The Gray Man

by Mark Greaney

  “So who burned me? Hanley?”

  “That’s a discussion for another day. Maybe we’ll talk it over when you get here.”

  “It’s a date. Bye.”

  “At the moment you should be less worried about who burned you in ’06, and more worried about who will burn you tomorrow if you don’t drop in for a visit.”

  Gentry snorted into the phone. “Can’t be burned twice.”

  “Sure you can. When I left the agency, I took out a little insurance policy. I saw what happened to you and a few other men. I knew what barbarity the politicians who run the company were capable of when a heretofore successful operation falls out of favor with the men and women who have to testify before Congress. I told myself, ‘Lloyd, you’re too smart to go down like dumb old Court Gentry and the others.’ So I did what I had to do to ensure my survival.”

  “You stole secrets.”

  “Like I said, I’m a survivor.”

  “You’re a traitor.”

  “Same thing. I copied documents detailing operations, sources and methods, personnel files.”

  “Personnel files?”

  “Yes. I have them with me right now.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Just a moment.” Fitzroy watched Lloyd thumb through some papers in a gold folder on the table. There was a stack of similar folders alongside the one the young American picked up. “Gentry, Courtland A. Born 4/18/74 in Jacksonville, Florida. Parents Jim and Lyla Gentry. One brother, deceased. Entered grammar school in—”

  “That’s enough.”

  “I’ve got more. I’ve got it all. Your agency history with the Special Activities Division and the Autonomous Asset Development Program. Your Golf Sierra exploits. Your known associates. Photos, fingerprints, dental records, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want you to come to Normandy.”

  “Why?”

  “That will be discussed when you arrive.”

  The pause lasted long enough for Fitzroy to hear snippets from the second floor of the château below him. Elise was yelling at Phillip. Sir Donald knew the marriage was rocky, knew this pressure was the last thing they needed.

  Finally Gentry spoke. “Do what you have to do, Lloyd. Put my documents out there; I don’t give a shit. I’m done with this.”

  “Very well. I’ll spray your data to the world. Within a week, every mobster you’ve wronged, every enemy agency you’ve run against, every grumpy assassin you’ve beat out for a contract, they all will be after you. It will make the last forty-eight hours look like a vacation in a day spa.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “And Fitzroy dies. His family dies. Can you handle that?”

  A slight hesitation. “He shouldn’t have screwed me.”

  “Okay. You are a hard man, Court, I get it. But there is just one other thing I forgot to mention. Yours were not the only personnel files I filched from the agency. If you do not come to Normandy, I will distribute the names, photographs, and known associates files of all the operators in the Special Activities Division, active, inactive, retired, or otherwise indisposed. Every company triggerman will become just like you: burned, hunted, left hung out to dry because their services have been rendered useless and their names are popping up on every search engine on the Internet.”

  It was a long time before Gentry spoke. “What the fuck is all this about? Why would you do that, just to get to me?”

  “This isn’t just about you, you arrogant shit! You are insignificant in the scope of the real objective. But I need you here. I need you here, or I will scorch the earth clean of America’s best covert operators. I’ll see that every SAD asset and all their known associates are hunted dogs!”

  Court Gentry said nothing. Fitzroy cocked his head, thought he could hear the clacking cadence of a train over tracks in the background of the connection.

  Lloyd next said, “Of course, it will take a few days to dump all the personnel files of you and the SAD boys onto the net. There’s so damn much of it. I’ll have to start with something else. If you’re not here bright and early tomorrow morning, the first to check out will be the Fitzroy family downstairs. I figure I’ll begin with the little ones. The first-in, first-out principle. Know what I mean? I’ll kill the babies, kill the parents, and then top off my morning by killing old man Fitzroy here.”

  Gentry spoke up finally. “If you touch Claire or Kate, I will find you, and I will torture you so slowly that the only prayer on your lips will be for a quick death.”

  Lloyd clapped his hands. “That’s what I like to hear! Emotion! Passion! Well, you’d better get here in time for eggs and biscuits tomorrow, because snapping the necks of those pretty little girls will be the first order of business after breakfast!”

  Fitzroy had been silent, sullen. He’d sat to the side during the conversation like a forgotten dog. But when Lloyd spoke his last piece, Sir Donald launched from his Louis XV chair and onto the American and grabbed at the young man’s throat. Freshly led wires to the computers and speakers became caught up in their legs, and equipment was ripped from the table. Lloyd’s swivel chair flipped up as the two crashed to the ground. Sir Donald tore off Lloyd’s wire-rimmed glasses and smashed his fists into the taut cheekbones of his adversary’s face.

  It took almost ten seconds for the two Northern Irish guards to enter the room and pull the heavy Englishman off the young American solicitor. When finally they were separated, Fitzroy was shoved back in his chair. The two Scottish guards next rushed in and held his head and his arms. Shouts and screaming echoed all over the third floor as one of the Belarusians came up with chains found in the garage alongside the greenhouse. Fitzroy was strapped roughly into his chair, but he still fought against them all as chains were run over the arms and legs of the Louis XV and tightly around the arms and legs of Sir Donald. The cold steel links were strung around his neck, another loop at his forehead. Everything was secured with a huge padlock.

  All the while Lloyd remained on the floor. He’d sat up, breathing heavily, pushed his hair back in place, and retightened his necktie. He found his glasses on the floor, bent the arms a bit to approximate their original shape, and put them back on. His face was scratched slightly, his arms and chin and neck were bruised, but he was otherwise uninjured.

  Finally he climbed back into his chair and rolled back up to the desk near the telephone.

  “Sorry, Court. Some technical difficulties there. We’re back with you. You still there?”

  But Gentry had hung up.

  Lloyd looked to Fitzroy. Fitzroy looked to Lloyd, basically because he could look nowhere else with his head immobilized with chains.

  “He’d better stay on track, Don. He’d better stay on track, or you and your family are going to die slow and miserable fucking deaths! You take me for some Ivy League lightweight? So did the CIA. I was shuffling policy papers while the door kickers got all the glory. Well, fuck them, and fuck you! I can play as dirty as the best of the dirty tricks boys. I can and I will do what I need to do to see this through. Abubaker will sign the contract, and we’ll be readying our natural gas operation by noon tomorrow. You and yours will be forgotten by me. Between now and then you can live or you can die, I could not give a rat’s ass which. It’s your decision, Donny boy. Pull that shit again, and see if I give you a third chance.”

  “Court will stay on track. He will come. And he will kill you.”

  “He won’t make it here. But even if he does, the Gray Man who makes it here will be a very different man than the one you know. He’ll be hurt, short on time, short on sleep, short on gear.”

  “Gear?”

  “Yes. These types are lost without their gear.”

  Sir Donald chuckled angrily. “You haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. Court’s most valuable piece of kit is between his ears. The only weapon he needs is his mind. Everything else: guns, knives, bombs . . . they’re all just accessories.”

  “Rid
iculous. You’ve bought into the fairy tale of tactical operators. A glorified goon is all he is.”

  “It’s no fairy tale, and there is no glory in what he does. He’s a man at work and as cold and as brutal and as efficient as a corner butcher going about his business. Get in his way, and you’ll see.”

  “Oh, I have every intention of getting in his way.”

  Fitzroy’s corpulent face was beet red and covered in sweat after struggling with five men. He was chained like a beast to the chair with the thick links covering a third of his head. Still, he smiled.

  “I’ve dealt with talkers before, little wankers who move their mouths when their backs are to the wall. Pricks with power. I have seen many a chap like you come and go in my day. You will have your moment, and then your moment will pass. You don’t scare me.”

  Lloyd’s face twitched as he leaned close to Fitzroy. “No? How ’bout I walk downstairs, say, ‘Eenie, meenie, minie, moe,’ come back up here with a little pigtailed prize? How ’bout I—”

  “You little sod. Scared of the man in chains, so you threaten a child? The more you try to show me how dangerous you are, the more you fit into the mold of exactly what I took you for the first time I saw you. A weak little nancy boy. A pathetic prat. You can’t sort out an old man lashed to a chair, so you have to go after a weaker target. Bloody fucking wanker.”

  Lloyd’s eyes narrowed with fury, and his breath was heavy in Fitzroy’s face. Slowly, the American sat up, smiled a little. He lifted a strand of hair away from where it had drooped on his forehead, pressed it back along his scratched scalp.

  “I’ll show you what I can do to you. Just you and me.” He reached a hand out behind him, back to one of the security men from Minsk by the door. “Somebody give me a goddamned knife.”

  NINETEEN

  Song Park Kim awoke at dawn in his suite at the swank Plaza Athénée. His quarters surrounded him with opulence, but he did not sleep on the bed, did not drink from the minibar, did not partake of the room service. He’d slept in a back closet on the floor after rigging tripwires and telltales all around him.

  He left his room at six in the morning and began walking through the streets of Paris, memorizing the roads that led from the Right Bank, over bridges, to the Left Bank: taking in the looks and mannerisms of the westerners: and memorizing the natural choke points of both automobile and pedestrian traffic.

  He’d received a list of names and addresses on his GPS: the Gray Man’s known associates in Paris: a former CIA coworker who now headed a market intelligence firm in a skyscraper in La Defense, to the west of the city; an Afghani interpreter used by the Special Activities Division in Kabul in 2001, who now ran a swank Middle Eastern restaurant in the Left Bank on the Boulevard Saint Germaine; an informant in Fitzroy’s Network who was also a federal pen pusher at the Ministry of the Interior in an office near the Place de la Concorde; a pilot of renowned skill who had flown for the SAD in Europe and now lived semiretired in the Latin Quarter.

  The Korean used public transportation to take a quick look at each site, checking them all out: access to the buildings, locations of nearby parking, and public transportation routes to and from each area. He knew there were local watchers hired by the people who had hired his government to send him, and in fact he’d seen men and women at every site on his list, men and women unable to remain undetected by an exceedingly well-trained operator. He had no doubt the Gray Man would see them, too. Kim knew he would have to supplant their support with his own tracking skills.

  Afterwards, Kim patrolled the city center, still studying the map. He was prepared to rush back to any of the known associates’ locations if there was a Gray Man sighting, but he did not expect his adversary to use an associate on his current mission. If he could, Kim was certain, the Gray Man would bypass Paris altogether. It was too congested an area, with too many police and too many cameras and too many old acquaintances that would invariably be under surveillance. If the American assassin was forced to go into the city for some reason, Kim knew, he’d do his utmost to get what he needed from sources other than those who could be traced back to him.

  Kim knew this because he himself was a lone assassin. A singleton. He himself had been hunted down like a dog, and he himself had been forced to avoid all those who might have been inclined to help him.

  But Kim also knew that isolation, exhaustion, injury, necessity, and desperation all led to mistakes, and he knew that if his target somehow made it as far as Paris and had some need in the city, the Gray Man would be a desperate animal indeed, and all bets were off as to how he would act and react. This operator was perhaps already the most dangerous man in the world. Throwing in wild-eyed fear and a frantic race against time might make him slip up, but it would also make him even more dangerous to those around him. Kim knew that if the call came that the Gray Man was here, then blood would flow like a river through the streets of the City of Lights.

  Gentry had ridden his stolen bike through the snowy dawn, then pulled up to the train station at the village of Ardez. A few locals milled about, waiting for the first morning trains west to Zurich or east to the Italian or Austrian borders. The American borrowed a cell phone from a kid waiting for the eastbound train and paid the teenage boy the equivalent of forty dollars to call Fitzroy for five minutes to confront his handler about selling him out. He walked twenty yards down the cement platform for privacy and stood in the snow as a train to Interlaken rolled by. He’d finally hung up the phone when a fight broke out on the other end of the line, erased the number in the phone’s memory, and handed it back to the kid with the cash. A few minutes later, Court climbed aboard the first train of the morning to Zurich. It was a Saturday, so he was the only passenger in his car for the majority of the hour-and-forty-five minute travel time through the narrow valley. One after another, the bright red train chugged on past the railroad stations of the villages along its tracks.

  Gentry warmed up on the train, checked his wounds by dropping his pants in the empty car and poking at the sores on his knees and at the entrance and exit wounds on his stinging thigh with his fingertips. He was afraid he might have contracted an infection in the gunshot wound. Certainly, swimming in Szabo’s cistern hadn’t helped. Otherwise, he was okay. He’d put miles on the lacerations on his feet, and they did little more than throb, just like his broken rib.

  He knew he had to continue on to Normandy, though he felt his odds for success were lessening with each mile nearer he came to the trap waiting for him. Fitzroy was a bastard for tricking him as he had, but, Court had to admit, Lloyd had put Sir Donald into one hell of a difficult position. Court wondered what lengths he himself would have gone to, who he would have sold out, if the twins were his family and their lives were jeopardized by some motherfucker with a mob of gun monkeys and no compunction about killing innocent children.

  Thinking about Lloyd made Gentry’s blood boil. He honestly didn’t remember the guy, but the CIA had never gone wanting for lightweight desk-riding a-holes who worked way back in the rear of covert operations, while the Gray Man and those like him operated on the sharp edge. Court couldn’t picture any faces, but once in a while his superiors had cause to introduce him to some Langley suit. Lloyd must have been one of these, before taking top secret SAD personnel records and leaving the company for the private sector.

  What a prick.

  Court wanted to recall Lloyd, find something back in his memory banks that could somehow help him out of his current predicament, but the rhythm of the train along the tracks began to carry him off to sleep. With all his cuts, bruises, pulled muscles, and extra holes, it was a chore to relax at all, but it was almost as if he was too tired to hurt. He fell asleep a few minutes before arriving in Zurich, was jarred awake by the slowing of the train and the recorded announcement of the impending stop. As he stood and made his way to the exit, he cussed himself for his lack of discipline, for dozing with hunters so close on his tail.

  In the Zurich Hauptbahnhof, he boug
ht a ticket for Geneva. It would mean another two hours on the rails, so he made his way over to a sausage counter and bought a large bratwurst and a cup of coffee. It was a grotesque combination, but he hoped the jolt of caffeine and the half pound of solid protein would keep his body alert.

  With twenty minutes until his train’s departure, he descended the escalator to a large shopping center two levels below the station, found a pay bathroom, and commandeered a stall. Here he sat, fully dressed, on the porcelain, leaned his head back on the cold wall behind him. He drew his pistol and held it at the ready in his lap. Train stations were obvious places for his enemies to hunt him. He didn’t like the scarcity of escape routes in a bathroom stall, but still, he knew he was better off hiding in the toilet than he would be standing at his track for a quarter hour just begging to be identified by the opposing force. If Lloyd’s goons found him here, then he’d just empty a couple of magazines into the door of the stall in front of him and try to bust his way out.

  It wasn’t a good plan, but, Court admitted to himself, by taking on this operation in the first place he had forgone any pretense of wisdom. Now it was just about making his way through the shit in the hopes he would live to, and maybe even through, eight o’clock on Sunday morning.

  With less than a minute to departure, Gentry walked up the platform alongside Track Seventeen and slipped silently on the train to Geneva just as it began to roll.

  Riegel’s phone rang at nine forty in the morning. He was in his office, putting in a full day on Saturday, having reluctantly canceled a weekend grouse-hunting trip in Scotland.

  “Riegel.”

  “Sir. Kruger speaking.” Kruger was a Swiss security chief for LaurentGroup based in Zurich. “I have information on the target. I had been instructed to contact Mr. Lloyd, but I thought I would let you know.”

  “Fine, Kruger. I’ll pass the information. What do you have?”