Dead Eye

THIRTY

Ruth raced into the living room in her shorts and tank top; she’d taken out her contacts, so she fumbled to get her glasses on, and her bare feet slapped the wooden floor as she approached. “Are you sure?”

Lucas said, “I’m not, but the computer is. Well, relatively sure. We’ve been tracking a guy for about two minutes. He’s turned back twice to look behind him, which kind of looks like tradecraft to me. More importantly, the facial recog software puts his periocular region at 73 percent chance of a match.”

Ruth looked past Lucas’s shoulder to the screen and saw a greenish image of dozens of pedestrians moving along in the dark in both directions through an outdoor mall. A lone individual in the crowd walked through the snow and slush wearing a hooded black three-quarter-length coat. He or she faced away from the camera. Ruth would not have known which person to focus on in the scene except the figure in the dark coat was framed by a superimposed red square.

“That’s him?”

“Watch him for a second. He’ll look back.”

Ruth did as Lucas suggested, but while she waited for him to check his six, a thought occurred to her. She asked, “How is it that no one is noticing the UAV? You are pretty low.”

Carl had been quietly piloting the Sky Shark, but he answered now, his face remaining a mask of concentration as he spoke. “It’s a little trick. You fly about four stories up, moving along as close to the wall of the buildings as possible. During the day the gray and black UAV isn’t silhouetted in front of the sky, it just blends in with all the concrete and glass and metal. But at night you are above the streetlights, so it’s even more invisible.”

Lucas swiveled his chair quickly over to another laptop on the rack, and he began feverishly manipulating the mouse and clicking keys.

“What are you doing?” Ruth asked.

“I’m setting the computer to record his gait so we can track him. The human gait is actually quite unique. Once it has a good reading of Gentry’s particular walking pattern, we can find him and track him automatically when he’s on foot. It’s not the best biometric identifier, but if it’s him, it will be a cinch to get a usable reading to narrow him down in a crowd later.”

“If it’s him,” Ruth added.

Just then the figure moved out of the flow of foot traffic and closer to the building on his right. He slowed and looked into a shop window. He stopped fully now, people passed by, and he turned and looked back up the street.

On the computer in front of Ruth the image zoomed automatically on the man’s face. The resolution was surprisingly good, though the face was green because of the night vision optics.

Ruth said, “It might be him. I still can’t—”

Just then Lucas, who was in front of the other laptop, said, “Recog has bumped probability up to 90 percent.”

“Well, then,” said Ruth. “I guess we’ve got the bastard!”

Ruth and Aron quickly rushed back into the bedroom to dress for the cold. Sixty seconds later they rushed back into the living room.

“Where is he?” Ruth asked Lucas as she pulled her boots on.

“He’s on… shit.” Lucas struggled to read the Swedish name on the moving map display on the laptop. “Drottningatten? However you pronounce it, it’s about twenty minutes from here on foot. He’s headed north, away from us.”

“We’ll take the car.” She put her phone’s receiver in her ear. “Call us with updates.”

Ruth put her hood up on her coat and followed Aron out the door.

Ten minutes later Ruth parked the embassy Skoda next to Tegnerlunden Park, and she and Aron began walking briskly through the snow shower, following Lucas’s instructions coming through their earpieces. They’d also called in Laureen and Mike, who would soon approach on foot from the south.

“Listen up,” Lucas said over the team comms. “He’s a couple minutes ahead of you on… Radmansgatan, if I’m saying that right.”

“Understood,” Ruth said. “We can track him. You make sure your drone is out of sight.”

“No worries.”

“I worry, Lucas. Tell your partner to keep the Sky Shark back.”

After a quick pause he replied. “Lady, how ’bout you do your job and you let us do ours? He won’t see the Sky Shark, but he might see you guys.”

Ruth sighed, expelling a long plume of vapor from her body.

Before she could say anything else, the American sensor operator spoke again. “Bingo! He just went inside a building. Made a beeline right for it; I think he knew exactly where he was heading.”

“What building?”

“Wait one.” There was a pause while Lucas waited for Carl to get his drone in position to see the address and any signage. While they waited, Ruth and Aron picked up the pace even more. If he was inside now, he wouldn’t see them unless they got too close to the building.

As they walked, Mike Dillman and Laureen Tattersal folded in behind them on the sidewalk. The two couples did not acknowledge each other at all. They just walked on in the same direction, some hundred feet or so apart.

“He’s on the southwest corner of Radmansgatan and… shit, how the fuck do you pronounce this?”

Ruth barked at him. “Sound it out, Lucas! Hurry!”

Slowly he said, “Sveavagen, or something like that. Just two blocks west of the intersection is an outdoor pedestrian space that’s higher than the road below. There is a staircase with a pretty good overlook on the building the target entered. There’s no cover there, but you should be able to see the entrance without having to get any closer.”

Ruth and her team arrived at the overlook as he finished describing it.

“Got it,” she said.

“All right. He’s in the building down there on your right. Forty yards away.”

“What is that place?”

Lucas typed the address into a computer, then said, “There is a steakhouse on the ground floor, but he did not go in that entrance. He took the staircase next to it up to the second floor. It’s cheap rental apartments. Immigrants. Families. That’s Gentry’s MO. He likes staying in low-rent tenements. I’ll wager that’s where he’s living while here in town.”

Mike Dillman put his hand over his earpiece so he could not be heard by the Townsend men. “Let’s call in Metsada and we can get on the next plane home before I freeze my dick off.”

Aron and Laureen laughed.

Ruth looked at him with annoyance. She covered her own mic. “We don’t even know what he’s up to. Metsada won’t be targeting anyone on this operation unless we know the man is a threat. I don’t want to hear any more talk like that.”

Mike said, “It was a joke, boss.”

Aron looked at Ruth for a moment. “What’s wrong, Ruth? Why can’t we just let Townsend put him down and be done with it?”

“This one feels different. I can’t put my finger on it.”

Lucas transmitted over their headsets now, “We’re pulling the Sky Shark back home and calling it a night. We’ll get back on him in the A.M. You guys can stay out there if you want, but we’re low on juice.”

The four Israelis remained at the top of the staircase looking down to Radmansgatan Street for several minutes, surveilling the urban area from this high ground to find the best place to watch the building. As people passed, heading up and down the staircase next to them, the four operatives discussed softly among themselves where they would post their overnight watch on the building.

As they stood there, a family of seven passed the Mossad team, then trudged through the snow to the stairs to the second-floor property. The youngest in the family could not have been more than two years old, and she bobbed along in the line, her thick boots kicking up snow almost to her eye level.

Laureen said, “Kids. That complicates things.”

Ruth nodded. “Immigrant tenements like this are usually full of children. We will need visibility inside that building. Aron, tomorrow I want you to see if they have a vacancy. We’ll pull up the schematics of the building and run fiber optics through the wall into Gentry’s room.”

While they talked it over, Aron looked around at the raised area they were standing on. “You know, right here is the best place to watch the building tonight. You don’t even need to rent an apartment in the neighborhood. It’s not a perfect sight line, but it’s not bad.”

“No,” she agreed. “Not bad at all.” She looked back over her shoulder, then down again toward the street and Gentry’s building.

She said, “He’s made something of a mistake, tactically speaking, hasn’t he?”

The question was to herself, but Aron responded.

“You mean hiding out in that tenement? With this overwatch covering the entrance just up the road?”

“Yes,” she answered, even more distracted now.

Laureen offered, “He has a lot to think about, I guess. Only so many places in the area he can rent.”

“But why this one? Why here?”

Mike answered. “It’s convenient. Close to the tram. Close enough to the river if he wants to jump on a vessel to get out of town. Our file on him says he’s used urban waterways in a pinch. Plus there are good options for food in the neighborhood.”

Ruth shook her head. “That’s not how this man thinks.”

“Then what?” Laureen asked. “He just screwed up? Got lazy?”

Ruth shook her head again. Slowly at first, but then more emphatically. “No. No, that’s not what’s going on.”

“What’s going on, then?”

She turned away from the stairs down to the street, away from the narrow view of the windows leading to the second-floor apartments. Her movement was slow and unconcerned, but her words to the others were severe. Demanding. “Turn around and walk with me. Now, dammit!”

“What’s wrong with you?” Laureen asked, but she did as she was told.

“He knows where to look.”

“What?”

“He saw the vulnerability this overwatch created; there is no way he would miss that. But he chose that location anyway. He did that because he knew staying there would funnel any surveillance of his safe house into that one spot. Every time he comes out of the front door of that building, he’ll look right up here, first thing. All he has to do is keep his eyes on this overwatch; as soon as he sees someone here he doesn’t buy, someone who doesn’t fit, someone like the four of us idiots standing in the snow watching his door, for instance, he will know he’s been compromised and he will disappear.”

Together the four of them left the overwatch, heading in the other direction. They wandered up the street, back up a slight rise on Radmansgatan Street.

“That’s fucking brilliant,” Aron said. “If you’re right, that is. Maybe you are giving him too—”

“I’m not giving him too much credit. He’s that good.”

“So, did he see us, then?”

Ruth shrugged as she walked, her hands jammed in her coat pocket and her head leaning forward, into the snow. She was mad at herself, but she did not want to harp on it in front of her people. “No. I don’t think so. If he’s got a corner window he might have line of sight on the overwatch from his flat, but it’s a small chance. I think we dodged a bullet.” They were clear now, so she turned to her team. “We have to be smarter with this one. Slower, more thoughtful in our actions. Lose him, short term, if you have to, but do not get compromised. I don’t want Gentry to disappear from Stockholm and reappear at Kalb’s assassination.”

“What do you want us to do?”

“I want someone out here, all night. There was a bus stop up the street; it’s a shitty line of sight on the entire building, but it will get us eyes on the front door, at least. Tomorrow we can look for apartment space or office space on the street to get twenty-four-hour line-of-sight coverage.”

Ruth sighed, more vapor pouring from her mouth. She was confident in her abilities and those of her team, but she realized now she was up against an adversary who had been playing this game at an elite level for a long time. She could make one call to Mossad and have a dozen more surveillance technicians here in twenty-four hours, full electronic suites, vans and cams and forged credentials to get them access to anywhere they wanted to go.

But Ruth wanted to keep this investigation small. This target would spook at the first sign of trouble, and the Townsend drones seemed to be an effective technology with a low probability of compromise.

That would do for now.

And more than this, she was nowhere near ready to call in more of her countrymen, because she did not yet know she was hunting a man who posed a threat to her leadership.

All she knew for sure was the Americans sure wanted him dead.