by Mark Greaney
“Fight like a bloody man, you feckin’—”
Dougal’s words were replaced by a choking gurgle. Gentry cinched the collar tight like a twisted garrote, using the man’s own shirt to strangle him. He wrapped his right arm around Slattery’s neck as if he were hugging him passionately, wrapped both his legs around the man’s back, and held on for dear life as his left hand pulled and pulled and pulled on the rugby shirt digging into the boxer’s fat throat.
In the panic of loosing his airway, Slattery moved across the flat, wobbling on his bad knee, crashed the American assassin’s back into the glass window, slammed him into a wall hard enough to crack the Sheetrock and knock cheap imitation lithographs of mustachioed bare-knuckled boxers onto the floor, and then spun him sideways into the heavy wooden door.
Just then, above the crashing and the panting and the shouting, a pounding came from the other side of the door. A woman screamed frantically, asking Mr. Slattery if he was all right. Asked if she should go for help. Dougal could not speak. He tried to reach for the door latch with his left hand, but the strength was leaving him with the depletion of oxygen in his lungs. Just as he got a finger on the latch, Court reached back with his right hand, flicked the dead bolt to lock it, and then used his legs to push off from the door.
Both men went crashing to the floor in the middle of the flat.
Slattery still could not breathe, but he had plenty of fight left in him, and he managed to use his legs for leverage as he flipped on top of Court. But Court did not, would not, let go. He forced the momentum of the roll to continue and again found himself above his target.
For thirty seconds they grunted and kicked at one another among the shambles of the broken furniture and furnishings of the little flat. Gentry got both legs over one of Slattery’s arms, but the other fist hammered down on Court’s back and the top of his head with frantic repetition.
The big Irishman tried head-butting Gentry, as well, but their heads were pressed against one another already; there was no room for him to get his skull back so that he could slam it forward.
And then the fight slowed. And then the fight ceased.
Court kept the pressure up on his victim’s throat, but he leaned back a bit to check Slattery’s face. His eyes had bugged out, his face had turned impossibly red and was covered with sweat that smelled like whiskey and vinegar and body odor. Court was over him, could see his own blood dripping off his lips from where the shot glass cut them. The red splotches speckled the Irishman’s forehead and stained red the sweat rivulets running into his eyes.
The bulging eyes blinked weakly.
Court let the rugby jersey loosen a bit. Quickly Dougal sucked air, gagged, and wheezed.
Court’s face was inches from him. Gentry spoke through gasps from the exertion of the brutal fight. “The kid. Your boy . . . with the Down’s? He’s real?”
Slattery’s tongue was swollen, his throat was nearly closed. He coughed bloody sputum. “I swear it.”
Court nodded. He wiped sweat from his own brow. Still he spoke through gasps from his near hyperventilated state. “Okay . . . okay. Don’t worry. I’ll see to him. He’ll be okay.”
The bugging eyes of the Irishman turned to him. Blinked tears mixed with blood that streamed down both sides of his face. Mucus sprayed from his nose as he sobbed. He nodded. Spoke through a clenched throat. “That’s just grand, lad. I take it back. You’ve got a soul. You’re a good man.”
“Yeah.” Court brought his fingertips to the Irishman’s forehead. “That’s me.” He smoothed the man’s sopping-wet gray hair back gently.
He nodded again.
“I’m a goddamned saint.”
In a swift single motion, Court Gentry scooped the Makarov from its resting place on the floor beside him, punched the suppressor into Dougal Slattery’s fleshy neck, and fired a single round up through his chin, through his tongue, through the roof of his mouth, through his sinus cavity, and into his brain. The .380-caliber hollow point projectile danced inside the skull of the fifty-four-year-old Irishman before coming to rest behind the left ear. Slattery’s protruding eyes turned glassy and remained wide-open in death.
Court rolled off of Slattery’s chest and lowered himself onto his back on the floor next to the dead man. He was exhausted, drained, sapped of all energy and emotion. His face hurt where he had been punched, his stomach and leg hurt where he’d been stabbed and shot last winter.
Together he and Slattery lay amid the shattered shambles of the little flat and stared vacantly together at the low ceiling.
FIVE
The landing launch cleared the fog bank a half mile from shore. Behind it, lost in the mist, the Lithuanian freighter that had been Court’s transportation both to and from the Emerald Isle had already turned to the north, brought its engines to full power, and begun steaming for its home port. Court stood at the front of the small launch, squinting towards the docks of the Gdansk shipyard in front of him. He was the boat’s only passenger.
He continued speaking into his satellite phone.
“Paulus, I want to be very clear. Except your commission, every last cent goes to this patient. I don’t care how you do it. Just do it.”
“That is no problem. We can set up a small trust. Regular automatic withdrawals for the institution. I checked into it as you asked. It is the best establishment in Ireland for people with such conditions.”
“Good.”
He paused. Court could sense discomfort in the call. “Sir. You understand I will need to contact Sir Donald.”
“Go ahead. But since you’ll be talking to him anyhow, tell him this. This money isn’t his. It isn’t mine. It belongs to the kid. He touches it . . . and I’m going to—”
“Herr Lewis. Please do not threaten Sir Donald. He is my employer. By duty I will be obliged to relay whatever you say—”
“I’m counting on it. I want you to tell him word for word. He touches the account, looks into it in any way, and I will show up at his door.”
“Herr Lewis, please—”
“You have the message, Paulus.”
“I know he will fulfill your wishes. And I will handle the account as agreed. My standard commission will apply to the funds.”
“Danke.”
“Bitte schön. Sir Donald is very fond of you, Herr Lewis. I am not sure why you two parted ways, but I hope maybe someday the two of you could sit down and—”
“Good-bye, Paulus.”
A frustrated pause. A polite good-bye. “Auf wiedersehen , Herr Lewis.”
Gentry stowed his sat phone in his canvas bag. Then he focused all his attention on a new threat ahead.
Court had noticed it three hundred yards out: a large black car on the docks. At two hundred yards he could just make out men leaning against the vehicle, all wearing dark gray. At one hundred fifty yards he counted four of them, could tell they were big. At fifty yards he had them pegged as Slavic, wearing suits, and their car was a limousine of some make.
These would be Sid’s boys, here to pick him up and take him for a ride, and this made Court furious. He’d planned on getting off here in Gdansk, losing himself for a few days on the Polish coast, and then contacting Sid via the Ural Mountain Tours Web site when he was good and ready. Sir Donald, his ex-handler, never made him work face-to-face, but these goons, sent by his soon-to-be ex-handler, had no doubt come here on a babysitting mission to make sure Gentry came along peacefully to kneel before the throne of his liege.
“Fuck this shit,” Court said it aloud at twenty-five yards. The men were up off the hood of the limo; cigarettes were thrown on the ground and crushed out. Court could see the glint of thin gold chains around their necks. Russian mob boys. Who else? The men stepped up to the edge of the dock, coming to the water’s edge to prevent him from running away when the ferry landed.
As if.
Court looked up and down the landing to see if there was any place to run to.
Nope. Shit.
Gentry
stepped off the swaying launch and up onto the floating wharf. He stood in front of the four goons. No words were exchanged. The only communication between them was through the looks of five men filled with testosterone, all of them on the job, none of them here particularly willingly. Court’s old CIA Special Activities Division team leader, a foul-mouthed ex-SEAL named Zack Hightower, referred to it as “eye fucking,” a crude but accurate description of men simultaneously sizing up one another and projecting their own power and prowess through their cold stares.
Slowly Court opened his peacoat to reveal the butt of the .380 Makarov on his hip. One of the younger Russians stepped forward and yanked the gun free of its holster, sneering at Gentry during his backwards draw stroke as if he had discovered the weapon himself. He then patted Court down front to back, pulled a knife from the foreigner’s pocket, and slipped it into his own. He looked through the canvas bag on Gentry’s shoulder, yanked out the satellite phone and pocketed it, but he did not find anything else of interest. Satisfied he’d disarmed the Gray Man, the Russian stepped back, and with an impatient gesture, he beckoned the American forward to the car.
Court unslung his bag from his shoulder, then tossed it underhanded to one of the men to carry. The bag hit the thick man on the chest, and he let it fall to the ground in front of him; his “eye fuck” stare neither wavered nor diminished.
Court could not help it. He cracked a smile, stepped forward, and scooped it up with a chuckle, then walked to the black limo and opened the back door of the car and climbed in.
An hour later he was airborne. A Hawker 400 light corporate aircraft had been waiting for his entourage at Lech Walesa International Airport. No passports or customs inspections were performed that Court could see; certainly no one asked him any questions or solicited from him any documentation. The Hawker shot upwards through the wet clouds and into a clear mid-morning Polish sky. With him in the seven-seated cabin were the four men who’d picked him up at the dock. They showed him where the food and the booze were stored on the plane, and in broken English they said the flight would only be two hours. They did not tell him where they were headed, but they did not need to.
Court knew. He was being taken to the boss, and the boss lived in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Gentry leaned back and relaxed, sipped bottled water, and listened to Sidorenko’s henchmen chat. Court’s Russian comprehension had been fair at its peak, a dozen years earlier, but it was extremely rusty at the moment. By concentrating on the chitchat of the men around him with his eyes closed for over an hour, he felt like he was retuning his brain to the nearly impenetrable language.
He was reasonably sure that Sid and his men would have no idea that he spoke a word of Russian, and he thought he might be able to use their ignorance to his advantage in the hours to come.
The Hawker dipped a wing and descended, landing just after noon. Court’s assumption that he’d be heading to Saint Petersburg to meet with his employer was confirmed when, upon their descent, he spied the Gulf of Finland out the port side window. He recognized the airport, as well. Rzhevka was to the east of Saint Pete, less convenient to the city center than the main international airport, but Court had been to this airfield more than once.
In the old days, ten or more years before, Gentry had worked as a CIA singleton operator living undercover and alone overseas. Theoretically his missions could be anywhere on the planet, in either friendly or enemy territory, but in practice he operated more or less steadily in the former USSR. Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia, Tajikistan—the CIA had reasons to send operatives from their Autonomous Asset Program into the badlands of the East, tailing and chasing and sometimes even killing traders of weapons or nuclear secrets. For a time it seemed the only things worth selling from behind the former Iron Curtain were the surviving relics of doomsday left behind by the former evil empire, and for a time it seemed the only thing Court Gentry and other Double A-P men were ever asked to do was to head over there, follow a target, report on his activity, and/or bug his house and/or buy off his friends and/or plant evidence to incriminate him of a crime.
And/or kill him.
But those were the nineties. The good ol’ days.
Pre-9/11.
He’d been to Saint Petersburg just once since, in January 2003. By then he was a member of Task Force Golf Sierra, the Goon Squad, a CIA Special Activities Division/Special Operations Group paramilitary black ops team that hunted terrorists and their associates around the globe. Court and the Goon Squad flew into this very airport on an agency jet. Part of the team stayed in a safe house out in the countryside while Court and Zack Hightower billeted in a ramshackle tenement a couple of blocks away from the posh hotels on Nevsky Prospect. And then, on their third week in town, the Goon Squad boarded Zodiac rubber raiding craft and hit a freighter leaving the Port of Saint Petersburg. On board was supposed to be nuclear material heading to Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Instead it was conventional weaponry, stuff that went bang and not boom, as Zack Hightower had reported to Langley from his satellite phone at the time. They were ordered to leave the guns behind, to hop off the boat, and to get out of Russia. Perplexing, but it made sense later, sort of, when that very lot of goods was “discovered” in Basra, Iraq, and paraded in front of the media, Russian packaging and all. The ship had been tracked all the way to Iraq and the cargo monitored by satellite. The Marines who found it had been told where to find it, and the embarrassment for Russia nudged them a bit in their support of the U.S. mission there. Not much, really, but a little.
It was politics, and politics wasn’t the Goon Squad’s stated mission. Court didn’t like it, but as his boss, Zack, had said at the time, he wasn’t paid to like it, he was paid to do it.
From Sidorenko’s airplane Court was shepherded across a hundred meters of frozen tarmac to a black stretch limousine. His minders led him to the front passenger seat. One man said, “You get in front. The back is for VIPs.” He smiled, enough metal around his neck and in his teeth to pick up local AM stations. “You are just a P.” He laughed aloud, then translated his joke to his colleagues, and they laughed, too.
Court shrugged and climbed into the front seat. The minders, hardly VIPs themselves, got into the plush back. An absurd security violation: Court sat up front with only a late-middle-aged driver, but Sidorenko’s security men did not appear to be the smartest henchmen around.
As they drove west towards Saint Pete, Court did his best to retain information about the trip, in case he needed to find his own way back to the airport. He planned on making this a very short journey. Thirty seconds to tell Sid he didn’t appreciate being dragged up here, a violation of his and Sid’s agreement, another thirty seconds to tell him he didn’t appreciate being deceived about the hit he’d just performed, and a final ten or so seconds to tell his Russian handler that he quit, and if Sidorenko’s gold-chained, skinhead mouth breathers tried to stop him from leaving, then there would soon be more vacancies to fill in Sidorenko’s organization.
But, in the end, it did not work out quite the way Gentry had envisioned.
SIX
After an hour on the road, Court was taken to a massive home on the northern outskirts of Saint Petersburg. He had never been in this suburb and admitted to himself that he could not even find this place on a map. The streets were wide and tree-lined, the properties were large and landscaped, the homes were old and stately.
The limousine turned up a drive, and Gentry immediately focused on the home ahead. It was breath-taking from a distance. Architecturally speaking, it was magnificent.
But as they got closer it appeared to Court as if Sid’s crew of dumb-ass henchmen also moonlighted as his landscapers and housekeepers, tasks for which they were even less suited than security. There were tents erected on the grounds, like a small military encampment, with smoking fires and young men standing around, apparently doing little or nothing. Several four-wheel-drive vehicles, mud-covered and poorly maintained, were parked on the shredded lawn
on both sides of the driveway.
The facade of the mansion was covered in flaking paint, and the gravel roundabout parking space was covered with bottles, cigarette butts, and other trash. Gentry climbed out of the limo and was led through a kitchen that looked like something from a frat house whose house mother had run away after a nervous breakdown: dishes upon dishes in the sink, plastic carry-out trays covering every flat space, and vodka bottles rimming the floors like some sort of shabby chic glass trim work.
Court was no neatnik, but he could not help but wonder about the prospects for wildlife in this kitchen during the summer, and he felt thankful for the frigid air that made its way through the thin kitchen window to keep bug life from flourishing, and the three or four fat cats he’d noticed strolling around both the interior and the exterior of the mansion to keep furry vermin at bay.
Next it was two flights up on a wide, circular staircase. Men sat on the steps, played handheld video games, chatted on mobile phones, read newspapers, and smoked, each man with a submachine gun on his lap or a shoulder holster stowing an automatic pistol under his arm. Some wore typical Russian mobster suits, but most of them were in camouflage or army green, though not in any sort of coherent uniforms—more like the attire of survivalists or hunters.
And they were all skinheads. Most stared up at Gentry with malevolence. He presumed it was his long hair and scruffy beard that served as indicators that he was not from the same club as they were. He even wondered if they thought he was a member of whatever particular ethnic group they blamed for all the problems in their shitty lives.
Fuck ’em, thought Court. He knew he could kick any five of their assess without breaking a shine on his forehead.
The only problem with his macho self-assuredness, he recognized, was that he’d seen at least ten times that number of men so far on the property.