The Gray Man

TWENTY

Riegel took the call at eleven thirty-eight in the morning.

“Sir, Kruger again. Gentry has been taken off the train at a little village called Marnand. Not a scheduled stop.”

“Taken off by who?”

“Municipaux. He’s cuffed and just sitting on the platform, surrounded by the police. I heard one of the cops calling for a transport wagon to be sent up from Lausanne. It should take no more than thirty minutes.”

“Did you get off the train as well?”

“No other passengers were allowed off. I’ll disembark in Lausanne and go directly to the police station, wait for him to arrive.”

Riegel stared at a map on his computer as he hung up and called Lloyd. “Tell the Venezuelans Gentry’s in Marnand, about thirty kilometers north of Lausanne. The police have him.”

The American answered back immediately. “They can’t have him! We need him!”

Riegel looked across his desk. The heads of a dozen brilliant animals, trophies of his hunts, stared back at him. He said, “I know that. Tell the Venezuelans they are weapons free. They can destroy whoever gets in their way.”

“Now we’re talking! Are they any good?”

“They are from the General Intelligence Office, Hugo Chavez’s secret police. They are the best Caracas has to offer.”

“Right. Are they any good?”

“We’ll know soon enough, won’t we?”

Gentry sat shivering on a wooden bench on the one platform of the small train station. His left hand had been cuffed to the bench’s iron armrest. Five municipal cops stood around him in the light snowfall; the rest had stayed on the train.

He’d gotten the idea that his description had been distributed after the morning ruckus in Guarda. He guessed the stolen bike showing up at the train station in Ardez earned the ticket girl a questioning by the police. She would have remembered a foreigner on the first train to Zurich that morning. Zurich being the main transportation hub in the tiny nation, it was just a matter of alerting every cop to check every train, bus, and aircraft out of Zurich for a brown-haired male in his thirties traveling alone.

The sign on the platform said Marnand. He had no idea where this burg was on the map, but his body felt like he may have gotten a couple of hours of sleep, so he suspected he was not far from Geneva. He had to find a way to get free from these guys and get back on the road. In the back of his head a clock was ticking.

The lead policeman sat down next to him. His hair was white like a snow-capped mountain peak, and he smelled of fresh aftershave.

“We wait for a car from Lausanne. They take you to the station. Detectives come and talk to you about the fight in Guarda and the gun you have on train.”

“Yes, sir.” Gentry was trying on the friendly approach now, his strategy blowing around like a summer wind because he did not know what else to do. It wouldn’t win him release, but it easily could help him get the upper hand with the police, cause them to lower their guard just enough for him to find a window of opportunity to exploit. Still, carrying a gun in your pants in Switzerland was an outrage with nearly the gravitas of mass murder in America.

“Can I go to the bathroom?”

“No. Hold your piss.”

The younger cops around laughed.

Court sighed. It was worth a shot.

Off to his left, down the platform, a two-lane road twisted up and over a rise. The road was wet and clean and black like liquorice, bisecting the white snowfall on the hill. A dark green panel truck was parked high up on the hill, fifty yards from the station’s edge and a hundred yards or so from where Court sat and his police guards stood on the station’s single platform. Exhaust vapors blew out from the muffler, rose into the air behind the vehicle.

Court looked to his right now, still trying to find a way to gain the advantage before more cops showed up. To his right was the edge of the village proper. Gingerbread homes were sprinkled in among more modern structures. Plumes of woodsmoke floated into the air above the homes and dissipated in the gray sky above.

A green truck, identical to the one on his right, rolled slowly out of the village and pulled into a gas station thirty yards from where Court sat. It jolted to a stop in the parking lot, away from the pumps.

The Gray Man decided in seconds that he had just been surrounded.

“Sergeant!” he called quickly to the cop in charge.

The older man was speaking with his subordinates, but he walked over towards Court on the bench.

“Please listen carefully. We have a problem. On both sides of us are green trucks. In or near those vehicles are men who have been sent to kill me. They will not hesitate to kill you and your men to get to me.”

The policeman looked to his left and right at both of the vehicles, then back to Gentry.

“What is this shit you are saying?”

“They will be well-trained killers. You need to move us all inside the station. Hurry!”

Slowly, the policeman pulled his walkie-talkie from his belt and brought it to his mouth. His eyes did not leave Gentry’s. In German he instructed his men behind him to come over.

He switched to English. “Two green vehicles. One to the north, one to the south. This man tells me they are men here to rescue him.”

“Not rescue! Kill!”

All five looked up and down the platform at the vans. There was still no movement from either.

“It’s a trick,” said a young blond officer as he unfastened the retention restraint over the tang of his pistol.

“Who are you?” asked another man.

Court didn’t answer. Instead he said, “We need to go inside. Quickly.”

The lead policeman told his officers, “Watch him. I’ll check this out.” He turned and began walking up the platform towards the van to the south at the gas station.

“Sergeant! You really do not want to do that.” Court called out but was ignored by the silver-headed policeman in the heavy coat.

The cop descended the platform steps and onto the property of the little gas station. The green van had tinted windows. It sat at idle, steam pouring from its exhaust and drifting away in the air behind.

As the Municipaux officer approached the truck, Gentry spoke to the four remaining men.

“He’s going to die. Don’t freak out; we will all have to work together. If you try to run, they will just gun you down. If you want to live, just do what I say.”

“Shut up,” said one, and all four were looking at their sergeant as he approached the driver’s-side window. He used his walkie-talkie to tap on the tinted glass.

“Don’t forget about the other van!” Court pleaded to the uniformed men standing over him.

“Shut up,” repeated the policeman. Gentry could see their growing concern as their heads swiveled back and forth between the north and south.

The sergeant tapped harder on the glass. As Gentry and the others watched, the silver-haired man seemed to peer closely through the heavy tint. He must have seen something, some movement or other indicator of danger, because quickly the Swiss policeman stepped back and reached down to the pistol on his hip.

The driver’s-side window shattered with the crack of gunfire. The cop backpedaled away quickly, and the door opened. A man in a black jumpsuit and a ski mask slid out from behind the wheel and onto the pavement, a short-barreled machine pistol in his hand. He fired another three-round burst into the sergeant’s stumbling body, and the Swiss officer dropped dead on his back.

All four Swiss cops around Court drew their pistols with technique hampered by panic. At thirty yards an accurate shot would be difficult, but the young men fired rounds downrange as they shouted in shock and dropped for cover.

“The other truck! The other fucking truck!” Court screamed as he himself dropped to the cement. He lay on the cold pavement next to the bench, his left arm above him in the seat, shackled to the armrest.

The cops looked behind them and saw four masked men walking down the blacktop road towards their position. They all held rifles similar to the man at the gas station, who was now joined by three confederates. All eight moved closer with confidence, like they had all the time in the world.

“Uncuff me! We’ve got to get inside!” Court yelled, but the policemen just pressed lower into the cement platform, squatted and ducked behind a wooden push-cart or lay flat in the open, and they fired inaccurate rounds at the gunmen as the men in black approached menacingly through the swirling snowfall from opposite directions.

A bald-headed young policeman shouted into the radio affixed to the epaulets of his jacket. He crouched fifteen feet from Gentry behind a luggage cart that provided him poor shielding from the men on the hill to the north and no cover whatsoever from the men fanned out at the gas station to his south.

Court watched bursts of concrete stitch up the platform, race towards the young cop as he looked the other way and screamed into his microphone, unaware. Each explosion of cement and dust tracked closer to him, until finally supersonic machine pistol rounds burrowed into his legs and back. He spun onto his side and twitched on the concrete. The death throes ceased as quickly as they began.

“Somebody give me a gun!” Gentry shouted. The three remaining policemen ignored him. They fired inaccurately and reloaded slowly with jittering hands.

Court swiveled around on the cold concrete. He put his boots against the iron legs of the bench and kicked as hard as he could. He desperately tried to break the large iron end piece to which he was manacled free from the rest of the twelve-foot wooden bench. The metal handcuff bit into his left wrist as he kicked and pulled. Soon he created a rhythm to his work. A kick with his feet, cracks of the old wood, and searing pain in his wrist and hand.

A salvo of automatic fire hit the window above him, sending broken glass over the bench and onto the ground all around. As he kicked he looked back over to his right. A second policeman had been hit in the shoulder and hip. He dropped his gun and writhed on the cement in agony.

It took over thirty simultaneous strikes with both feet to break the iron end piece away from the wooden bench. On the last drive down with his boot heels, he yanked back with his arm. The pain in his left wrist was excruciating, but the bench broke apart. Gentry crawled to his knees, knelt over the heavy piece of ornamental metal, and lifted it. It was easily thirty pounds and still attached to his scraped and swelling wrist. He hooked his handcuffed arm over the metalwork and hefted it off the platform. Then, in the line of fire from both directions, he ran towards the injured cop writhing in agony in the middle of the platform. When he was still a dozen feet away, he flung the iron out in front of him, down next to the man, and fell with it in a slide. The piece clanged on the cement with nearly as much noise as the gunshots barking all around. His swelling wrist tightened inside the metal cuff.

Kneeling over the Swiss officer, he reached to the man’s midsection.

The cop cried out to his rescuer. “My hip! I’m hit bad in the—”

“Sorry,” Court said as he pulled the handcuff key off the chain on the cop’s utility belt. It was smeared with the young man’s blood. Crouching lower in response to a supersonic whine just inches from his right ear, the American assassin pushed the ornamental iron armrest out in front of him, towards the platform’s edge. He crawled along as he pushed it again.

The injured policeman reached up and grabbed Court’s leg as the American moved away, a pitiable attempt to both seek help from a rescuer and to regain control of his prisoner, as if that were somehow still an issue. Gentry kicked off the dying man’s hand, picked the cop’s Beretta off the platform, and kept crawling. A spray of sub gun rounds chased Court all the way to the edge of the platform, just missing him as he and his iron anchor rolled off. Gentry dropped four feet down to the ground and behind the cover of the platform’s edge. His adrenaline-tinged brain nearly panicked when he lost the key for a moment in the snow, but he quickly dug it out. Rising to his knees, he kept his frozen red fingers steady as he unhooked the handcuff on his left wrist.

Of the five policemen who pulled him off the train, only two were still in the fight. Both crouched behind poor cover on the platform. Not wanting to place his head in the gun sights of anyone who’d watched him drop off the platform, Court moved down a few feet before he peered back over the top. He shouted to the cops, told them to break cover and come to him. One yelled back that he was out of ammunition. The other had a wounded right hand and was firing over a stone planter with his left. From the look of his technique Gentry determined the man to be right-hand dominant.

Movement in the train station caught Gentry’s eye. The few civilians at the station had long since hit the road or hit the deck, so when he saw two men running towards the platform inside the building, Court knew some of the attackers had managed to flank his position.

The door to the platform flew open, and two black-masked men appeared over the policeman with the injured hand.

Court raised the Beretta in his right hand; his left was useless with its new injury. At twelve yards’ distance, Gentry shot both masked men in the face. Their forward momentum coupled with the bullets’ impact caused them to stumble into each other and fall out the door together to the cold platform.

Court’s borrowed Beretta 92 locked open with the second shot. Empty.

“Hey! Slide me that rifle!”

This was the third time he’d called for a weapon. The difference this time, of course, was that the first two times were before the two surviving policemen had seen him at work. The young cop with the bloody hand quickly skidded one of the gunmen’s small black rifles across the platform to Gentry. Court grabbed it and ducked back down.

It was an HK MP5, the most ubiquitous submachine gun in the world. It felt comfortable in the Gray Man’s hands. The American pulled the mag and found it full, with thirty rounds of nine-millimeter ball ammo. He shouted to the injured cop to slide the other rifle to the uninjured man. When the transfer was made, Court said, “Put it on semiauto! Fire one round at a time in each direction! Do that until it’s empty! Do you understand?”

“Oui!” shouted the cop.

“Go!”

In a crouch, Court hurried along the platform’s edge, moving north, closing the distance between himself and the four who’d come from the truck on the hill.

A train was approaching in the distance from the north. Court heard sirens from the direction of the village. He tried to push everything from his mind as he crawled forward alongside the track through the snow. Everything but the men he knew would now be closing on the platform, just around the corner of the cement ahead. His wrist throbbed, and his knees stung from the window glass lacerations he received escaping from Laszlo Szabo in Budapest the afternoon before. The ever-present pain in his thigh from Thursday’s gunshot wound was the least of his maladies at the moment.

Ten feet from the corner of the cement platform, he heard them: men speaking Spanish. Spanish? Was the entire fucking planet trying to kill him? They were tucked down by the steps up to the platform. Though Gentry’s ears rang, he was able to make out the clicking and spring-tightening sounds made by the magazine change of an MP5.

When he stood, he encountered two masked men, also just standing up. Court fired the HK one-handed, fully automatic, at a distance of less than ten feet. Both attackers dropped, and Court fired another short bust into each twitching body. He dropped the submachine gun from his hands and hefted a new one off a dead gunman, then spun around and ran back up onto the platform.

He never even considered making a run for it, though he had the perfect opportunity to escape both the Spanish-speaking kill squad and the Swiss police. But there was a fight going on, Court was already in it, and disengaging at this point did not seem right. A couple of innocent cops were still alive, and they would not last long on their own. As the sirens approached, flashing lights beat off the few remaining panes of glass in the train station. Court Gentry ran back to the aid of the two policemen, his one good arm holding the HK out in front of him, searching for fresh targets.