by Mark Greaney
Riegel nodded. He regarded his sniper for a moment. “I saw the body. The entry wound. Good decision or not… it was a magnificent shot.”
The Belarusian lowered his eye from the scope of his Dragunov but continued his survey of the orchard. He betrayed not a speck of emotion. “Da. It was.”
Lloyd was tired of being ignored. “Look, Riegel. You’re wasting time. Even if Gentry does make it here, which he won’t, do you really think he’s going to come running straight up the middle of the yard?”
“It’s a possibility. He will do whatever he considers his best option.”
“That’s insane. He’s not going to storm the castle by himself.”
“I have to prepare as if he will. His options will be limited.”
“Well then, why don’t you line the fucking garden with land mines?” Lloyd’s sarcasm was delivered with utter derision.
Riegel looked at him a long moment. “Would you know where I can get some land mines?”
Just then, Lloyd’s phone chirped in his pocket.
“Yeah?”
“It’s the Tech here. Gentry is calling on Sir Donald’s phone. I can forward the call to you.”
Lloyd hit the speakerphone on his unit. “Do it.”
“Hello, Lloyd.” Gentry’s voice was tired.
“So you slipped the noose again. I was hoping to be standing over your charred remains sometime this evening.”
“No. Instead, your rented thugs just killed a seventy-five-year-old American hero.”
“Right. A terminally ill, out-to-pasture spy on the take. Excuse me while I dab the tears from my eyes.”
“Fuck you, Lloyd.”
“You’re in Geneva?”
“You know that I am.”
“Do you need me to fax you a goddamned map? Northern France is in northern fucking France, not southern Switzerland. I don’t know why you went to see Maurice. Money, documentation, weapons, another gunman, whatever. None of that shit is going to make a damn bit of difference in the long run. The only thing you need to be worried about right now is time, because tomorrow morning when the little hand reaches the eight and the big hand reaches the twelve, it is open fucking season on little British girlies up here!”
“Don’t worry, Lloyd. I’ll be there soon.”
“Why are you calling?”
“I was sitting here worrying that you may begin to relax, you may think that I died in the explosion. The possibility that you might be having a comfortable afternoon was really beginning to chap my ass, so I thought I’d give you a ring, let you know to leave a light on for me tonight.”
Lloyd sniffed into the phone. “You just wanted to make sure I didn’t give the mission up for lost. Didn’t go downstairs and kill the Fitzroys because I don’t need them anymore.”
“That, too. I don’t know how many more hit teams you have between you and me, but all the goons on earth won’t stop me from getting my hand around your throat in just a few hours.”
The Tech ran up to the three men in the back garden. Out of breath, he held up a sheet of paper on which he’d hurriedly scrawled the words, “Sat Phone — no trace.”
Lloyd frowned. He said, “Court, your death is an inevitability. Why don’t you save us all some time, make things easier on everyone, and kill yourself, then put your head in a cooler and ship it up to me.”
“I’ll make you a deal. I’ll supply the head. You get the ice chest ready. Soon enough, I’ll give you the opportunity to put the two together.”
“Sounds like a plan, buddy.”
“Come tomorrow morning, Julius Abubaker is going to have to find himself a new bitch to bargain with, because when you fail, and you will fail, either I will kill you, or someone else will.”
Lloyd’s face twitched in anger. “I’m nobody’s bitch, you knuckle-dragging bastard. I’ve seen a lot of smug scalp hunters come and go in my days. You’re no different. You’d do well to remember that even with your reputation and your spooky nickname, you are just a glorified door kicker. You’ll be dead in a few hours, and I’ll have forgotten about you before the maggots finish you off.”
There was a short pause. “Let me guess, Lloyd. Your dad was somebody.”
“As a matter of fact, my father is somebody.”
“Figures. See you soon.” Gentry hung up the phone.
Riegel hid his smile from Lloyd. The Tech still stood with his hands on his knees, breathless from the run. He said, “Gentry sounds like he really thinks he’ll make it here.” There was palpable terror in his voice between his gasps for air.
Lloyd snapped at him, “Get back to work. I want helicopters in the air, I want men on the trains, and I want him dead before he gets to Paris!”
* * *
An hour later, Riegel stood on a flat rampart lining the rear of the château’s roof. He looked out through the decorative battlements at the cold but sunny afternoon. Three teams of Belarusians, each consisting of two men with assault rifles and radios, walked the grounds in a crisscrossing pattern. The sniper and his spotter were on Riegel’s left, high in the tower with a near-perfect 360-degree view of the lawn in the back and the lawn in the front. The helicopter with the thermal imaging equipment had just radioed in that they were on their way back from Paris with all the gear and the two-man team of engineers that could set it up in under an hour.
The Tech had put a hit team on the TGV from Geneva, the high-speed train to Paris. They’d reported no sign of Gentry. Three more teams and most of the available watchers were taking up positions on the highways through the French Alps that the Gray Man would have to traverse if he was traveling by car or motorcycle. Three more kill squads were in Paris. It was a natural staging area, a city full of his known associates and a city in which he might well stop for supplies or support.
There was not much left for Kurt Riegel to do at the moment but wait.
Still, something was bothering him.
It started out as a nagging irritation in the back of his mind and grew by the minute as he reconciled himself to the fact that he’d tidied up all the ends of the operation that he could at the moment. But it somehow remained after he could think of no other preparations to make.
Finally he closed in on the origin of his ill ease: something the Gray Man had said to Lloyd. Sure, Gentry would have figured out this op against him had to do with his assassination of Issac Abubaker. But what did he mean by Lloyd being Abubaker’s bitch? How could Gentry have known that Lloyd wasn’t just an employee of Abubaker, or of the CIA, doing a job? That he did his job for some other reason. Some sort of bargain. Riegel had read the Tech’s handwritten transcripts of Gentry’s phone conversation with Lloyd earlier in the day, before Riegel was on site. There was no mention by Lloyd or Fitzroy of LaurentGroup or the true reasons behind this endeavor. Why on earth would the Gray Man assume this operation involved some sort of deal between the parties, which clearly the term bargain implied? Why on earth would the Gray Man assume Lloyd’s life hung in the balance of his success?
It was another full minute of speculation, and when the answer came to Riegel, the sign came to him like it would were he hunting prey on safari. When tracking an animal, a skilled hunter can find indication in the animal’s tracks, indications that it knows it is being pursued. It had picked up a scent. It had seen movement. The gait changes when prey senses trouble, and only a uniquely adept hunter can pick up this subtle alteration in his quarry’s tracks.
Kurt Riegel was such a hunter.
Gentry had more than a scent of the real operation against him. He had specific details that he only could have gotten one way.
Kurt Riegel spun on the rampart and entered the château. He passed Lloyd, who was stepping out of the bathroom, continued down the corridor with the bearing of a storm trooper.
Lloyd saw the hunter’s determination. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
Riegel said nothing. He marched down the hall and descended the wide, carpeted staircase to the second floor. He sto
rmed down this hallway, past the sconces and the paintings, past the door to Elise Fitzroy’s room, past the bedroom where the kids were locked up. With Lloyd close on his heels, he passed Leary, one of the Northern Irish thugs Lloyd had brought along from LaurentGroup London. The fifty-two-year-old German threw his shoulder into the heavy door Leary was guarding, and it flew open. In the large room beyond, lying on his back in the bed, covered in white linen and facing the door, Sir Donald Fitzroy stared back at the procession of men filing into the room.
Riegel stomped across the room to Sir Donald’s bed. He showed none of the courtesy he had displayed in their earlier meeting. His face was that of a man who’d been played for a fool and was out for blood in recompense.
In a hushed voice that was incongruous to his mannerisms, Riegel asked a one-word question. “Where?”
Lloyd and Leary stood back in the center of the room. They looked at one another, searching for some clue as to what was happening.
“What are you talking about?” asked Donald.
Riegel drew his Steyr pistol, pressed it hard to the bald forehead of Sir Donald. “Your very last chance.” His voice was still a whisper. “Where is it?”
After a brief pause, Sir Donald Fitzroy’s arms moved slowly under the covers. Soon a mobile phone appeared. He handed it to the big German.
Riegel did not even look at it. He slipped it into his pocket. “Who?” he asked now, still in a hushed and angry voice.
Sir Donald said nothing.
“It will take me seconds to determine the owner of this phone. You can save yourself some measure of misery by giving me the answer yourself.”
Sir Donald looked away from Riegel, across the room to Lloyd, then his eyes drifted to the Northern Irish guard.
“Padric Leary worked for me back in the old days, back in Belfast. You were one of my best touts, Paddy.” He looked back to Kurt Riegel. “Still, the wanker shook me down for a king’s ransom to make a couple of lousy calls.”
As Riegel’s fury turned from the Englishman to the Irishman, Fitzroy called out to the stupefied guard, “Sorry, old boy. Don’t guess I can come through with the ten thousand quid, after all. You’ll just have to take solace in the fact you remain a loyal servant to a nobleman of the Crown.”
Leary looked to Riegel. “A bloody lie! There’s a right bleedin’ Brit for ya! He’s bloody lying! Before two days ago I’d never laid eyes on the fooking old bastard!”
“Is this your phone?” Riegel pulled it from his pocket and held it out.
Leary looked at it for several seconds, then began walking towards Fitzroy in his bed.
“How the fook did you get your wrinkled old hands on my—”
A gunshot cracked in the small room. Leary’s head snapped forward, and he crashed face-first at Riegel’s feet. The German dropped to a knee in a blur of action, raised his weapon in a flash as he went down.
Lloyd stood in the middle of the room, his arm outstretched and a small silver automatic at the end of it. It was still pointed to where the back of the Irishman’s head was before the .380 hollow-point round sent it lurching forward.
“Nein!” shouted Riegel in a Germanic scream.
As Lloyd spoke, he waved the gun around the room, used it as a pointer, swung it with his gesticulations. “We have enough problems out there without having to worry about enemies in our midst.” He then motioned to Riegel, who was still in a low crouch, eyes on the handgun dancing about the room at the end of Lloyd’s arm. “You wanted to treat Donnie boy like a gentleman, and this is how he repays you. You were too soft, and he used that against you. He’s been manipulating people since before I was born. That’s what he does! Find out who he called and what he said. You do it right now, or I will call Marc Laurent and tell him you are getting in the way of my mission!”
Lloyd lowered the gun and turned. He left the room. After a few more seconds on his knee with his gun raised, still scanning for targets, Riegel holstered his weapon, looked back to Fitzroy, and said, “I’m disappointed.”
Fitzroy’s voice was surprisingly strong. “I see the desperation, Riegel. I see it in your eyes as well as Lloyd’s. This is not only about a contract to siphon and ship natural gas. Abubaker has something else he’s holding over LaurentGroup. Some dirt about your past, your practices. Something that, should it see the bright light of day, would blow your organization to pieces.”
Riegel looked in a mirror hanging above a large armoire. He fixed his graying blond hair with his fingertips. “Yes, Sir Donald. We’ve allowed ourselves to be caught up in quite an unenviable predicament. My father used to say, ‘If you lie down with dogs, you will wake up with fleas.’ Well, we have lain down with many, many a dog for many, many years. Abubaker is one of the worst, and he knows much about what Marc Laurent will do for money and power. Since the decoloni zation of Africa, the continent’s resources have been ripe for exploitation for anyone prepared to dance with a despot. We have had Abubaker in our back pocket for years… and now we are in his. He’s threatening to talk about the length to which Marc Laurent has gone to take resources from Africa. It’s not a pretty story. We’d very much prefer the outgoing president held his tongue.”
With that, Riegel started to the door. Without a backward glance, he called out to his prisoner, “I’ll send someone to clean up the body.”
“Don’t bother. When Court gets here, there will be corpses all over the house.”
TWENTY-SIX
Five soldiers of Saudi Arabia’s Al Mukhabarat Al A’amah, or General Intelligence Directorate, flew west over the Alps in a stolen Eurocopter EC145. The chopper was the property of a local owner-operator who’d made a good living ferrying snowboarders and extreme skiers to otherwise inaccessible peaks on Mont Blanc and other mountains in the area.
Now the sleek black Eurocopter’s owner, a former French army major, was dead in his hangar, shot once through the heart with a silenced pistol, and the Saudis flew his craft north over the highway. The road below them rose and fell, weaved and disappeared into alpine tunnels and rushed past bright green forests and lakes so blue the bright sky around them looked positively dull in comparison.
Only the Saudi pilot spoke English. He stayed in sporadic contact with the Tech, an open two-way communication between his headset and the command center that came and went with the jagged peaks on either side of the aircraft. The Tech simultaneously ran other hit teams in the area and relayed reports from the watchers at bus stations and taxi stands. No sign of the Gray Man had been reported since he slipped his coverage just after leaving the financier’s home in Geneva.
The A40 is the obvious highway for a traveler to take from Geneva, Switzerland, through southwestern France, into the French heartland. There, at the city of Viriat, one could stay on the A40 to the A6, or one could go northeast on the A39 into Dijon. Either way it is roughly a five-hour drive to Paris, as compared with six or more hours by avoiding these routes.
The Saudis in the helicopter knew where to look for their target. If he came over the roads, they knew he would pass below them on the A40.
They just did not know what type of vehicle they were looking for.
Thirty watchers positioned themselves at overpasses, rest stops, along the highway’s shoulders with the hoods up on their vehicles. Others drove along with the traffic. Each pavement artist watched the road, scanned the occupants of as many cars as possible for the most basic profile. It was a large operation to remain concealed to the police, and for that reason and others, Riegel had been against the enterprise entirely. When it became clear Gentry had not boarded a train or taken a bus, Riegel wanted all watchers, all kill teams, and all resources to be pulled back to Paris. He was certain the Gray Man would not bypass Paris altogether. Riegel presumed, and Lloyd did not dispute, that the CIA financier Court met in Geneva had probably supplied him with some equipment, weaponry, a vehicle, medical attention, and likely cash. Also, Riegel supposed that if the Gray Man had time to field a call from Sir Donald
Fitzroy, then he had time to get other contacts from the well-connected ex-CIA banker. If Court had made arrangements to pick up men or matériel, he would have no time to go anywhere other than locations already on the way.
Paris was the last major city on his route, and it was chock-full of shooters, document forgers, black-market gun dealers, former CIA pilots, and all other manner of ne’er-do-wells the Gray Man could employ to help him rescue the Fitzroys and take back the personnel files Lloyd stole from American intelligence.
Riegel wanted all the operation’s resources to concentrate on Paris, but Lloyd demanded one final choke point ambush set up on the main highway to the north to stop Gentry before he made it any closer to the château.
* * *
But Gentry did not take the A40 to the A6, nor did he take the A40 to the A39. These were, by far, the most efficient routes but, Court reasoned, they were only efficient to those travelers not targeted for termination by dozens of killers along these roads.
No, Court decided the operation against him warranted his adding an extra two or so hours’ driving time on his tired and hurting body. It would suck, seven full hours behind the wheel just to make it to Paris, but he saw no alternative. Buses and trains were out of the question with all the gear in the trunk he had to transport. He had to drive.
At least he was driving in style. The Mercedes S550 was sleek and solid, and the nearly new interior filled his nostrils with the luxurious scent of fine leather. The 382 horsepower engine purred at eighty-five miles an hour, and the satellite sound system kept Court company. From time to time Gentry put on local radio, struggled with the French to pick up tidbits of information about gun battles in Budapest, Guarda, and Lausanne, and something about a house explosion in the Old Town section of Geneva.
By five in the afternoon, Gentry’s exhaustion threatened to run him off the road. He pulled into a rest stop just shy of the town of Saint-Dizier. He filled his tank and bought a ubiquitous French ham and cheese sandwich in a large baguette. He downed two sodas and bought a huge bottle of water after a bathroom visit. In fifteen minutes he was back on the road. His GPS resting on his dashboard told him he would not make it into Paris until nine p.m. Calculating all he needed to do before heading on to Normandy, Gentry determined he’d arrive at the château about two thirty in the morning.