by Mark Greaney
“Don, I need you to trust me. Best thing I can do is get there and clean this shit up myself. I need you to get me all the intel you can about their force structure, don’t give up any info on me, and I will get your family back.”
“How?”
“Somehow.”
This time it was Sir Donald’s turn to pause. He rubbed his thick fingers in his eyes and said slowly, “I would be forever in your debt, lad.”
“One thing at a time, boss.” The line went dead.
Lloyd punched his fists into the air in victory.
Fitzroy turned to Lloyd and said, “I’ll get you the scalp you are after. But you have to adhere to your end of the bargain.”
“Sir Donald, nothing will make me happier than calling off my men and leaving you and your family alone.”
ELEVEN
Court Gentry had worked as a private operator for four years. Before that was Golf Sierra, AKA the Goon Squad, and previous to this he ran singleton ops for the CIA. A few steely-eyed agency operatives notwithstanding, Gentry had spent the majority of adult life alone. To be sure, when he was in deep cover, he developed the relationships necessary to conduct his missions, but these interactions were fleeting and based on a bed of lies.
His was a life lived out in the cold.
There had been but one episode in the last sixteen years when Court was not an assassin, not a spy, not a shadowy figure moving into and out of the landscape. Two years earlier, for just under two months, Fitzroy had employed the Gray Man in a capacity completely unique to anything else on his résumé. Court took a post in Close Personal Protection, bodyguard work, to watch over Sir Donald’s two granddaughters.
Their father, Sir Donald’s son, was a successful London real estate developer. He did not follow in his father’s footsteps into the shadowy realm of intelligence; he was an honest businessman, played by the rules. Still, Phillip Fitzroy managed to run afoul of some Pakistani underworld types, something to do with his firm’s lobbying against a municipal proposal that would have allowed more uncertified and unqualified labor on his construction sites. Philip Fitzroy logically argued that it was best for everyone in London if only well-trained workers built apartment dwellings and shopping centers, but the Pakistani mob had been extorting from the undocumented populace for years, and they decided that if more immigrants had higher-paying jobs, they could squeeze out from them a few quid more.
It began with threatening phone calls. Phillip was to back off, quit the lobbying campaign. A fake pipe bomb in the mailbox was found by Elise Fitzroy, Phillip’s wife. Scotland Yard opened an investigation; dour-faced detectives rubbed their chins and promised to be vigilant. Phillip continued his fight against the labor law, more threats came, and the Yard put a car with a narcoleptic officer in front their Sussex Gardens town home.
Elise was cleaning out six-year-old Kate’s school backpack one afternoon while the girls watched television. She pulled a folded page out of an outside pouch, thinking it to be a note sent home from Mrs. Beas ley. She opened it. Handwritten scrabble. Large capital letters.
“Any time we want them, we can have them. Lay off, Phil.”
Elise hysterically called Phillip, Phillip called Sir Donald no less frantic, and seven hours later Sir Donald arrived at the door with an American in tow.
The Yank was neither big nor small, he was quiet, and he made little eye contact. Elise thought he was in his late twenties; Phil put him near forty. He wore jeans and a small backpack that never left his shoulder and an oversized sweater under which Phillip assumed was stashed God knows what manner of obscene apparatus for doing harm to his fellow man.
Sir Donald sat with Elise and Phillip in the drawing room while the man waited in the hall. He explained to the worried parents that this man’s name was Jim, just Jim, and he was quite possibly the best in the world at that which he did.
“What, exactly, is that, Dad?” asked Phillip.
“Let’s just say you’re better off with him than you’d be were your whole street lined with cars filled to bursting with bobbies. That’s no exaggeration.”
“Doesn’t look like much, Dad.”
“That’s part of the job. He’s low-profile.”
“What the bloody hell do we do with him, Dad?”
“Throw him a sandwich a couple of times a day, keep the coffeepot hot in the kitchen, and forget he’s here.”
But Elise refused to treat the man as an inanimate object. She was polite and found him to respond in kind. He never looked at her; this she insisted when her husband asked. “He looks out the window to the street, out the window to the back garden, at the door to the twins’ room. Never at me. You and he have that in common, Phillip; you should get on brilliantly.”
The introduction of an additional man to the Fitzroy household inevitably caused friction between husband and wife.
Claire and Kate took to Jim. They mimicked his American accent, and he was good-natured about it. He drove them to school each day in the Saab while Elise rode along. Young Kate teased him once about being a bad driver, and he surprised mother and daughters with a burst of laughter, admitting he usually traveled by trains or rode a motorcycle. Within a second his face rehardened, and his eyes returned to the mirrors and the road ahead.
For almost two months he was at the girls’ sides every moment they were awake, and he was on a cot in the hallway by their door while they slept. The only moment of excitement in the eight weeks came one Sunday on the way to the market when a car accident blocked the road. As soon as traffic stopped, Jim bumped the car up onto the pavement. He opened his sport coat, and Elise saw the butt of a handgun nestled under his arm. He drove down the pavement with his left hand, through a scrambling crowd, while his right hand curled around the pistol in its shoulder holster. Ten seconds later they were in the clear. He said not a word to the passengers, like it was just another normal Sunday jaunt out for milk and cakes. Mum and her girls stared at him wide-eyed for the rest of the drive.
And then one morning he was gone. The quilt was left folded on the cot, the pillow laid on top. It was in the papers that the Pakistani mobsters had been arrested by the dour-faced men at Scotland Yard, the danger had passed, and Sir Donald had sent his Yank away.
Phillip and Elise breathed an incredible sigh of relief that the threat was no more, and the ridiculous law had been defeated.
But the little girls cried when their father told them Uncle Jim had to go back to America and, no, he was not likely to return.
Court bought a motorcycle less than an hour after he closed his call with Fitzroy. It was an ’86 Honda CM450 with a decent enough engine and tires that looked like they could make it for a few days of heavy use.
The seller was a local boy who worked at a petrol station alongside the road in Seberov, just southeast of Prague. No paperwork, just a cash transaction, a few hundred crowns extra for a helmet and a map, and Court was on the road.
He hadn’t hesitated a moment since hanging up the phone with Don. Court knew there was a day or so of travel ahead of him if he was to go to Normandy. He could work on a plan while on the move and check in with Fitzroy en route. No, there was no time to sit on a park bench here, six hundred miles away, and contemplate.
After buying the bike, he stopped at his cache in a long-term rental unit four miles south of the city center. He no longer had a key for the door, so he merely picked the lock. He could recite the credit card number used to pay the monthly rent if he had been questioned, but in fact there was no one around. He’d established the cache nearly three years earlier, had only been back once, and now the small, unlit room was dusty and moldy and cold. It was an eight feet square, empty except for four duffel bags stacked one on top of the other, each wrapped in a white garbage bag covered in dust. The cache contained pistols, rifles, ammo, clothing, and vacuum-packed food and medical supplies. He tossed the CZ he’d picked up in the gunfight in the metro into one of the bags and retrieved a small Walther P99 Compact pistol and tw
o extra magazines. The weapon was clean and well-lubricated, but still he checked the ammunition and the operation of the slide and the striker. He ignored the rest of his guns. He knew he could hardly cross the border into the European Union with an arsenal on his back.
The handgun would just have to do.
Next he ripped open a medical kit, dropped his pants, and sat on the cold, dirty floor. The scratching of a rat in the aluminum walls let him know just how unsanitary these conditions were. He examined his day-old injury with a professional fascination. Court had never before been shot, but he’d picked up dozens of other injuries in his work. His leg throbbed like a bitch, but he’d been hurt worse from burns, broken bones, a chunk of shrapnel in his neck. It came with the job.
He poured a generous splash of iodine on the entrance and exit wounds. He tore open packages of bandages and antiseptic cream, redressed his injury as well as possible in the low light, and then crumpled all his supplies back into a small bag and shoved it into his pocket. In his second duffel he found cold weather gear. He changed out of his light clothing into thick corduroys, a grease-stained brown cotton shirt, and a thick canvas jacket. A pair of work gloves went on his hands, and they warmed his fingers instantly. Leather hiking boots. A black watch cap that could be pulled down as a ski mask was positioned on his head. He zipped up all his cases, left them as he’d found them, closed the door, and climbed back on his bike.
Minutes later he found himself at a crossroads south of the city. A few hours west was the German border, then the French border, then Normandy.
He blew out a sigh masked by his engine’s rumble. Steam from his exhalation poured through the microfiber ski mask covering his mouth.
If it were only that easy.
No, he had to make a few crucial pit stops along the way. Gentry needed to pick up some matériel before he arrived in Normandy. He knew where to get what he needed, but he also knew it would involve an extra half day on the road.
For one, Court needed a new “escape,” new forged identity papers. He still had the passport he’d used to get into the Czech Republic, and he knew it would get him around in Central Europe, where they did not have all their immigration processes computerized and integrated, but he’d already been burned once under the legend Martin Baldwin, Canadian freelance journalist. Only a hopeless optimist or a damn fool would try to use it to get into the European Union, and Gentry was neither. But more than entrée to the EU, he needed an escape solid enough to get him out of Europe when the shooting stopped. He knew that after he did what he had to do in Normandy, he would need to disappear somewhere far away, and clean identity papers would be the easiest way to achieve this end.
Court knew a man in Hungary who could provide him with documentation quickly. With well-made docs, he could cross quickly and efficiently into the EU and, should he have to produce papers for any reason along the way, he could safely do so. And then, once he’d finished his operation, he’d be able to dump all his guns and gear, hop on a plane to South America or the South Pacific, or fucking Antarctica if the heat on him remained as hot as it had been the last two days.
There’d be no time to run around and buy dirty docs after Normandy, and no way to quickly get off the Continent without them.
A cold November wind blew from the west as Gentry turned onto the E65, the highway that would take him past Brno, into Slovakia, around Bratislava, and then south to the Hungarian border. From there it would be a quick trip down to Budapest. Six hours’ travel time, factoring in a couple of quick stops for gas and two poorly guarded borders.
As he opened the throttle and leaned into the cold wind, he forced himself to think about the next forty-eight hours. It was grim contemplation, but necessary, and a hell of a lot better than dwelling on the past forty-eight.
TWELVE
Gentry entered the capital of Hungary at three in the afternoon. Rain clouds hung low and gray white, just tickling the rounded green tips of the hills of Buda on the west side of the Danube River that bisected the city of four million. Court had last visited Budapest four years earlier on his first job for Fitzroy, a simple domestic op against a Serbian hit man who’d put a bomb in a local restaurant to kill a mob gunrunner but in so doing also took out an American man’s brother. The surviving brother had money and ties to the underworld, so it was a simple thing for him to connect with Fitzroy and hire a triggerman. And it was a simple thing for Fitzroy to send his newest asset to Budapest to find the offending Serb in a dockside bar, fill him with drink, then slip a knife into his spine and let his lifeless form slip silently into the black waters of the Danube.
Gentry also knew Budapest from before, back in his time with the agency. He’d been in and out of the city once every couple of years for nearly a decade, tailing diplomats, running sneak-and-peeks against shady Russian businessmen in the mansions of Buda or the hotels in Pest. He’d once chased off a Tajik assassin targeting the local CIA chief of station because there was no one else handy to deal with the matter.
In Court’s work in the city he’d had multiple run-ins with a local fraudster named Laszlo Szabo. Szabo was an amoral, devious scumbag; he’d do anything for anyone waving a big enough wad of crumpled Hungarian forints in his face. His specialty was forgery, buying and selling identity papers and modifying them for whoever needed their identity changed on the fly. He’d helped a dozen wanted Serb war criminals flee Central Europe just ahead of the International Court of Justice and had made a shitload of money cleaning up the dirty loose ends of that war and others. Then in 2004 he ran afoul of Gentry himself when he agreed to create papers for a Chechen terrorist who’d slipped out of Grozny and the Russians’ grasp and into Budapest on his way farther west. Court and his Goon Squad caught up with the Chechen in a warehouse Laszlo owned in the suburbs. It had gone loud, and in the melee a tub of Szabo’s photographic chemicals had blown up, killing the terrorist. Court and his team had to disappear before the fire trucks arrived, leaving Laszlo to slip away. Immediately thereafter, Court was sent after bigger fish, but he remembered Szabo, kept tabs on the forger, just in case someday he needed his services. Court normally used documentation assets from Sir Donald Fitzroy’s Network, but it was nice to know there was also a man in Budapest who could, for the right price, turn him into anyone he wanted to be, at least on paper.
Laszlo Szabo was an irredeemable piece of shit. Court knew this beyond a shadow of a doubt. But Court also knew Szabo was damn good at his work.
It was three thirty by the time Court had filled his gas tank, bought a gyro and lemonade at a little Turkish stand on Andrassy Street, and parked his bike a block away from Laszlo’s lair in Pest, just a kilometer or so from the shores of the Danube. Icy sheets of cold rain poured down, but Gentry did nothing to shield himself from the weather. His muscles were tiring from the already long day; the rain soaked his hair and his beard and his clothes, but it also kept him alert.
The door to Laszlo’s building was a deception. A rusty iron plate on hinges sunken in a stone building on Eotvos Utka Street, it was covered with yellowed and torn handbills and stood no more than five feet high. It looked like no one had passed through since the Second World War, but Court had just finished his soggy meal of lamb chunks and cucumber sauce folded into a pita when the door creaked open and disgorged two thin black men. Somalis, Court guessed. In Europe illegally, obviously, since no one who had access to legitimate papers would have need to come see Laszlo. Court knew how easy it was for Africans and Middle Easterners to immigrate legally to the Continent these days. The two knuckleheads walking past him in the rain somehow didn’t qualify for the near-universal rubber stamp entry, which indicated to Gentry that these were some seriously shady fuckers.
In a moment of perspective, the Gray Man realized there were few people on earth more wanted than he, so Court allowed he was, by definition, likely a shadier fucker than either of these two Somalis.
Gentry banged on the little iron door with an open left hand. His right hove
red above the Walther pistol in his waistband and hidden under his wet jacket. There was no answer after a minute and a further knock. Finally Court found a little plastic intercom button tucked into the upper left corner of the doorway, “Szabo? I need your help. I can pay.”
A tinny response through the intercom. “References?” His accent was unmistakably Hungarian, but his English was good. The tone of his voice was sheer boredom. A clerk in a paint store. Court was just the next of a long line of customers reaching the counter to inquire about goods.
“I’m one of Donald Fitzroy’s men.” Though Szabo was not a Network asset, he would certainly know of Sir Donald.
A pause just long enough for Court to worry ended with a buzz and the sound of remote-controlled door locks clicking open. Court pushed in the iron door warily, knelt, and entered a dark hall behind it, followed a pinprick of light fifty feet on. The light was another doorway, and through it Court found a large workshop, part science lab, part library, and part photo studio. Laszlo was there, sitting at a desk against the wall. He turned to face his visitor.
Szabo wore his gray hair long over his shoulders. His clothes were Hungarian drab, black jeans and a polyester shirt open halfway down to expose his rail-thin chest. He was sixty, but an East bloc sixty, which looked eighty in the face but thirty in the physique. A life of physicality, a life of hardship. He appeared to Court something like an aging rock star who still fancied himself a catch.
He stared at Court for a long time. “A familiar face,” he said. “Without the beard and the rainwater, perhaps I would know you?”
Court knew Szabo had never seen his face. He’d worn a balaclava mask when he took down Szabo’s lair with the Goon Squad in 2004, plus it had been dark and the action quick and confusing.
“Don’t believe so,” said Gentry, looking around the room for security threats. Wires hung off the walls like ivy, tables and shelves of equipment and boxes and books, locked file cabinets along the wall, a full-sized photography studio in the corner with a camera on a tripod facing a chair on a riser.
