by Mark Greaney
He stepped to the small iron door, but it flew inwards as he reached for it. Bright lights shone into the Hungarian’s eyes, though it was dark and raining outside. In shock he leapt back, tripped over his bad leg, and fell onto his back. Squinting the lights away, he saw a team of men dressed in black, hooded faces, a half dozen gunmen with short-barreled weapons held to eye level. Protruding from each rifle was a powerful flashlight. The first man to him dropped onto a black kneepad. He lifted Szabo by the neck.
“Going somewhere?” He spoke softly in English. It was the CIA. Szabo could barely see eyes behind the operator’s goggles.
“I . . . I was waiting for you. Just putting the bag in the car, you see. I’ll be heading out after you boys finish.”
“Sure. Where’s the subject?”
Szabo was helped back to his feet. All the men in the narrow hall kept their weapons trained ahead.
“He’s in the front room, at the end of the hall. Step up on the riser and look down. He’s twelve feet down in the cistern, covered with a thick sheet of—”
“Show us.” Szabo read the man’s voice. There would be no negotiation. He turned and hobbled back up the hallway with the American paramilitaries.
Inside the low-lit room the leader of the SAD unit positioned his five men against the walls and stepped to the riser slowly. Laszlo urged him on, told him there was nothing to be afraid of, managed to drop the station chief’s name no less than three times as a way to let the CIA gunmen know he was “one of them.” Finally, the heavily armed and armored leader stepped up on the riser and peered warily over into the glass.
Laszlo called out, still trying to curry favor. “He probably has a gun, but he can’t use it while the lid is shut. He’d have to be quite a dancer to dodge a ricochet in that little space. Your boss promised Laszlo he’d be taken care of. Maybe I should call him and you can all have a talk so you see everything Laszlo’s done for your side. Laszlo the Loyal, he calls me.”
The tac team leader leaned over farther. Then farther. He took a knee over the Plexiglas. Turned slowly around, back to Szabo. “What the fuck is this?”
Laszlo did not understand. “What do you mean? It’s the Gray Man, all wrapped in a nice bow for my friends at the CIA—”
“Did you kill him?” asked the American operative, standing up now and turning to face the Hungarian.
“Of course not. Why do you ask me this?” Quickly the master forger hobbled on his cane towards the riser to see what was wrong.
Court had not sat as idly for the past seventy minutes as Szabo had presumed. As soon as the Hungarian left him alone, he’d pulled his necklace over his head, stripped off the thin leather to reveal a wire saw. He used this to cut away at the exposed water pipe below the mattresses. He’d cut it down in two places to where a few more passes of the wire’s teeth would open the pipe and fill the cistern with hot springwater in a matter of minutes.
Once this was done, Gentry pulled his pistol, ejected the round from the chamber, and retrieved the spare mags from his pants. Using his waterproof boots for a collection bin and the pliers on his multi-tool, he’d pulled each cartridge apart, poured the potassium nitrate-based gunpowder in the boot. When he had the powder from thirty of the thirty-one bullets he carried on his body collected, he disassembled one of his magazines, removed the spring, reattached the plate, filled it tight with gunpowder from his boot, and then placed the follower at the top, packing the explosive agent tighter in the metal magazine. Court used the magazine spring to bind the follower securely in place.
Lazlo checked in on him from time to time. The old cripple made so much noise climbing up on the wooden riser it was no trick for the Gray Man to stuff his arts-and-crafts project below a rotten mattress in time to avoid detection.
Next Gentry took off a sock, filled it with the empty cartridges, because the powder would not ignite without help from the primer each cartridge contained. He crammed the powder-filled magazine in the sock and lashed everything together tight with his bootlace.
In his fist he held it. It was a big, heavy sock and roughly the power equivalent of a hand grenade.
Gentry feverishly ripped several lengths of fabric from a mattress, tied them together to make a thin strand about ten feet long. He reloaded his Walther pistol with his one remaining round, left the magazine well empty, and tied the gun with more mattress strands to where the muzzle of the three-and-a-half-inch barrel was placed point-blank at the sock full of primers and explosive. The long strand he tied to the pistol’s trigger.
Finally, Gentry took off his pants. He tied the legs tight at the ankles and then again at the crotch. This created two chambers filled with air. They wouldn’t stay water tight for long, but long enough for Court’s needs. He used his last shoelace to tie the grenade to the pants. He sat with the pants draped over his legs so Laszlo would not easily notice he wasn’t still wearing them.
Lastly, he pulled wads of soggy foam from a mattress to use as earplugs when the time was right.
Satisfied with his preparations, Court waited.
Soon Szabo leaned over and said good-bye, then disappeared. This was the Gray Man’s cue. Frantically, the American cut the water pipe. Within a minute the cistern had filled more than knee-deep with water as hot as a bath. Court stood and held the grenade with the pistol affixed to it and the pants with the air chambers, all in his hands.
He stood there in his underwear and waited for the water to rise.
Within three minutes he floated up with the water and the mattresses, treading in place. After six minutes, the cistern was filled nearly to the top. He fought panic; he knew there was no guarantee his contraption would work or, even if it did, that it would be powerful enough to blow open the trapdoor.
When the water was three inches from the Plexiglas ceiling, Court forced himself to hyperventilate in the little space. He filled his lungs to capacity and then ducked down below the surface, positioned the floating bomb at one of the hinges. He pushed a mattress between himself and his bomb, then he swam down to the bottom of the cistern, one hand holding the line of mattress fabric that led to the pistol’s trigger and the other hand wrapped around the water pipe to hold him at depth. Looking up to make sure everything was in place, he saw his contraption had floated away from the hinge. Quickly, with depleting air reserves, he shot up to the top. Now there was no air here left to breathe. He fought the mattress to the side, repositioned the bomb, and struggled again to the bottom. The day-old gunshot wound in his right thigh burned with the flexion of his muscles. Panic, frantic exertion, and oxygen depletion all seemed to compete with one another to squeeze on his heart and crush it tight deep inside his body.
Finally he reached the water pipe and took hold. He looked back up and saw his device was in place.
Shortly before he pulled the cord, he saw a dark figure step onto the riser and kneel down, then turn back to face someone in the room.
The team leader said, “He must be dead. This hole is filled with—”
With a muted pop, the black-clad operator lifted into the air. The Plexiglas burst below his feet, white water sprayed in all directions, pieces of sharp plastic tore into the ceiling above. The operator crashed to the left of the riser, a tidal wave of warm water sloshing over him.
The other armed men dived for cover. Szabo fell on his back in the middle of the room.
The leader was alive. He scrambled to his knees and retrained his weapon on the riser to his left.
“Jesus! All elements, stand fast!” he shouted, his ear-drums ringing from the explosion.
Just then, small men in civilian attire and rifles held high poured into the room from the hallway, and gunfire erupted all around.
Laszlo Szabo was the first to die.
FIFTEEN
Even with his ersatz plugs, Court’s ears screamed from the pressure of the blast. He pushed off with his feet at the bottom of the cistern and shot to the surface. He had no idea who was waiting above for him. The CIA? Las
zlo back for a last check on him? Ultimately, it didn’t matter; he needed air.
He’d built momentum on the way up, so when his head broke the surface of the water, he shoved open the plastic door. Both hinges were broken off, and the Plexiglas was cracked through. He sucked in a huge breath of air and scrambled over the side, rolling off the riser and down to the floor, enveloped in a wave of the warm water. He found himself along the wall in the back corner of the room. All around was the sound of close gunfire and shouting men, but Court could see no one around the platform’s edge. He rolled to his knees, into a low crouch, and bolted towards the back hallway, his wet feet slapping the linoleum. He didn’t take time to look back. Whatever was going down in this room, Gentry had no intention of getting in the middle of it with no firearm and no idea who the players were.
The doorjamb to the hallway splintered with a burst of submachine gun fire just a step in front of Gentry’s face. He ran right at it, through the overpressure of the supersonic ammo and the flying splinters, down into the dark hall and to the bathroom where he’d shaved an hour and a half earlier. He ducked in quickly for his backpack and threw it over a shoulder.
Wearing only his underwear and a bandage on his thigh, he sprinted into a small bedroom at the end of the hall. Over the low twin bed was a window with a thin wire grating. He shattered the glass with a metal end table, lifted the mattress and pushed it over the windowsill to cover any remaining shards, then rolled out over it into a small courtyard. A door to the building behind Laszlo’s was locked, so Court ran to the far corner of the courtyard. He used iron security bars over a first-story window to climb his way to a second-story balcony where, after four or five tentative kicks from his left heel, he finally shattered a glass window.
Loud snaps of gunfire continued below and behind him. He took care to avoid the broken glass left in the pane as he stepped through the window, but as he climbed into the apartment, he cut both his feet stepping in on the carpet. He cried out in pain, fell to his knees, and cut them, too.
Crab-walking through the small bedroom, he finally stood, hobbled into the bathroom, and rifled through the medicine cabinet. A few seconds later, he sat on the toilet and dressed his fresh injuries. His right foot was okay, a little jab that he poured antiseptic into and wrapped with toilet paper. The ball of his left foot was much worse. It was a relatively deep puncture. He washed it quickly and cinched a hand towel tight around it to stanch the bleeding. It needed stitches but, Court knew, he wouldn’t be getting stitches any time soon.
Similar to his feet, his left knee was okay, but his right was badly injured. With a wince he pulled a shard of glass from his skin, an unlucky barb at the end hooked on his flesh as he removed it. Blood ran down to the floor.
“Fuck,” he groaned as he cleaned and dressed the gash as best he could.
Three minutes later, he realized the shooting had died down across the courtyard. He heard sirens, shouting, a baby crying in the next apartment, woken from its nap by the activity.
He’d thought the apartment was empty, but when he walked into the living room, still just in his wet boxers but now with wrapped feet and knees, he found an elderly lady sitting alone on a couch. She looked at him with eyes unafraid, bright and piercing and blue. He put a hand out to calm her but lowered it slowly.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said, but he doubted she understood. He mimicked pulling on pants, and she slowly pointed to a room down the hall. There he found men’s clothes. A dead husband, maybe? No, a son away at work. He found blue coveralls and climbed into them, and heavy steel-toed boots that were too big but serviceable with two pairs of white socks.
Gentry thanked the lady with a bow and a smile. She nodded back slowly. He pulled a wad of euros from his backpack and laid them on a table. The old woman said something he did not understand, and with another bow, he was out the door to the second-floor hallway.
Injured, unarmed, with neither means of transportation nor the documents he came all the way to Budapest to acquire, Court Gentry stepped outside and into a steady rain. He looked down to his watch. It was five in the afternoon, eight and one-half hours since beginning his journey. He seemed so much farther away now than when he started.
At LaurentGroup’s London office, Lloyd and Fitzroy waited for the news of the Indonesians. It came after four p.m., but not from the team itself. Sir Donald’s phone rang. It was Gentry.
“Cheltenham.”
“It’s me.”
Fitzroy had to compose himself before speaking. Finally he said, “Thank God! You’ve gotten clear of Szabo?”
“Yeah. Just.”
“What happened?”
“Not sure. Sounded like an SAD field team showed up, Szabo must have had some personal security, and it went loud.”
Lloyd and Fitzroy stared at one another.
“Uh . . . Right. Understood. How are you?”
“Surviving.”
“Where are you now?”
“Still in Budapest.” Both Lloyd and Fitzroy looked over to the Tech. His head leaned over a computer terminal, but he bobbed it up and down, confirming the truthfulness of the target by pinpointing the cell tower the phone was using.
“What now?” asked Fitzroy. The question was as much to the American on his right as it was to the American on the other end of the line.
“I head west. Everything’s still on track. Do you have any more information for me?”
“Umm, yes. The men you met this morning in Prague were Albanians. Simple mercenaries. Hired by Nigerian Secret Service.”
“They’ve probably contracted a new team by now. Any idea what I’m up against?”
“Hard to say, son. I’m working on it.”
“What do you know about the enemy force structure around your family?”
“Four or five Nigerian secret police types. Not tier-one gunmen by any stretch, though they have my family scared witless.”
“As I get closer, I’ll need the exact location.”
“Aye. You’ll be there by tomorrow morning?”
“No. I have a stop to make first.”
“Not another dangerous detour, I hope.”
“No. This one is on the way.”
Fitzroy hesitated, then said, “Right. Anything else you need from me?”
“Anything else? What have you given me so far? Look, you are my handler. Handle something. I need to know if I am going to run into any more goons along my route. I need to know how the fucking Nigerians found out my name. Found out about you. There is something very screwed up here, and I need as much of it figured out as possible before I get to Normandy.”
“I understand. I am working on it.”
“Have you had any more contact with the kidnappers?”
“Sporadically. They think I’m turning over every rock to find you. I’m calling everyone along my Network. Just to make it look good, you know.”
“Keep it up. I’ll stay away from the Network. Call me if you learn anything.” The line went dead.
Within two minutes Fitzroy and Lloyd had more of an explanation about what had happened. Riegel called, and between the three of them, they managed to put the pieces together. The six Indonesians had been completely wiped out. All dead. The CIA had torched the building to cover their tracks. It was unknown if the agency had taken casualties. Szabo was dead, and Gentry had used another of his nine lives but had gotten free.
“So where is he now?” asked Riegel.
“Heading west from Budapest.”
“Via train, car, motorcycle?”
“We don’t know. He called us from a cell phone. He’d apparently pulled it off a passerby, dumped it just after he hung up.”
“Anything else to report?” asked Kurt Riegel.
Lloyd barked into the phone angrily, “You report to me, Riegel! What happened to your shit hot Indonesian Kopassus commandos? I thought you said Gentry would be no match for them.”
“Gentry didn’t kill them. CIA paramilitaries did. Lo
ok, Lloyd, we knew the Gray Man would have some resiliency; my plan all along was for one or two teams to knock him off balance, get him reactive instead of proactive. That way, he’ll stumble into the next team unprepared.”
Lloyd said, “We have ten more teams lying in wait for him. I want him dead before the night is through.”
“Then we agree on something.” Riegel rang off.
Lloyd then turned his attention to the Englishman. A pained expression flashed on the older man’s face.
“What is it?”
Fitzroy’s anguish was unrelenting.
“What’s wrong?”
“I believe he told me something. He didn’t mean to tell me, but I sussed it out.”
Lloyd sat up. The few wrinkles in his pinstripe suit smoothed out with the movement. “What? What did he tell you?”
“I know where he’s going.”
The young American attorney’s face slowly widened into a smile. “Excellent!” He reached for his mobile phone. “Where?”
“There’s a catch. This place he’s going, only three blokes have ever known about it. One of those blokes is dead, one of those blokes is the Gray Man, and one of those blokes is me. I’ll tell you where, but if your little reality show contest doesn’t destroy him there, he’s going to know I’ve set him up. Your chaps miss him this time, and it’s game over.”
“Let me worry about that. Tell me where he’s going.”
“Graubünden.”
“Where the fuck is that?”
SIXTEEN
Song Park Kim had sat motionless in a meditative state while airborne, but his eyes opened, awake and alert, upon touchdown at Charles de Gaulle Airport. The only passenger of the Falcon 50 executive jet, his small, rough hands rested on his knees, and his eyes remained hidden behind stylish sunglasses. His perfectly tailored pinstripe suit fit his environment precisely. The cabin was appointed for executive travel, and he appeared to be a youngish but otherwise unremarkable Asian executive.
