The Gray Man (13 page)
Dumb fucking luck.
These assassins just decided to stop in for coffee before taking position outside of his hotel, and Court just happened to be at the café when they got there.
Everything else just fell into place after that.
Court was lucky.
He knew it was good to be lucky. But he also knew his luck could turn in an instant. Luck was fleeting, arbitrary, fickle.
Court scavenged the bodies quickly and without a shred of remorse. He knew the morning’s first commuters would be rounding the corner either towards or away from the trains in moments. Less than thirty seconds after the last gunshot, the Gray Man had collected a Czech-made CZ pistol and a small wad of euros and crowns.
One minute after that, he was back at street level and wearing a canvas jacket taken from one of the men. The blood on his dark brown pants was concealed by the morning’s shower. Through the mist he walked, purposefully but without haste, towards a bus stop near the Charles Bridge. A slight limp in his gait, but nothing else differentiated him from the ever-increasing throngs of people on the street, each beginning their workday commute.
Fitzroy had been offered a small room with a cot to rest, but he refused on principle. Instead, he dozed fitfully in the conference room in a high-backed executive chair. Around his slumped form, the Tech moved from terminal to terminal, and Lloyd made call after call on his mobile. The security men stood both inside and outside the door throughout the night.
Sir Donald awoke at six thirty and was just sipping black coffee when the Tech called across the room to Lloyd. “Sir. The Albanians are not checking in.”
Lloyd had been sitting in a chair across from Fitzroy, drinking coffee and staring at a map of Prague. He looked up at his man, shrugged his shoulders, and pursed his lips. “Hard to do when you’re dead.”
The Tech remained hopeful. “We have no way of knowing—”
Lloyd wasn’t listening. He spoke mostly to himself. “One down. Eleven to go. That didn’t take long.”
Fitzroy smiled behind his coffee cup, and Lloyd noticed this. He rose to his feet, circled the mahogany table, and kneeled in front of Sir Donald. In a soft voice he said, “You and I may seem like adversaries, but we have the same goal here. If you are secretly celebrating the Gray Man’s victory, remember that as he gets closer to his target, the stakes will rise. The quicker he is put in the dirt, the better it is for you, your son, your daughter-in-law, and your precious little granddaughters.”
Sir Donald’s smile faded.
Over an hour later, Fitzroy’s satellite phone chirped. Lloyd and his men immediately went into silent mode. Sir Donald pushed the speakerphone button just after the third ring.
“Court? I have been trying to reach you. How are you?”
“What the hell is going on?”
“What do you mean?”
“Another kill squad just tried to zap me.”
“You’re joking.”
“Do I joke?”
“Admittedly not. Who were they?”
“I’m pretty fucking sure they were not Nigerians. Three white dudes. Looked Central European. Didn’t have time to pull IDs. If they were any good, they wouldn’t have been carrying them, anyway.”
“Abubaker must still be using hired hands. No surprise, considering his deep pockets. Are you injured in any way?”
“Yeah, I am, but not by these clowns. I took a bullet to my thigh in the plane yesterday morning.”
“You’ve been shot?”
“No big deal.”
Lloyd reached quickly for a notepad and jotted this information down.
“Son, there has been a complication.”
“Complication? I’ve had to take down eight guys in the last twenty-eight hours because of some breach in your Network. You’re damn right there’s been a complication!”
“The Nigerians know I am your handler.”
The satellite connection went quiet for a moment. Finally Gentry said, “Shit, Don. How did that happen?”
“Like I said . . . a complication.”
“Then you are in just as much danger as me. It’s just a matter of time before they come for you, too.” There was concern in the younger man’s voice.
“They already have.”
A pause. “What’s happened?”
“They have my family. My son and my daughter-in-law, my two grandchildren.”
“The twins,” Court said softly.
“Yes. They are holding them in France, telling me I must give you up, or they will kill them. Thirty minutes ago they gave me forty-eight hours to produce you, dead or alive. They have teams hunting for you, but they want me to give them intel on your whereabouts.”
“Which you already have, apparently.”
“No, son. I haven’t said a word. You were compromised in Iraq somehow, yes, but a Nigerian agent saw you board the plane in Tbilisi. I’ve told them nothing, and I don’t intend to.”
“But your son’s family.”
“I don’t turn on my men. You are family, too.”
Fitzroy’s face was twisted into a pained expression of disgust at his words, but Lloyd’s eyes widened appreciatively at the elder Englishman’s two-faced ability to simultaneously cajole and betray his top killer. Fitzroy was playing whatever remaining heartstrings his assassin possessed like a virtuoso.
Lloyd knew Gentry’s file like the back of his hand. He knew what would come next.
“Where are they holding them?”
“A château in Normandy, France, north of the town of Bayeux.”
“Forty-eight hours?”
“Minus thirty minutes. Eight a.m. on Sunday morning is the deadline. They say they have assets in the French National Police; any hint of an operation against their location will result in a massacre.”
“Yeah. The cops will be useless. I’ve got a better chance going solo.”
“Court, I don’t know what you are thinking, but it is too dangerous for you to try any sort of—”
“Don, I need you to trust me. Best thing I can do is get there and clean this shit up myself. I need you to get me all the intel you can about their force structure, don’t give up any info on me, and I will get your family back.”
“How?”
“Somehow.”
This time it was Sir Donald’s turn to pause. He rubbed his thick fingers in his eyes and said slowly, “I would be forever in your debt, lad.”
“One thing at a time, boss.” The line went dead.
Lloyd punched his fists into the air in victory.
Fitzroy turned to Lloyd and said, “I’ll get you the scalp you are after. But you have to adhere to your end of the bargain.”
“Sir Donald, nothing will make me happier than calling off my men and leaving you and your family alone.”
ELEVEN
Court Gentry had worked as a private operator for four years. Before that was Golf Sierra, AKA the Goon Squad, and previous to this he ran singleton ops for the CIA. A few steely-eyed agency operatives notwithstanding, Gentry had spent the majority of adult life alone. To be sure, when he was in deep cover, he developed the relationships necessary to conduct his missions, but these interactions were fleeting and based on a bed of lies.
His was a life lived out in the cold.
There had been but one episode in the last sixteen years when Court was not an assassin, not a spy, not a shadowy figure moving into and out of the landscape. Two years earlier, for just under two months, Fitzroy had employed the Gray Man in a capacity completely unique to anything else on his résumé. Court took a post in Close Personal Protection, bodyguard work, to watch over Sir Donald’s two granddaughters.
Their father, Sir Donald’s son, was a successful London real estate developer. He did not follow in his father’s footsteps into the shadowy realm of intelligence; he was an honest businessman, played by the rules. Still, Phillip Fitzroy managed to run afoul of some Pakistani underworld types, something to do with his firm’s lobbying against a municipal proposal that would have allowed more uncertified and unqualified labor on his construction sites. Philip Fitzroy logically argued that it was best for everyone in London if only well-trained workers built apartment dwellings and shopping centers, but the Pakistani mob had been extorting from the undocumented populace for years, and they decided that if more immigrants had higher-paying jobs, they could squeeze out from them a few quid more.
It began with threatening phone calls. Phillip was to back off, quit the lobbying campaign. A fake pipe bomb in the mailbox was found by Elise Fitzroy, Phillip’s wife. Scotland Yard opened an investigation; dour-faced detectives rubbed their chins and promised to be vigilant. Phillip continued his fight against the labor law, more threats came, and the Yard put a car with a narcoleptic officer in front their Sussex Gardens town home.
Elise was cleaning out six-year-old Kate’s school backpack one afternoon while the girls watched television. She pulled a folded page out of an outside pouch, thinking it to be a note sent home from Mrs. Beas ley. She opened it. Handwritten scrabble. Large capital letters.
“Any time we want them, we can have them. Lay off, Phil.”
Elise hysterically called Phillip, Phillip called Sir Donald no less frantic, and seven hours later Sir Donald arrived at the door with an American in tow.
The Yank was neither big nor small, he was quiet, and he made little eye contact. Elise thought he was in his late twenties; Phil put him near forty. He wore jeans and a small backpack that never left his shoulder and an oversized sweater under which Phillip assumed was stashed God knows what manner of obscene apparatus for doing harm to his fellow man.
Sir Donald sat with Elise and Phillip in the drawing room while the man waited in the hall. He explained to the worried parents that this man’s name was Jim, just Jim, and he was quite possibly the best in the world at that which he did.
“What, exactly, is that, Dad?” asked Phillip.
“Let’s just say you’re better off with him than you’d be were your whole street lined with cars filled to bursting with bobbies. That’s no exaggeration.”
“Doesn’t look like much, Dad.”
“That’s part of the job. He’s low-profile.”
“What the bloody hell do we do with him, Dad?”
“Throw him a sandwich a couple of times a day, keep the coffeepot hot in the kitchen, and forget he’s here.”
But Elise refused to treat the man as an inanimate object. She was polite and found him to respond in kind. He never looked at her; this she insisted when her husband asked. “He looks out the window to the street, out the window to the back garden, at the door to the twins’ room. Never
at
me. You and he have that in common, Phillip; you should get on brilliantly.”
at
me. You and he have that in common, Phillip; you should get on brilliantly.”
The introduction of an additional man to the Fitzroy household inevitably caused friction between husband and wife.
Claire and Kate took to Jim. They mimicked his American accent, and he was good-natured about it. He drove them to school each day in the Saab while Elise rode along. Young Kate teased him once about being a bad driver, and he surprised mother and daughters with a burst of laughter, admitting he usually traveled by trains or rode a motorcycle. Within a second his face rehardened, and his eyes returned to the mirrors and the road ahead.
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