The Gray Man

TWENTY-THREE

Court parked the van at the main train station in Geneva, the Gare de Cornavin, located on the seedier north side of the city. Parking at train stations was simple tradecraft. When the vehicle was found, which Court had little doubt would take no time at all, his followers would have to entertain the possibility that he’d just jumped on the first set of wheels rolling out of town, causing them time and manpower to investigate where he might have gone.

It wasn’t much, but parking at the train station at least avoided the obvious “tell” of pulling his stolen vehicle up to the front door of his true objective.

The weather was cold but bright, and the last of the late autumn leaves blew across the wide streets of the city. From the station he walked south, past the afternoon street whores and the sex shops of the red-light district, over the bridge crossing the canal into huge Lake Geneva, passing middle-aged bankers and diplomats heading towards all those street whores and sex shops behind him. Five minutes south of the bridge the wide and modern streets gave way to uneven cobblestone passageways and the chic shops lining the roads morphed suddenly into medieval stone walls as a steep hill rose away from the modernity and towards the ancient, picturesque buildings of the Old Town.

Gentry consulted a tourist map hanging on the wall of a hotel lobby, hid his scraped and swollen left wrist from the Japanese couple next to him, and then returned to the chilly street. Another minute or two of climbing an alley brought him to the square in front of the Cathédrale St-Pierre. There Saturday afternoon tourists stood, heads and eyes and cameras all pointed to the thousand-year-old cathedral’s impressive facade. Court walked behind the two dozen or so sightseers, then melted down a side street that ran along the south side of the church. On his left was a white wall six feet high with a large iron gate in the center. As he walked past the gate, he glanced inside. There was a white house with a small front garden, a large chestnut tree on either side of a narrow walkway to the front door. The trees strained for light in the shadow of the Cathédrale St-Pierre that loomed high in front of them. Court walked on down a cobblestone passage that ran off the little one-lane street, followed the winding footpath through a narrow tunnel that led him down and around to the back of the white house.

Here the wall was two stories high. Modern structures stood alongside it: an apartment building with a nail salon on one side, a nursery school on the other. A few tourists wandered towards a narrow shopping street that ran farther down the hill behind.

Gentry saw the watcher immediately. An attractive woman with long, braided blond hair, she sat at a picnic table in a little playground alongside the shopping street. Court was twenty-five yards from her, but her eyes were on the white house to his right.

Gentry turned, walked back through the foot tunnel, followed it up and around towards the white wall of the white house. There was an iron handrail built into the wall to aid pedestrians with the steep incline of the passageway. Court stepped up on this and, with his good right arm, pulled himself up on the top of the wall. He kicked one leg and then the other over and dropped down, letting his good left leg take the majority of the impact with the ground.

Still, the one-handed climb and the drop hurt like hell.

Inside the small garden, Gentry saw the security system through the glass. He knew how to circumvent all sorts of countermeasures, but this looked too sophisticated for him. He’d need schematics and tools and time.

Court moved low below a window, rose again at a side door. He drew a Beretta pistol he’d picked up on the platform shortly before fleeing the scene, left there by a dead Swiss municipal policeman. He held it low by his side as he tried a side door.

It was unlocked.

He entered a hallway and then a well-appointed kitchen. The lights were off, and he could easily make out the sounds of a television in the next room. The glowing set reflected off a mirror in a hallway on the other side of the kitchen, and Court used the flickering light to make his way.

He saw a pistol sitting on the kitchen counter: a full-sized 1911 forty-five caliber.

An American’s gun.

Gentry crossed the long kitchen carefully. He hefted the weapon and slid it into the back of his pants. His swollen wrist rewarded the movement with a hot jolt of electricity up to his elbow. Court moved into the hallway, rose confidently now, and entered a wide living room.

A plasma screen hung above a large fireplace that crackled with pine logs.

A lone man sat on a leather sofa with his back to Court. His eyes were trained on the television. The language coming from the TV was French, but the images were clear enough to Gentry. Less than two hours earlier he’d stood on that same train platform. He’d spoken to that young policeman who now lay facedown and dead on the snowy cement, the video images catching the moment when a yellow tarp was draped over his still form.

Court holstered his gun. There was no one else around.

“Hello, Maurice.”

The man stood and turned. He was pale and wrinkled, easily seventy and unhealthy looking. If Gentry’s appearance in his flat was a surprise to the old man, he made no sign of it. He stood on thin legs.

“Hello, Court.” American English.

“Don’t waste your time looking around,” Gentry said. “I have your gun.”

Maurice smiled. “No. You have one of my guns.” The old man pulled a small revolver from under his shirt and leveled it at Gentry’s chest. “You don’t have this one.”

“I didn’t figure you for the paranoid type. You weren’t so careful in the old days.”

“Even so, you should have kept your weapon trained on me till you knew I was unarmed.”

“Apparently so.”

The old man hesitated several seconds. The revolver did not waver. “Damn, boy. I taught you better.”

“You did. I’m sorry, sir,” Gentry said sheepishly.

“You look like shit.”

“I’ve had a rough couple of days.”

“I’ve seen you after rough days. You’ve never looked this bad.”

Court shrugged. “I’m not a kid anymore.”

The old man regarded Gentry for a long moment. “You never were.”

Maurice turned his revolver around in his hand, tossed it underhanded across the room to the younger American. Court caught it, looked it over.

“Thirty-eight police special snubby. The other one’s a 1911. You do know, Maurice, that there is no law that says that just because you are old, your guns have to be, too.”

“Kiss my ass. Want a beer?”

Gentry tossed the revolver underhanded onto the leather sofa. “More than anything else in the world.”

Two minutes later Court sat on the kitchen counter. He held a fat bag of frozen blueberries over his left wrist. The cold burned his skin, but it reduced the swelling. He could still move his fingers, though, so the hand was functional, if barely.

His host was Maurice, just Maurice. Court didn’t know his real name, could only be certain that it was not Maurice. He was an old agency man, Gentry’s primary instructor at the Special Activities Division’s Autonomous Asset Development Program training center at Harvey Point, North Carolina. Court only knew tidbits about the man and his history. He knew he’d cut his teeth in Vietnam, performed targeted killings in the Phoenix Program, then spent the next twenty years as a Cold War spook in Moscow and Berlin.

He’d been demobilized for years, working as a trainer for the CIA when a twenty-year-old convicted murderer was brought into his prefabricated aluminum classroom within sight of the Atlantic Ocean. Gentry was both cocky and quiet, raw beyond belief, but in possession of intelligence, discipline, and zeal. Maurice turned him out in under two years and announced to Operation’s leadership that this kid was the best hard asset he’d ever built.

That was fourteen years ago, and their paths had seldom crossed since. Maurice had been lured back into the game after 9/11, as were most high-level retired assets still in possession of a pulse. Because of his age and uncertain health, he was sent to Geneva to work in the finance end of the CIA’s Directorate of Clandestine Services. His knowledge of Swiss banking and bankers, accrued through forty years of utilizing numbered accounts for CIA shell corporations in his operations, made him an effective paymaster for operatives and operations around the globe.

It was easy work — clean, compared to some of the jobs he’d done as a younger man — but it was not without danger or controversy. Shortly after Court had been drummed out of the agency, Maurice himself was cashiered by the brass. Something about misappropriated funds, though Court did not believe the official story for a minute.

The word from Langley was that Maurice was now completely retired from the CIA. Court did not know that for sure, wasn’t 100 percent certain Maurice wouldn’t turn on him, which explained the pupil’s initial suspicion of his teacher.

Maurice handed Gentry a bottle of French beer, so the younger man cradled the frozen bag of blueberries in his lap and let his wrist rest upon it. The stinging cold slowly numbed the ache. The old man asked, “You hurt bad?”

“Not really.”

“You always were a tough bastard.”

“I learned from the best not to whine. It never worked around you.”

“I haven’t seen you in six years. Cyprus, was it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You saw the watcher outside?”

“Yeah. Girl with the braids.”

“Good boy. She’s pretty good, dressed like a tourist. We get a lot of tourists here in the Old Town. I hate tourists.”

“Transitory faces.”

“That’s right. Do yourself a favor, Court. If you make it to retirement, move someplace so damn god-forsaken no tourist would set foot there.”

“Will do.”

Maurice coughed. Cleared his throat. “There’s news floating about. Not connected yet, just bouncing around in the ether, waiting for dots to be connected. Prague, Budapest, and then this morning up by the Austrian border. I knew something big was going down, didn’t figure I knew any of the players until the coverage on my house started about eleven thirty. ’Bout an hour after she showed up, all the local stations began broadcasting the news of the gunfight just north of Lausanne. At that point, I knew you were heading this way.”

“How did you know it was me?”

“I connected the dots. A hunted man who just kept on living. Death and destruction in his wake. As the bodies got closer, I told myself, ‘Here comes Court.’ ”

“Here I am,” Gentry confirmed distantly, looking at the bottle in his hand.

“Tell me you didn’t shoot those poor cops.”

“You know me. I wouldn’t kill a cop.”

“I knew you. People change.”

“I didn’t change. The police were holding me when a wet team showed up. I tried to convince them I was no longer their biggest problem. They wouldn’t listen.”

“A lot of people want you dead, Court.”

“You aren’t exactly the flavor of the month yourself. The CIA burned you, too.”

“There’s no shoot-on-sight directive against me. You were the one they really fucked over.”

“Still, how they framed you was wrong, Maurice. You were one of the honest ones. They should have left your reputation intact.”

Maurice said nothing.

“What are you doing these days?” Court asked.

“Finance. Private sector stuff. No more spook work.”

Court’s eyes scanned the expensive real estate around him. “You look like you are doing okay.”

“There is money in money, or haven’t you heard?”

Court detected a little defensiveness. He swigged his beer and rotated his arm to spread the cold around his swollen wrist. “You remember a guy at Langley named Lloyd?”

“Sure. Sharp-dressed little fag, law degree from London. King’s College, I think. He got in the way of a finance operation I worked in the Caymans not long before I got shit-canned. Smart kid, but a prick.”

“He’s at the center of all this stuff I’m dealing with now.”

“No kidding? He was like twenty-eight at the time. Must be only thirty-two or so now. He left Langley about a year ago, I heard.”

“What happened to all the good guys?” asked Court rhetorically.

“Before 9/11, we were a basket with a few bad apples. After 9/11, we grew into an orchard. Now there are enough bad apples to fill baskets. Same shit, different scale. No surprise.”

They both sipped beer for a minute in silence, relaxing in each other’s company, as if they spent every Saturday afternoon together. Maurice started to cough, and his coughing morphed into a violent hack.

When it ended, Gentry asked, “What’s wrong with you?”

Maurice looked away a moment, answered without emotion. “Lungs and liver, take your pick.”

“Bad?”

“The good news is I may not die from the lung cancer because the liver disease may get me first. Conversely, I may be buried with a working liver if I can only die from lung cancer. Drinking and smoking fifty-some-odd years.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.” He laughed, and this turned into a raspy coughing fit as well.

“How much time do you have?”

“There’s an old Henny Youngman bit. Doc says I’ve got six months to live. I tell him, ‘I can’t pay your bill.’ He tells me he’ll give me another six months.” Maurice’s laugh turned into a wheeze and then a violent hack.

“So six months, then?”

“That’s what they said. Seven months ago.”

“Don’t pay ’em,” quipped Court. It was gallows humor, though Gentry wasn’t comfortable joking with his mentor about impending death.

“Let’s get back to you. What have you gotten yourself mixed up in?”

“It’s related to a job I did last week. I pissed someone off, I guess.”

“The colored guy who got it in Syria. Ali Baba, whatever his name was. That was you, wasn’t it?”

“Abubaker,” Court corrected, but he neither confirmed nor denied his involvement.

Maurice just shrugged. “He needed to go. I’ve followed your career as a private. Your ops are always white on black. Not just nicely performed, but moral, just.”

“Tell that to Lloyd.”

“A lot of people say that thing in Kiev was you.”

“That’s what they say.”

“So?”

Maurice’s phone rang. The old man reached a reed-thin hand to the handset on the wall and answered it. His gray eyes widened slightly as he looked up at his young guest.

“It’s for you.”