we are concerned, you are encroaching on our AO.”
Babbitt replied, “My boys have the situation in hand, Alvey. You need to stand back and let them do their jobs.”
Alvey said, “I want to remind you that we have a valuable and irreplaceable officer who may very well be in close proximity to your target.”
Babbitt chuckled. “A nice way of saying your woman has been flipped by a mass murderer and now they are working together.”
“She may be wrong about Gentry, I do not know. But I doubt very much she is wrong about Townsend Government Services. It was her assessment that your outfit is an unscrupulous band of out-of-control cutthroats.”
Babbitt did not seem offended by the remark. He just replied calmly, “Do I need to remind you we have the full backing and sanction of the Central Intelligence Agency?”
“No, you don’t need to remind me of that.” The line was quiet for a moment as the ambiguity as to what Alvey meant by the statement hung in the air.
Babbitt said, “We don’t want Ettinger. We want Gentry. Right now we have technical surveillance over several known associates of his in the city. It is just a matter of time before we find him. If Ettinger is with him, we will use our utmost care to keep her safe.” He paused. “Our two organizations should be able to avoid one another on this operation.”
Yanis Alvey said, “If Ruth is hurt I will hold you personally responsible.”
“Mr. Alvey, I am on an aircraft over the Atlantic right now. You have more control over that situation than I do. Keep your people away from my people, and you can avoid a disaster.” He paused a beat. “Like the one you suffered in Rome last year.”
Alvey disconnected the call and looked back out the window.
FIFTY
A few hundred yards east of the Hamburg Hauptbahnhof in the district of St. George, Court Gentry walked alone through darkness, shifting to stay out of the glow of streetlights and shop windows as he did so. He passed a phalanx of hookers on a street corner, working outside even on this evening with temperatures in the low twenties, and he negotiated his way around drug dealers who stood like traffic cones in his path trying to get him to buy hash or pills or needles filled with heroin.
Court had worked in Hamburg a few years earlier on a solo op. At the time his handler, Sir Donald Fitzroy, had equipped him with a long-range rifle to assassinate a wealthy Serbian businessman working here who, in a past life, had been a war criminal in Bosnia. But when the weather forecast changed for the date of the hit, Court realized the conditions would be too foggy to see his target through a scope at five hundred yards. So he changed his operation midstream and decided to do the job up close and personal, and to do this he needed a handgun. He spent two full days in the seedy bars and back alleys of Hamburg’s St. George district, knowing the area to be rife with foreign gangs with access to weapons.
He finally made a connection with a middle-aged Turk named Ozgur who sold him a Walther P99 handgun. It was an excellent weapon, exactly what he needed for the op, and it came in handy when he killed the Serb with a bullet through the back of the head in the portico of his luxury condo.
Now Court hoped like hell Ozgur was still around and ready to make a quick and easy few thousand euros before bedtime.
He found the decrepit building and walked past the elevators to a poorly lit stairwell in the back that smelled like someone regularly used it as a latrine. He climbed up the metal staircase to the fifth floor of the seven-story building, and then made his way down a long narrow hallway.
When he had been here a few years earlier, Ozgur had kept a lookout in the hallway, just a Turkish boy with a cell phone, but now the hall was empty other than bags of trash and cheap bicycles.
Court found the apartment and knocked on the door.
He heard shuffling inside, and he expected a long battery of suspicious questioning through the door.
But instead it opened quickly.
Ozgur stood there in a white tank top; he held a baby in his arm and a phone to his ear. His eyes widened a little when he saw Court, and then he said something in Turkish into the phone that did not sound alarmed or threatened.
Court imagined it was something along the lines of I’ll call you back.
“Guten Abend,” he said after he hung up the phone. He bounced the baby on his forearm, a little boy with a shock of black hair, and Court immediately realized that the child’s eyes were much more curious about Court than were Ozgur’s.
“Do you remember me?” Court asked in German.
“Aber sicher. Was wollen Sie?” Of course. What do you want?
“If you remember me, then you know what I want.”
A woman appeared behind Ozgur. She was obviously not Turkish; her hair was dirty blond and her eyes were blue. Court took her as a Pole, as Polish immigrants were common in Germany. Ozgur handed the baby off to the woman; she took the boy and gave Court an unwelcoming look.
Ozgur stepped outside into the hall and shut the door behind him.
He switched to English. “A gun? Are you serious? I don’t deal in weapons anymore.”
Court wasn’t in the mood to be jacked around by someone trying to make a few extra euros by hyping up the scarcity of his product.
“I’ve got money, Ozgur. What I don’t have is time. Name your price, but do it now.”
“It’s not a game, man. I don’t have no gun. I sell you something else, maybe? A cell phone?”
“Look. I’ve come a long way, and I’ve had a rough day. I know you are the man around here who can get me what I need.”
Far off in the distance Court registered the thumping beat of a helicopter, but it did not seem out of the ordinary in the center of Germany’s second-largest city.
One of the Metsada operators called Yanis Alvey over to his seat on the port side of the Sikorsky and pointed out the window next to him.
In the distance Alvey watched the Townsend Eurocopter descend to just above the train tracks a quarter mile from the Hauptbahnhof.
“Somebody get me some binos!”
A pair of binoculars was put in his hands seconds later. He looked through them in time to see two men fast-roping from the chopper down to the tracks, twenty feet below. Soon they were running up an embankment, and seconds later they disappeared into the tight streets of the St. George neighborhood.
The Eurocopter climbed back up into the sky, then headed over St. George and began circling around an apartment building.
Alvey watched through the binos and spoke into his microphone. “They’re going to fast-rope onto a building over there. Those first two were a ground-floor blocking force.” He looked at the men around him. “They’ve found Gentry.” He hurried up to the cockpit. “Pilot? How close can you get to that neighborhood without alerting that helo?”
The pilot immediately began descending and closing on the area. “Several blocks to the north there is a park by the Kennedy bridge over Lake Aussenalster. I can come in low over the water when he banks to the south. I’ll land right next to the bridge, and you can all go on foot.”