The Gray Man

by Mark Greaney

  A plasma screen hung above a large fireplace that crackled with pine logs.

  A lone man sat on a leather sofa with his back to Court. His eyes were trained on the television. The language coming from the TV was French, but the images were clear enough to Gentry. Less than two hours earlier he’d stood on that same train platform. He’d spoken to that young policeman who now lay facedown and dead on the snowy cement, the video images catching the moment when a yellow tarp was draped over his still form.

  Court holstered his gun. There was no one else around.

  “Hello, Maurice.”

  The man stood and turned. He was pale and wrinkled, easily seventy and unhealthy looking. If Gentry’s appearance in his flat was a surprise to the old man, he made no sign of it. He stood on thin legs.

  “Hello, Court.” American English.

  “Don’t waste your time looking around,” Gentry said. “I have your gun.”

  Maurice smiled. “No. You have one of my guns.” The old man pulled a small revolver from under his shirt and leveled it at Gentry’s chest. “You don’t have this one.”

  “I didn’t figure you for the paranoid type. You weren’t so careful in the old days.”

  “Even so, you should have kept your weapon trained on me till you knew I was unarmed.”

  “Apparently so.”

  The old man hesitated several seconds. The revolver did not waver. “Damn, boy. I taught you better.”

  “You did. I’m sorry, sir,” Gentry said sheepishly.

  “You look like shit.”

  “I’ve had a rough couple of days.”

  “I’ve seen you after rough days. You’ve never looked this bad.”

  Court shrugged. “I’m not a kid anymore.”

  The old man regarded Gentry for a long moment. “You never were.”

  Maurice turned his revolver around in his hand, tossed it underhanded across the room to the younger American. Court caught it, looked it over.

  “Thirty-eight police special snubby. The other one’s a 1911. You do know, Maurice, that there is no law that says that just because you are old, your guns have to be, too.”

  “Kiss my ass. Want a beer?”

  Gentry tossed the revolver underhanded onto the leather sofa. “More than anything else in the world.”

  Two minutes later Court sat on the kitchen counter. He held a fat bag of frozen blueberries over his left wrist. The cold burned his skin, but it reduced the swelling. He could still move his fingers, though, so the hand was functional, if barely.

  His host was Maurice, just Maurice. Court didn’t know his real name, could only be certain that it was not Maurice. He was an old agency man, Gentry’s primary instructor at the Special Activities Division’s Autonomous Asset Development Program training center at Harvey Point, North Carolina. Court only knew tidbits about the man and his history. He knew he’d cut his teeth in Vietnam, performed targeted killings in the Phoenix Program, then spent the next twenty years as a Cold War spook in Moscow and Berlin.

  He’d been demobilized for years, working as a trainer for the CIA when a twenty-year-old convicted murderer was brought into his prefabricated aluminum classroom within sight of the Atlantic Ocean. Gentry was both cocky and quiet, raw beyond belief, but in possession of intelligence, discipline, and zeal. Maurice turned him out in under two years and announced to Operation’s leadership that this kid was the best hard asset he’d ever built.

  That was fourteen years ago, and their paths had seldom crossed since. Maurice had been lured back into the game after 9/11, as were most high-level retired assets still in possession of a pulse. Because of his age and uncertain health, he was sent to Geneva to work in the finance end of the CIA’s Directorate of Clandestine Services. His knowledge of Swiss banking and bankers, accrued through forty years of utilizing numbered accounts for CIA shell corporations in his operations, made him an effective paymaster for operatives and operations around the globe.

  It was easy work—clean, compared to some of the jobs he’d done as a younger man—but it was not without danger or controversy. Shortly after Court had been drummed out of the agency, Maurice himself was cashiered by the brass. Something about misappropriated funds, though Court did not believe the official story for a minute.

  The word from Langley was that Maurice was now completely retired from the CIA. Court did not know that for sure, wasn’t 100 percent certain Maurice wouldn’t turn on him, which explained the pupil’s initial suspicion of his teacher.

  Maurice handed Gentry a bottle of French beer, so the younger man cradled the frozen bag of blueberries in his lap and let his wrist rest upon it. The stinging cold slowly numbed the ache. The old man asked, “You hurt bad?”

  “Not really.”

  “You always were a tough bastard.”

  “I learned from the best not to whine. It never worked around you.”

  “I haven’t seen you in six years. Cyprus, was it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You saw the watcher outside?”

  “Yeah. Girl with the braids.”

  “Good boy. She’s pretty good, dressed like a tourist. We get a lot of tourists here in the Old Town. I hate tourists.”

  “Transitory faces.”

  “That’s right. Do yourself a favor, Court. If you make it to retirement, move someplace so damn god-forsaken no tourist would set foot there.”

  “Will do.”

  Maurice coughed. Cleared his throat. “There’s news floating about. Not connected yet, just bouncing around in the ether, waiting for dots to be connected. Prague, Budapest, and then this morning up by the Austrian border. I knew something big was going down, didn’t figure I knew any of the players until the coverage on my house started about eleven thirty. ’Bout an hour after she showed up, all the local stations began broadcasting the news of the gunfight just north of Lausanne. At that point, I knew you were heading this way.”

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “I connected the dots. A hunted man who just kept on living. Death and destruction in his wake. As the bodies got closer, I told myself, ‘Here comes Court.’ ”

  “Here I am,” Gentry confirmed distantly, looking at the bottle in his hand.

  “Tell me you didn’t shoot those poor cops.”

  “You know me. I wouldn’t kill a cop.”

  “I knew you. People change.”

  “I didn’t change. The police were holding me when a wet team showed up. I tried to convince them I was no longer their biggest problem. They wouldn’t listen.”

  “A lot of people want you dead, Court.”

  “You aren’t exactly the flavor of the month yourself. The CIA burned you, too.”

  “There’s no shoot-on-sight directive against me. You were the one they really fucked over.”

  “Still, how they framed you was wrong, Maurice. You were one of the honest ones. They should have left your reputation intact.”

  Maurice said nothing.

  “What are you doing these days?” Court asked.

  “Finance. Private sector stuff. No more spook work.”

  Court’s eyes scanned the expensive real estate around him. “You look like you are doing okay.”

  “There is money in money, or haven’t you heard?”

  Court detected a little defensiveness. He swigged his beer and rotated his arm to spread the cold around his swollen wrist. “You remember a guy at Langley named Lloyd?”

  “Sure. Sharp-dressed little fag, law degree from London. King’s College, I think. He got in the way of a finance operation I worked in the Caymans not long before I got shit-canned. Smart kid, but a prick.”

  “He’s at the center of all this stuff I’m dealing with now.”

  “No kidding? He was like twenty-eight at the time. Must be only thirty-two or so now. He left Langley about a year ago, I heard.”

  “What happened to all the good guys?” asked Court rhetorically.

  “Before 9/11, we were a basket with a
few bad apples. After 9/11, we grew into an orchard. Now there are enough bad apples to fill baskets. Same shit, different scale. No surprise.”

  They both sipped beer for a minute in silence, relaxing in each other’s company, as if they spent every Saturday afternoon together. Maurice started to cough, and his coughing morphed into a violent hack.

  When it ended, Gentry asked, “What’s wrong with you?”

  Maurice looked away a moment, answered without emotion. “Lungs and liver, take your pick.”

  “Bad?”

  “The good news is I may not die from the lung cancer because the liver disease may get me first. Conversely, I may be buried with a working liver if I can only die from lung cancer. Drinking and smoking fifty-some-odd years.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.” He laughed, and this turned into a raspy coughing fit as well.

  “How much time do you have?”

  “There’s an old Henny Youngman bit. Doc says I’ve got six months to live. I tell him, ‘I can’t pay your bill.’ He tells me he’ll give me another six months.” Maurice’s laugh turned into a wheeze and then a violent hack.

  “So six months, then?”

  “That’s what they said. Seven months ago.”

  “Don’t pay ’em,” quipped Court. It was gallows humor, though Gentry wasn’t comfortable joking with his mentor about impending death.

  “Let’s get back to you. What have you gotten yourself mixed up in?”

  “It’s related to a job I did last week. I pissed someone off, I guess.”

  “The colored guy who got it in Syria. Ali Baba, whatever his name was. That was you, wasn’t it?”

  “Abubaker,” Court corrected, but he neither confirmed nor denied his involvement.

  Maurice just shrugged. “He needed to go. I’ve followed your career as a private. Your ops are always white on black. Not just nicely performed, but moral, just.”

  “Tell that to Lloyd.”

  “A lot of people say that thing in Kiev was you.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “So?”

  Maurice’s phone rang. The old man reached a reed-thin hand to the handset on the wall and answered it. His gray eyes widened slightly as he looked up at his young guest.

  “It’s for you.”

  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.”