Free Dead Eye by Mark Greaney Page A

course. If there is any trouble, stay with me.”
    “Thank you, Yanis.” She said it like she meant it. And then, “How are they going to play it?”
    Yanis sipped his tea and, over the top of the cup, he cast his eyes to the apartment building next to the parking garage. “In a moment two sedans will arrive, each carrying three men and a driver. A third van will provide a blocking force at the top of the exit to the garage. The six will go upstairs and effect the action.”
    Ruth nodded. “You wish you were on the team going in, don’t you?”
    “Of course I do.” He said it without equivocation. “I enjoyed that part of my life very much. But now I am the man who sits across the street to watch instead of one of the men who swoops in to carry out justice.”
    “You could still do it, I’m sure,” she said.
    He waved the comment away. “Someone has to evaluate the surroundings to give the all clear. Plus, none of those boys get to enjoy the afternoon at a café with a beautiful woman. They are probably all jealous of me.”
    Ruth just smiled softly.
    He looked at her a long moment. “You feel okay about this one, yes?”
    “Yes. Of course I do.”
    “Good. I know it has been difficult for you since—”
    “Shhh.” She hushed him, then gestured with a subtle tip of her head toward the building across the street. Two gray cars turned into the alley and disappeared. A van pulled in behind them, turned into the mouth of the alley, and then stopped, blocking anyone trying to leave from the alley or the parking garage exit on the right.
    Yanis said softly, “Fifty euros says it goes wet.”
    Ruth shook her head. “Sucker’s bet. It
will
go wet. Somebody is about to die on the third floor of that building over there.”
    They sat silently for a moment; Yanis drummed his fingers on the tabletop. He was thinking about how damn much he missed it, the action going on across the street. Ruth reached out and put her hand over his hand and the drumming stopped, and then she rewrapped her thin fingers around the espresso.
    Across the street a Toyota hatchback pulled out of the parking garage adjacent to the building but was blocked from leaving by the van. The Toyota honked, but the van did not move.
    Ruth knew this, very likely, was the only excitement she would see of the operation across the street. It wasn’t much, but she did not care.
    As she’d told Yanis Alvey, she liked to watch.
     
    Ruth Ettinger was thirty-seven years old, and though she had a clean and bureaucratic-sounding official title, her job description was really quite simple: She was a targeting officer for Mossad, Israeli intelligence.
    Ruth ran a team of operatives on one of several task forces under Mossad’s Collections Department, all given the mandate of protecting Israeli government officials from assassination and kidnapping. In actuality, virtually all of her cases involved threats against the prime minister of Israel, Ehud Kalb, the sixty-seven-year-old ex-IDF Special Forces officer who led her nation.
    Ettinger had never met Kalb, had never even been in the same room as her prime minister, but she had taken it as her life’s work, her one overbearing responsibility, to find those suspected of harming him, assess the credibility of the threat, and then, if that threat was determined to be real, to call in Mossad’s action arm, Metsada, to finish the job.
    Yanis was Metsada, in control of the operators and her link to the Operations Department, and she was his link to the Collections Department.
    Together they had chased terrorists, hit men, and nut jobs all over the globe. For more than five years Ruth had been serving on this task force, first as a support officer, and then as a targeting team leader. Ruth had become the best targeter in the Collections Department at locating, tracking, and assessing threats, and Ruth damn well knew it.
    And then, the previous spring, Rome happened.
    An incident in Rome had turned into a debacle for