by Mark Greaney
With all that taken into account, the Gray Man knew he was fortunate to find himself in such good condition. Sliding, rolling, and bouncing down a steep hillside in the dark could have gone much worse, even without the gunmen firing machine guns at him.
Then he took stock of his belongings. His buoyed spirits sank anew. He’d lost everything but the small Walther handgun in his ankle holster, his wallet snapped shut in his back pocket, and a folding knife in his front pocket. Everything else—sat phone, medical equipment, extra ammo, guns, grenades, binoculars—all gone.
It took him another twenty minutes to get to the bottom of the valley, down to the one road and the one railroad track, to the one-room train station. The snow had turned to sleet, and he shivered, his ungloved hands buried deep in his pockets.
He saw a minivan, the only vehicle parked in the tiny lot. He took this as the kill squad’s vehicle. He broke the driver’s-side window and climbed in quickly, then smashed the steering column apart with two kicks of his boot heel. In seconds he had the ignition barrel out, and in under a minute he’d sparked the ignition wires. But the van would not start. Hurriedly he felt around under the dash for a kill switch. Finding none, he climbed back out of the van, slammed the door shut, and jabbed his knife into each of the tires. He knew sabotaging it would show the gunners he’d made it down this far and was certainly on the road by now but, he decided, they would have to leave Guarda immediately anyway. The police would be arriving within minutes. The kill team wouldn’t be able to search the forest for him all morning, so there was little use in trying to mis lead them that he was still on the mountain.
As it stood, he figured they were no more than ten to twenty minutes behind him now, depending on how concerned they were about being detected by the villagers or how nervous they were about bumping into the first police cars coming up the hillside.
Court broke a small windowpane in the door to the train station, reached around, and opened the latch. First he checked a schedule on a wall, a timetable for all the trains in the country. Then he pulled a heavy brown coat off a coat stand. Gentry slipped it on. It was a little tight at the shoulders, but it would keep him alive. A woman’s bicycle with thick tires leaned against a wall, and Gentry took it, closed the door behind him, and winced along with the flare-up of pain in his lower rib cage when he kicked a leg over to mount it.
It was after six, and he knew the trains would not begin running through the valley until seven. He needed to make it to a larger village to get the first express train of the morning to Zurich.
So he biked west on the Engadine Road away from the hint of a faint orange daybreak behind him. His lower back, right thigh, and left knee burned with each revolution of the pedals. His face stung in the cold. He leaned into the snowfall, dead tired and wounded and disheartened. He’d wasted an entire day going after documents and weapons, and he’d acquired nothing but injuries. Still, there were few men on earth who could summon determination in the face of adversity as well as the haggard and bloody man in the ill-fitting coat on the woman’s bike. He had no plan, no gear, no help, and now he was certain he had no friends. Fitzroy had lied to him, had set him up. Court knew he had every right to disappear and leave Don to whatever had hold of him, whatever made him burn his number one asset.
But Court decided to continue to the west, if only for now. He knew he needed a better understanding of what was going on, and he only knew one way to get it.
EIGHTEEN
Shortly before six a.m. London time, Sir Donald Fitzroy looked out the portside window of the Sikorsky and down at a green meadow. As the helicopter raced at an altitude of just a few hundred feet, the landscape dropped away, and whitecaps and dark water appeared a thousand feet down. Below him were the white cliffs of Dover, the end of the British Isles and the beginning of the English Channel. He and Lloyd and Mr. Felix, the representative of President Abubaker, along with the Tech and the four LaurentGroup henchmen, flew south towards Normandy. The sixty-eight-year-old Englishman did not know why. “Additional incentive,” Lloyd had said an hour earlier. “On the off chance the Libyans botch the job in Switzerland and Court changes his mind, tells you that for all he cares your family can go to hell, then I have another lure I will use to reel him in.”
Before Fitzroy could question further, Lloyd was on the phone ordering a helicopter fueled for a flight across the channel to be sent immediately to the Bat tersea Heliport.
Sir Donald traveled to the Continent often, occasionally by aircraft from Gatwick or Heathrow, sometimes by the Eurostar high-speed train through the channel, but he much preferred the overland and over-sea route. A train south through Chatham and then to Dover, onto a ferry to Calais in France or Oestende or Zebrugge in Belgium. This was the old way, the way of his youth, and neither the quick and easy airlines nor the modern expediency of the tunnel under the North Sea could compare with the feeling of pride and love that he felt when he returned to England on the ferry and, in the distant haze over the water, he could see the white cliffs of Dover in all their majesty.
Was there anything so beautiful in the world to an Englishman?
And above the cliffs, white birds soared, welcoming travelers over the channel much as they had the returning aircraft of the Royal Air Force seventy years before, the thin airframes pocked with holes and filled with young boys who had just killed and died and risked all for Her Majesty in the air war against fascism.
Now Donald gazed with melancholy out the portside window, watched the beauty of Dover slip away behind him in the moonlit predawn, and knew he would likely never see this view again.
“I just got the word from Riegel. The Libyans have failed.” It was Lloyd speaking over the intercom, his voice bleating through the earphones of the headset that pinched the tufts of white hair on either side of Sir Donald’s head.
Fitzroy looked around the cabin and found Lloyd on the other side, facing back to him. Their eyes met in the dim red glow of the cabin lights. Fitzroy noticed the young American’s suit had wrinkled in the past twenty-four hours, his necktie now hung loose around an open collar.
“How many lives lost?” asked the Englishman.
“Zero, surprisingly. One man injured. They are saying the Gray Man is a ghost.”
“The comparison is not without merit,” said Fitzroy into his microphone.
“Sadly, no. Ghosts are already dead.” Lloyd sniffed. “I’m sending the Libyans to Bayeux to supplement the coverage there on the outside chance Gentry makes it through our gauntlet.”
Fitzroy shook his head. “Forget it. I was the only one who knew about the cache in Switzerland. He will know it was I who tipped the assassins off. Knowing that I’ve been double-crossing him all along, he will not be so inclined to save my family.”
Lloyd just smiled. “I’ve prepared for this contingency.”
“Are you bloody daft? He won’t come to my rescue. Can’t you understand that?”
“That is no longer my plan.” Lloyd turned away, conferred with the Tech.
The helicopter raced over the channel, and the moonshine flickered on the water below like a tray of loose diamonds. At seven in the morning, the Sikorsky crossed directly over Omaha Beach, the site of the most bloody of the D-day landings. Nearly three thousand young American men died in the water and on the sand and in the bluffs off the beach below them. Lloyd did not look out the window. He was talking to the Tech over the helicopter’s intercom radio; Sir Donald listened in but said nothing. Lloyd authoritatively barked orders, orchestrating the movements of the surveillance experts like chess pieces on a board. He ordered the Tech to send all kill teams now east of Guarda to the west of Guarda: Zurich, Lucerne, Bern, Basel. As the road between Gentry’s starting point and objective shortened, the ten hunter-killer units still in the fight had less territory to cover.
“Let’s move the Venezuelans from Frankfurt to Zurich. Have the South Africans head to Bern on the off chance he turns south. Who’s in Munich? Then Gentry has alrea
dy bypassed the Botswanans. Let’s pull them all the way back to Paris; they can support the Sri Lankans on site there. The Kazaks are in Lyon. Right? Lyon is too far south, but we’ll stage them there till we get more intel. Make sure they’re near the highway and ready to head north. Send another detail of surveillance to Zurich and double-check Gentry’s known associates list. Who else is in Paris? Well, I don’t care how good he is, one man is not enough. Gentry has lots of history there; I want three teams in Paris plus the Korean. The Korean hasn’t checked in? Don’t worry about it. Just keep sending him updates. He’s a singleton operator. He won’t be calling in lonely.”
Claire sat on the edge of her bed and worried. It was seven thirty a.m. The full shine of the morning was still a half hour off.
She’d slept, only because last night her mother had made her drink some awful green cough syrup. When she woke, it was still dark. She’d wondered where she was at first, then one by one, she remembered the terrible events of the day before, culminating in the short drive from the family villa in Bayeux to the large old château with the huge gate and the long driveway and the green lawn. She remembered the big men in the leather coats speaking the strange language and the scared looks of Daddy and Mummy, despite their continued assurance that everything was just fine.
Claire checked to make sure her sister was sleeping next to her. Kate was there; she’d choked down a mouthful of cough syrup, too.
Claire sat on the edge of the bed and looked out the window. The only movement was the huge man below her in the gravel car park at the side of the castle. A big gun hung around his neck, and he fished one cigarette after another out of his coat, smoking constantly.
Now and then he talked into a walkie-talkie. Claire knew what the radio was; she remembered the American, Jim, who’d stayed with her family when she was little. He’d had a radio, and he’d showed her and her sister how to press the button and talk into it like a telephone, with her mum answering on the other end in the back garden.
These men around her were nothing like Jim the American. Although she could not remember everything about his time in her house, she remembered he was nice and friendly, where these men had angry and unhappy faces.
Last night before Mummy made the girls drink the cough syrup, Kate had wanted to go exploring throughout the castle. Claire went along, but she was not playing like her silly sister. The angry men all but ignored them as they walked through the kitchen. Kate beat on pots and pans with a spoon because they echoed wildly in the massive château. They wandered down endless wooden-floored corridors and turned back from some because they were too dark and spooky. They found a cellar full of dusty wine bottles and they found a big library full of huge leather books and they found room after room where the walls were lined with the heads of large, scary animals with fur and horns and huge teeth. An orange cat ran down the hall, and they followed it down into the basement, watched it push open a little window high on a wall above a shelf and let itself outside and into the back garden.
Next the girls discovered a spiral staircase that wound up and up and up, and they climbed to the top of a tower. There they turned on a light, saw a man at a table sitting in a chair and looking out one of the open windows into the dark. He had a radio next to him, and he had a big gun in front of him. He’d yelled at the girls in that ugly foreign language, and Kate laughed and ran back down the stairs. Claire followed her sister, but her heart pounded in her chest. The man had barked into his radio, and soon men came and got the girls and took them by their arms to their parents’ room. In English one of the big men told Daddy to put his girls to bed, and Daddy had yelled back at the man, told him to keep his hands off, and then stormed out on the balcony while Mummy brought Kate and Claire into the bathroom to drink the medicine.
It had been an awful day and an awful night, and now that Claire had awakened, she knew it had been no bad dream, and today would likely be just as horrid.
As Claire sat at the edge of her bed in the low light and worried, she thought she heard a funny noise in the distance. Soon it was louder, came closer to the château. The skies above her home in London were filled with helicopters, so it didn’t take her long to identify the distinctive sound of a propeller.
She stood with her face to the window. The helicopter came over the woods on the far side of the big fountain in the big back garden. Its black rotors spun above its white body as it approached the far edge of the gravel car park, then it turned to the side, landed on its wheels, and sank down. The door on the side opened, and four men in suits climbed out.
The whipping wind of the helicopter blew open one man’s suit coat, and even from sixty meters Claire could see the pistol holster against the man’s white shirt.
More men with guns.
As the blades whipped above them, four more men stepped out of the chopper. The first man was black and wore a brown suit. The next man hauled two suitcases. He had a long ponytail and ran forward towards the château. Then came a man carrying a briefcase. He was thin and wore a black suit with a raincoat over it. His shiny black hair was short and messy in the wind, and Claire could tell, even in the distance, that he was someone important. The way he looked about, stormed forward on the balls of his feet, and gestured to those around him.
The next man who exited the helicopter was larger, older, bald except long white hair around his ears that lashed around below the spinning propellers. Claire pressed her face to the glass, squinted to get a better look.
Then she shouted out loud, waking Kate behind her with a start, though she’d somehow managed to sleep through the helicopter’s approach and landing.
“Grandpa!”
Fitzroy was allowed a minute with his son and daughter-in-law in the kitchen on the ground floor of the château. Phillip and Elise were subdued and confused and a little too scared to be angry.
From there he was shuffled up to the third floor to a large room that was set up similar to the conference room at the LaurentGroup subsidiary in London. There was a seat for him, a big Louis XV armchair. Lloyd had his own chair, a sleek, black, modern model. The Tech was already on station, setting up equipment on a long bank of tables that had been hauled in from other rooms and pushed together to suit his needs. He was just now flipping switches on laptops and radio sets, bringing the new operation’s center online.
The room had three doors leading from it. One was to an adjoining bathroom, the second was to the main hall, and the third, Fitzroy noted when one of the Belarusian guard force came through it to speak privately with Lloyd, was the entrance to a small spiral staircase that surely went both up towards the tower above them and continued down to the lower floors.
The new arrivals from London were still just settling in when Sir Donald’s phone vibrated on the table next to his chair. A wire ran from it to a speaker box on the table. As Lloyd pushed the button to answer, the Tech shouted to the room that he was not yet ready to trace the call.
“Cheltenham Security,” said Sir Donald. His voice was tiring, scratched.
“It’s me,” said the Gray Man.
“How are you, lad?”
There was a long pause. Finally, “You told them about Guarda.”
Fitzroy did not deny it. He said softly, wearily. “Yes, I did. I am truly sorry.”
“Not as sorry as you’re gonna be when your family dies. Good-bye and good luck, Don.”
Lloyd stood in the middle of the room. Quickly he walked to the table, leaned over the phone, and spoke. “Good morning, Courtland.”
There was no reply on the line for so long that Lloyd picked up the little phone and looked at it to see if the call was still open.
“Who the hell is this?”
“Court, you may not want to be so hard on the good knight here. I am afraid I put him in an utterly untenable position.”
“Who are you?”
“You don’t recognize my voice?”
“No.”
“We used to work together. It’s Lloyd.�
��
There was nothing.
Lloyd continued, “From Langley. Back in the halcyon days, you know.”
“Lloyd?”
“That’s right. How have you been?”
“I don’t remember a Lloyd.”
“Come now, Mr. Gentry. It hasn’t been that long. I worked for Hanley, helped run you and some of the other assets on the sharp end back in the Goon Squad days.”
“I remember Hanley. Don’t remember you.”
Fitzroy could see that Lloyd was genuinely offended. “Well, you knuckle draggers and door kickers never were known for your social IQ.” He looked over at Sir Donald. Embarrassed, perhaps? He waved a dismissive hand. “Doesn’t matter. What does matter is, even though you may feel disinclined to come here to Normandy to help your fearless leader, you might consider keeping your current travel itinerary for now. Because, let me assure you, there is still something here you do want.”
“There’s nothing I want bad enough to knowingly walk into a trap. Good-bye, Floyd.”
“It’s Lloyd, no F, double L, and you might want to stay on the line to hear my sales pitch.”
“Were you the one who put out the burn notice on me four years ago?” asked Gentry. His voice was measured and sounded dispassionate over the phone, but Fitzroy knew a question like that must come filled with emotion and intensity.
“No. I didn’t burn you. At the time I disagreed with the decision. I thought you still could have been useful to us.”