by Mark Greaney
Was there anything so beautiful in the world to an Englishman?
And above the cliffs, white birds soared, welcoming travelers over the channel much as they had the returning aircraft of the Royal Air Force seventy years before, the thin airframes pocked with holes and filled with young boys who had just killed and died and risked all for Her Majesty in the air war against fascism.
Now Donald gazed with melancholy out the portside window, watched the beauty of Dover slip away behind him in the moonlit predawn, and knew he would likely never see this view again.
“I just got the word from Riegel. The Libyans have failed.” It was Lloyd speaking over the intercom, his voice bleating through the earphones of the headset that pinched the tufts of white hair on either side of Sir Donald’s head.
Fitzroy looked around the cabin and found Lloyd on the other side, facing back to him. Their eyes met in the dim red glow of the cabin lights. Fitzroy noticed the young American’s suit had wrinkled in the past twenty-four hours, his necktie now hung loose around an open collar.
“How many lives lost?” asked the Englishman.
“Zero, surprisingly. One man injured. They are saying the Gray Man is a ghost.”
“The comparison is not without merit,” said Fitzroy into his microphone.
“Sadly, no. Ghosts are already dead.” Lloyd sniffed. “I’m sending the Libyans to Bayeux to supplement the coverage there on the outside chance Gentry makes it through our gauntlet.”
Fitzroy shook his head. “Forget it. I was the only one who knew about the cache in Switzerland. He will know it was I who tipped the assassins off. Knowing that I’ve been double-crossing him all along, he will not be so inclined to save my family.”
Lloyd just smiled. “I’ve prepared for this contingency.”
“Are you bloody daft? He won’t come to my rescue. Can’t you understand that?”
“That is no longer my plan.” Lloyd turned away, conferred with the Tech.
The helicopter raced over the channel, and the moonshine flickered on the water below like a tray of loose diamonds. At seven in the morning, the Sikorsky crossed directly over Omaha Beach, the site of the most bloody of the D-day landings. Nearly three thousand young American men died in the water and on the sand and in the bluffs off the beach below them. Lloyd did not look out the window. He was talking to the Tech over the helicopter’s intercom radio; Sir Donald listened in but said nothing. Lloyd authoritatively barked orders, orchestrating the movements of the surveillance experts like chess pieces on a board. He ordered the Tech to send all kill teams now east of Guarda to the west of Guarda: Zurich, Lucerne, Bern, Basel. As the road between Gentry’s starting point and objective shortened, the ten hunter-killer units still in the fight had less territory to cover.
“Let’s move the Venezuelans from Frankfurt to Zurich. Have the South Africans head to Bern on the off chance he turns south. Who’s in Munich? Then Gentry has already bypassed the Botswanans. Let’s pull them all the way back to Paris; they can support the Sri Lankans on site there. The Kazaks are in Lyon. Right? Lyon is too far south, but we’ll stage them there till we get more intel. Make sure they’re near the highway and ready to head north. Send another detail of surveillance to Zurich and double-check Gentry’s known associates list. Who else is in Paris? Well, I don’t care how good he is, one man is not enough. Gentry has lots of history there; I want three teams in Paris plus the Korean. The Korean hasn’t checked in? Don’t worry about it. Just keep sending him updates. He’s a singleton operator. He won’t be calling in lonely.”
* * *
Claire sat on the edge of her bed and worried. It was seven thirty a.m. The full shine of the morning was still a half hour off.
She’d slept, only because last night her mother had made her drink some awful green cough syrup. When she woke, it was still dark. She’d wondered where she was at first, then one by one, she remembered the terrible events of the day before, culminating in the short drive from the family villa in Bayeux to the large old château with the huge gate and the long driveway and the green lawn. She remembered the big men in the leather coats speaking the strange language and the scared looks of Daddy and Mummy, despite their continued assurance that everything was just fine.
Claire checked to make sure her sister was sleeping next to her. Kate was there; she’d choked down a mouthful of cough syrup, too.
Claire sat on the edge of the bed and looked out the window. The only movement was the huge man below her in the gravel car park at the side of the castle. A big gun hung around his neck, and he fished one cigarette after another out of his coat, smoking constantly.
Now and then he talked into a walkie-talkie. Claire knew what the radio was; she remembered the American, Jim, who’d stayed with her family when she was little. He’d had a radio, and he’d showed her and her sister how to press the button and talk into it like a telephone, with her mum answering on the other end in the back garden.
These men around her were nothing like Jim the American. Although she could not remember everything about his time in her house, she remembered he was nice and friendly, where these men had angry and unhappy faces.
Last night before Mummy made the girls drink the cough syrup, Kate had wanted to go exploring throughout the castle. Claire went along, but she was not playing like her silly sister. The angry men all but ignored them as they walked through the kitchen. Kate beat on pots and pans with a spoon because they echoed wildly in the massive château. They wandered down endless wooden-floored corridors and turned back from some because they were too dark and spooky. They found a cellar full of dusty wine bottles and they found a big library full of huge leather books and they found room after room where the walls were lined with the heads of large, scary animals with fur and horns and huge teeth. An orange cat ran down the hall, and they followed it down into the basement, watched it push open a little window high on a wall above a shelf and let itself outside and into the back garden.
Next the girls discovered a spiral staircase that wound up and up and up, and they climbed to the top of a tower. There they turned on a light, saw a man at a table sitting in a chair and looking out one of the open windows into the dark. He had a radio next to him, and he had a big gun in front of him. He’d yelled at the girls in that ugly foreign language, and Kate laughed and ran back down the stairs. Claire followed her sister, but her heart pounded in her chest. The man had barked into his radio, and soon men came and got the girls and took them by their arms to their parents’ room. In English one of the big men told Daddy to put his girls to bed, and Daddy had yelled back at the man, told him to keep his hands off, and then stormed out on the balcony while Mummy brought Kate and Claire into the bathroom to drink the medicine.
It had been an awful day and an awful night, and now that Claire had awakened, she knew it had been no bad dream, and today would likely be just as horrid.
As Claire sat at the edge of her bed in the low light and worried, she thought she heard a funny noise in the distance. Soon it was louder, came closer to the château. The skies above her home in London were filled with helicopters, so it didn’t take her long to identify the distinctive sound of a propeller.
She stood with her face to the window. The helicopter came over the woods on the far side of the big fountain in the big back garden. Its black rotors spun above its white body as it approached the far edge of the gravel car park, then it turned to the side, landed on its wheels, and sank down. The door on the side opened, and four men in suits climbed out.
The whipping wind of the helicopter blew open one man’s suit coat, and even from sixty meters Claire could see the pistol holster against the man’s white shirt.
More men with guns.
As the blades whipped above them, four more men stepped out of the chopper. The first man was black and wore a brown suit. The next man hauled two suitcases. He had a long ponytail and ran forward towards the château. Then came a man carrying a briefcase. He was thin and wore a blac
k suit with a raincoat over it. His shiny black hair was short and messy in the wind, and Claire could tell, even in the distance, that he was someone important. The way he looked about, stormed forward on the balls of his feet, and gestured to those around him.
The next man who exited the helicopter was larger, older, bald except long white hair around his ears that lashed around below the spinning propellers. Claire pressed her face to the glass, squinted to get a better look.
Then she shouted out loud, waking Kate behind her with a start, though she’d somehow managed to sleep through the helicopter’s approach and landing.
“Grandpa!”
* * *
Fitzroy was allowed a minute with his son and daughter-in-law in the kitchen on the ground floor of the château. Phillip and Elise were subdued and confused and a little too scared to be angry.
From there he was shuffled up to the third floor to a large room that was set up similar to the conference room at the LaurentGroup subsidiary in London. There was a seat for him, a big Louis XV armchair. Lloyd had his own chair, a sleek, black, modern model. The Tech was already on station, setting up equipment on a long bank of tables that had been hauled in from other rooms and pushed together to suit his needs. He was just now flipping switches on laptops and radio sets, bringing the new operation’s center online.
The room had three doors leading from it. One was to an adjoining bathroom, the second was to the main hall, and the third, Fitzroy noted when one of the Belarusian guard force came through it to speak privately with Lloyd, was the entrance to a small spiral staircase that surely went both up towards the tower above them and continued down to the lower floors.
The new arrivals from London were still just settling in when Sir Donald’s phone vibrated on the table next to his chair. A wire ran from it to a speaker box on the table. As Lloyd pushed the button to answer, the Tech shouted to the room that he was not yet ready to trace the call.
“Cheltenham Security,” said Sir Donald. His voice was tiring, scratched.
“It’s me,” said the Gray Man.
“How are you, lad?”
There was a long pause. Finally, “You told them about Guarda.”
Fitzroy did not deny it. He said softly, wearily. “Yes, I did. I am truly sorry.”
“Not as sorry as you’re gonna be when your family dies. Good-bye and good luck, Don.”
Lloyd stood in the middle of the room. Quickly he walked to the table, leaned over the phone, and spoke. “Good morning, Courtland.”
There was no reply on the line for so long that Lloyd picked up the little phone and looked at it to see if the call was still open.
“Who the hell is this?”
“Court, you may not want to be so hard on the good knight here. I am afraid I put him in an utterly untenable position.”
“Who are you?”
“You don’t recognize my voice?”
“No.”
“We used to work together. It’s Lloyd.”
There was nothing.
Lloyd continued, “From Langley. Back in the halcyon days, you know.”
“Lloyd?”
“That’s right. How have you been?”
“I don’t remember a Lloyd.”
“Come now, Mr. Gentry. It hasn’t been that long. I worked for Hanley, helped run you and some of the other assets on the sharp end back in the Goon Squad days.”
“I remember Hanley. Don’t remember you.”
Fitzroy could see that Lloyd was genuinely offended. “Well, you knuckle draggers and door kickers never were known for your social IQ.” He looked over at Sir Donald. Embarrassed, perhaps? He waved a dismissive hand. “Doesn’t matter. What does matter is, even though you may feel disinclined to come here to Normandy to help your fearless leader, you might consider keeping your current travel itinerary for now. Because, let me assure you, there is still something here you do want.”
“There’s nothing I want bad enough to knowingly walk into a trap. Good-bye, Floyd.”
“It’s Lloyd, no F, double L, and you might want to stay on the line to hear my sales pitch.”
“Were you the one who put out the burn notice on me four years ago?” asked Gentry. His voice was measured and sounded dispassionate over the phone, but Fitzroy knew a question like that must come filled with emotion and intensity.
“No. I didn’t burn you. At the time I disagreed with the decision. I thought you still could have been useful to us.”
“So who burned me? Hanley?”
“That’s a discussion for another day. Maybe we’ll talk it over when you get here.”
“It’s a date. Bye.”
“At the moment you should be less worried about who burned you in ’06, and more worried about who will burn you tomorrow if you don’t drop in for a visit.”
Gentry snorted into the phone. “Can’t be burned twice.”
“Sure you can. When I left the agency, I took out a little insurance policy. I saw what happened to you and a few other men. I knew what barbarity the politicians who run the company were capable of when a heretofore successful operation falls out of favor with the men and women who have to testify before Congress. I told myself, ‘Lloyd, you’re too smart to go down like dumb old Court Gentry and the others.’ So I did what I had to do to ensure my survival.”
“You stole secrets.”
“Like I said, I’m a survivor.”
“You’re a traitor.”
“Same thing. I copied documents detailing operations, sources and methods, personnel files.”
“Personnel files?”
“Yes. I have them with me right now.”
“Bullshit.”
“Just a moment.” Fitzroy watched Lloyd thumb through some papers in a gold folder on the table. There was a stack of similar folders alongside the one the young American picked up. “Gentry, Courtland A. Born 4/18/74 in Jacksonville, Florida. Parents Jim and Lyla Gentry. One brother, deceased. Entered grammar school in—”
“That’s enough.”
“I’ve got more. I’ve got it all. Your agency history with the Special Activities Division and the Autonomous Asset Development Program. Your Golf Sierra exploits. Your known associates. Photos, fingerprints, dental records, et cetera, et cetera.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to come to Normandy.”
“Why?”
“That will be discussed when you arrive.”
The pause lasted long enough for Fitzroy to hear snippets from the second floor of the château below him. Elise was yelling at Phillip. Sir Donald knew the marriage was rocky, knew this pressure was the last thing they needed.
Finally Gentry spoke. “Do what you have to do, Lloyd. Put my documents out there; I don’t give a shit. I’m done with this.”
“Very well. I’ll spray your data to the world. Within a week, every mobster you’ve wronged, every enemy agency you’ve run against, every grumpy assassin you’ve beat out for a contract, they all will be after you. It will make the last forty-eight hours look like a vacation in a day spa.”
“I can handle it.”
“And Fitzroy dies. His family dies. Can you handle that?”
A slight hesitation. “He shouldn’t have screwed me.”
“Okay. You are a hard man, Court, I get it. But there is just one other thing I forgot to mention. Yours were not the only personnel files I filched from the agency. If you do not come to Normandy, I will distribute the names, photographs, and known associates files of all the operators in the Special Activities Division, active, inactive, retired, or otherwise indisposed. Every company triggerman will become just like you: burned, hunted, left hung out to dry because their services have been rendered useless and their names are popping up on every search engine on the Internet.”
It was a long time before Gentry spoke. “What the fuck is all this about? Why would you do that, just to get to me?”
“This isn’t just about you, you arrogant shit! You are insi
gnificant in the scope of the real objective. But I need you here. I need you here, or I will scorch the earth clean of America’s best covert operators. I’ll see that every SAD asset and all their known associates are hunted dogs!”
Court Gentry said nothing. Fitzroy cocked his head, thought he could hear the clacking cadence of a train over tracks in the background of the connection.
Lloyd next said, “Of course, it will take a few days to dump all the personnel files of you and the SAD boys onto the net. There’s so damn much of it. I’ll have to start with something else. If you’re not here bright and early tomorrow morning, the first to check out will be the Fitzroy family downstairs. I figure I’ll begin with the little ones. The first-in, first-out principle. Know what I mean? I’ll kill the babies, kill the parents, and then top off my morning by killing old man Fitzroy here.”
Gentry spoke up finally. “If you touch Claire or Kate, I will find you, and I will torture you so slowly that the only prayer on your lips will be for a quick death.”
Lloyd clapped his hands. “That’s what I like to hear! Emotion! Passion! Well, you’d better get here in time for eggs and biscuits tomorrow, because snapping the necks of those pretty little girls will be the first order of business after breakfast!”
Fitzroy had been silent, sullen. He’d sat to the side during the conversation like a forgotten dog. But when Lloyd spoke his last piece, Sir Donald launched from his Louis XV chair and onto the American and grabbed at the young man’s throat. Freshly led wires to the computers and speakers became caught up in their legs, and equipment was ripped from the table. Lloyd’s swivel chair flipped up as the two crashed to the ground. Sir Donald tore off Lloyd’s wire-rimmed glasses and smashed his fists into the taut cheekbones of his adversary’s face.
