On target

FIVE

The landing launch cleared the fog bank a half mile from shore. Behind it, lost in the mist, the Lithuanian freighter that had been Court's transportation both to and from the Emerald Isle had already turned to the north, brought its engines to full power, and begun steaming for its home port. Court stood at the front of the small launch, squinting towards the docks of the Gdansk shipyard in front of him. He was the boat's only passenger.

He continued speaking into his satellite phone.

"Paulus, I want to be very clear. Except your commission, every last cent goes to this patient. I don't care how you do it. Just do it."

"That is no problem. We can set up a small trust. Regular automatic withdrawals for the institution. I checked into it as you asked. It is the best establishment in Ireland for people with such conditions."

"Good."

He paused. Court could sense discomfort in the call. "Sir. You understand I will need to contact Sir Donald."

"Go ahead. But since you'll be talking to him anyhow, tell him this. This money isn't his. It isn't mine. It belongs to the kid. He touches it… and I'm going to-"

"Herr Lewis. Please do not threaten Sir Donald. He is my employer. By duty I will be obliged to relay whatever you say-"

"I'm counting on it. I want you to tell him word for word. He touches the account, looks into it in any way, and I will show up at his door."

"Herr Lewis, please-"

"You have the message, Paulus."

"I know he will fulfill your wishes. And I will handle the account as agreed. My standard commission will apply to the funds."

"Danke."

"Bitte schon. Sir Donald is very fond of you, Herr Lewis. I am not sure why you two parted ways, but I hope maybe someday the two of you could sit down and-"

"Good-bye, Paulus."

A frustrated pause. A polite good-bye. "Auf wiedersehen, Herr Lewis."

Gentry stowed his sat phone in his canvas bag. Then he focused all his attention on a new threat ahead.

Court had noticed it three hundred yards out: a large black car on the docks. At two hundred yards he could just make out men leaning against the vehicle, all wearing dark gray. At one hundred fifty yards he counted four of them, could tell they were big. At fifty yards he had them pegged as Slavic, wearing suits, and their car was a limousine of some make.

These would be Sid's boys, here to pick him up and take him for a ride, and this made Court furious. He'd planned on getting off here in Gdansk, losing himself for a few days on the Polish coast, and then contacting Sid via the Ural Mountain Tours Web site when he was good and ready. Sir Donald, his ex-handler, never made him work face-to-face, but these goons, sent by his soon-to-be ex-handler, had no doubt come here on a babysitting mission to make sure Gentry came along peacefully to kneel before the throne of his liege.

"Fuck this shit," Court said it aloud at twenty-five yards. The men were up off the hood of the limo; cigarettes were thrown on the ground and crushed out. Court could see the glint of thin gold chains around their necks. Russian mob boys. Who else? The men stepped up to the edge of the dock, coming to the water's edge to prevent him from running away when the ferry landed.

As if.

Court looked up and down the landing to see if there was any place to run to.

Nope. Shit.

Gentry stepped off the swaying launch and up onto the floating wharf. He stood in front of the four goons. No words were exchanged. The only communication between them was through the looks of five men filled with testosterone, all of them on the job, none of them here particularly willingly. Court's old CIA Special Activities Division team leader, a foul-mouthed ex-SEAL named Zack Hightower, referred to it as "eye fucking," a crude but accurate description of men simultaneously sizing up one another and projecting their own power and prowess through their cold stares.

Slowly Court opened his peacoat to reveal the butt of the.380 Makarov on his hip. One of the younger Russians stepped forward and yanked the gun free of its holster, sneering at Gentry during his backwards draw stroke as if he had discovered the weapon himself. He then patted Court down front to back, pulled a knife from the foreigner's pocket, and slipped it into his own. He looked through the canvas bag on Gentry's shoulder, yanked out the satellite phone and pocketed it, but he did not find anything else of interest. Satisfied he'd disarmed the Gray Man, the Russian stepped back, and with an impatient gesture, he beckoned the American forward to the car.

Court unslung his bag from his shoulder, then tossed it underhanded to one of the men to carry. The bag hit the thick man on the chest, and he let it fall to the ground in front of him; his "eye fuck" stare neither wavered nor diminished.

Court could not help it. He cracked a smile, stepped forward, and scooped it up with a chuckle, then walked to the black limo and opened the back door of the car and climbed in.

An hour later he was airborne. A Hawker 400 light corporate aircraft had been waiting for his entourage at Lech Walesa International Airport. No passports or customs inspections were performed that Court could see; certainly no one asked him any questions or solicited from him any documentation. The Hawker shot upwards through the wet clouds and into a clear mid-morning Polish sky. With him in the seven-seated cabin were the four men who'd picked him up at the dock. They showed him where the food and the booze were stored on the plane, and in broken English they said the flight would only be two hours. They did not tell him where they were headed, but they did not need to.

Court knew. He was being taken to the boss, and the boss lived in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Gentry leaned back and relaxed, sipped bottled water, and listened to Sidorenko's henchmen chat. Court's Russian comprehension had been fair at its peak, a dozen years earlier, but it was extremely rusty at the moment. By concentrating on the chitchat of the men around him with his eyes closed for over an hour, he felt like he was retuning his brain to the nearly impenetrable language.

He was reasonably sure that Sid and his men would have no idea that he spoke a word of Russian, and he thought he might be able to use their ignorance to his advantage in the hours to come.

The Hawker dipped a wing and descended, landing just after noon. Court's assumption that he'd be heading to Saint Petersburg to meet with his employer was confirmed when, upon their descent, he spied the Gulf of Finland out the port side window. He recognized the airport, as well. Rzhevka was to the east of Saint Pete, less convenient to the city center than the main international airport, but Court had been to this airfield more than once.

In the old days, ten or more years before, Gentry had worked as a CIA singleton operator living undercover and alone overseas. Theoretically his missions could be anywhere on the planet, in either friendly or enemy territory, but in practice he operated more or less steadily in the former USSR. Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia, Tajikistan-the CIA had reasons to send operatives from their Autonomous Asset Program into the badlands of the East, tailing and chasing and sometimes even killing traders of weapons or nuclear secrets. For a time it seemed the only things worth selling from behind the former Iron Curtain were the surviving relics of doomsday left behind by the former evil empire, and for a time it seemed the only thing Court Gentry and other Double A-P men were ever asked to do was to head over there, follow a target, report on his activity, and/or bug his house and/or buy off his friends and/or plant evidence to incriminate him of a crime.

And/or kill him.

But those were the nineties. The good ol' days.

Pre-9/11.

He'd been to Saint Petersburg just once since, in January 2003. By then he was a member of Task Force Golf Sierra, the Goon Squad, a CIA Special Activities Division/Special Operations Group paramilitary black ops team that hunted terrorists and their associates around the globe. Court and the Goon Squad flew into this very airport on an agency jet. Part of the team stayed in a safe house out in the countryside while Court and Zack Hightower billeted in a ramshackle tenement a couple of blocks away from the posh hotels on Nevsky Prospect. And then, on their third week in town, the Goon Squad boarded Zodiac rubber raiding craft and hit a freighter leaving the Port of Saint Petersburg. On board was supposed to be nuclear material heading to Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Instead it was conventional weaponry, stuff that went bang and not boom, as Zack Hightower had reported to Langley from his satellite phone at the time. They were ordered to leave the guns behind, to hop off the boat, and to get out of Russia. Perplexing, but it made sense later, sort of, when that very lot of goods was "discovered" in Basra, Iraq, and paraded in front of the media, Russian packaging and all. The ship had been tracked all the way to Iraq and the cargo monitored by satellite. The Marines who found it had been told where to find it, and the embarrassment for Russia nudged them a bit in their support of the U.S. mission there. Not much, really, but a little.

It was politics, and politics wasn't the Goon Squad's stated mission. Court didn't like it, but as his boss, Zack, had said at the time, he wasn't paid to like it, he was paid to do it.

From Sidorenko's airplane Court was shepherded across a hundred meters of frozen tarmac to a black stretch limousine. His minders led him to the front passenger seat. One man said, "You get in front. The back is for VIPs." He smiled, enough metal around his neck and in his teeth to pick up local AM stations. "You are just a P." He laughed aloud, then translated his joke to his colleagues, and they laughed, too.

Court shrugged and climbed into the front seat. The minders, hardly VIPs themselves, got into the plush back. An absurd security violation: Court sat up front with only a late-middle-aged driver, but Sidorenko's security men did not appear to be the smartest henchmen around.

As they drove west towards Saint Pete, Court did his best to retain information about the trip, in case he needed to find his own way back to the airport. He planned on making this a very short journey. Thirty seconds to tell Sid he didn't appreciate being dragged up here, a violation of his and Sid's agreement, another thirty seconds to tell him he didn't appreciate being deceived about the hit he'd just performed, and a final ten or so seconds to tell his Russian handler that he quit, and if Sidorenko's gold-chained, skinhead mouth breathers tried to stop him from leaving, then there would soon be more vacancies to fill in Sidorenko's organization.

But, in the end, it did not work out quite the way Gentry had envisioned.