by Mark Greaney
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? Laszlo 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. Look, 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.
The Falcon taxied off the runway, down and off the taxiway, past a long row of parked corporate jets, finally turning into an open hangar door. A waiting limousine, still wet from the drizzle of the gray evening, idled in the middle of the hangar. A driver stood alongside.
As soon as the jet came to a complete stop and the turbines slowed, the copilot made his way back to the seven-seat cabin carrying a nylon gym bag. He sat in front of Song Park Kim and lowered the bag onto a mahogany table between them.
Kim said nothing.
“I was told to give you this upon touchdown. Immigration has been dealt with. No customs problems. There is a car waiting for you.”
A curt nod, nearly imperceptible, from the short-haired Korean.
“Enjoy Paris, sir,” said the copilot. He stood and retreated to the cockpit. The small partition closed behind him.
Alone, Song Park unzipped the bag. Pulled out a Heckler & Koch MP7A1 machine pistol. He ignored the telescoping stock and held the weapon like a handgun out in front of him, looking through the gun’s simple sight system.
Two long, thin magazines, each filled with twenty 4.6x30mm hollow-point cartridges, were attached to one another by means of a nylon cinch.
He replaced the weapon in the bag.
Next he pulled out a mobile phone and an earpiece. He tucked the earpiece in place on the side of his head and turned it on. The phone he also turned on before slipping it into his coat pocket. A handheld GPS receiver went into another pocket. More MP7 magazines, a suppressor, and a change of clothes remained in the bag untouched.
A black-handled, black-bladed folding knife emerged from the bag, and he slipped this into his pocket.
Two minutes later he sat in the limousine. The driver looked straight ahead as Kim said, “City center.”
The limo rolled forward towards the hangar doors.
Kim was South Korean, an assassin with the National Intelligence Service.
He was their best. Five wet jobs inside North Korea, most of them with no support whatsoever, had built a legend for him in his unit. Seven more operations in China against North Korean sanction’s violators, two in Russia against purveyors of nuclear secrets, and a few hits on fellow South Koreans in need of permanent attitude adjustments vis-à-vis their nefarious northern neighbors had made Song Park Kim, at thirty-two, the obvious choice when his leaders were asked to furnish a killer to send to Paris to hunt a killer in exchange for cold, hard cash.
Kim did not voice opinions on his assignments. Working alone, he had no one to voice them to, but were his thoughts solicited, he would have said this mission smelled rotten to the core. Twenty million dollars for the head of the Gray Man, a former CIA operative who, he’d heard through the grapevine, had not deserved the sellout he had gotten from his masters. The twenty million was being offered by some European corporation. This was nothing like the nationalistic operations Kim worked throughout his career.
Still, Kim knew he was an instrumen
t of South Korea’s domestic and foreign policy, his counsel had not been sought, and those whose judgment was valued had decided he should come here to Paris, settle in, wait for a call giving him the Gray Man’s whereabouts, and then pour hot bullets into the poor bastard’s back.
* * *
Graubünden is an eastern canton of Switzerland, tucked into a little niche near where the southwestern Austrian border concaves. It is known as the canton of a hundred and fifty valleys, and one of these valleys runs east to west in an area called the Lower Engadine. There the tiny village of Guarda rests atop the sharp ledge of a steep hill high above the valley floor, just miles from both the Austrian and Italian borders. There is only one sheer, winding road up to the little village, and it connects the one-room, whistle-stop train station below to the half-timbered houses above, a laborious forty-minute hike.
There are almost no cars in the village, and farm animals greatly outnumber the human residents. Narrow cobblestone roads wind steeply up and between the white buildings, alongside water troughs and fenced gardens. The town ends abruptly, and the steep hill resumes, a meadow that rises to a thick pine forest that itself gives way to rocky cliffs that loom above the town that surveys the valley floor below and all who pass or approach.
The villagers understand German but among themselves speak Romansch, a language spoken by barely 1 percent of the seven and a half million Swiss, and virtually no one else on earth.
At four a.m., a few snow flurries swirled around the little road that led from the valley floor up to Guarda. A lone man, dressed in thick jeans, a heavy coat, and a black knit cap limped up the steep, winding switchback. A small backpack hung off his shoulders.
Ten hours earlier, minutes after speaking with Don Fitzroy from a pink cell phone he’d snatched from the open purse of a staggeringly drunk female university student meandering alone on the sidewalk, Gentry found an outdoor clothing store in Budapest and purchased a full wardrobe, new from the bottom of his leather boots to the top of his black knit cap. Within an hour of leaving Szabo’s building, he was boarding a bus at Népliget Bus Terminal for the Hungarian border town of Hegyeshalom.
