FORTY-NINE
Court dialed a number just minutes after Zoya left his little apartment. It was only five a.m. D.C. time, but he didn’t care.
Hanley answered, and it was clear he was wide awake. “That you?”
Court said, “Violator. Iden Alpha, X-ray, Mike—”
“Skip it, it’s you. I’m getting reports from the embassy about more gunplay nearby. What the hell happened?”
“The Russians made an attempt on Anthem. She’s okay, but her contact at Shrike is dead, and she’s been burned.”
“Shit,” Hanley said, and then he said it again with more conviction. “Shit!”
“Yeah.”
“Where is Anthem now?”
“She’s on a plane out of here. She didn’t tell me where and I didn’t ask. She dumped her phone so she can’t be tracked.” Court needed Zoya off Hanley’s radar for a while, for her safety and also so she could retrieve Hightower and put him back into play.
He went on to tell the DDO about Zoya’s thoughts that Shrike Group was creating false linkage between a Quds cell operative and the Iranian embassy.
Hanley sighed loudly. “What’s our next play? Berlin station is burned by PowerSlave.”
Court replied, “I’m going to go find Annika Dittenhofer, and I’m going to get her to lead me to Mirza.”
“How are you going to get her to—”
“I’ll give her five seconds to talk, and then I’ll start breaking bones.”
“Violator, you are not healthy enough to—”
“I’m fine. I’ve been getting a little treatment.”
Hanley paused on hearing this, but not for long. “Approved. Whatever you have to do.”
“Solid copy, boss. By the way, I guess congratulations are in order.”
“For what?”
“General Rajavi. You put a warhead on his forehead this morning. Well done.”
“Yeah, but this wasn’t just a regular drone hit. We knew there would be implications. The president wanted the motherfucker dead, so I killed the motherfucker, but I knew we’d be paying for it for a long time.”
“Was it the right call, then?” Court asked.
Hanley snapped back at him a little. “You’d have killed him, too, if you had him in your rifle sights.”
“Yeah, I would have, but I’m not always smart.”
“I hear you. Truth is, we might have just kicked the shit out of a bees’ nest in our backyard. One full of bees that might have stung us once or twice each summer, pissing us off, but not really hurting us.”
Court said, “Yeah, but in this case, you didn’t destroy the hive, you just broke it open. Now we are standing here in the backyard asking ourselves if the bees are gonna be mad.”
“Fuck yeah, they’re gonna be mad,” Hanley replied. “And that’s why your work is crucial. With Zoya out of it, Shrike is a loose cannon.”
Court hesitated, then said, “There is something you aren’t telling me about all this, isn’t there, Matt?”
There was a short pause. “Isn’t there always?”
“Jesus, you don’t even try to sugarcoat it anymore, do you?”
“You are too smart for that. I’m giving you everything you need to know to do your job. Find Dittenhofer.”
Court hung up with Hanley, slipped his phone into his pocket, and winced with the movement. His right biceps stung like hell when he used it, and he’d had no concept of how often he used it until it got slashed open this morning.
He had Annika’s home address in Kreuzberg, but he doubted she would be there, especially after the death of Ennis this morning, along with the death of the German intelligence agent following Zoya the previous evening.
He also doubted Dittenhofer would be at the Shrike Group office. He’d driven by the Potsdam building and found it all but boarded up. He saw no vehicles in the parking lot and no lights on in the windows.
No, he realized he needed to approach finding her from another angle.
Clark Drummond had told Court that he always met Miriam at the same Tunisian coffee shop, Ben Rahim, near Alexanderplatz. It was common for intelligence officers to meet an agent in the same place. Court had no illusions that she met others there, however, and since Drummond had also described the woman as a very skilled intelligence operative, he figured she was too smart to conduct clandestine meetings in a place she frequented on her personal time. And even if she had frequented Ben Rahim, now that the man she’d met there had been exposed to compromise, he doubted she’d go back.
But Drummond’s small shred of intel did give him an idea. From a search of the Internet the evening before he’d located four other highly rated Mediterranean coffee shops, all within a couple miles of Ben Rahim.
His thinking was that the highly specific coffee served at Ben Rahim insinuated that Miriam liked Mediterranean or Middle Eastern coffees, and while she might steer clear of one establishment because of the Drummond compromise, she might not feel the need to go cold turkey on her beverage of choice for the sake of operational security.
This was thin, he knew, but he was playing a hunch, and that was all he had to go on. He popped an Adderall and a pair of hydrocodone, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and headed downstairs to his bike.
Between four and five p.m., Court entered all four establishments he’d pegged as being similar enough to the Tunisian café where Drummond always met with Miriam, and in each location he’d ordered a drink, sat at a table near a plant or a corner or some knickknack on the wall, and then, careful to remain clandestine, he placed a tiny wireless camera that had been given to him by Berlin station. Once each one was set, he looked at an app on his phone and judged the video coverage displayed, then moved the camera via swipes on his screen, either left, right, up, or down.
The last location he cammed up was Café Latrio, a Mediterranean coffee shop and deli only a few minutes away from Ben Rahim. He planted his device high on a small decorative bookshelf while feigning a search for something to read. He then sat back down, finished his Turkish coffee, and headed back to his safe house.
At six p.m. a woman using the passport of American Virginia resident Stephanie Arthur boarded an Iberia Airline flight at Schönefeld Airport, beginning thirteen hours of travel to South America.
Zoya had a lot to do between now and then, but she knew Court needed the support that she couldn’t give him.
She owed him that much. In truth, she realized that despite the lingering bad blood between the two of them, she owed him everything.
Keith Hulett, call sign Hades, followed his target through Berlin’s Gesundbrunnen station, following along through the flux of workers heading home during rush hour.
The man he was after today was well into his forties; he wore a black turtleneck and carried a leather folio over a shoulder, and his wire-rimmed glasses made him look, to Hulett, like some sort of Middle Eastern college professor.
All he knew about the man was what he looked like and what streetcar he would disembark from in front of the station on his way to his train to his home in Neuenhagen.
And he knew it was his team’s job to kill him.
The target stepped onto the train. Apollo, Mars, and Thor were already on board, and Hades climbed in last.
The plan had been to tail the man back to his house and do him there, or on the street close to his home.
But the plan changed when their target stood from his seat and headed out to the bathroom between two train cars.
Mars came over Hades’s earpiece. “Looks like an opportunity.”
“Roger that,” Hulett replied. “Who is closest?”
“You and Thor.”
“Okay, when he gets out of the head, we knock him out. We break his neck and roll him out of the train onto the tracks. It’ll look like he fell or jumped and got run over.”
The two Americans positioned themselves outside the bathroom, reached inside their coats, and each pulled a set of brass knuckles they’d made out of bicycle chains. They put the weapons on their hands and then, when the door opened, both men dove on the man in the wire-rimmed glasses, bashing him in the side of the head over and over.
In the end, they didn’t have to break his neck. He was dead in less than ten seconds from massive blunt-force trauma.
They hefted him up, opened the door to the train, and rolled him out, down a shallow, rock-strewn ravine.
Their mission accomplished, both men started back for their seats, but Thor took Hades by the arm. “Shit, boss,” he said, nodding towards the open bathroom. “Blood.”
Hades spent the next ten minutes in the locked toilet, wiping blood with every piece of toilet paper he could find, splashing water around the enclosed space, even taking his sport coat off and ripping out the inner liner, giving him more fabric with which to clean.
When the train hit its next stop, Hades left the bathroom and was first out the door and down to the platform. A light rain had begun to fall, but he and the rest of his team walked through it in the crowd, the men behind Hades watching to make certain no one was following their leader.
By the time they climbed into a taxi for the drive back to the safe house, they told themselves they were in the clear, and they’d eliminated another terrorist.
Yesterday they had both killed a man and lost a man. Today, in contrast, was a win, though Keith Hulett knew he wouldn’t be satisfied until he found Court Gentry in his gunsights again.
Next time, he vowed to himself, he would take the fucking shot.