Dead Eye

ELEVEN

Court walked the streets of Tallinn for hours, then spent another hour shopping for a hotel that suited a laundry list of needs. The one he settled on was a three-story stone building on Kooli Street built into a long row of buildings, all running along the fifteenth-century city wall that partially circled the Old Town. Court’s tiny room was cold and damp due to the fact that it shared a stone wall with the town’s ancient battlements. The room did not, however, have much else going for it. Just a bed on a low platform off the floor, a tiny desk, a toilet, and a small window that looked through the stone wall and out to a park to the north.

But the room was perfect for him; it was at the end of a hall full of creaky floorboards, and he knew if he was attacked, he would hear anyone approaching, and he could quickly get out the window and descend to the ground, using the rope he’d already tied to the leg of his twin bed and stashed under it.

He took a long hot shower down the hall, soaking his bruises and sore joints picked up from slamming his body around Sidorenko’s property. After he redressed himself and put his boots back on, he packed his backpack up with all his belongings and secured his heavy coat between the straps. When Court was operational, his training taught him to sleep with his clothes on and keep everything he owned ready to snatch and run if he had to bug out at a moment’s notice. And since Court was virtually always operational, he had been living this way for years.

He sat at the little desk in the room and ate a can of beans and a tin of salmon he’d bought at a market during his SDR, washing it down with a large bottle of A. Le Coq, the local beer. He would have preferred heading out to a little bar for a drink and a hot meal, but he liked to take a day or two in a new place before venturing out. This first night he would remain in his room, listening to the sounds of the hotel, getting a feel for the normal action around him.

He sat on the bed and turned the TV on to CNN. There was no news about the action near St. Petersburg, but that was no surprise. Mob shootouts in Russia only received international coverage if there was gripping video to play along with the reportage, and although Gentry assumed there were CCTV cameras all over Sid’s place, he was equally certain that whoever was running Sid’s Bratva now would have no interest in releasing that video to the public.

Court flipped through the channels as he lay in bed. He hoped to relax now; this was his first real downtime in weeks.

It felt good to get the Russian mafia off his ass; it let him concentrate on the main threat to him. The United States of America. For five years Court had been on the run from the CIA after a shoot-on-sight order was placed on him by his Langley masters. He did not know why they wanted him dead; he only knew they had sent wave after wave of men after him, and he did not expect that to change any time soon.

The CIA’s manhunt for him had kept him out of the USA for the past half decade, living off the net, in the third world mostly, taking contracts for hire to fund his run. He’d worked for a string of handlers and benefactors over the years, from a venerable British spymaster who’d double-crossed him, to Sid, the Russian mobster whom Court had double-crossed and now killed. He’d also double-crossed a Mexican drug cartel boss along the way.

Court had developed a habit of subverting the goals of the men who paid him in order to achieve a greater good.

Gentry didn’t feel bad about fucking over his employer when his employer was scum of the earth. But achieving these little victories had never been his ultimate goal. Court wanted, more than anything else in this world, to return to the USA. To be free of the CIA’s shoot-on-sight sanction.

But for now he was a man without a country, an expatriate assassin for hire.

He flipped channels on the television in the dark, found a French comedy, and despite the persistent worries hanging heavily over him, he started to laugh at the absurdity of the story.

Outside gentle snowflakes began drifting in the breeze, and two floors below him, another solitary traveler entered the tiny lobby of the hotel.

It took hours of hunting, but Russ Whitlock hit pay dirt on his fourth try.

At one hotel he had trouble getting information about the other guests, so he went ahead and rented a room, then learned from the innkeeper that he was the first new guest of the day. He went up to his room, unmade the bed, and then immediately slipped away out the back. At the second location he learned the only other guests were a group of Asians in town for a boat show, so he politely demurred at the nightly rate, making his apologies and leaving before the woman behind the counter could offer a negotiated price.

A third location also turned into a dry hole.

It was dark by the time he found the fourth hotel that had everything he would look for if he were the man on the run after an op. It was in the Old Town, the touristy part of the city, which meant a steady influx of foreigners and strangers, but it was small and out of the way at the northern tip of the quarter, which meant it was quiet enough at night, and anyone entering the building might be noticed.

The windows in front overlooked an open parking lot that was surrounded on three sides by other buildings, making a small square open space in front of the hotel that amplified the echoes of approaching vehicles and shouted voices.

He walked around back to find a park, and here he saw that the wood-and-stone building was built along the wall that had surrounded this part of the town for six centuries. A large circular stone tower, peaked with a conical wooden roof, was attached to it, and there were windows in the stone wall that must have led to the hotel rooms in the back of the building.

Yeah, Russ thought. This looks right.

He entered the lobby, asked the girl behind the desk for a room, and then looked down at the ledger.

Someone had taken room 301 just an hour earlier. Russ saw the signature, just a scratch of a pen on a line. He did not expect it to say Court Gentry and it did not, but the timing was right. He was sure it was his man.

The girl wanted to put him on the third floor as well, but he told her he had hurt his knee falling on the ice and asked if she had anything lower. She complied with a sympathetic smile, giving him room 201, directly below his target.

He paid in euros for three nights; she asked to see his passport and he slipped it out confidently. Russ knew his paperwork was solid, thanks to the document people at Townsend. Their special relationship with the CIA allowed Townsend personnel to operate with credentials that came directly from a program the Agency operated with the Department of State.

Whitlock, unlike Gentry, could go wherever he wanted in the world, and he knew his credos would hold up to scrutiny.

After heading upstairs and dropping his backpack, he walked around the hotel for several minutes more to take a mental picture of the layout of the building. He then zipped up his coat and returned outside into the cold air. Snow fell steadily now, blowing in the breeze under an overcast sky. He entered the neighboring buildings, still creating a mental map of his surroundings. Then he moved around back to the park that ran along the city wall and determined which window corresponded to Gentry’s room. Once finished with his recon, he headed back to the town square for dinner.

He called in to Townsend, reported that he had located the target, and asked to be put in touch with the leader of the strike team as soon as he arrived.

Just south of Old Town he enjoyed a meal of elk stew and a bottle of red wine; he ate and drank slowly, sitting alone in a dark corner of the restaurant. While he dined he used his smart phone to study the greater neighborhood around his new hotel, adding a bird’s-eye-view perspective to the area he had seen with his eyes. When he had completed this task, he pulled up a map of the country and traced several routes along train lines and highways that would get him out of town quickly and easily.

A call came through his headset when he was almost finished with his meal.

“Go,” he said, speaking softly.

“Trestle Actual here.”

“Say iden,” Russ instructed, and then he picked his last bite of soda bread off his plate, dipping it in the elk stew before popping it in his mouth.

“Iden key, niner, three, three, oh, eight, seven, two, five, niner.”

“Confirmed. Dead Eye here. Iden number four, eight, one, oh, six, oh, five, two, oh.”

“I’m at the airport. Will be in the AO in an hour. Have you located the target?”

“Of course I have.”

“All right. We can meet at twenty-two hundred.”

Russ pulled his paper map of the city from his pocket and looked it over for a few seconds. “Open your map. You’ll need to write this down.”