On target

ONE

At a pharmacy he bought a pack of acetaminophen tablets and a bottled water. He'd been injured a few months back, a bullet through the thigh and a knife blade into his gut. The pain had lessened by the week. The body had incredible power to heal, so much greater than that of the mind. Court had grown dependent on the pills and injections: Vicodin and OxyContin, Demerol and Dilaudid. A surgeon in Nice had kept him supplied since the operation to clean and close his abdominal wound, and Gentry had popped pills each day since. But he'd purposely left them behind when he boarded the freighter; he'd gone over a week now without his meds, and this self-imposed detox was making him miserable.

The acetaminophen was no substitute for a heavy narcotic, but his mind found comfort in the ritual of swallowing the tablets nonetheless.

Three hours after leaving the boat, he checked in to a Chinese-run budget hotel in a narrow alley off Parnell Street, a half mile north of the river. His room was dark and dank and smelled of mold and frying grease; the restaurant two floors below him blew the stench through the vents. A near-horizontal rain beat steadily on the dirty window but failed to clean it; the oily grime covered the inside of the glass.

Gentry lay on his back on the sagging mattress and stared at the ceiling, his thoughts unfocused. He'd been on a boat for over a week; it felt odd not swaying back and forth, rising slowly up and down.

It took hours to drift asleep, the cold rain unceasing on the pane next to his head.

In the mid-afternoon he sat at the Chinese restaurant in the tiny hotel, ate noodles and pork, and used a store-bought mobile phone to log on to the Internet. He accessed a bulletin board on a Web site that sold adventure tours of the Ural Mountains, entered a password to log on to a forum for employees; with a further code he gained entry to a thread with one other viewer.

Court typed on his phone with his thumb while he drank tepid orange juice.

I'm here.

A few seconds later the tiny window in the phone refreshed. Someone had replied on the forum.

In Bangkok, I trust? This was the code that confirmed the identity of the other party. Gentry's identity was established with his reply.

No. Singipore. Only by the misspelling was the identity check complete.

Nice journey, my friend? came the next reply. Court read it, bit into a fried wonton as greasy as the window in his upstairs room.

He tried not to roll his eyes.

It had not been a nice journey, and Gregor Ivanovic Sidorenko was not Court Gentry's friend. Court had no friends. And it was unlikely Sidorenko, or Sid to all those in the West who knew of him, had any himself. He was Russian mob, an overboss in Saint Petersburg. He ran an organization that controlled illegal gambling and drugs and hookers and hit men and… out of desperation on the part of the American assassin, he now ran Court Gentry, the Gray Man.

While ostensibly in the same line of work, Gregor Sidorenko was no Donald Fitzroy. Sir Donald had been Court's handler for years, ever since the CIA had chased Gentry out of the U.S. with a burn notice and a shoot-on-sight directive. Fitzroy had taken him in, had offered him good jobs against bad men, had paid him fairly for his work, and had even once hired him to protect his own family. But then Fitzroy had been pushed into a corner, had turned on Court, and though he'd apologized profusely and even offered up his life to his American employee in recompense, Gentry knew he could never trust him again.

He would never trust anyone again.

Sid was scum, but he was a known quantity. Court knew he couldn't trust the forked-tongued Russian fuck as far as he could throw him, but Sid could supply access to some of the most lucrative contracts in the industry. And Sid agreed to Gentry's caveat that he would only accept those hits he deemed righteous, or at least those that tipped slightly to the good side of the "morally neutral" category.

Which had led Court here to Ireland.

This trip to Dublin was Court's first op for Sid. He'd read the dossier of the target, agreed to the job, argued online about the low wages offered for the contract, and then reluctantly accepted.

He needed to stay operational. The downtime and the wounds and the drugs were softening him, and he was a man who absolutely could not afford to soften.

Court had memorized the relevant portions of the target's dossier. Standard operating procedure before a wet operation. Name: Dougal Slattery. Age: fifty-four years. Nationality: Irish. Height: big. Weight: fat. He'd been a boxer as a young man but couldn't break out of the thick midlist of local pugilistic talent. Then he found work as a tough guy, a bouncer in Dublin nightclubs. He branched out, did some rough stuff for a local syndicate, slapping around lazy Polish hookers and knocking Turkish drug dealers' heads together for not making quota. He graduated to some low-level killings: gang versus gang stuff, nothing fancy till he was sent on an errand to the Continent. In Amsterdam he'd made the big time, killing his boss's rival in a hail of bullets after using his gnarled fists to bash in the faces of two of his bodyguards.

From there he'd climbed to the second tier of the killer-for-hire trade. Wet jobs in Ankara, in Sardinia, in Calcutta, in Tajikistan. He did not run solo, Court had noticed in his file; he wasn't the brains behind his operations, but his curriculum vitae included some respectable kills. Not respectable in the moral sense; no, he'd reportedly killed a police detective, an honest businessman, a journalist or two. But Court appreciated that the operations themselves had been, if not spectacular, at least competently executed.

But his last hit on file was six years ago. Court couldn't help but notice that Sid's dossier on Slattery went wafer thin after that. A few speculative inferences aside, all that was known about his life since then was that he played the drum in a traditional Irish band that performed five nights a week in the touristy Temple Bar section of Dublin.

Hardly work that got your name scribbled onto a termination order.

Gentry found this to be one of his more morally neutral operations. The man was a killer, but so was Court. Court rationalized the difference; he vetted his targets, made sure their deeds warranted extrajudicial killing. Dougal Slattery clearly did not. According to Sid, the Irishman was now on retainer for an Italian-run international criminal organization. His next victim might well be a recalcitrant prostitute or the owner of a restaurant that failed to pay protection money to the Mafia.

Killing Dougal Slattery wouldn't much improve the evil ways of the world, Court decided, but it certainly wouldn't hurt.

Well, it wouldn't hurt anyone who was not named Dougal Slattery.

Hello? You still there? Sid's previous post was three minutes old. Court had drifted off-mission for a moment. He forced himself to concentrate on his phone's tiny screen.

I'm here. No problems.

How long will you need?

Unknown. Will assess situation tonight. Act at first prudent opportunity.

I understand, my friend. Don't take too long. I have more work after.

There was always more "work," Court knew. But most "work" involved contracts Gentry would never accept. Court would be the judge if there was "more work after." He didn't argue the point with Sidorenko, though. Instead he just replied, Okay.

I look forward to good news. Do svidaniya, friend.

Court just logged off. He shut down the phone and stuck it in the side pocket of his peacoat. He finished his meal, paid, and left the hotel.

In the late afternoon he walked the neighborhoods around Grafton Street. He'd spent an hour looking at the dress and mannerisms of the locals, trying to assimilate. It would not be hard for the trained professional; Dublin was an international city full of Poles, Russians, Turks, Chinese, South Americans… even a few Irish here and there. There was no one look or walk or attitude to parrot; still, Court stepped into a used-clothing shop on Dawson Lane and stepped out with a bag. In the bathroom of a department store he changed into worn blue jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, and a black denim jacket. Black athletic shoes and his dark blue watch cap finished off the ensemble.

By nightfall he was a local, moving with the masses. He ran a security sweep, backtracked, stepped on and off a few trains on the DART-Dublin's mass transit-all to make sure he was not being followed. There were more people in this world who wanted Court Gentry dead than would ever give a rat's ass about Dougal Slattery, and Court kept this in mind, just to keep his operation in perspective. His secondary objective was to kill the Irishman; the primary objective, as always, was to keep his own ass alive for another day. His PERSEC, or personal security, needed to remain at the forefront of his thoughts.

Satisfied he had not grown a tail, he headed to the Temple Bar neighborhood on the southern bank of the River Liffey.

At ten o'clock he sat at the bar at the Oliver St. John Gogarty. Although it was a Wednesday evening, the touristy pub was packed full. Americans, Continental Europeans, Asians. The only Irish in the bar were likely the barmaids, the bartenders, and the band.

Court hadn't spent much time in raucous juke joints in the past few months. He'd laid low in the south of France, lived in the tiny attic room of a tiny cottage in a tiny hillside village and rarely ventured out past the little corner market for canned foods and bottled water. Even his few visits into Nice to see his doctor were tame. It was the winter season; the nightclubs and the kitschy shops on the Promenade des Anglais, always bursting at the seams during the tourist season, were nearly empty or boarded up. That was the way Court liked it. The Oliver St. John Gogarty was anathema to his standard tradecraft; already the female bartender had asked him his name, and two Englishwomen next to him had tried to engage him in small talk. He'd ignored their overtures, sipped his Guinness, scanned the room, wished he had four milligrams of Dilaudid to relax him, and then angrily told himself to unfuck himself and get his head back on this job.

There are two types of people in the world. Only two. Sheep and wolves. Court was a wolf, and he knew it. The past few months had weakened him somewhat, but a wolf was always a wolf, and it had never been more evident to him than it was here at the bar, surrounded as he was by a hundred sheep. No one in the crowd scanned for threats like he did. No one in the crowd had pin-pointed the exits and the fit men in the room and the type of glass in the front window. No one in the crowd had taken note of the paucity of law enforcement on the street or the lighting scheme of the back alley. No one in the crowd knew where to sit so no mirror's reflection cast his image about the room.

No one in the crowd had a plan to run for his life if necessary.

And no one in the crowd had a plan to kill everyone else in the crowd if it came down to it.

Yes, he was in a crowd full of sheep, but there was, in fact, one more wolf in the room. According to Sid's dossier, the drummer onstage was a hard man as well. There were five in the traditional, or "trad" band, and though Gentry was no expert on such matters, from the reaction of the patrons, he supposed they must have been very good. The big man with the white hair sitting on a bench to the side of the stage played a bodhran, a traditional handheld Irish drum. He took his work seriously, kept his head down and leaned forward as if to pick up on the subtleties of the music. He looked to Court more like a middle-aged musician and less like a middle-aged hit man. Maybe it had been a while since he'd worked his "day job." Next to him, a young thin man played a tin whistle into his microphone, the guitarists strummed and sang in harmony, and the crowd of sheep went wild. Court couldn't make out many of the words of the song, but it had something to do with a beautiful young woman and a bad potato harvest and a husband dead from drink.

Court finished his stout and headed out the door.