The Gray Man

FIFTEEN

Even with his ersatz plugs, Court’s ears screamed from the pressure of the blast. He pushed off with his feet at the bottom of the cistern and shot to the surface. He had no idea who was waiting above for him. The CIA? Laszlo back for a last check on him? Ultimately, it didn’t matter; he needed air.

He’d built momentum on the way up, so when his head broke the surface of the water, he shoved open the plastic door. Both hinges were broken off, and the Plexiglas was cracked through. He sucked in a huge breath of air and scrambled over the side, rolling off the riser and down to the floor, enveloped in a wave of the warm water. He found himself along the wall in the back corner of the room. All around was the sound of close gunfire and shouting men, but Court could see no one around the platform’s edge. He rolled to his knees, into a low crouch, and bolted towards the back hallway, his wet feet slapping the linoleum. He didn’t take time to look back. Whatever was going down in this room, Gentry had no intention of getting in the middle of it with no firearm and no idea who the players were.

The doorjamb to the hallway splintered with a burst of submachine gun fire just a step in front of Gentry’s face. He ran right at it, through the overpressure of the supersonic ammo and the flying splinters, down into the dark hall and to the bathroom where he’d shaved an hour and a half earlier. He ducked in quickly for his backpack and threw it over a shoulder.

Wearing only his underwear and a bandage on his thigh, he sprinted into a small bedroom at the end of the hall. Over the low twin bed was a window with a thin wire grating. He shattered the glass with a metal end table, lifted the mattress and pushed it over the windowsill to cover any remaining shards, then rolled out over it into a small courtyard. A door to the building behind Laszlo’s was locked, so Court ran to the far corner of the courtyard. He used iron security bars over a first-story window to climb his way to a second-story balcony where, after four or five tentative kicks from his left heel, he finally shattered a glass window.

Loud snaps of gunfire continued below and behind him. He took care to avoid the broken glass left in the pane as he stepped through the window, but as he climbed into the apartment, he cut both his feet stepping in on the carpet. He cried out in pain, fell to his knees, and cut them, too.

Crab-walking through the small bedroom, he finally stood, hobbled into the bathroom, and rifled through the medicine cabinet. A few seconds later, he sat on the toilet and dressed his fresh injuries. His right foot was okay, a little jab that he poured antiseptic into and wrapped with toilet paper. The ball of his left foot was much worse. It was a relatively deep puncture. He washed it quickly and cinched a hand towel tight around it to stanch the bleeding. It needed stitches but, Court knew, he wouldn’t be getting stitches any time soon.

Similar to his feet, his left knee was okay, but his right was badly injured. With a wince he pulled a shard of glass from his skin, an unlucky barb at the end hooked on his flesh as he removed it. Blood ran down to the floor.

“Fuck,” he groaned as he cleaned and dressed the gash as best he could.

Three minutes later, he realized the shooting had died down across the courtyard. He heard sirens, shouting, a baby crying in the next apartment, woken from its nap by the activity.

He’d thought the apartment was empty, but when he walked into the living room, still just in his wet boxers but now with wrapped feet and knees, he found an elderly lady sitting alone on a couch. She looked at him with eyes unafraid, bright and piercing and blue. He put a hand out to calm her but lowered it slowly.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said, but he doubted she understood. He mimicked pulling on pants, and she slowly pointed to a room down the hall. There he found men’s clothes. A dead husband, maybe? No, a son away at work. He found blue coveralls and climbed into them, and heavy steel-toed boots that were too big but serviceable with two pairs of white socks.

Gentry thanked the lady with a bow and a smile. She nodded back slowly. He pulled a wad of euros from his backpack and laid them on a table. The old woman said something he did not understand, and with another bow, he was out the door to the second-floor hallway.

Injured, unarmed, with neither means of transportation nor the documents he came all the way to Budapest to acquire, Court Gentry stepped outside and into a steady rain. He looked down to his watch. It was five in the afternoon, eight and one-half hours since beginning his journey. He seemed so much farther away now than when he started.

At LaurentGroup’s London office, Lloyd and Fitzroy waited for the news of the Indonesians. It came after four p.m., but not from the team itself. Sir Donald’s phone rang. It was Gentry.

“Cheltenham.”

“It’s me.”

Fitzroy had to compose himself before speaking. Finally he said, “Thank God! You’ve gotten clear of Szabo?”

“Yeah. Just.”

“What happened?”

“Not sure. Sounded like an SAD field team showed up, Szabo must have had some personal security, and it went loud.”

Lloyd and Fitzroy stared at one another.

“Uh… Right. Understood. How are you?”

“Surviving.”

“Where are you now?”

“Still in Budapest.” Both Lloyd and Fitzroy looked over to the Tech. His head leaned over a computer terminal, but he bobbed it up and down, confirming the truthfulness of the target by pinpointing the cell tower the phone was using.

“What now?” asked Fitzroy. The question was as much to the American on his right as it was to the American on the other end of the line.

“I head west. Everything’s still on track. Do you have any more information for me?”

“Umm, yes. The men you met this morning in Prague were Albanians. Simple mercenaries. Hired by Nigerian Secret Service.”

“They’ve probably contracted a new team by now. Any idea what I’m up against?”

“Hard to say, son. I’m working on it.”

“What do you know about the enemy force structure around your family?”

“Four or five Nigerian secret police types. Not tier-one gunmen by any stretch, though they have my family scared witless.”

“As I get closer, I’ll need the exact location.”

“Aye. You’ll be there by tomorrow morning?”

“No. I have a stop to make first.”

“Not another dangerous detour, I hope.”

“No. This one is on the way.”

Fitzroy hesitated, then said, “Right. Anything else you need from me?”

“Anything else? What have you given me so far? Look, you are my handler. Handle something. I need to know if I am going to run into any more goons along my route. I need to know how the fucking Nigerians found out my name. Found out about you. There is something very screwed up here, and I need as much of it figured out as possible before I get to Normandy.”

“I understand. I am working on it.”

“Have you had any more contact with the kidnappers?”

“Sporadically. They think I’m turning over every rock to find you. I’m calling everyone along my Network. Just to make it look good, you know.”

“Keep it up. I’ll stay away from the Network. Call me if you learn anything.” The line went dead.

Within two minutes Fitzroy and Lloyd had more of an explanation about what had happened. Riegel called, and between the three of them, they managed to put the pieces together. The six Indonesians had been completely wiped out. All dead. The CIA had torched the building to cover their tracks. It was unknown if the agency had taken casualties. Szabo was dead, and Gentry had used another of his nine lives but had gotten free.

“So where is he now?” asked Riegel.

“Heading west from Budapest.”

“Via train, car, motorcycle?”

“We don’t know. He called us from a cell phone. He’d apparently pulled it off a passerby, dumped it just after he hung up.”

“Anything else to report?” asked Kurt Riegel.

Lloyd barked into the phone angrily, “You report to me, Riegel! What happened to your shit hot Indonesian Kopassus commandos? I thought you said Gentry would be no match for them.”

“Gentry didn’t kill them. CIA paramilitaries did. Look, Lloyd, we knew the Gray Man would have some resiliency; my plan all along was for one or two teams to knock him off balance, get him reactive instead of proactive. That way, he’ll stumble into the next team unprepared.”

Lloyd said, “We have ten more teams lying in wait for him. I want him dead before the night is through.”

“Then we agree on something.” Riegel rang off.

Lloyd then turned his attention to the Englishman. A pained expression flashed on the older man’s face.

“What is it?”

Fitzroy’s anguish was unrelenting.

“What’s wrong?”

“I believe he told me something. He didn’t mean to tell me, but I sussed it out.”

Lloyd sat up. The few wrinkles in his pinstripe suit smoothed out with the movement. “What? What did he tell you?”

“I know where he’s going.”

The young American attorney’s face slowly widened into a smile. “Excellent!” He reached for his mobile phone. “Where?”

“There’s a catch. This place he’s going, only three blokes have ever known about it. One of those blokes is dead, one of those blokes is the Gray Man, and one of those blokes is me. I’ll tell you where, but if your little reality show contest doesn’t destroy him there, he’s going to know I’ve set him up. Your chaps miss him this time, and it’s game over.”

“Let me worry about that. Tell me where he’s going.”

“Graubünden.”

“Where the fuck is that?”