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  Court added, “But Townsend isn’t our problem right now. It’s the Germans. They will get air after us quickly, probably police choppers, which we can outrun, but the German Luftwaffe will scramble something before long. I want us to be on the ground long before there is a major response.”

  “‘On the ground’ sounds a little vague.”

  “We’re going to have to land on a stretch of road or a field somewhere. It would be nice to find something with lights. This part of Germany is flat, so we don’t have to worry about the terrain too much, as long as I can see it.”

  “Please stop making it so obvious you are an inexperienced pilot.”

  Court laughed at that but then quickly refocused. He said, “We’ll split up in Hamburg. You’ll go directly to Brussels. I’ll acquire a weapon and meet you there by morning. When I get there I’ll contact Dead Eye and see if I can pinpoint his location.”

  “Dead Eye?”

  “Yeah. That’s Whitlock’s agency code name.”

  “Will you really come to Brussels?”

  He nodded. “I’ll come.”

  Ruth stared at him, his impassive face glowing red from the cabin lights. She asked, “Why are you doing this?”

  “Have you forgotten? You said you would frame me if I didn’t.”

  She shook her head. “I know I threatened to sic Metsada on you, but I don’t believe that is the only reason. You could run from this and disappear. Like you always do.”

  Court hesitated, glanced at her. She was surprised to see a sudden vulnerability in his regular stoic expression. “Yesterday Dead Eye said some things. Things about where he and I came from. Things I hope aren’t true, but things, I suspect, are true.”

  “What things?”

  The drone of the Cherokee’s engine filled the cabin with a low persistent hum.

  “I guess in the back of my mind I always knew I was damaged goods.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Never mind. I need to see this thing with Whitlock and Kalb all the way to the end to prove to myself he was wrong about me. There’s right and there’s wrong. Sometimes I teeter on the edge, like I could fall off in either direction. So I fight it. I fight against falling off on the wrong side, by doing right whenever I can. It doesn’t make me pure. It just . . . it’s just better than the alternative.”

  Ruth said, “What you do. What they made you. This does not have to be what you are.”

  Court smiled a little. “That sounds all well and good, but the truth is, you don’t want me to stop. You want me to go after Russ Whitlock, and you want me to kill him.”

  She sighed wearily. “I do. I am using you just like they used you.” She looked out the window. “I guess I’m no better.”

  Court said, “Why don’t we worry about the next twenty-four hours for now, and then deal with whatever comes after, after?”

  “Deal.”

  They landed fifteen minutes later on a road in the middle of a lighted golf course near the village of Jersbek. Court and Ruth pushed the airplane off the road and down into a gully and began walking through the little town. By ten P.M. they were on a bus that would take them into the huge metropolis of Hamburg.

  A black Sikorsky S-92 helicopter raced two hundred feet above the Elbe River, its four rotors beating the icy air for both lift and velocity.

  The aircraft had been cleared to overfly the Hamburg industrial districts of Hafen City and Kleiner Gasbrook at low altitude; below the helo’s belly were several square miles of fat warehouses and spindly train tracks, open container lots butted up against a webbed network of harbor channels where massive cargo ships occupied seemingly every nook and cranny of the narrow waterways.

  The pilot ignored the landscape below and concentrated on flying just above tall Portainer cranes loading and unloading the freighters, and he kept his eyes on the city lights on the north side of the harbor. He’d reported to air traffic control that he did not yet have a destination determined, but he presumed he would be heading somewhere near the Hauptbahnhof, the main train station.

  Inside the Sikorsky, fifteen Israelis sat bathed in green interior cabin lights. Most of them were male and although they wore civilian attire, the XM35 rifles hanging from slings outside their coats gave away the fact that they were no regular members of the population.

  They were Metsada, Mossad Special Operations.

  For now there was nothing for the assault team to do but enjoy the ride. They sat alone with their thoughts; some looked out the window at the lights of the city below, and others fiddled idly with their gear.

  In the rear of the cabin two female targeting officers sat together looking over a laptop, reading data from Mossad case officers already in the city and coordinating data flows with computer hackers back in Tel Aviv who had broken into Hamburg’s network of municipal traffic cameras. So far they were having no luck identifying their target, but the operation was only a few minutes old.

  And next to the two women was one additional male. Yanis Alvey was the oldest on board, at fifty, but he’d spent decades serving as one of the men with a rifle around his neck and a mandate to kill Israel’s enemies. Now he was management, not labor, a liaison between the Collections Department and Special Operations, a job that gave him command authority over the targeters and command-and-execute authority over the spec ops boys.

  Alvey carried a weapon himself, a CZ pistol in a shoulder holster under his coat, but at this stage of his career it was really more of an affectation. He was no longer a triggerman, but carrying the semiauto served to remind both himself and his team that he would always remain an operator at heart. He also wore a simple Kevlar vest under his shirt, same as his Metsada men, although Alvey’s days of shooting and scooting through dangerous environs were well past him.

  One of the female targeters had been in comms with an informant in the local police. She nodded into her phone and turned to Alvey.

  “The plane was found alongside a golf course just northeast of the city. Shall I tell the pilot to proceed there?”

  “Negative,” Alvey said. “They will be long gone from the aircraft by now. We’ll stay aloft over the city till we get a hit on the traffic cameras or a police report.”

  Yanis Alvey had begun to accept the troubling fact that Ruth Ettinger was now working with the Gray Man. He had begun to suspect it after she reported in to him this afternoon from Helsingborg. She fully believed in Gentry’s innocence, and Ruth wasn’t one to follow the official line if it diverged from her beliefs, but still it was a shock to Alvey that she had become so irrational after Dillman’s death.

  Her collaboration with Gentry had been made clear to him when Babbitt called him an hour earlier and reported them fleeing Travemünde together. Yanis caught himself wishing, for everyone’s sake, that there was some evidence that Gentry was holding Ettinger against her will, but that was just fantasy. This was no kidnapping; on the contrary, as well as Yanis knew Ruth, he halfway suspected she would be leading Gentry around by the nose at this stage of the game.

  He blamed himself for not forcing her away from fieldwork after Rome.

  Now Tel Aviv was ordering Yanis to kill Gentry and to bring Ruth back. They wanted Gentry dead because they bought the CIA’s assertion that Gentry was in play and about to assassinate Ehud Kalb. The reasons for bringing Ruth home had nothing to do with altruism. The graybeards at Mossad were concerned about word spreading that a decorated Mossad officer was working with the Gray Man to conspire in the assassination of the prime minister.

  That just would not do.

  It was insanity, of course, and Alvey knew it, but he’d been unable to persuade his superiors that their officer in the field had not gone completely off the rails. He had, of course, conveyed Ruth’s warnings about Whitlock to Tel Aviv, but Tel Aviv was in bed with Langley on this, and Langley had a quick counter to every one of Ruth’s allegations. The Mossad believed the CIA, not their officer in the field, and this put Alvey here, now, over Hamburg
with a mandate to kill the Gray Man.

  This directive was his actual primary mission, but it was not his greatest personal concern. Even though Tel Aviv did not care about Ruth, Yanis did, and he would do everything he could to extract her from the danger of this situation with all the resources at his disposal.

  He knew her career was over now, but tonight he would do everything in his power to save her life. He doubted the Townsend men would check their fire if they had Gentry in view, and Ruth Ettinger could well become collateral damage.

  He had to find Gentry before Townsend did. Alvey saw himself as Ruth’s only chance.

  Court and Ruth climbed out of the bus at the Hamburger Strasse U-bahn station and immediately descended into the underground tunnels toward the trains. From here Ruth would head to the Hauptbahnhof and catch a train to Brussels, and Court would descend deeper into Hamburg’s dirty underbelly to go hunting for a weapon.

  They shook hands, told each other they would meet again in a few hours, and then separated in the busy subway station.

  Minutes later Ruth walked through the Hauptbahnhof with her head low and covered by a hood. She climbed aboard a train to Paris via Brussels. She bought a couchette in a sleeper car, and as soon as they left the station she crawled into her couchette and lay on her back, and she fell asleep within minutes, haunted with dreams of what lay ahead in Brussels.

  The Mossad Sikorsky S-92 had been circling the city of Hamburg for nearly half an hour, trying to get some actionable intelligence as to the location of Gentry. Yanis Alvey left much of the communications with local assets up to his targeting officers, while he looked out the window and thought of Ruth.

  He snapped out of his repose when he felt the helicopter climbing. He put on a headset and switched to the cockpit channel on the intercom. “Pilot, why are we ascending?”

  “We’ve been ordered to flight level two thousand by air traffic control. There is another helicopter circling the city, and they have been given the lower clearance.”

  Alvey looked out the window on his right, then crossed the cabin to look out the left. There, a thousand feet below and a mile to the west of where the S-92 now circled, a blue Eurocopter EC175 moved in a wide arc over the St. Pauli district.

  “Pilot, can you hear the transmissions of the other helo?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who are they? What are they doing?”

  “They are American; they say they are a film crew and will be doing some low-level work for the next hour.”

  Alvey turned to the two female targeters sitting with him. In a grave tone he said, “Townsend is here.”

  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.”