map ornamentFIFTY-ONE

Court woke before dawn, then changed the dressing on his arm, which he found to be a shame because Dr. Kaya had done an amazing job on it late the night before. Still, a little blood wept through the bandage, and he knew he’d have to clean it a couple of times a day, like it or not.

He didn’t want another infection.

He’d visited the young doctor’s flat just after ten p.m., where he received his transfusion, and she treated his fresh wound with no small amount of frustration that Court was still out there getting himself injured.

When she’d first seen the bandaging, she’d said, “I can tell this was wrapped by a man.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s done professionally, but roughly. You need a more feminine touch.”

Zoya had been the one who dressed his wound. He smiled to himself.

Dr. Kaya didn’t mention one thing about all the news. Court was certain there had been wall-to-wall coverage of all the killings in the center of the city, and she would know, without question, that the rough man who visited her at night to be treated for injuries would be involved in them, but she didn’t say a word.

He felt bad for Azra, but he left her apartment feeling good, then went back to his safe house and crashed for a few hours.

Now, before dawn, Court sat on the floor of his third-floor flat on Bismarckstrasse in Spandau, a laptop open in front of him and the recorded camera feeds of four coffee shops playing out on a split screen. They’d been recording twelve hours already; the battery charges were good for twenty-four, and then he’d have to go switch them out.

Each time a female who looked anything like Dittenhofer entered a café, he tapped a key, bringing all four simultaneous recordings to a stop. And then, invariably, he’d determine that the woman was not the woman in the picture on the floor next to him, and then he would continue his scan.

It was tedious work, but it required constant focus nonetheless.

And then, shortly after eight a.m., he saw a woman fitting Annika Dittenhofer’s general profile enter Café Latrio. He didn’t have a good image of the coffee shop customer until she sat at a table and opened her own laptop. Then, using a function on the app to zoom in on and then sharpen the face, he checked her out more closely.

He recognized her both from the photo Drummond had printed for him and from older photos Brewer had sent along.

She reminded him a little of Zoya; they were the same age, and they both had a combination of soft feminine facial features and focused, intelligent eyes, although Dittenhofer’s hair was somewhat longer and much, much curlier, and her eyes were aquamarine, whereas Zoya’s were brown.

Court shook his head to clear it. Upon further inspection, she looked little like Zoya.

The woman before him had a look about her that said all business, all the time; she typed on her laptop, her ceramic coffee cup next to her, her oversized shoulder bag on the chair at the table.

Getting caught in the open by going to a café similar to the one she regularly met a compromised colleague at was not good tradecraft on her part, to say the least, which meant one of two things to Court. Either Drummond had misjudged this woman’s abilities, or else this woman wasn’t experiencing much or any counterintel threats in her work.

But Drummond had been NSA and CIA; he knew quality when he saw it, so Court assumed Miriam was simply confident Drummond had not compromised her before he died, and she clearly wasn’t feeling any threats from any of her intelligence targets here in Berlin.

Court raced out of his apartment and down the stairs to his motorcycle, hoping he could make it to Café Latrio before she left her seat.

Since the moment Ric Ennis’s body had been discovered in a hotel suite registered to Stephanie Arthur the day before, Annika Dittenhofer and Rudy Spangler had spoken to each other over a dozen times. Annika was desperate to get more information from the police, and Rudy was in full crisis mode himself.

Both of them suspected from the outset that a Russian hit team had come for Zakharova, and Ennis had just suffered the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But this theory had one flaw. It didn’t account for Zakharova’s whereabouts now. Spangler speculated that the former SVR operative had been rendered back to Russia alive, and the operation was a kidnapping and not an assassination plot at all.

There was some evidence in favor of this. The entire camera network at the hotel had been brought down as the operation took place. It seemed like this was a step the Russians would only have taken if they were not going to be able to exfiltrate in a clandestine fashion.

Annika wasn’t sure. She still felt Zakharova could have actually been the one who killed Ennis, although she couldn’t figure out why.

Each time Spangler and Dittenhofer spoke, the owner of Shrike International Group urged his subordinate to stay focused on the company’s mission. Spangler passed down a new targeting list to Dittenhofer, and when she called him this morning, his first question was about her progress.

“The names I gave you. VAJA men. Where are you on—”

“Rudy?”

“What is it?” he asked, his voice nervous.

“I have good news, for once. Haz Mirza received a hard stand-down order from military intelligence in Iran. They disavowed any actions he might take, and they threatened to send men to kill him themselves if he even contemplated doing anything to upset the Europeans.”

“You picked up communications from Tehran?”

“We did. Mirza wasn’t happy about it, but Tehran was very clear in their wording. No attacks are to take place in Europe.”

Spangler said, “That is, indeed, excellent news. I told you, Annika, that something good was going to come of this.”

Annika was dubious. She let out a little laugh. “So far, nothing has come out of our work, other than the fact that we know Iran isn’t going to retaliate.”

“My client is taking our information and processing it, and I expect all the Quds operatives to be arrested in short order.”

“Okay, well, I’m not rolling up my operation. Moises, Yanis, and I are going to stay on Mirza today. Track his movements. We picked up chatter that yesterday he dropped in on a couple of the cell members; they were complaining to one another that he was wild with fury, insisting they would get a green light for one of their operations. This was before he was given the stand-down order, but he sounds like a loose cannon. I’m going to keep tracking.”

Spangler said, “Don’t compromise yourself. After what happened to Ennis and Zakharova yesterday, we need to be careful.”

“You, too, Rudy.”

Annika Dittenhofer hung up the phone, took her empty coffee mug to the counter, then left Café Latrio, anxious to meet up with Moises and Yanis in their surveillance vehicle to see if Haz Mirza was going to meet with any of his people today.

But first, she told herself she should run a short SDR. Normally she didn’t bother; the Iranians were unaware of Shrike and its operation against them, but with the killing of Ennis the day before and the disappearance of Zakharova, she knew she had to up her personal security. Twenty or thirty minutes of random movements would alert her to anyone on her tail, she decided, so she got to it immediately.

Court Gentry watched her leave the café, and he fell in behind her, remaining careful not to underestimate her skill based solely on the fact that she’d fucked up on choosing a coffee shop.

And he was glad for this. He began to notice her taking stock of her surroundings as she moved, checking behind her a couple of times. It looked to be more of an automatic function ingrained in her, and less of a specific worry, but Court knew he could get caught just the same if he wasn’t careful.

But Court was the Gray Man; he walked along unnoticed, stayed behind small clusters of pedestrians, moved diagonally to remain behind a bus stop advertisement when she reached a corner, always keeping something between himself and his target except for brief moments of time. He even crossed the street and moved one block laterally to her to avoid a choke point he’d seen ahead.

After a five-minute stroll she climbed aboard a streetcar and Court hopped on behind her, losing sight of her in the process, but checking at subsequent stops to see if she got off.

She made it three stops, switched trains, and started back in the opposite direction.

She ran an SDR for thirty minutes or so; it was competent, demonstrating to Court that she had, in fact, been trained, though she seemed to be a little overconfident in her abilities, or at least in the paucity of threats to her operation.

When she stepped off the streetcar on Fritz-Reuter-Allee in the gritty Neukölln neighborhood, she glanced behind her briefly, checking to see if anyone of interest got off to trail her. Court waited for her to do this, to satisfy herself she was in the clear, and then he jumped out of the last car just as the doors shut. Dittenhofer was a good seventy yards away by now, but he kept his stroll casual and his head moving, left and right, making sure he had both her in sight and himself in her blind spot in case she turned around.

It took another ten minutes, but the German woman finally arrived at her destination. She climbed into the back of a small moving truck on Gielower Strasse. Long rows of identical three-story apartment buildings were arrayed out in all directions on the block. Court presumed she was here, perhaps with technical staff, surveilling someone in one of the apartments.

He reached into his backpack, pulled out a device, and turned it on. While he did this he walked along the sidewalk, closer and closer to the moving truck.

His face displayed the countenance of a man lost in deep thought; he just strolled by like he passed this way every day at this time, and he showed no interest in anything or anyone around him.

Court had become an expert on planting bugs or tracking devices in plain view. He stepped off the sidewalk behind the moving truck and then, shortly before he came around the side where he could be picked up in the rearview mirror, he bent over without breaking stride and affixed the magnetic GPS tracker just under and inside the rear bumper.

Court continued on into and across the little street, then headed down a pedestrian walkway between two rows of apartment buildings.

He was clear in seconds, and minutes later he sat in a nearby café and ordered a coffee.

He didn’t have a line of sight on his target, but he had positioned himself between her physical location and the closest streetcar stop and the closest U-Bahn station. With the tracker on her vehicle, he had her covered regardless of whether she left via the truck or on public transportation.

He’d like to have an eye on her right now, but in truth, he wasn’t interested in monitoring her surveillance. No, he wanted to take her, to interrogate her. He considered just busting into the van, holding a gun on any cohorts she had there, and pulling her away, but realistically he knew he wouldn’t make it far. He didn’t have a vehicle with him at the moment. His best option, he decided, was to wait for her to leave, alone. He’d look for an opportunity to snatch her, and then he would take her to a dark and quiet place.

He caught himself wishing Zack were here. There was no one on earth better at interrogating intelligence away from a wily prisoner.