The Gray Man

THIRTY-TWO

The early morning glow shone off the English Channel, and a hint of the morning’s first hues brushed the back of Justine’s shoulders as she drove the dirty white four-door west along the coastal road. She kept to the marked speed limit, read the signs carefully.

Her passenger seat and her backseat were empty except for several aluminum suitcases.

She motored alone, made a left in the coastal village of Longues-sur-Mer, did not speed up or slow down when a black helicopter swooped a couple hundred feet above her. It made a second pass and then a third before disappearing from her view, heading to the southwest.

She had the road all to herself for a while, but not long after the helicopter’s departure, a blue Citroën pulled behind her from a gravel lane to her left, dust and exhaust rising behind it. She chanced a glance into her rearview and saw nothing but bright headlights. They stayed close behind her for several hundred meters, and then the car pulled alongside. Justine gripped the thin steering column so hard she thought it would break off in her hands as a flashlight beam illuminated her, then scanned around behind her in the backseat. Then the light turned off, the Citroën pulled ahead of her, and she was certain she would see its brake lights come on, forcing her to stop. But the car sped away. Its taillights disappeared in the mist ahead after another minute.

After heading south for a few kilometers, she looked down at the map in her lap, noted the pencil marks Jim had put there for her. There was a left turn ahead, and she took it after flipping off her lights. The narrow road ran straight; thick hedgerows reached high on each side of her. After three minutes of driving through the darkness, the road turned to the south, but she slowed, bumped the little car off the pavement, and revved the engine just enough to send it into a deep thicket.

A large stone wall rose from the ground on the other side of the thicket, three meters high. From her view, it filled the windshield and seemed to reach up into the infinite sky. She bumped the sedan’s front bumper against it and turned off the engine.

It was nearly pitch-dark here with the high trees on either side of the narrow road. Quickly, she climbed from the driver’s seat. She was careful not to slam the door behind her. She knocked four times slowly on the trunk of the Fiat, a prearranged signal that all was well.

A moment later, the trunk lid lifted. Jim looked up at her from his tight squeeze inside, an empty paper coffee cup by his side and a black rifle in his arms.

“No problems?” he asked as he slowly climbed out. She could see the pain on his face that came with the movement’s effect on his injuries. He left the rifle in the trunk of the car, walked around to the side, stretching out after suffering the cramped confines of the trunk.

“There are men around. In a car and in a helicopter. I am sure there are more inside the property. They must think you are a very dangerous man to have so many people waiting for you,” Justine said as she stood behind the car in the road.

The American had pushed through the tall bushes on the passenger side to pull open the door to the backseat. “My reputation is exaggerated.”

“What?”

“Never mind. I want to thank you for all you’ve done. You’ve earned every cent of that money. I could not have done this without you.”

Justine smiled in the low light. “You haven’t really done anything yet, Jim.”

“That’s a fair point.”

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Like I just downed a triple dose of speed with a double espresso. Your stitches are holding fine.”

Without warning, a car’s headlights raked over Justine’s body. She turned to look to the light, then quickly she spun back to look to Jim for guidance, but he was gone.

Seconds later, the blue Citroën pulled to a stop behind her, and four men quickly climbed out.

Justine stood in the bright light and raised a hand up to shield her eyes. The light washed over her, and she felt naked in the bright beams. The four men moved in front of the lights and were silhouetted in them. She saw the profiles of long guns in the men’s arms. Someone shouted at her, but she did not understand, and she could not speak. Instead, she looked to her left and to her right, into the predawn’s dimness all around.

Somewhere in the safety away from the shafts of light, she knew Jim had run away and gotten free from the men in front of her. She thought he must have somehow made it over the stone wall. He’d left her here to explain the trunks of equipment in the car and to come up with some plausible reason she should be right here right now.

The terror in her body threatened to burst her heart open inside her chest.

“Bonjour,” she said to the four silhouettes, her meek voice little more than a whimper.

The figures moved closer to her as one, guns still pointed forward.

Fifteen meters, ten meters, the shadows converged as they closed.

Then the steady movement forward of the silhouettes changed suddenly, a fast shadow from the left, a profile turned towards the movement, the shape of a long gun beginning to rise and then a cry of surprise from the specters in front of her as one tall figure crumpled into a ball.

Quickly she backed up, bumped into the trunk of the car, watched the dancing movement of light and dark in front of her. Through the confusion on the road she distinguished the outlines of arms and legs as punches rained down and kicks flew, guns spun free through the air and clanked to the dusty gravel amid the shouts and cracks of fists on flesh and bone on bone.

A second figure dropped and stilled, this one flat under the headlights’ beams. She saw that it was not Jim. More convergence of shadows in the rising dust cloud, and a man’s outline wrapped its dark appendages around the head and neck of another profile and spun, lifted the silhouette off the pavement, and Justine heard the snap of a neck as cervical vertebrae shattered from obscene torsion.

Justine had seen fistfights on television action shows. This was nothing of that. The movements were faster, more brutal, crueler. There was no ballet or poetry in the relationship between the adversaries, no choreography. No, it was unyielding surface on unyielding surface, the jerking reactions and the grunts and cries of wild beasts, labored breathing from exertion and panic. The sounds of cracking impacts and the frenzy of a combat so pitiless, she was sure all the men would tear to pieces in the street in front of her.

Three men were down now, and a fourth ran out of the shafts of light to go for a rifle that had fallen and skidded free of the fight. Justine saw Jim now as he pursued in the dusty street and knocked the other man down from behind. Blows were exchanged by each, and Jim was thrown flat on his back in the cold road. Quickly the Frenchwoman turned to the trunk to lift the rifle the American had left there, though she had no idea how to turn it on so that she could use it. As she looked away from the fight, she heard a sick cry of pain. She hefted the big gun and turned back to find Jim up on his knees and the fourth man rolling away from him, hands over his eyes. Jim regained his feet, bringing a long gun up with him and then over his head. While Justine watched, Jim beat the writhing man with the butt end of the gun. One after another, like an axe chopping wood, the blows fell onto the struggling man’s back. His hands raised in defense, but the rifle’s butt beat its way to the horror-stricken eyes. The eyes erupted in blood and his jaw broke and hung open sickeningly. It must have taken a dozen merciless blows to the crushed head to still the man on his back in the cold road, and Justine could not look away.

Slowly, when it all was over, the Frenchwoman slid down the bumper of the car to the ground. She laid the rifle in front of her, and her empty hands shook as she covered her face and cried.

Court fought hyperventilation as he cleared the four bodies from the road. He heard a helicopter above in the lightening morning. With the hedgerows on both sides and the high wall surrounding Château Laurent, the chopper would have to fly directly above to spot his position, but Gentry knew every second he stayed exposed on the dusty road was a gamble.

Quickly he checked the trunk of the car for any equipment he could put to use. Immediately he found four sets of level 3A body armor. All but worthless against a rifle-caliber bullet, but damn effective stopping pistol fire. Quickly he pushed his head through a vest and Velcroed the side panels tightly around his waist. Also in the back were hard-shell tactical knee and elbow pads. He put these on as well, figured a scuffed elbow would be the absolute least of his many worries in the next few minutes, but there was no sense leaving an ounce of protective gear behind.

Then he sat down in the driver’s seat of the little Citroën, shoved it in gear to drive into the thick hedgerow in an attempt to conceal it from the air. Looking down, he realized he’d popped some if not all of the sutures Justine had used to tie his stomach back together. His knife wound bled and wet his bandages and his shirt under the bulletproof vest. Blood trickled out of his stomach, down his pants, and onto the car seat. “Shit,” he said aloud. Once again he was operating on borrowed time.

After hiding the bodies and the car and tossing the AKs into the bushes, he went to Justine, who was still kneeling by the car. She wiped tears and strands of tousled hair from her eyes. Slowly she rose to her feet.

She looked towards the bodies poorly concealed in the bushes. Discarded. Arms and legs splayed unnaturally. “They were bad men, yes?”

“Very bad. I had to do it, and now I have to go over that wall and do it some more.”

Justine did not respond.

Court began opening the aluminum cases, cinching a utility belt tightly around his waist, hooking the drop-leg pistol holster on his right thigh and the sub-load magazine carrier on his left. “I’m out of time. I have to go.” He slung the M4 assault rifle over his neck and left arm and fastened the small HK MP5 submachine gun, muzzle down, to the vest on the chest rig he’d taken from the blue Citroën. He slid the Glock 19 pistol into the thigh holster and Velcroed the two fragmentation grenades into place on the vest. From the front seat of the car he took the satellite phone and jammed it into his hip pocket.

In just under three minutes he was ready. He turned back to Justine, who stood silently behind him, still looking at the exposed legs of the four shattered corpses. “I’ll need to use the hood of the car to climb over the fence. Once I clear the top, I want you to back up, turn around, drive back up the coast. Go west, not east. Park this car at the next train station you see, get on the first morning train to Paris, and go home. Thank you again for everything you’ve done for me.”

Justine’s eyes were distant. Gentry knew killing the four men in hand-to-hand combat right in front of her had shaken her badly. It would upset anyone, he thought, at least any normal person who did not live his life.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asked gently.

“Are you a bad man, Jim?” she asked, her pupils still wide from the fight.

He put his hand on her arm, held it gently if uncomfortably. “I don’t think so. I’ve been taught some bad things. I do some… some bad things. But only to bad people.”

“Yes,” she said. She seemed to clear a little. “Yes.” She looked up at him. “I wish you luck.”

“Maybe, when I’m done with this, we can talk—”

“No,” she interrupted. Looked away. “No. It’s better I try to forget.”

“I understand.”

She hugged him briefly, but to Gentry she felt distracted, as if she took him as some sort of animal now after his brutal display of violence. She clearly just wanted to get away from him and all this madness. Without another word, she climbed into the driver’s seat of the car, and he got up onto the hood. The painkillers she’d given him while he slept provided some relief. Even so, climbing the wall was pure agony for a man with such a savage wound in his abdomen, to say nothing of his wrist, leg, and rib cage.

Gentry slid over the top of the stone wall, hung his feet down, dropped into soft grass, and heard the little four-door back away and turn around in the road. Court looked down at his watch. It was seven forty a.m.

The heavy fog totally obscured the château. All he could see was the beginning of an apple orchard in front of him. Bright red fruit lay on the ground under row after row of small trees with narrow trunks.

Court checked his gear one last time, took a deep breath to control his aches and pains, and began running through the orchard and into the deep gray mist.