Dead Eye Read Online Free PDF Page B

larch. A propeller jutted from the broken tree limbs.
    “What the fuck?” Lev muttered, his flashlight scanning all around the forest, searching for a hint as to where the hell this thing came from.
    Yevgeny did not answer Lev’s question, because he did not know what the fuck. But he did know what to do. He reached for the radio inside his coat. “North patrol to north shack! Something’s going on out here!”
     
    Court moved up a quiet fourth-floor hallway with his pistol leveled in front of him. He’d wiped moisture from the lens of his night vision monocle, and through it he had a narrow, dim, green view of the way ahead over the top of his long silencer, and he saw no threats.
    The intel he had been provided by the Moscow
Bratva
had not given him a clear picture of the inside of the mansion, so Court was doing much of this by feel. Court had been inside another of Sid’s St. Petersburg properties, and there Sid kept an office and bedroom on the top floor, no doubt because he felt he was safer up here. Court decided he would clear the top floor first, imagining Sid’s paranoia would force him to keep the same setup for all of his properties.
    The dark hallway ended at a balcony that overlooked a wide circular atrium. He peered over the railing and, four stories down, he saw a low fountain in the center of a courtyardlike space, along with a few tables and chairs nestled between potted plants and trees.
    Above him, over the center of the atrium, the glass-domed roof, some thirty feet across, was rimmed with ornate iron support beams, from which lights hung. The lights were off now, and only a faint glow of the moonless night through the glass hazed his night vision monocle.
    Scanning the open balconies on the floor below him, he saw two guards one floor down on the other side of the atrium. They sat in chairs by an open staircase. Court thought it likely there would be more men directly under him.
    Gentry had no plan to return to this part of the house, but he took a quick mental picture of the area. If he needed a fallback option, he might well find himself here again, and with no time to get a proper look at the layout.
    This done, he left the balcony and began heading up a hallway that shot off to his right. It was dark here; there were electric lighting sconces along the corridor, but they were turned off for the night. Upon making a turn in the hall, however, he saw a single sconce shining brightly outside a heavy wooden door at the far end of the passage. The rug that ran all the way down to the end of the hall was more ornate than the bare floor of the hall he had just left, and there was an unmistakable scent of wood smoke and incense in the air.
    Court got the impression he was nearing his target.
    He’d made it only a few feet up the hall when a door on his right opened. The muzzle of his pistol swiveled toward the movement, and his finger left his trigger guard and took up the scant slack of the Glock’s trigger safety. At first he saw no one in the doorway, but he lowered his aim and centered his pistol on a small boy, no more than six or seven years old. The boy looked at him with sleepy, unfixed eyes. Behind the boy Gentry saw a child’s bedroom.
    There was little light in the hall and no light in the bedroom, and Court doubted the boy could see the gun or even identify the man standing in the hall five feet in front of him.
    Court knew who the boy belonged to. His intel indicated that Sidorenko, a bachelor, had family who lived with him: two male cousins who were part of his organization and a sister, and his sister had several children. Court braced himself to encounter kids here in the mansion, but he hoped that hitting in the dead of night would help keep them from straying downrange of his gun barrel.
    No such luck.
    “I can’t sleep.” The boy said it in Russian, but Court understood.
    Court lowered his pistol and hid it behind his leg, but his long night vision optic protruded from