The Gray Man

TWENTY-FOUR

“Shit.” Gentry took it. “Yeah?”

“Court? It’s Don.”

“What do you want?”

“They don’t know I’m calling. I got Claire to pinch a phone from one of the chaps guarding the château. She’s a right chip off the old block, is she not?”

Gentry gritted his teeth. Maurice handed him a fresh bottle of cold beer. “What the fuck is your problem, Don? Claire is not some Belfast tout! You can’t run her like one of your agents! She’s a little girl! She’s your family!”

“Desperate measures for desperate times, mate. She was brilliant.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Do you want the intel I have, or not?”

“How can I use anything you’ve got? How do I know you still don’t—”

“They killed Phillip, Court. Claire did a runner. The bastards shot my boy as he went to look after his child.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“We can only hope.”

“I’m sorry.” Court paused. “How did you know I was here?”

“Lloyd knows you’re in Geneva.”

“Figured the shoot-out on the way from Zurich might tip him off.”

“Quite. I racked my brain as to what you were doing there. Knew you were too smart to approach somebody in my Network. Then I remembered there was an old agency banker in Geneva, used to be SAD, ran hard asset training. Figured you must have had dealings with him in your former life. I called a few contacts and got a number.”

“How are you able to make phone calls without them knowing about it?”

“They think I’ve given up. I’m lying in a bed with stab wounds and busted teeth from that fucking poof Lloyd. He tried to rough me up, did a cock-up job of it. Can’t even torture a man respectably. They have me pegged as a half vegetable, a compliant old shell-shocked nutter in bed upstairs. But I haven’t given up, Court. When I thought the only hope for my family was to make you dead, that was my intent. I’ll admit that to you. Now I know bloody well the only hope for my family is to get you here. To help you in any way I can to hit this place as hard as you can with everything you’ve got.”

“Just keep the girls out of it from now on. Can you do that? They’re just kids.”

“You have my word.”

“Lloyd really does have the documents he says he does?”

“He has your CIA personnel file, a couple dozen others, too. Papers and computer disks. He brought us down from London to add another enticement, to make sure you’d come.”

“Why is he doing this?”

Fitzroy told Court all about LaurentGroup. About Abubaker’s demands. About Riegel and the Minsk guard force and the pavement artists. About the gauntlet of a dozen hit squads from a dozen intelligence agencies in a dozen third-world countries, all sent after him for the twenty-million-dollar bounty.

As Sir Donald relayed all the information he had about the operation against Gentry, Maurice pulled a blue box from a cabinet and brought it to the kitchen table where Court was seated. The aged financier and former Clandestine Services operator cleaned the cuts on his young protégé’s wrist with antiseptic, then squeezed bags of cold gel to force a chemical reaction, turning the compresses frosty white in seconds. These he wrapped around Gentry’s swollen left wrist, followed by a compression bandage to hold everything in place and prevent further swelling. It was a tight, neat job, executed by someone who had obviously been trained to tend to the wounded.

When Fitzroy finished his report, Court said, “I can’t believe they’d go through all this just for the contract. I get it, ten billion dollars is a lot of cheese, but for Abubaker to confidently make a demand like this, I’ve got to think there is some other motive in play here.”

“I agree. The shoot-out with the Swiss cops — that’s an incredible risk for a company like LaurentGroup to take, even if they did it by proxy with Venezuelan shooters.”

Gentry said, “There is more than just a contract at stake. Look into that, okay, Don?”

“I’ll talk to Riegel. He’s a bit more lucid than Lloyd.”

“Good. Keep that phone with you. Ringer off.”

“Any way I can contact you while you’re on the move?”

Gentry looked up to Maurice. “You wouldn’t have a spare sat phone just lying around I could buy off of you?” The older man laughed, disappeared down a long hallway, a fresh coughing fit almost doubling him over at one point. Moments later he returned with a satellite phone; it was a high-tech Motorola Iridium, a model Gentry knew well. Used by spies and soldiers and high-risk adventurers, it was not much larger than a regular cell phone, housed in a clear plastic case that was shockproof, waterproof, practically bombproof. Court nodded appreciatively as he took it. The number was written on tape on the back, and Court read it off to Donald before slipping the device into his front pocket.

After he recited the number back, Fitzroy paused a moment, then said, “Court, my boy, one other thing. When this is all over, when you’ve killed every last living thing that is a threat to you, I am going to contact you and give you an address. It will be a tiny out-of-the-way place that will be easy for you to slip into and out of without worry. You will find a little one-room cottage, and I will be in that cottage, sitting in a chair, stripped to my undershirt with my hands flat on a table, and I will be waiting for you. My neck will be bare. For what I have put you through, for what you have done for me, I will give you my life in recompense. It will give you little comfort, but maybe it will help you. I am sorry for what I have done to you in the last forty-eight hours. I was desperate. I didn’t do it for me; I did it for my family. Save them, and I will go to my death to give you a measure of peace.

“Court? You still there?”

“Keep the girls safe, Don. Do that one thing for me. We’ll settle up the rest when this is over.” Gentry hung up.

After Court handed the phone back to Maurice, he finished his second beer. Wiping his fingerprints from the bottle with a rag from the counter, he walked to the rear of the home and looked through the long curtains.

“When I leave, can you handle the watcher?”

“She’s just sitting there. I think I can manage that. I’m not dead yet.”

“You’ll outlive us all.”

“Coming from you, son, that’s not particularly comforting.” He changed his tone. More fatherly, now, he asked “How can I help you?”

“I’ve got to do a… ‘thing’ in northern France. Have to get up there and engage by first thing tomorrow morning.”

“You’re in no condition to—”

“It doesn’t matter. I have to go.”

“You need some money?”

“A little, if you can spare it.”

“Of course, I can float you some cash. What else do you need?”

“I’ll take the forty-five, if you’ve got a few more mags.”

Maurice chuckled, hacked. The sickness in his lungs seemed to grow with the conversation. “You’d probably just hurt yourself with a big manly weapon like that. They don’t make them like they used to. That’s my baby. I’ll get you something a little more contemporary.”

“I was hoping you might have a bug-out bag that you’d staged for a rainy day. I’ve got nothing, so any gear you could spare would be much appreciated.”

“I’ve got a SHTF cache a couple of blocks from here. In case the shit ever hit the fan. From what you’re telling me, I’d say your situation qualifies.”

“I really appreciate it.”

“Anything for my best student.” Maurice disappeared down a back hallway. He returned a minute later with a sheaf of euros in an envelope and a key on a chain. He wrote an address down on the envelope and handed it to his protégé. “I think you’ll be pleased with the gear.”

Court pocketed the items.

“Another beer?”

“I’d love one, but I’d better get moving.”

“Understood.” Maurice poured several antiinflammatory pain pills from a bottle in a cabinet into Gentry’s hand. Court downed them with the last swig from his bottle. Then they walked together towards the back door.

Court said, “I wish I could say I’d see you again. If I make it through tomorrow, I’ll have to drop off the face of the earth for a while. Maybe if you don’t pay your doctor’s bill, we can have another beer someday.”

Maurice smiled, but this time he did not laugh. “I’m dying, Court. No sense in putting lipstick on a pig. I can’t make it any prettier than it is.”

“Is there anything I can do for you? Anybody you need me to see? Look in on after you’re gone?”

“There’s nobody. No family. No friends. There was just the Agency.”

“I know the feeling,” Court said. Spending time with his mentor was good in that Gentry had so few opportunities to talk to someone who’d gone through some of the same things in life as he had. But it was also bad. Depressing, because Court saw a measure of himself in the tired old cynical eyes of the man facing him in the living room and knew that, though no one likes to get old, in Gentry’s profession, mere survival was the absolute best one could hope for.

And this was success?

“You can do one thing for me.” Maurice smiled as he spoke. “When you get yourself extracted from this mess you’re in, I want you to get away to some tropical island somewhere. When you read in the paper about an older-than-dirt disgraced American banker dying in Switzerland, I want you to go out to your favorite can tina, find yourself a pretty girl, and drink the night away with her. I’m serious. Get through this and get out of this life. There are still corners of the world where no one gives a shit what you’ve done. Go there. Meet somebody. Live like a human. Do that for me, kid.”

“I’ll try.”

“Someday you will learn. All the things you’ve done, all the things in the past you thought were dead and buried — you think you’ve put them behind you, but you haven’t. You’ve just stored them away. Stored for the time when there is only you and a quiet room and your memories and the goddamned demons of those you killed.”

“I’ve got to go, Maurice.”

“I know I can’t stop you from doing what you have to do. But think about what I am saying. All the shit I taught you back at Harvey Point. Sooner you forget what I taught you then, sooner you follow what I’m telling you now, the sooner the killing and the death will be dealt with. End of sermon, kid.”

They shook hands.

Court’s game face reappeared in a flash. He crammed the wad of cash into his pants pocket and the sat phone into his jacket and headed for the back door. He peered through the blinds out the front window, into the medieval passageway.

Instantly he sensed that something wasn’t right.

“What is it?” asked Maurice, picking up on his protégé’s unease.

“Check the back. See if the girl is still there.”

Maurice walked down the hall to the back living room and called out to Court, “She’s gone.”

“They pulled her.”

“Who pulled her?”

“Hitters.”

“Because they want her out of the way when it goes loud?”

“Exactly.”

“They’re here?” asked Maurice as he returned to Gentry’s side.

“Not here, but close,” confirmed the Gray Man. “I can fucking smell them.” Gentry’s eyes narrowed. “Tell me you didn’t set me up, Maurice.”

“Not on your life, Court.”

A moment’s pause. “I believe you. Sorry.”

“Who’s out there? Any idea?”

Court and Maurice barricaded the doors with an armoire and a bookcase. “God only knows. In the past three days I’ve had everyone but killer Martians on my ass.”

“This must be the killer Martians, then. I hear they’re real bastards. You can get out through the ceiling. There are boards in the crawl space laid out to a vent. Push the vent out, and you should just about fit through. This will drop you into the attic of the preschool behind my house. They are closed on Saturdays. They have a basement that leads into the nail salon next door. You look like you could do with a manicure, but try to fight the urge. Slip out their front door to the Rue du Purgatoire, then down the little alleyway, Rue d’Enfer. That should get you clear.”

“What about cops?”

“The closest station is at the Palais de Justice, but we aren’t talking frontline troops. Better we don’t call them at all lest a bloodbath ensues.”

Gentry stood motionless and just stared at Maurice.

The elderly man laughed heartily, fought his wheezing. “I set the escape route up long ago. For me, back when I could have managed. I had a neighborhood boy test the crawl space just a few months back. No problem. Go on then.”

“Come with me.”

“You aren’t getting my feeble ass into that crawl space. I’m not running from anyone. Now go.”

“Maurice, in a few seconds an alpha team is coming through those doors. They will know you helped me. They’ll do whatever it takes to get intel from you.”

Maurice smiled, shrugged. “I’ve never been afraid of dying, Court. But the thought of dying for nothing really chaps my ass. If I’d taken a bullet back in Nam like every goddamn friend I had back there, then it would have been worthwhile. If I’d died on the job with the company, that would have been honorable. I mean, depending on what we were doing at the time, you know what I’m saying. But sitting here in my house in Geneva, flipping channels on the television and waiting for the moment my lungs cough up or my liver pisses out… there’s just no nobility in that.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I’ll die for you, kid. You’ve done more righteous hits than the entire damn agency in the past four years. You deserve someone to help you when you’re down.”

Gentry did not know what to say, so he said nothing.

“Don’t fuck it up, boy. Get out of here. I’ll slow them down, maybe bloody a nose or two in the process. No promises, but I’ll try to thin their ranks a bit.”

“I’ll never forget you.”

Maurice smiled and pointed upwards. “If I get past security and make it up there to heaven, I’ll put in a good word for you with the Man. See if I can’t save your scrawny ass in the afterlife, too.”

An awkward hug between two men whose minds were tightening for impending action. Maurice said, “One more thing. I hope you will remember me in a positive light. Not think bad things about me if… if you should learn that I made a mistake or two along the way.”

“You are my hero. That’s never going to change.”

“Thanks, kid.”

There was the sound of a truck’s brakes out front. “Go!”

Gentry nodded. He squeezed the frail man on the shoulder and leapt to the rafter overhead without another word. Quickly he pulled himself up and into the attic, his broken rib and his swollen wrist both shrieking with pain. He had just replaced the tile when a crash at the front door knocked the armoire a foot into the room.

Maurice spun around and moved into the kitchen as quickly as his old legs and scarred lungs would take him. Another impact cracked the door behind him. He grabbed hold of the huge commercial stove, yanked the old gas appliance back a few inches with a jerk. Desperately he reached behind the stove, stretched his aged body to its limit, but he could not take hold of his objective. He looked around the room for something to extend his reach.

The South Africans were commandos from their nation’s National Intelligence Agency. The leader of the six-man squad stood in the front yard of the white house, his Benelli shotgun resting on his shoulder, as the rest of his team finally made entry on the barricaded door. They moved in a well-practiced tactical train throughout the two-story building. They split into two units in the middle of the first room. One team went into the kitchen and found an old man sitting at a table, hands on top of his head, fingers laced, facing the far wall, the image of submission. The first man in the train pulled him down to the floor roughly and searched him in the narrow breakfast nook. He found a pistol in the old guy’s waistband and threw it up and into the sink.

“That gun is an antique, idiot!” said the elderly man as two South Africans shoved him roughly back into his chair. They dragged him and his chair into the main room and waited until the other four members of the unit pronounced the rest of the house clear.

When the entire team re-formed around their prisoner, the old American looked at all the faces.

“South Africans,” he said, obviously having heard their accents.

The leader asked, “Where is the Gray Man?”

“Look at you guys.” Maurice ignored the leader’s question. “Three black, three white. Ebony and ivory. Back in the old days you whiteys would be beating down on you darkeys, wouldn’t you?”

There was no response.

“You white boys must miss those apartheid days, huh?”

The leader repeated himself. “Where is the Gray Man?”

“Ah, but the head of the operation is white. You boys still roll like that? The plantation owners put the slaves in the big house, but they still give the orders. Am I right?”

One of the black operators unhooked his Uzi from his chest rig and raised it to smash its butt into Maurice’s jaw.

“Stop!” shouted the leader. “He’s just tryin’ to slow us down so his lover boy can get clear. Won’t work, old man. Now… where is the Gray Man?”

Maurice smiled. “This is the part where I say, ‘Who is that?’ ”

The leader’s eyebrows furrowed. He spoke in a thick Afrikaans accent. “And this is the part where my man hits you across the face for giving us an attitude instead of an answer.” He nodded to the black operator still poised above him, and the Uzi’s squat butt smashed into the old American’s jaw, sending his head snapping back.

“Now, fooker. Let’s try again. Where did he go?”

Maurice spat blood and a bit of his bottom lip on the floor in front of him. “I don’t remember. I have reached the advanced age where the memory starts to falter. Very forgetful, you understand. Getting old sucks.”

After several seconds of waiting, the leader shouted into the man’s face, “I will not ask again. The Gray Man was here. Where is he now?”

“Sorry, young man. I’m unwell. You mind terribly if I use the restroom?”

The leader of the assassins looked to his subordinate. “Hit the fooker again.”

Maurice said immediately “He is gone. And you will not find him.”

The South African sneered at the thin man. “I’ll find him. I’ll find him, and I’ll kill him. The Gray Man’s reputation is nothing but a load of hype.”

Maurice laughed and coughed. “Do you have any idea how many men who said that very thing are now rotting away eternity in a pine box?”

“That ain’t gonna be me, mate.”

Maurice nodded appreciatively. “I will have to concede that point to you. There’s not going to be enough of you left for a pine box. But not to worry, I hear mortuary services here in Geneva are exceedingly diligent. With a little luck they may salvage a blob of you big enough to half fill an urn on your mother’s mantel.”

The South African cocked his head. “What the hell are you talking about, you nutter?”

“I’m just saying, your future looks bleak, pal, but there is good news.”

The South African looked around to his men. He was clearly speaking to a crazy old buzzard. “I’ll play along, chief. What is the good news?”

“Your bleak future will be short-lived.” Then Maurice smiled. He softly began a prayer asking forgiveness for his sins.

Just then the Tech’s voice came over the radio. The six men put their hands to their earpieces to aid their hearing.

“Watcher Forty-three reports the subject just came out of the nail salon a block behind the house. He’s on foot, heading west.”

The leader of the South Africans nodded, turned his attention back to Maurice.

“Good news all around, Granddad. We won’t have to torture you to find out where he’s going.”

Maurice did not look up from his prayer. The South African team leader shrugged his shoulders, lowered his shotgun to the seated man’s chest, and fired one-handed.

As the slug left the barrel in a shower of fire, the South African lifted into the air and flew backwards into the kitchen. His neck snapped, and the skin burned from his face and hands. The other five suffered similar fates, though in the confines of the living room there was less open distance for the men to fly.

Maurice died instantly from the twelve-gauge blast to the chest at close range.

Firefighters on the scene minutes later would recognize the telltale devastation of a massive gas leak, probably from the connection between the wall and the big industrial oven. This was an unfortunate but all too common occurrence in old homes like this one, and was hardly a surprise. Only hours later, when the fire had been doused and the water and foam levels lowered to where the bodies could be examined, were the investigators scratching their heads. The seven bodies soaked and burned beyond recognition gave them little information. But the massive amount of firearms surrounding all the victims save one was highly irregular in peaceful Geneva, to say the least.