Dead Eye

FIFTY-SIX

Gentry drove through the afternoon traffic in southern Brussels, leaving the sound of sirens behind him. He knew that although the shootout he’d survived minutes before would be the most dramatic and shocking event to hit this city in years, it would not immediately be linked in any way to the secret visit by the Israeli prime minister in Uccle, more than ten miles away from the gun battle.

Kalb would arrive as Russ expected him to, which was good news for Court.

Court no longer gave a damn whether or not Ehud Kalb lived or died. He was operating out of simple vengeance, pursuing Whitlock not because he threatened a world leader and not because he threatened Gentry himself, but because he’d ended the life of a woman Court both liked and respected. A woman who was doing her best for what she believed.

Russ Whitlock was right — Court would seek revenge.

It occurred to him that he might be able to save the prime minister by driving his van directly to the cemetery and creating such havoc that the PM’s security would hustle their protectee away, but he knew the Israelis would just shoot him dead, and he’d have no way to be certain Kalb would not go ahead with his graveside visit after the fact.

And again, this wasn’t about Ehud Kalb.

This was about Ruth.

His arm throbbed and the blood ran freely down his hand. He had a trauma kit in his backpack in the backseat, but he did not take the time to deal with his injury yet.

At twelve forty he neared the neighborhood of Uccle, and he immediately saw the most obvious location for a sniper to hide himself. The steeple of the Eglise St. Job was commanding over the cemetery on the hill in the distance, and just a few hundred yards away from the cemetery. It was an obvious location for Whitlock to use.

But it was too obvious. The Israelis would have that covered, no question, and there was no question but that Whitlock would know this himself.

Way off to the east in the hazy afternoon, far beyond the steeple of the Eglise St. Job, Court saw a forested hillside covered in snow. It was the highest ground in the area, but it was also another five to seven hundred yards from the church, making it a good ten to twelve hundred yards to the cemetery.

Could Whitlock make the shot?

Court thought about it for only a moment.

I could do it. He could do it.

He parked the van at a pharmacy on Sint-Jobsesteenweg, climbed out, and fought the urge to rush inside for medical supplies. He had no time, and he couldn’t let anyone see him in this condition, because they would almost certainly call the cops.

He found a tiny one-lane road that led up the hill toward the woods and he began climbing quickly, clutching his wounded right arm with his left hand, stanching the flow of blood and preventing the broken bones from moving as he walked. The little road turned into a footpath, still rising up the hill, and the homes on either side gave way to forest. The fresh snow covered the trees and blanketed the ground.

Court passed a stack of loose branches of all sizes, piled there along the path after being cleared from the forest, and stopped, then pulled his trauma kit from his backpack. He searched a moment to find a reasonably straight branch about a half inch in diameter, and he cleaned off leaves and shoots with his free hand and teeth, then broke the stick in half. Next he struggled to take off his leather motorcycle jacket and unstrapped the Kevlar vest that had saved his life, revealing a white long-sleeved thermal undershirt beneath it. Even though the entire lower half of the right arm of the shirt was bloodred, he felt he would blend into the winterscape much better with the white top, although his pants and boots were black.

He dropped to his knees in the snow now, placed his broken arm on the ground, and put a piece of the stick on either side of it. For the first time he looked over the injury. It hurt like a bitch, but he was somewhat relieved to discover only one of the bones had snapped from the impact of the bullet. He fought through the pain, wrapped his arm and the two sticks tightly with a compression bandage from his trauma kit. He couldn’t avoid scooping up a healthy amount of bloody snow inside as well.

He cinched the splint tight enough to make him cry out in the quiet forest and tied it off. He stood back up with difficulty. Even in the frozen air, sweat dripped from his forehead. He left his backpack and his coat and his bulletproof vest and his blood there in the snow, and he started climbing deeper up the forested hill.

He had no weapon, only one good arm, and he knew the pain would slow him down. But he had to push on. He had no choice.

He had no time.

Russ Whitlock lay in his hide in the tiny greenhouse on the hill, his rifle in front of him. Though the week-old gunshot wound on his hip burned like fire after the action on Rue Kelle and the walk through the woods to his hide, he felt good, certain he would be able to achieve his objective today.

He checked his watch and saw that his target was due to arrive any moment.

After peering through the scope for a few seconds, he took a moment to relax himself, and to think of how things stood.

By killing the Ettinger woman, Russ knew Gentry would likely still take the fall for the Kalb hit because Babbitt would not reveal to the Israelis that one of his employees assassinated their prime minister. If the Townsend operators finished Gentry here in Brussels today, Russ felt confident he wouldn’t have to worry about the Mossad hunting him for the rest of his life.

CIA would issue a shoot-on-sight sanction against him, just as they had done to Gentry, and that sucked, but it almost felt inevitable to Russ that he would pick up the mantle for Gentry; Russ would be the new singleton on the run, the new freelance killer for hire.

The new Gray Man.

Russ marveled at the irony. He would be the Gray Man.

He shook the thought out of his mind, and refocused his attention on his mission. He clicked the windage knob on his Leupold scope to account for a five-mile-per-hour full-value southerly breeze at a range of seven tenths of a mile. He centered his reticule on the iron gate at the entrance to the Dieweg Cemetery in the distance, and then he shifted his aim to an Israeli security officer standing to the side.

He’d like to shoot the man right now. He had no quarrel with the Israeli, but Russ truly enjoyed killing at distance. Striking a man dead with complete impunity. That he had no reason to kill the man meant nothing to Whitlock. What that sentimental fool Court Gentry called collateral damage, Russ knew to be simply natural selection. The survival of the fittest. The culling of the herd of irrelevant people populating the earth.

Still, he fought the urge to shoot the security man through the forehead. He’d get his chance to kill in moments, and that shot would reward him with much more than the burst of pride he got when he ended a life.

It would reward him with twenty-five million dollars.

He whispered to himself, his words so soft they made no frozen vapor between his eye and his rifle scope.

“Come on, Kalb. Let’s dance.”

A small murder of crows flitted between the high branches of the bare trees around Gentry, their angry accusing calls piercing the air, adding even more ominousness to the low dappled light of the gray woods.

Court climbed on, off the path and through dense forest now, certain he was closing in on danger but uncertain what he would do when he found it. He thought of Ruth and told himself that if he stood for anything at all, he stood for someone who had sacrificed everything to stop a psychopathic killer.

Maybe Court was crazy himself. Maybe the CIA had determined him to be unfeeling and uncaring and remorseless. But what was this emotion in him now if not empathy and compassion?

He also felt the bitter anger, felt it compel him forward, but he would not let the bitter anger control him.

No, he would slow himself, use his training and his cunning.

He would not, however, use his right arm. His hand was swollen and barely functional, and the arm itself quivered and throbbed inside the broken-branch splint.

He came to a clearing, and from it he could see the cemetery on a distant hill to the west. He looked around, tried to determine where a sniper would position himself, and realized the best place would be in the woods on the far side of the clearing.

Court pushed himself back into the trees and moved to his left, finally following fresh footsteps that crossed in the clearing far back in the hilly pasture, fifty yards or more below the crest of the hill on the far side of the cemetery, and surely behind any sniper overwatch. From here he made his way over a waist-high barbed-wire fence and into the trees again.

The crows of the forest cried, their movement above him in the bare branches constant, as if they were shadowing his progression in the forest. An audience to the impending show.

He was close now, he had to be. Another thirty yards and he would be at the front edge of the forest, the perfect location for a sniper to secret himself, giving him both a clear view of his target on the far hillside and cover from the woodline.

He followed the footsteps past a little ditch on his left that wound away to the south, and then, also on his left, a frozen pond lay at the bottom of a steep drop-off.

He followed a narrow walking path on a hill over the pond; with the frozen ground and the six inches of fresh snowfall his footfalls were soft and quiet, but he knew he had to leave the path to close on his target. He moved as slowly as he could, only once looking at his watch and finding he had run out of time, but unwilling to rush forward now, so close to his destination.

He had gone only a few yards off the path when he placed his right foot down on a large felled tree hidden under the snowfall. It felt sturdy, so he stepped up on it, then reached his right foot out to find another solid step.

Below his foot he felt a tree branch that jutted from frozen mud, and he decided it was large enough to take his weight. He stepped down on it, swung his other leg over.

The branch cracked, the sound shockingly loud in the still forest.

Shit. The noise was enough to send the crows above flying from their branches.