The Gray Man

NINE

Gentry allowed himself to admit that his fortunes seemed to be changing. After limping northward towards the Turkish border for less than an hour, he was picked up by a patrol of local Kurdish police. The Kurds in northern Iraq love Americans, especially American soldiers, and from his tattered uniform and injuries, they presumed him to be an American Special Forces operator. Court did nothing to dissuade them of this assumption. They drove him into Mosul and cleaned him up and rebandaged his leg wound in a clinic built by the U.S. government. Within seven hours of dropping from the ass of an airplane without a parachute on his back, the American assassin found himself dressed in pressed slacks and a linen shirt, boarding a commercial aircraft bound for Tbilisi, Georgia.

The improvement in his circumstances was not due entirely to luck. One of Court’s fallback plans involved him finding his own way out of Iraq, and to prepare himself for this eventuality, he’d sewn a forged passport, forged visas for Georgia and Turkey, cash, and other necessary documents into the legs of his pants.

No, Gentry benefited from a little luck from time to time, but he did not rely on it. He was nothing if not a man prepared.

After passing through Georgian customs with a Canadian passport identifying himself as Martin Baldwin, freelance journalist, he bought a ticket to Prague, Czech Republic. The five-hour flight was nearly empty, and Court landed at Ruzyne Airport just after ten in the evening.

He knew Prague like the back of his hand. He’d worked a job here once and often used the neighboring suburbs as a place to hide out.

After a cab and a metro ride, he walked through the cobblestone streets of the Stare Mesto District, then checked into a tiny attic hotel room a quarter mile from the Vltava River. After a long, soaking shower, he had just sat down to redress his thigh when the satellite phone in his new backpack began to beep.

Court checked it, saw that Fitzroy was calling, and continued to work on the gunshot wound. He’d talk to Don in the morning.

Gentry was understandably pissed about the extraction team turning on him.

He didn’t even entertain the possibility that Sir Donald himself had ordered his men to kill him. No, he was angry because Fitzroy’s operation was obviously compromised to the degree that the Nigerians were able to infiltrate a mission in progress and almost succeed in turning his rescuers into his executioners. Fitzroy had been strongly against Court going through with the hit on Abubaker after the death of the paymaster, and now Gentry wondered if Fitzroy had put together a half assed support structure for the op as a way to show his disapproval.

Fitzroy’s organized support structure was called the Network, and the Network was Gentry’s only lifeline in the field. It was made up of legitimate doctors who would patch up a wounded man, no questions asked, legitimate cargo pilots who would take a stowaway on board without looking over the gear on his back, legitimate printers who could alter documents. The list went on and on, grew over time. Gentry used the Network as little as possible, much less than the other men in Fitzroy’s stable. The Gray Man was, after all, a high-speed, low-drag operator. But everyone who works in Gentry’s arduous profession needs a little help from time to time, and Court was no different.

Gentry had worked for Fitzroy for four years, beginning within a few months of the night the CIA indicated that they no longer required the services of their most experienced and successful man hunter. Court thought back to the night. The indication of their dissatisfaction was followed immediately by a bomb in his car, a hit squad in his apartment, and an international arrest warrant processed from the Justice Department, distributed through Interpol to every law enforcement agency on the planet.

At that time, Gentry was desperate for work to fund his life in hiding from the U.S. government, so he contacted Sir Donald Fitzroy. The Englishman ran a seemingly aboveboard security business, but Gentry had had dealings with the black side of Cheltenham Security Services when performing hits and renditions with the CIA’s Special Activities Division, so it was a natural place for the recently unemployed gunman to seek work.

Since then, he had become something of a star in the world of private operators. Although virtually no one knew his real name, or the fact that he worked for Fitzroy, the Gray Man had become a legend amongst covert operators across the Western world.

As with any legend, many of the details were enhanced, enriched, or wholly fabricated. One of the details of the myth of the Gray Man that was true, however, was his personal ethic to only accept contracts against targets that he felt had earned the punishment of extrajudicial execution. This was entirely novel in the world of killers for hire, and though it enhanced his reputation, it also caused him to be extremely choosy about his operations.

Gentry took the toughest of the tough ops, went into bandit country alone, faced legions of enemies, and built a reputation and a bank account that was un rivaled in his admittedly low-profile industry. In four years he had satisfactorily performed twelve operations against terrorists and terrorist paymasters, white slavery profiteers, drug and illegal weapons runners, and Russian Mafia kingpins. Rumor had it he’d already made more money than he could ever need, so the inference was that he did what he did for the purpose of righting wrongs, protecting the weak, making the world a better place through the muzzle of his gun.

The myth was a fantasy, not reality, but unlike most fantasies, the man at the center of this one did exist. His motivations were complex, not the comic-book stimuli that had been ascribed to him, but at his core he did consider himself one of the good guys.

No, he didn’t need the money, nor did he have a death wish. Court Gentry was the Gray Man simply because he believed there existed bad men in this world who truly needed to die.

Lloyd and his two Northern Irish henchmen put Fitzroy into a LaurentGroup limousine and motored through the city in a driving rain. There was no conversation. Fitzroy sat quietly, holding his hat in his hands between his knees, looking out the window into the rainy night like a beaten man. Lloyd worked his mobile phone, making and taking call after call, constantly checking in with Riegel, who was contacting men all over the globe to set their rushed plan into motion.

The limo arrived at LaurentGroup’s UK subsidiary just after one in the morning. The French corporation’s local office was housed in a three-building campus in Fulham. Lloyd, his men, and their cargo rolled through the front gates, past two rings of guards and guns, and down a road towards a single-story structure alongside a helipad.

“This will be home for a while, Sir Donald. I apologize if it’s not up to the standards of that to which you are accustomed, but at least you won’t go wanting for company. My men and I will not leave your side until we get everything settled and we can take you back to Bayswater Road and put you right back where we found you with a pat on your bald head.”

Fitzroy said nothing. He followed the entourage through the rain into the building and down a long hallway. He passed two more men in suits standing in a little kitchen, and he immediately identified them as plainclothes security officers. For a moment Fitzroy had a flicker of hope, and it showed on his face.

Lloyd read his thoughts. “Sorry, Sir Donald. These are not your boys. A couple of heavies from our Edinburgh office. These Scotsmen hold allegiance to me, not you.”

Fitzroy continued down the hall. He mumbled, “I know a thousand chaps like that. Those blokes hold no allegiance. They’re in it for the money, and they will turn on you if the price is right.”

Lloyd waved a card key over a reader alongside the last door in the hall. “Well, then, lucky for me I pay so well.”

It was a large conference room, with an oak table and high-backed chairs, the walls lined with flat screen monitors, computers, and a big LCD display showing a map of western Europe.

Lloyd said, “Why don’t you take the head of the table? Considering your knighthood, I apologize we couldn’t arrange something round for you. I’m afraid oval was the best we could manage.” The American chuckled at his own joke.

The two Scottish security men took places near the door, and the Northern Irishmen found corners in which to stand. A thin black man in a chestnut brown suit entered and sat at the table with a bottle of water in front of him.

“Mr. Felix works for President Abubaker,” Lloyd explained. It was far short of an introduction. “He’s here to verify we kill the Gray Man.”

Mr. Felix nodded to Fitzroy from across the table.

Lloyd conferred with a young man with a ponytail and a nose ring whose thickly rimmed glasses reflected the light from the computers on the desk in front of him. He looked up to Lloyd and whispered.

Lloyd turned to Sir Donald. “Everything is on schedule. This man will be in charge of all communication between the watchers, the hunters, and myself. We will call him the Tech.”

The young man stood and proffered a hand politely, as if he had no idea he was being introduced to a kidnapping victim.

Fitzroy turned away.

Just then the Tech took a call in his headset. He spoke softly to Lloyd in a British accent.

Lloyd replied, “Perfect. Get assets there immediately. Pin down his location.”

Lloyd smiled at Fitzroy. “It was time I had a little luck. Gentry was spotted in Tbilisi, boarding a plane to Prague. The flight has already landed, so we can’t tail him from the airport, but we have men checking the hotels. Hopefully, we’ll have a hit team there waiting for him when he gets up in the morning.”

An hour later Lloyd sat at the table opposite Fitzroy. The lights were dimmed, and the Tech placed a backlight behind the American. A camera on the ceiling spun under motor power to face him. A monitor displayed a silhouette of Lloyd so obscured that the young attorney had to lift his arm in the air in a wave to be sure he was looking at himself in real time.

Next, one by one, LCD screens along the wall across the table came to life. At the bottom of each screen were a title and the local time. Luanda, Botswana, was first online. Four men sat in a conference room similar to the one in England. They were backlit and in silhouette, similar to Lloyd. Then Jakarta, Indonesia, came up. This time, there were six dark figures sitting shoulder to shoulder at a table and looking at a monitor. Then Tripoli, Libya. A minute later Caracas, Venezuela; Pretoria, South Africa; and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia all illuminated simultaneously. Within the next five minutes the feeds from Albania, Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, and Bolivia were up and running. Freetown, Liberia, took another minute for the Tech to patch through. Finally the transmission from South Korea appeared. A single Asian man sat alone at a desk.

These were the government kill teams Kurt Riegel had arranged for the hunt. Riegel had already spoken to the head of each team’s agency, so he declined speaking to the operators directly. That was Lloyd’s job. As Riegel had said, he was just helping with arrangements and consultation.

Before the audio came online, Lloyd called across the room to the Tech, “Where are the rest of the Koreans?”

The Tech checked a paper on his desk quickly. “They just sent one guy. Don’t guess it will matter. All in all, there are over fifty men total on the twelve teams.”

The Tech next assured Lloyd his voice would be altered with both hardware and software to make it completely unrecognizable.

After a final moment for the Tech to check the audio link with the translators sitting off camera in each location that needed them, Lloyd cleared his throat, his silhouette brought a hand to his mouth and then lowered it.

“Gentlemen, I know you have been briefed in general about the mission we have for you. It’s very simple, really. I need a man found, but that is not your problem. I have nearly one hundred pavement artists either on call or already on the job combing the area of operations at this very moment. Once found, I will need this man neutralized. This will be your objective.” The image in the monitors at the twelve remote locations changed. A color photo of a clean-shaven Court Gentry in a sport coat and wire-rimmed glasses appeared on the screen. Lloyd had taken it from a forged passport in his CIA file. “This is the Gray Man, Court Gentry. The photograph before you is five years old. I am afraid I do not know how he might have changed his appearance. Don’t let his normalcy fool you. He was the best scalp hunter who ever worked for the CIA.”

Someone mumbled something in Spanish. Lloyd understood only one word: “Milosevic.”

“Yes, I thought some of you may already know this man by his reputation. Rumors abound regarding his operations. Some say he killed Milosevic, some say he did not. Some say he was responsible for the events in Kiev last year… Most reasonable minds recognize that to be impossible. Nevertheless, I know enough about specific jobs that he has carried out, both working for the U.S. government as well as his private work, to assure you Mr. Gentry is the most formidable singleton operator you will ever encounter.”

A new disembodied voice spoke. “Looks like a faggot.” From the accent, Lloyd immediately turned his attention to the South African feed.

Lloyd’s altered voice reverberated through the speakers. “He will be the faggot who walks right up to you and slips an ice pick between your ribs, pops your lung, and stands above you while you choke to death on your own blood.” There was anger in the American lawyer’s voice. “You kill him, and then you can tell me what a fucking joke he is. Until you kill him, you keep your goddamn juvenile comments to yourself.”

The South African feed fell silent.

Lloyd continued, still glaring at the silhouettes in Pretoria. “The Gray Man is trained in long-distance sniping, in close quarters battle, in edged weapons, Krav Maga, the martial art used by Israeli Special Forces. He can kill with a long gun, a short gun, or no gun at all. He can take you out from a mile away, or you can die with his breath in your ear. He has extensive training in explosive ordnance and even poisons. There was a rumor going around the CIA that once in Lahore, Pakistan, he used a blowgun to take down a target in a restaurant, while he went unnoticed by the target’s security detail.” Lloyd paused for effect. “Gentry was at the next table. Kept right on eating his meal as the target dropped dead.

“As soon as we finish here, you will all board aircraft. We will send a dozen teams in a dozen planes to a dozen airports along the route we expect Gentry to take across Europe in the next forty-eight hours. I will oversee and coordinate the activities from here, and I will pass on any intelligence I may be able to obtain. Each team that takes part in the hunt and survives will be paid one million dollars plus any expenses incurred. The team that kills Gentry will be paid a bonus of twenty million dollars.”

“What’s America going to do if we kill him?” asked a man with a booming African voice.

Lloyd turned to the Liberian feed, but he was not certain. “This has been addressed by the leaders of your organizations. This man is already marked for death by the U.S. government. There is shoot-on-sight sanction at the CIA. He has no friends, no close family. No one on this earth will cry for him when he dies.”

Next someone spoke in an Asian language. When he finished, a translator asked, “Where is he now?”

“He flew to Prague last night. I have our agents asking around at hotels for him, but there is no way to know if he is still there.”

“Which team is being sent to Prague?” someone asked.

“The Albanians. They are closest.”

“That’s hardly fair!” shouted a South African.

Lloyd, in silhouette, took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “No offense to the Albanians, but I don’t think the first team he encounters will be the one that gets him.”

There was grumbling on the Albanian feed, but it was quickly extinguished with hisses.

“We will kill Gentry in the next two days, yes. But we will likely do it through attrition. Many of you may die.” He paused a beat, a halfhearted attempt to act like he gave a shit. “That said, we don’t know that the Albanians will get the first crack at him. He may well have moved west by the time your plane lands. If that is the case, if we do pick up his trail past Prague, we will put you back on your plane, and you will take up a new ambush point closer to the final destination. There is no clear advantage to being farthest east, I assure everyone.”

Lloyd sat up straighter in his chair. His silhouette appeared thin but athletic. “Let me finish by saying this. Do what it takes to get the job done. I could not possibly care less about collateral damage. If you can’t stomach a few dead kids or dead pensioners or dead puppy dogs, then don’t get on my goddamn airplane. Your job is to kill Court Gentry. Do that, and you will make millions for your organization and garner the thanks of the Central Intelligence Agency. Fail, and you will most likely die by his hand. You would be well served to avoid worrying about anything else.

“Any questions?”

There were none.

“Then, gentlemen… game on.”

At four fifteen in the morning a LaurentGroup security officer from the firm’s massive truck farm in Brno, Czech Republic, showed Gentry’s photo to a sleepy hotel desk clerk at a narrow four-story inn in the Stare Mesto, the old town of Prague. The old man behind the hotel counter looked at the photo for a long time, said he could not be sure, but upon taking payment of five hundred crowns from the beady-eyed stranger, he changed his tone. He was certain the clean-shaven man in the picture and the bearded tourist in his attic room were one in the same.

The surveillance agent called Lloyd immediately. He was an employee of LaurentGroup, and Lloyd was under strict orders to keep company people away from any direct action, so Lloyd instructed him to go home.

“A team is on the way,” Lloyd said.

“If you need him dead, I’ll do it for one hundred thousand crowns.”

Lloyd chuckled into the phone. “No, you won’t.”

“Are you saying I can’t handle—”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“Fucking Americky prick.”

“I’m the fucking Americky prick who just saved your worthless Czech life. Go home. Forget. You will receive a bonus for your good work.”

“I hate Americans.”

Lloyd laughed out loud as the line went dead.