On target

EIGHT

Gentry dined alone at a Russian restaurant with no other patrons. He sat in the back, and his minders sat towards the front and turned potential customers away while the waiters sat by themselves and smoked morosely but did not complain. After his meal he was taken to the Nevsky Palace on Nevsky Prospect. The limousine pulled into a loading dock, and five of Sid's men ushered the American through an employee entrance. A staff elevator shot the entourage to the twelfth floor, and they continued down a long, bright hall to a corner room. Court was led inside a junior suite and was told his minders would be outside the door and in the next room all night. They would wake him at seven for breakfast and then drive him back to Sid to give him his answer.

A young man with a shaved head closed the door on his way out.

For a junior suite it was opulent, hideously so, and it had clearly been modified by Sidorenko's men. A large seating area led to a narrow balcony. The telephone was conspicuously absent. A hallway off the living room connected to a large bedroom-again, with no telephone-which was connected to a large, modern bathroom. Court found a massive stock of toiletries on the vanity, enough for a soccer team to prepare for a night on the town. On the bed he found a single change of clothes: a silk tracksuit, multicolored-black with a thick trim of purple and a gold V shape under the velour collar. Obnoxious anywhere in the world except for the countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain.

Back in the sitting room he saw a thick stack of papers, books, and booklets, open and bookmarked and at his service. Presumably Sid had these put here so he could check out everything the Russian mobster had said about the Sudan, the Russians, the Chinese, and Tract 12A in the Darfuri desert.

Court ignored his homework and instead stepped out on the balcony and watched the heavy traffic clogging the road below. He spent a minute scanning the buildings around, squinting down into the streetlights' glare. He then returned to the bathroom. He scooped up a can of shaving cream and a washcloth and slipped both inside the pockets of his jacket before stepping back onto the balcony. Deftly, he went over the railing with one leg and then the next. He shimmied down the ornamental drainpipe running along the wall next to the balcony, descended to the floor just below him, swung twice for momentum, and then kicked his legs forward. Immediately upon landing on the eleventh-floor balcony he could tell the corresponding room was occupied. Lights were on and clothes were strewn about, but no one seemed to be inside at present. Perhaps, he thought, they were out to dinner. The balcony door was locked. Quickly he shook the can of shaving cream and then pressed the button to discharge the white foam on the sliding glass door, concentrating it just next to the door handle. By the time the can was empty, the shaving cream had created a thick covering over the glass the size of a dinner plate. He wrapped his right hand in the washcloth and quickly punched through the thick cream, creating a fist-size hole with an audible crack but without the loud shattering sound of broken glass, as the foam both muffled the impact and muted the clanging of glass on the tile floor. He let the washcloth fall from his hand inside the room and then he reached in and unlatched the door.

He entered the room, checked the clothing in the suitcases and on the floor, and was disappointed to find nothing that fit. Disappointed, but not surprised. Nothing in his life was too easy; rarely did he pull off any scheme without a single hitch. He left through the door of the room and took the hallway to a stairwell. He descended four flights and then walked along another hallway, entered another stairwell, and then exited into the lobby. From here he found employee-only access that led him to a laundry room. No one paid any attention to him as he entered.

Thirty minutes after slinging a leg over the balcony on the twelfth floor, Gentry was dressed in fresh clothing and entering a tiny guesthouse a quarter mile from the Nevsky Palace. Court remembered the place from his last trip here. This was the nondescript hotel he'd stayed in back in 2003 with Zack Hightower, team leader of the Goon Squad, while they waited to take down the cargo ship full of Saddam's guns. Then, as now, it was pretty much a dump, but it was quiet and secluded and at the end of a narrow cul-de-sac that gave a good view of all who came and went.

He paid an elderly lady in euros for one night. She asked for a passport, but he shrugged his shoulders and fanned two more twenty euro notes. She shrugged herself, and took the money. He asked for the second-floor room that faced the street, and she took him up one narrow flight of stairs, past the community toilet, and down a shoulder-wide second-floor hallway that creaked with each step. She opened the door with the key and then turned and shuffled back to the staircase without a glance.

Court much preferred spending the night here, as opposed to being held captive in his suite at the Nevsky Palace, surrounded by skinhead goons. He just wanted to crash, lie in bed, and think about his options as far as making a run for it or working with Sidorenko to get into the Sudan, maybe even return to his suite in time to thumb through some of the documentation left there to help him make up his mind.

Court entered his darkened room and flipped the light switch. Nothing happened. Shit hole. He breathed a slight sigh of frustration and felt his way forward, using the dim illumination from the streetlights outside the vinyl curtains. He stepped around the tiny twin bed and drew open the curtains and turned around to survey his room.

Five men faced him in the low light. Still as statues, they were positioned against the walls, but all were within a couple of steps of the Gray Man.

Court's fight-or-flight response kicked on in a single heartbeat, and he attacked. He ducked low and charged the man on his far right, slammed into him as the big man's arms came down hard on the back of Court's head. They crashed into the wall together. Gentry raised his left leg to deliver a groin kick to whoever would surely be attacking from behind. He connected with inner thigh, not a debilitating blow, and while he brought his right palm up hard for an open-hand uppercut on the man embracing him, he felt an airborne body hit him hard from the right. Court's palm connected with the first man's face just as he spun away, crashed onto the bed on his back, and felt two more men grab his legs and pin them.

With his one free arm he delivered a vicious punch to the solar plexus of a man moving towards him. He felt a Kevlar vest under his dark clothing and knew he'd done no damage.

As he struggled and fought, he recognized plainly that the men attacking him were competent. No, they were damn good. They were fast, strong, and well-trained. More important, they worked together and didn't shout or scream or freak out as they fought him. He managed a solid elbow to the side of a smaller man's head, sending him hard against the headboard of the bed and then off the side onto the wooden floor. But the others filled in the gap left by their wounded comrade in an instant, their body weight pinning his appendages to the bed as he wrestled desperately to get free.

Looking to his left, he saw one of the men had retrieved something from somewhere in the darkness and approached now with careful confidence. Court saw the sharp glint of thin metal, a stubby piece of clear plastic. Even in the negligible light he recognized the outline of the syringe. The needle approached, and whatever noxious goo it had been filled with was on its way to his bloodstream unless he could stop the man trying to punch it against his skin.

Instantly Gentry decided these were CIA Special Activities Division Paramilitary Operations officers, an entire field team, and he knew he was in deep shit. There was a termination order on him. He'd ducked them for years, but they had found him now.

Bound to happen sooner or later.

Court relaxed his left arm for an instant, gave the man holding it down a moment's respite from the struggle. The ruse worked, and Gentry shot his arm down, under the man's grip and to his side. From here it was free, and he jetted out a fierce jab to the needle man's face. The needle man's head snapped back, and he dropped the syringe as he folded back on his legs and grabbed his nose, but the operator pinning his left leg down reached out and grabbed the instrument off the floor, buried its business end into Court's thigh, and pressed the plunger as Gentry tried and failed to kick free.

"Son of a bitch!" Court shouted, not knowing what he'd been injected with but recognizing that, no matter what he did now, he had just lost the battle.

He stopped moving immediately. There was no point. He was as good as dead.

A sixth man entered the room-slowly, but with an unmistakable swagger in his step. Court tried to focus on him, but already he could feel a drug taking hold of his central nervous system. Whatever they'd given him was powerful; he'd worked with poisons and incapacitating anesthetics enough to know that he'd been dosed with a hard and potent sedative. His muscles relaxed; he felt as if his body were melting into the mattress.

The new man in the room leaned over him as the others climbed off. Two of the original five were down; the other three calmly tended to their associates' injuries, while the new visitor to the dark room just looked down on Court with curiosity. Gentry tried to focus on the man, to fight against the growing fuzz from the drugs in his blood. For a moment he thought the face looked familiar, but a wave of dizziness wiggled the image out of his mind.

The man above him spoke. "Hiya, Court."

Through the haze Gentry knew the voice somehow. The man grabbed Court's cheeks and pinched them until his mouth opened. Saliva oozed out past his protruding tongue and down his chin.

"Twenty seconds and he's out," said the man above him to the men standing around. Then he turned his attention back to Gentry. "Predictable. I knew you'd sneak out of the hotel and come here. Haven't you picked up any new travel tips in the past eight years?" He smiled. "Unlucky for you I just happened to remember this shit hole."

He turned back to his colleagues. "Sierra Six never was the luckiest dude around. We used to say that if it were raining pussy, Court Gentry would get hit with a dick."

Sierra Six?

As Court felt himself falling into blackness, his numb mouth moved, and he whispered a single word before the lights went out completely. "Zack?"