She passed through the door and into the great room at the front of the flat, and was led by the arm toward Parks and Babbitt, who sat on wingback chairs facing away from her. Two Jumper cowboys stood next to the sofa, blocking her view of a man seated there facing the Townsend execs, so it was not until she was just feet away that she found herself face-to-face with the seated man. He was fit and rugged looking, but not particularly tall or overly muscular. His hands were behind his back.
She looked him over even closer now. His eyes looked exactly like Court’s. They were mature and searching; they flitted around the room at first, but when they locked on hers she knew the brain behind them was reading every aspect of her person, taking in all the data and measuring her as a threat.
“You’re Whitlock,” she said.
“You’re Ettinger,” he replied, and he started to stand, but one of the Jumper men pushed the barrel of his gun into the side of his head.
He sat back down and the guard pulled his weapon back.
“Excuse me if I don’t get up,” Russ said.
Ruth turned to Babbitt now. “You are aware you just kidnapped a Mossad officer, are you not?”
Lee shook his head and leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs. “We did nothing of the sort. Time was growing short while we watched you wander the city. You had no intention of bringing Gentry here for a trade. I realize that. So we just invited you back here to speed up the process.”
Ruth said nothing.
“But now we have Dead Eye and, most awkwardly, but perhaps also more importantly, we have you. You will call Gentry, give him this address—33 Rue Kelle — and then we will wait for him to come save you and kill Dead Eye.”
Russ stood up from the couch again. “I think we can all come to an—”
The other Jumper man guarding him shoved his gun barrel against the side of Whitlock’s head, and Russ sat back down, his hands still tight behind his back. He leaned back on the sofa, facing Babbitt and Parks, who were seated in front of him, and Ettinger, who stood next to Beaumont and the two Townsend execs.
Just then Parks took a call from Dagger Team. He put it over the speaker on the table holding the UAV gear.
Dagger Actual said, “We’re two minutes from the safe house. The UAV team there isn’t answering the radios.”
“Roger that, Al,” said Parks, and then he looked to Babbitt. “If Gray Man found the UAV station at the Overijse farmhouse, then we can end this right now.”
From his seat on the sofa Russ Whitlock said, “I think it is a very safe bet Court did, in fact, find the UAV station.”
Babbitt asked, “What makes you say that?”
“That makes me say that.” Whitlock nodded toward the large bay windows across the room. Ruth, Babbitt, Parks, and Beaumont all turned to it.
A Sky Shark drone hovered at eye level, just a foot from the window. Its camera was trained through the glass at everyone in the room.
“Jesus!” Parks lurched back in surprise as if Gentry himself stood there, on the other side of the glass.
Whitlock laughed from his position on the sofa. “Calm down, Parks. It’s not weaponized. He’s not going to launch a Hellfire.”
But even Babbitt was shaken up by the realization that Gentry was watching his every move from a distance of no more than ten feet. “Everyone remain calm,” he said. The phone on his belt rang and he jumped slightly.
From his position on the sofa, Russ Whitlock seemed to retain the most control of anyone in the room. He said, “Answer your phone, Lee. Say hi to Court, and wave for the camera.”
FIFTY-FOUR
Before Babbitt answered he glanced to Parks. Softly he said, “Have Dagger hit the location the second they get there.”
“Yes sir,” he said, and he stepped out of the living room.
Babbitt answered his phone. “Who is this?”
After a short pause he heard, “You know who this is.”
“Gentry?”
Court all but growled. “Babbitt.”
“What happened to my UAV team?”
“I persuaded them to work for me.”
Babbitt cleared his throat nervously, and he struggled to force an air of authority in his voice. “Yes. Well, as… as you can plainly see, we have Dead Eye here.”
“I see that. I want to see every son of a bitch in that room with a gun on Dead Eye. He can disarm those two idiots standing next to him in under a second.”
But Babbitt was not going to let Gentry order his men around. He told the six other Jumper men in the room to stay where they were.
Next he glanced to his left, beyond the view of the camera looking in the window. Parks was there, and the younger man held up a single finger. “Ten seconds,” he mouthed.
Lee looked back to the drone’s camera. “Now, Court. You have all the advantages here. What can we do to rectify this situation?”
“You let Ruth go, and I come in.”
“We are taking good care of Ms. Ettinger.” He glanced to his left at Parks, who stood out of view in the dining room. Parks held a phone to his ear, and his other hand up with five fingers extended, then four, then three, then two.
Babbitt smiled into the drone camera now, but he did not reply.
Parks shouted, “Executing now!”
Ruth pushed away from Beaumont and ran toward the bay window. “Run!”
At the Townsend safe house in Overijse, the eight-man Dagger team breached at four different entry points, using explosives on the front and back doors and smashing through floor-to-ceiling windows in the front living room and a smaller window in an upstairs bedroom.
The four two-man teams raced quickly through the property, working their way from all compass points toward the UAV table in the center.
“Clear!” came the call from the front-door entry team.
“Clear!” The upstairs team found the second floor to be a dry hole, as well.
The living room team cleared the kitchen and the living room. “Clear.”
And the back-door team moved to the table on which the laptops and flight control equipment for the UAVs had been positioned.
There was blood on the floor, but the table was empty. The gear was gone.
“Clear,” Dagger Actual reported. “Negative target.”
Court Gentry sat in the back seat of a minivan with his pistol pointed at the back of Lucas’s head. The sensor operator drove the vehicle toward the Rue Kelle safe house while Carl operated the drone with one hand and held his other hand tight on his right butt cheek, having to lie on his side in the back of the van to avoid putting too much painful pressure on the gunshot wound.
Court looked at the laptop and the surprisingly clear picture of the living room of the safe house on Rue Kelle. His headset in his ear afforded him fair audio coverage of the room via Babbitt’s mobile phone.
Babbitt had been looking off to the side for the last thirty seconds or so, suddenly uninterested in his conversation with Court. Court assumed this was because a takedown of the farmhouse had just begun, and soon enough the men hitting the property would realize their target had gone mobile with the UAV team.
Ten minutes earlier Court had ordered the drone operators to load up the van. They took their laptops and piled into the vehicle. Court was about to climb in with them, but as he crossed the driveway he noticed all the footprints in the snow leading to a horse trailer next to a barn. He brought the two men out with him as he shot the lock off the trailer, and inside he found a huge weapons cache.
Court pilfered several items from the cache. A Glock 19 pistol and several magazines, a sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun and a box of shells, a pair of hand grenades, and a Kevlar vest.
He threw them into the back of the van and then he, Lucas, and Carl left the property, with Lucas behind the wheel and under Gentry’s gun. Seconds behind them, the half-charged UAV in the backyard launched and began racing toward the Rue Kelle safe house.