The Gray Man

THIRTY

At two thirty a soft rain began to fall. Five hundred yards east-southeast of the cathedral of Notre Dame, on the Left Bank of the Seine, the Jardin Tino Rossi was barren in the dark. Fifty feet from the cobblestone quay, a grassy embankment ran along next to a low stone wall. There, between a tree and the wall, a figure lay on its back, knees raised slightly and arms askew. Anyone who walked up to the waterlogged body would see it had obviously come from the river. Perhaps a defiant final jolt of strength had allowed its weak arms to crawl clear of the river’s edge into the soft, wet grass; maybe it even found its feet for a moment, but then those arms and legs must have given out wholly, and the body had collapsed on the cold ground.

There was no movement at all from the body, no sound either, until an electronic noise began peeping, muffled by soaked clothing.

The body did not stir at once. Finally a twitch in the shoulders, a slight turn of the head in new recognition of its surroundings. After another ring, the form slowly reached into a coat pocket, pulled out a plastic case, and fumbled with it with one hand. It popped open, and the satellite phone dropped into the grass. The body’s eyes remained on the sky.

After jumping from the bridge, Gentry had hit the water hard. The cold took away what breath remained in his lungs after the impact. He sank deep. When he found the surface, he had already been carried downstream, under the Pont Neuf and towards the west. He sucked air and water as he bobbed for a minute or so before seeing a small house barge churning upstream towards him. Though Court was weak, on the verge of losing consciousness, he hooked an arm around the bottom rung of a ladder hanging off the side of the slow-moving black boat as it passed him. He held on with one hand, kept his head low in the boat’s foamy wake as the craft towed him back under the bridge from which he had just fallen. He heard the shouts of men in the water around him as they dove down, looking for a body, or trained their flashlights around the spans of the bridge.

Ten minutes later, Court was free of immediate detection. With nearly his last ounce of strength, he tried to climb the ladder to get on board the boat, but he fell. His weak legs, the pain in his gut, his wet shoes, the numbing cold all worked against him, and he dropped back into the frigid current. He reached out for the barge, took nothing but a fistful of the river, while the black ship chugged away upstream.

Fortunately for Gentry, he was not far from the water’s edge. He made it to the Left Bank, struggled up onto the pavement, climbed to his feet, but fell again in the wet grass next to a tree in the Jardin Tino Rossi.

And here he lay for twenty minutes, eyes open but unfixed, the soft drops of rain falling and beating and exploding against his pupils.

The phone rang again, and he lifted it off the grass, his eyes still on the impossibly low rain clouds illuminated by city lights around him.

His voice was weak and distant. “Yeah?”

“Good evening. This is Claire Fitzroy calling. May I please speak with Mr. Jim?”

Gentry blinked away the rain. His eyes instead filled with tears. He controlled his voice as best as possible, did what he could to mask the pain and the exhaustion and the despair and the utter sense of failure. “It’s past your bedtime.”

“Yes, sir. But Grandpa Donald said I could call you.”

“You remember me?”

“Oh, yes, sir. I remember how you drove us to school. Slept on the little cot in the hall, but Mummy said you didn’t really sleep, you watched out for us all night. You drank coffee, and you liked my mummy’s eggs.”

“That’s right. Extra cheese.” Court’s pelvic bone had been gored, his abdominal wall punctured. He did not think the knife made it deep enough to slice through his intestines, but the pain burning into the center of his being was indescribable, nonetheless. He assumed he was still bleeding. He’d done nothing to stanch the flow since he’d dropped into the river nearly an hour earlier.

The sirens of emergency vehicles screeched past on Gentry’s right. He was hidden from their view by the stone wall and the darkness.

“Mr. Jim, Grandpa Donald said you are coming to save us.”

Tears streamed down the American’s face. He wasn’t dead, but this felt a lot like dying. He knew he could not make it to Bayeux, and even if he somehow could, what could he do but bleed to death on the castle’s doorstep?

“Where is your grandfather?”

“He’s in the bedroom. He can’t walk right now. He said he fell down the stairs, but that is not true. The men here hurt him. He gave me the phone and told me to go into the bathroom closet and call you.” She paused. “That’s why I have to whisper. You are coming, right? Please tell me you are coming. If you don’t come… You are our only chance, since Daddy’s gone to London. Mr. Jim… are you there?”

Typical of Fitzroy. If Sir Donald himself had made this call, Court would have told him all was lost. But the cagey bastard had known Gentry would be in dire straits right about now, so who better to entice him to keep up the fight than one of the twins?

“I’ll do my best.”

“Do you promise?”

Court lay there in the dark, his freezing, soaked suit askew on his body, the cold mud pressed into the back of his neck and his shaved head. Slowly, with a weak voice, he said, “I’ll be there very soon.”

“Do you promise?”

Court looked down at the wound in his belly. He pressed hard upon it now. “I promise,” he said, and he seemed to muster a little power in his voice. “And when I get there, I need you to promise you will do something for me.”

“Yes, sir?”

“When you hear a lot of noise, I want you to go to your room, crawl under your bed, and stay there. Can you do that for me?”

“Noise? What kind of noise? Do you mean guns?”

“I do mean guns.”

“Okay.”

“Stay there until I come to get you. Get your sister to do the same, okay?”

“Thank you, Jim. I just knew you would come.”

“Claire.” There was a shred of new strength in Gentry’s voice now. “I need you to sneak the phone back to your grandfather. I have to ask him a very important question.”

“All right, Jim.”

“And Claire? Thank you for calling. It was nice to hear from you.”

Sixteen minutes later, Gentry staggered along the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. The rain had picked up, and there was no one around, which was lucky for the Gray Man, because he walked with both hands pressed to the left side of his abdomen, his left leg ramrod straight as he kicked it forward. Every twenty-five yards or so he stopped, leaned against a wall or a car or a lamppost, bent forward from pain, recovered after a few seconds to push off and cover a few more steps before again seeking refuge from the exhaustion of the blood loss.

He found the address Fitzroy gave him. The door was closed and bolted as he knew it would be, so he found a dark alcove a few doorways down and tucked into it, sat on a piece of cardboard like a bum, and leaned his head on the stoop to rest. Singsong police sirens wailed in the distance, maybe a mile away now. Surely the cops and the hitters and the watchers were all along the Seine looking for him, though hopefully they were concentrating their search not upstream but down, and hopefully they were all hindering one another with their respective presence.

He was just on the verge of dozing, his fist pressed into his bloody stomach, when he heard a noise back by the address Fitzroy gave him. He peered out of the alcove and saw the locked door open slowly. He’d expected someone to come by car, but apparently whoever worked at the location lived in a flat above in the same building.

A woman appeared on the pavement, barely visible from a streetlamp twenty meters on. Court rose to his feet and staggered forward.

“Allez!” She shouted in a whisper. “Hurry.”

He passed her, staggering still, and found himself in a long hall. Steadying his weak and swaying body on the corridor’s walls, he saw immediately he was smearing his own blood with his hands as he walked. The woman quickly tucked her head under his arm and hefted him. She was tall and thin but strong. After each step he felt himself giving in to her more and more.

They went through a doorway and into a darkened room. Before she could flip on the light, encumbered by the 170-pound man, Court was startled by a barking dog, close. Then another, then ten or more dogs barking at once, all around him.

When the bright overhead snapped on, he realized immediately that the emergency clinic Donald had sent him to was, in actuality, a veterinarian’s office. His knees gave out, and his weight dropped on the girl by his side. With a boyish grunt she pushed him forward and down to a small chair.

“Parlez vous français?” she asked, looking down to him. He looked up and saw, apropos of nothing, that she was rather pretty.

“Parlez vous anglais?” he asked.

“Yes, some. You are English?”

“Yeah,” he lied, but he had no intention of trying to fake an accent.

“Monsieur. I tried to tell Monsieur Fitzroy. Zee doctor is out of town, but I called him; he’s on his way here now. He will arrive in a few hours. I am sorry, I did not know how badly you were hurt. I cannot help you. I will call an ambulance. You need a hospital.”

“No. You are in Fitzroy’s Network. You at least have medicine and blood and bandages.”

“Not here, I am sorry. Dr. LePen has access to a clinic nearby, but I do not. I only work here with zee animals. You need a hospital. You need emergency aid. Mon Dieu, you are cold. I will find you a blanket.” She turned from him and left the room, returned with a thick wool blanket that smelled like cat piss. She draped it over his shoulders.

“What is your name?” Court asked, his voice at its weakest point yet.

“Justine.”

“Look, Justine. You’re a vet. That’s close enough. I just need some blood and—”

“I am a veterinary’s assistant.”

“Well, that’s close to close enough. We can make this work. Please help me.”

“I give baths! I hold zee dogs down for zee doctor! I can’t help you. Zee doctor is on his way, but you cannot wait for him. You are completely white. You need blood. Fluids.”

“I don’t have time to wait. Look, I know battlefield medicine. I can talk you through what I need. We’ll have to get some blood, just a couple units of O positive, some antibiotics, and your hands. When the weakness and pain get to be too much, I won’t be able to do what needs to be done.”

“Battlefield medicine? This is no battlefield. This is Paris!”

Court grunted. “Tell that to the guy who did this.” He opened the blanket and took his hand from his knife wound. His blood pressure was low enough now to where the blood no longer pumped from his waist, but it oozed and glistened in the harsh light of the treatment room.

Justine gasped. “That looks bad.”

“Could be worse. It’s through the muscle, bloody, but I’ll be okay if I can get some O positive. If you can help me, I’ll be on my way. Fitzroy will pay you and your doctor for the trouble.”

“Monsieur. Are you not listening? I work with zee dogs!”

He shut his eyes, seemed to drift off a bit, but he said, “Just picture me with fur.”

“How can you joke? You are bleeding to death.”

“Only because we’re arguing. Where is this clinic? We can go there, get what I need. I can’t go to a hospital. Have to do it this way.”

She breathed out a long sigh, nodded, and tied her brown hair in a ponytail behind her head.

“Let me put a bandage on that so you do not lose more blood.”

The barking of the dogs began to subside.

The small surgical center in the vet’s office was filthy. It had not been well cleaned after the close of business on Friday.

“I am sorry, monsieur. If I knew you were coming—”

“It’s fine.” Court made to pull himself onto the metal stand in the middle of the room, but Justine stopped him, grabbed a spray bottle, and perfunctorily wet and wiped down the brushed aluminum surface while her patient leaned against a shelf of bandages. She ran out through the door and came back with a cushion from the sofa in the waiting room.

“You must let your legs hang off zee side. It is not made for persons.”

“Okay.”

He used his last bit of strength to rip open his shirt. Buttons flew and bounced over the tiled room. Justine pulled off his rain-soaked shoes and used shears to cut his pants off, left him in his shorts.

“I… I am not so experienced with humans,” she said.

“You’re doing great.”

She fought her timidity and looked Gentry over from head to toe.

“What happened to you?”

“I got shot in the leg. A couple of days back.”

“With a gun?” She looked down at the open three-day-old wound in his thigh, then back up to the bloody hip. She quickly pulled rubber gloves on over her small hands. “Mon Dieu.”

“And then my legs and feet got cut with broken glass.”

“I see that.”

“Then I snapped a rib rolling down a mountain in Switzerland.”

“A mountain?”

“Yes. Then I fucked up my wrist busting out of some handcuffs.”

Justine was silent. Her jaw had dropped open slightly.

“And your stomach?”

“Knife wound.”

“Where?”

“Here in Paris. About an hour ago, I guess. And then I fell into the Seine.”

She shook her head. “Monsieur, I do not know what you do for a living, and I do not want to know. But whatever it is, I think you should find some other type of job.”

Court laughed a little, setting fire to the stab wound. “My skill set is not conducive to honest work.”

“I’m sorry. I do not understand these words.”

“Never mind. Justine, we can stanch the knife wound with this bandage, more or less, but if I don’t get some blood in me, I’ll pass out.”

“The clinic is close by, but it is closed.”

“We’re going to open it,” Court said. “Let’s go. I need to be on the move in under an hour.”

Justine had been wrapping a compression bandage tight around Court’s waist to hold the thick square of gauze she’d placed over the knife wound. “Move? You don’t need to move at all! For days. Do you not understand how badly injured you are?”

“You don’t understand. I have someplace I have to be! I just have to get patched up so I can leave!”

She clenched her teeth, and her eyes widened. “Monsieur, I am no doctor, but I can promise you there is no place you need to be right now other than in medical care. You could die within zee hour.”

“I’ll be okay. I have to be.”

Justine knelt down, unlocked a low cabinet, and began pulling equipment from it. “That is impossible! If we give you a transfusion, zee blood will just leak out of your stomach if you move. You need stitches. When you get the stitches they will just break if you try to move.”

Court thought it over. He looked down to his wrist-watch to find it was three a.m. “I… I need to get to Bayeux, up in Normandy.”

“Tonight? Are you crazy?”

“It’s life or death, Justine.”

“Yes, your death, monsieur.”

Court pulled Maurice’s envelope of cash from his pocket. It was soaked, but it was a miracle it had survived the river, as had his car keys. He handed the soggy envelope to Justine. “How much is it?” he asked as she looked through it.

Her eyes returned to his. “It’s a lot.”

“It’s all yours. Just help me get to Bayeux before eight a.m.”

“If you can’t even drive a car, what do you expect to do when you get there?”

“I can drive the car, but I need you to stitch me up and bandage me while I drive. We can do the transfusion on the way.”

She stood slowly. Said each word alone. “Sutures? In, zee, car?”

Court nodded.

“While you drive zee car?”

“Yes.”

She muttered something in French that Court did not understand. He picked up the word for dogs and figured she was saying it was due to moments like these that she preferred her patients to be the four-legged variety.

She tied the bandages around his waist and helped him put his wet dress shirt back over his shoulders. She did not look up from her work as she spoke. “What is going on in Bayeux early on a Sunday morning that you absolutely cannot miss?”

“Would you believe me if I told you I was singing in the church choir?”

She shook her head without smiling. “No.”

“Okay. Then I will tell you.” And he told her. He told her with holes in his story jumbo jets could fly through about what had happened and what he had to do by eight a.m. He told her about the kidnapped girls and the father who died trying to protect them. He told her about the teams of foreign operatives after him, and as the blood loss and fatigue addled his brain, he told her again about the phone call from Claire and again about the little kids he just had to protect.

She reacted with horror when he talked of the killers and the killing, the mortal peril of two little girls for the sake of the reputation of some thuggish corporation. Yes, Justine worked for a doctor of veterinary medicine who occasionally kept some strange hours and dealt with some highly suspicious patients, and the doctor had told her enough about Fitzroy and the Network to where she knew to ask no further questions, but she never imagined in a million years that men were as brutal and as callous as those in the stranger’s story.

“So… what do you think?” asked Court.

“Why are you trusting me?”

“Desperation. I was dead on the riverbank forty-five minutes ago. Since that moment, you have become my only hope. If you double-cross me, I am no worse off than I was lying there.”

“What about the police?”

“Lloyd says he will kill the hostages if anyone but me shows up at the house. I know men like this. They will do exactly what they threaten to do. I have to go alone, with your help. I’ll leave you in Bayeux. My destination is a few kilometers north of the village. You can be on the morning’s first train back to Paris. You’ll be miles from any danger, I promise you.”

“What do I call you?” she asked.

“Jim.”

“Okay, Jim. We will go on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“Let me give you a little pain medicine, just for the procedure. We’ll find something at zee clinic that we can give you once the transfusion brings your blood pressure back up. We will take my car. I will drive to Gare Saint-Lazare to get your car. Then we can go. There will be no traffic on zee road once we leave town. I will work on your injury as you drive.”

Court thought about it. Every fiber of his being was against taking any medication that would cloud his mind and dull his senses, leave him less than completely focused on the task at hand. He felt he could handle the pain.

No, he did not like Justine’s plan, but for some reason he did trust her. And as he looked at the cute, gangly girl standing over him, still pretty with her ponytailed hair messy from her bed and no makeup on her face and sweat forming above her lip from the work she was doing to keep some scary stranger alive, he conceded he was in absolutely no position to argue.

Justine helped Court back to his feet, and the two of them staggered together slowly out of the treatment room and down the hall towards the back of the clinic. Gentry winced with each step. Once his head bobbed low as if he would pass out.

Justine propped him against the wall in the courtyard while she fumbled with her keys.

“What the hell is this?” Gentry asked.

“It’s my car.”

“That’s a car?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s small.”

“When I bought it, I didn’t know I would be transporting patients in the passenger seat.”

“Fair enough. It’s fine. It sure as hell won’t draw much attention.”

They both smiled a little, but the smiles drifted away as she tried to help lower him into the seat. Court cried out in pain, a cry that culminated with shallow panting.

It took her nearly a minute to fire the little engine. By then Court was asleep. She’d dropped his seat to where he could lie almost flat. With considerable effort, she was able to get his legs up on the dashboard to help keep him from going into shock. As she turned north on Rue Monge, she saw helicopters in the air in the distance over the river.

Justine parked her car a few doors down from the clinic off the Rue des Ecoles. At half past three, there was not a soul around. Court stirred, looked around for a moment, and then asked her for a pen and a piece of paper. She dug through her purse a moment and then passed him an envelope and a pencil.

“There’s another med I need you to find. Should be with the pediatric drugs.”

“One of the twins needs medicine?”

“No. It’s for me.” He jotted something down and handed the envelope back to Justine. She looked at it.

“DextroStat? What does it do?”

“It will help. It’s very important. Find it.”

She shrugged, promised to look for it. Without another word to Court, she climbed out of her tiny Uno and went back to the trunk. Gentry did not, could not, turn around to see what she was doing. A few seconds later she walked to the glass door of the building and looked quickly in both directions. A tire iron in her right hand crashed through the glass, and she reached through the sharp shards to open the door from the inside. As Court watched, completely helpless, she disappeared into the dark clinic as a piercing alarm filled the street.

Even with the impending danger, Court fell asleep again in the car. He awoke with the jolt of the tiny two-door as it lurched forward. In the glow from the streetlamps flickering above them as they moved away from the alarm bells, he caught a glimpse of the young woman’s face: intensity and determination.

“What did you get?” he asked.

“Three units of O positive, two bags of dextrose, morphine, Vicodin, transfusion equipment, antiseptics, and a suture kit.”

“And?”

“And the medicine you asked about.”

“Well done.”

“Yes,” she said with a little smile. “That was fun.”

In the parking garage below the Gare Saint-Lazare, Justine and Court climbed into the big Mercedes. Gentry took the wheel and sat there, woozy and grimacing from agony. Justine began the transfusion of blood and a bag of nutrients as they sat together in the dark and empty garage. She hooked the bags on the dome light above them to keep the drip going and the supple black leather interior gave way to the French girl’s movements as she knelt over Court, poured antiseptic freely on his waist to let it soak into his bandages and his wounds.

Justine instructed Court to just lie there and relax, and she left the car. She disappeared from his view while he sat alone and tried to think about the task still at hand. He knew these delays meant he would not make it to the château before six in the morning. He would have virtually no time to lay up and get a feel for the territory. No, as it now stood, he’d only have time to drive up to the front door and begin his attack if he wanted to do so under cover of darkness. Shit. Court realized his chances for success were never good, but after the stabbing in Paris, they had now become incal culably small.

Just then Justine returned with a bag of pastries and two large servings of coffee. Court pulled one foam cup from her hand and swigged it until his mouth burned.

“Arrêt! Stop,” she demanded. “Sip it slowly.”

Court took a croissant and ripped into it with abandon. She tried to butter it for him while he ate, but he just took the little pat of butter from her hands and gobbled it down, too.

Justine lectured him. “Your mother would not be proud. Relax. You are getting the fluids and nutrition you need from the IV. Too much food with the morphine, and you will throw up. Drink the coffee slowly. Can you drive?”

“We’re about to find out,” Court said with a look of grim determination, and he backed the Mercedes out of the space, exited the underground garage slowly, and rolled out into the night.

They took the A15 north out of the city, and just as Justine had promised, there was virtually no traffic at four on a Sunday morning. She cursed loudly when she noticed the blood bag empty just a few minutes out of town; she switched it out with a second full liter bag and switched out the dextrose just to keep the fluids dripping into the IV at the fastest rate possible.

The A13 was the most direct route to Bayeux, but Court avoided it. He knew surveillance could easily be set up on the main route to the château. Instead, Court took a series of back roads that would add a half hour or so to his journey.

For an hour they delayed the inevitable. Justine talked about her family and friends and her six cats. Her nervousness was evident to Court from her random conversation. With less than an hour to go till the château, Justine grew quiet, carefully injected a tiny dose of morphine into Gentry’s IV. If his blood pressure was too low, as it surely had been back at the vet clinic, the morphine could have stopped his heart. But after two and a half units of blood, she determined a small shot of the strong painkiller was worth the risk, considering what he was about to endure.

As they drove through the dark, Court began feeling better, the pain medicine and the blood and the sugar water boosting his strength and spirits. They discussed the procedure, and Justine took several minutes to ready her sutures and bandages on the dashboard in front of her. She cringed as she threaded the razor-sharp hooked needle and dipped it in a bottle of antiseptic, laid it down on sterile gauze. She opened his shirt and cut off his bandages and poured half the contents of the bottle on his stomach, and he recoiled from the sting.

They both unfastened their seat belts, and she rose to her knees in the passenger seat. Gentry put his hands high on the wheel to allow her access to his belly. He gulped down the last few swigs of cold coffee and tossed the cup over his shoulder into the back. Justine then used adhesive tape to fasten Court’s small flashlight to the bottom of the steering wheel, lighting the area of her focus perfectly as long she was careful to keep her hands from casting shadows over the stab wound.

“I have never done this before on a human, even in the correct conditions, but I have sutured cats before.”

“You will do fine,” Court said. He realized they were both trying to steady the nerves of the other.

But Justine’s resolve faltered first. She looked up at the American and asked, “Are you sure? I will have to go deep into the muscle to close the wound. If I just pierce the skin it will tear as soon as you move.”

Court nodded, his eyes already watering in anticipation of the agony. “Justine,” he said, softly. “Whatever I say or do… do not stop.”

She nodded, steeled herself. “Are you ready?”

He nodded shortly, pulled his seatbelt off his chest and placed it in his mouth. He bit down hard.

The roadway ran flat and straight, and the headlamps showed the way.

Justine pierced her patient’s flesh a half inch from the bloody knife wound. The hooked needle found its own path deep through his abdominal muscle. It passed through the slit, and fresh blood bubbled into the flashlight’s beam. The curvature of the sharp spike sent it back out of his skin, a half inch on the other side of the stab wound.

Court screamed into the seat belt wedged in his mouth.

Justine took the thread with her gloved hand, pulled the instrument backwards the way it came, and re-threaded the needle. Even with a quarter dose of morphine going through her patient, she felt his teardrops on her arms as she made her second suture, close to the first.

For ten kilometers she continued. She did not look away from her work as she sewed him up, but she spoke to him in soothing French throughout, just as she would an injured dog. Above her, her patient winced and groaned. Miraculously, to her way of thinking, he continued to drive, execute gentle turns as needed, once even braking slightly. Justine assumed the road ahead and his need to concentrate on it was the only thing keeping him coherent.

She used gauze to swab away the blood as she worked, poured antiseptic from the bottle she’d staged between his legs to get a better view of the pumping wound.

Finally she said, “Almost done. I only have to pull it tight and tie it off. Just a few more seconds now.” Above her she heard him panting and sobbing. There was a rhythm to his sounds that distressed her; she knew he could go into shock at any time. “Here we go… I will be as gentle as possible.” She pulled on the thread, the wound closed beautifully, and the last of the bleeding stopped immediately. “Yes, perfect. Now I just tie it and—”

The tires below her ran over a series of bumps. The Mercedes’s suspension was awesome; she barely felt the rough surface. But when the bumps did not stop after several seconds, she looked up to check on her patient.

She was horrified to see his head hanging down just above her, his eyes closed.

Jim had passed out.

The black Mercedes ran off the road and crashed at five thirty a.m.