Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER FOUR

Tracksuit returned from the bathroom with his suppressed pistol stuck inside his waistband. In his hands he held what appeared to be a Montblanc fountain pen. Business Suit placed a second surgical mask over Tracksuit’s face, then pulled out his phone. Court noted that the man’s pistol was still on the bed, which told him these guys were more than confident in their capabilities.

Tracksuit waved the pen in the air. “Do you know what this is?”

Court lied. He was pretty sure he knew, but his cover identity would not have a clue. “It’s a pen.”

“No. It is designed to look like pen. But, in fact, it’s blowgun that uses compressed air to fire powerful powder that will alter your mind.”

“Heroin? What are you going to do with—”

“Not heroin. Scopolamine hydrobromide. A truth drug. I blow this in your face and you will tell us what we want to know within minutes. Of course, you will be zombie for hours, but that is just side effect.”

Court pushed a crack into his voice, the tenor of a man on the verge of panic. “Je-Jesus! I’ll… I’ll tell you now. No reason to use that shit! I’m just a businessman from Cleveland, here in town to… what are you doing?”

Business Suit stepped forward, raised his phone, and took a picture of Court’s face, then stepped back to the far side of the bed, near the pistol lying there. Court watched while the man thumbed keys on his phone. He assumed the man was about to e-mail or text the photo to someone.

While Business Suit did this calmly, Tracksuit unscrewed the front of the pen. Like his partner, he was as relaxed as he could be. This was just another day at work for the two of them.

Court realized quickly he wasn’t going to be able to talk his way out of this, to satisfy these two that they had the wrong man, or that the CIA plane he’d arrived in was something other than a CIA plane. And Court also knew there was absolutely no way to keep them from sending that picture to Chinese intelligence officials, something that would irrevocably ruin his mission here in Hong Kong.

Actually, there was a way. One way to save the mission. One way to stop this op from falling apart before it even began.

These two men had to die.

Behind the chair, Court’s left hand reached over to his right hand, and he slipped the gold wedding band off his finger. He used his fingernails to pry free a thin stainless steel band that ran around the inside of the ring in a small recess. As he pulled the two-inch-long flexible piece of metal out, it straightened into a tiny metal shim.

The ring had been left for him in the backpack on the plane, along with several other common CIA gadgets from the Science and Technology Division. Court had left the majority of the gear on the aircraft, but he’d taken a few novelties, the wedding band included, because he’d worn such a device off and on for the past decade, depending on his mission and on his alias.

As Tracksuit moved closer, Court used his right thumb and forefinger to manipulate the shim. He’d practiced the move a thousand times, almost always behind his back, though this was the first time he’d done it in the field. He inserted the thin metal shim in front of the ratchet teeth on the cuff, pushing it into the cuff’s main housing. He kept pushing, his thumb turning white with the pressure, until the entire steel shank had made its way in. This forced the teeth of the ratchet out of the pawl, a set of spring-loaded counter teeth inside the handcuff’s steel housing.

With the teeth disengaged from the pawl, he quickly turned his wrist, popped open the cuff on his left hand, and moved the cuff over to his right hand, next to its mate.

The man with the scopolamine blowgun said something to the man thumbing keys on his phone, and both men chuckled.

Tracksuit switched to English. “You won’t remember a thing after this. When we have all the information we need from you, I might get you to order room service for my colleague and me. I could go for a bottle of scotch and a lobster, paid for by the CIA.”

Both Chinese men laughed again.

Tracksuit leaned forward now, just feet in front of Court, and he brought the blowgun up to Court’s face. He only had to press the recessed button next to the clip and the powder would—

Court launched up and to the left, putting Tracksuit between himself and the man across the room. As he rose, his hands came out from behind the chair, and his right hand fired a jab towards the face of the surprised man in front of him. The momentum from Court’s muscular legs and back all added to the power of the jab, and both steel cuffs were wrapped around his right fist like brass knuckles. He drove his punch through the blowgun on his way to the man’s face, crushing the plastic device as well as the nose of the Chinese intelligence officer.

A cloud of white powder from the blowgun exploded into the air, all around Tracksuit’s head as he recoiled with the impact of the punch. Court moved between Tracksuit and the desk on his left, well aware of the gun on the bed next to the other man. Court dove for the bed, right under the cloud of powder, holding his breath as he did so.

He slid across the bed, but Business Suit beat him to the pistol, snatched it up, and tried to get a step back to earn enough space to raise it towards the blur in front of him. He let his phone fall to the carpet as he stumbled backwards against the wall separating the bedroom from the bathroom.

Business Suit was just squeezing the pistol’s trigger as Court rolled off the bed at speed and onto his feet, grabbed the suppressor of the handgun, and pushed it down. A subsonic 9-millimeter round left the pistol at 980 feet per second and scorched the air between Court’s legs, puncturing the floor. Court swung a handcuff-encased right hook that slammed into Business Suit’s temple and waylaid him, knocking him into the wall between the bedroom and the bathroom.

Court heard the sick crack of metal on bone, the man dropped straight down, and Court knew this man was out of the fight for now.

The unconscious man’s hand let go of the pistol easily, and Court snatched it away by the hot suppressor.

Spinning around towards Tracksuit, he first saw the huge cloud of powder hanging in the air. The man was somehow still on his feet, his head in the middle of the gray haze, facing away.

Court shot the man twice between the shoulder blades. The Chinese intelligence officer tumbled over the swivel chair and hit hard against the floor-to-ceiling window, then crumpled down and to his left, out of Court’s line of sight behind the bed.

Court heard the man cough, and it wasn’t the weak, raspy sound of a man who’d just had his lungs ventilated by a pair of 9-millimeter bullets. Court realized the operative must have been wearing a Kevlar vest under his tracksuit. The two rounds had done nothing more than knock him down.

Court began moving around the bed to get another shot off, the pistol high in front of him. He stopped after only a step, though, as the expanding gray puff of toxic dust created a no-go zone in the middle of the room. He could hear persistent coughing and hacking from the man on the floor by the window, but Court didn’t know if the man had his gun out and his wits about him.

Court realized the smart move was to find cover and then fire into the bed, hoping to get a round through and into the man’s head or arms. He backed up quickly, still unable to see his target. He didn’t want to get into a protracted trench-warfare-like gun battle here, and he thought about just retreating out into the hall and leaving the fight altogether, but he had other tasks to complete in the hotel room before he left. Both men were still alive, and there was a photo of Court’s face on the phone of one of the men.

Just as Court made it near the bathroom, a hand with a suppressed Beretta pistol in it rose over the far side of the bed and began firing.

Court dropped low, out of the line of fire, just as the wall to his right shredded with the incoming rounds. Court crawled backwards to the bathroom, looked back out up the length of the bedroom, ahead and to his right, and his eyes locked on the large flat-screen TV on the wall. There he could see the reflection of the Chinese operative wearing the tracksuit. The man knelt low, leaning his back against the floor-to-ceiling window on the far side of the bed, his legs obviously unsteady, and he coughed and shook his head, fighting the heavy effects of the scopolamine hydrobromide. His face was almost completely smeared with blood, like something from a horror film. Court also saw that despite the man’s struggle with the drugs, he kept his Beretta up and out in front of him, and his eyes forward, looking for his target. Court knew if he just leaned inches to his right he’d get shot in the face by this blood-drenched and doped-up asshole.

Tracksuit turned and looked to his left, then locked eyes with Court in the reflection of the sixty-inch television there. He knew Court’s exact location now; all he had to do was stand and shoot over the bed and through the far edge of the bathroom wall.

But Court wasn’t worried about this. He might not have had an angle on the Chinese officer, but he did have a line of sight on the big window the man leaned back against.

Just as Tracksuit reached back with one hand to push his weight off the window to stand, Court pointed his stolen pistol at the portion of the window in front of him, just over the fallen swivel chair.

Court fired at the glass, over and over. The suppressed weapon popped and hot brass ejected, forming a continuous arc that flew through the air till the spent casings banged against the wall to Court’s right.

He pressed the trigger over and over, emptying the pistol into the window.

The window glass pocked, then spiderwebbed, then shattered. Court watched through the reflection of the big television as the Chinese man in the black tracksuit tumbled backwards into the night behind a shower of crystalline shards.

It was twenty stories straight down to the roof of the adjacent building.

Tao shook his head slowly, wondering how long he’d been lying here unconscious. When he blinked to clear his mind, he realized the left side of his head dripped blood that ran down into his eyes. Smearing the blood away with the cuff of his jacket, he saw he was facedown next to the bed.

His head hurt like hell, and he knew he was still dazed.

He’d been out cold during the gunfight so he’d heard no shooting, but he smelled the burnt powder in the air now, and he had an immediate sensation that somewhere in the room a window had been opened.

He struggled up to his hands and knees and began reaching into his belt for a sheathed knife he kept there, but just as he got his fingers on the hilt he felt a pair of powerful hands grab him by the back of the neck. He tried to draw the knife, but it lurched from his hands and fell to the floor as he was yanked up off the ground. His feet kicked in the air in front of him, and in seconds he was half carried and half dragged into the bathroom.

He tried to yell, to talk to the man, to say anything, but his necktie was cinched tight around his throat, his airway was blocked and the blood to his brain restricted, and all the flailing with his arms could not break the hold of the bigger man behind him. He heard grunts of effort but no words from his attacker, the CIA man whom he had so much wanted to kill for sport just moments before.

Tao was dropped to the floor in front of the toilet; he grabbed on to the porcelain bowl and began pushing himself up. He was more disoriented now than when he’d regained consciousness, his eyes completely unfixed after ten seconds of intense choking, but he was a highly skilled operative, well trained in hand-to-hand fighting, so he knew if he could just climb to his feet and spin around to face his attacker he would be able to—

Tao felt the rough hands again, now on the back of his head, forcing him forward and down, and the crown of his head slammed violently into the open toilet seat, just before his face was shoved down, splashing into the shallow bowl of toilet water.

Tao gagged a throatful of water instead of air, and only then did his brain cycle into panic.

Court would have let this man live, not out of sympathy but out of efficiency; it takes more time to kill someone than it does to leave him, and Court had no idea how much time he had before someone else entered the hotel room.

But this Chinese agent had seen his face, and Court knew the man could either report to his higher-ups or even run into Court again on Court’s mission here in Hong Kong. The American had every intention of coming into contact with men like the man he now struggled to drown in the five inches of water in the toilet bowl, but those men he would come into contact with could not know he had deplaned from a CIA transport aircraft. The only way his mission here would be successful would be if he maintained his cover, and the only way Court knew to maintain his cover was to eliminate the compromise of the men here in the room with him.

There was little emotion in Court in the killing of this now-helpless man; there was only the work, the job. The man himself was a non-issue as an immediate threat, but he was a near-term threat to the mission, so Court killed him with all the sentiment of a file clerk operating a three-hole punch to fit documents into a binder.

This was, quite simply, what Courtland Gentry did for a living.

The small Chinese man went limp after nearly a minute. Court couldn’t know if he was dead or just unconscious, so when the muscles in the man’s neck went completely slack, the American lifted the head and drove it down hard, snapping cervical vertebrae against the cold, blood-smeared, and unyielding edge of the toilet bowl.

Court let the man wilt down to the tile floor, and then Court himself fell onto his ass, slipping on the splashed water from the toilet. He crawled back to his feet, quickly pulled off his soaked sport coat, wiped sweat from his face with it, and took a few calming breaths.

This done, he rushed back into the bedroom to pick up the man’s phone off the floor. The screen had not yet locked, and Court’s picture was there, attached to a text message. Business Suit had only had to push the send button and a close-up of Court’s face with a beard and eyeglasses would have been transmitted to God knows where, and there would have been no chance he could continue on with his job here in the city.

But he deleted the image, pocketed the phone to dispose of somewhere else, and searched the gym bag to see if these men were carrying anything else that could help him understand how they knew about him. He found nothing of interest save for a second blowgun disguised as a pen containing the scopolamine, which he started to pocket, thinking it might come in handy later.

After a few seconds he thought better of this, realizing he couldn’t take anything that would tie him to this incident. He slipped the pen into the man’s jacket.

Court changed into dry clothing as fast as he could, and then, just three minutes after killing the second of two Chinese intelligence operatives, he began packing his own bag, rushing to get himself out of there as fast as possible.