by Mark Greaney
Her eyes returned to his. “It’s a lot.”
“It’s all yours. Just help me get to Bayeux before eight a.m.”
“If you can’t even drive a car, what do you expect to do when you get there?”
“I can drive the car, but I need you to stitch me up and bandage me while I drive. We can do the transfusion on the way.”
She stood slowly. Said each word alone. “Sutures? In, zee, car?”
Court nodded.
“While you drive zee car?”
“Yes.”
She muttered something in French that Court did not understand. He picked up the word for dogs and figured she was saying it was due to moments like these that she preferred her patients to be the four-legged variety.
She tied the bandages around his waist and helped him put his wet dress shirt back over his shoulders. She did not look up from her work as she spoke. “What is going on in Bayeux early on a Sunday morning that you absolutely cannot miss?”
“Would you believe me if I told you I was singing in the church choir?”
She shook her head without smiling. “No.”
“Okay. Then I will tell you.” And he told her. He told her with holes in his story jumbo jets could fly through about what had happened and what he had to do by eight a.m. He told her about the kidnapped girls and the father who died trying to protect them. He told her about the teams of foreign operatives after him, and as the blood loss and fatigue addled his brain, he told her again about the phone call from Claire and again about the little kids he just had to protect.
She reacted with horror when he talked of the killers and the killing, the mortal peril of two little girls for the sake of the reputation of some thuggish corporation. Yes, Justine worked for a doctor of veterinary medicine who occasionally kept some strange hours and dealt with some highly suspicious patients, and the doctor had told her enough about Fitzroy and the Network to where she knew to ask no further questions, but she never imagined in a million years that men were as brutal and as callous as those in the stranger’s story.
“So… what do you think?” asked Court.
“Why are you trusting me?”
“Desperation. I was dead on the riverbank forty-five minutes ago. Since that moment, you have become my only hope. If you double-cross me, I am no worse off than I was lying there.”
“What about the police?”
“Lloyd says he will kill the hostages if anyone but me shows up at the house. I know men like this. They will do exactly what they threaten to do. I have to go alone, with your help. I’ll leave you in Bayeux. My destination is a few kilometers north of the village. You can be on the morning’s first train back to Paris. You’ll be miles from any danger, I promise you.”
“What do I call you?” she asked.
“Jim.”
“Okay, Jim. We will go on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“Let me give you a little pain medicine, just for the procedure. We’ll find something at zee clinic that we can give you once the transfusion brings your blood pressure back up. We will take my car. I will drive to Gare Saint-Lazare to get your car. Then we can go. There will be no traffic on zee road once we leave town. I will work on your injury as you drive.”
Court thought about it. Every fiber of his being was against taking any medication that would cloud his mind and dull his senses, leave him less than completely focused on the task at hand. He felt he could handle the pain.
No, he did not like Justine’s plan, but for some reason he did trust her. And as he looked at the cute, gangly girl standing over him, still pretty with her ponytailed hair messy from her bed and no makeup on her face and sweat forming above her lip from the work she was doing to keep some scary stranger alive, he conceded he was in absolutely no position to argue.
Justine helped Court back to his feet, and the two of them staggered together slowly out of the treatment room and down the hall towards the back of the clinic. Gentry winced with each step. Once his head bobbed low as if he would pass out.
Justine propped him against the wall in the courtyard while she fumbled with her keys.
“What the hell is this?” Gentry asked.
“It’s my car.”
“That’s a car?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s small.”
“When I bought it, I didn’t know I would be transporting patients in the passenger seat.”
“Fair enough. It’s fine. It sure as hell won’t draw much attention.”
They both smiled a little, but the smiles drifted away as she tried to help lower him into the seat. Court cried out in pain, a cry that culminated with shallow panting.
It took her nearly a minute to fire the little engine. By then Court was asleep. She’d dropped his seat to where he could lie almost flat. With considerable effort, she was able to get his legs up on the dashboard to help keep him from going into shock. As she turned north on Rue Monge, she saw helicopters in the air in the distance over the river.
Justine parked her car a few doors down from the clinic off the Rue des Ecoles. At half past three, there was not a soul around. Court stirred, looked around for a moment, and then asked her for a pen and a piece of paper. She dug through her purse a moment and then passed him an envelope and a pencil.
“There’s another med I need you to find. Should be with the pediatric drugs.”
“One of the twins needs medicine?”
“No. It’s for me.” He jotted something down and handed the envelope back to Justine. She looked at it.
“DextroStat? What does it do?”
“It will help. It’s very important. Find it.”
She shrugged, promised to look for it. Without another word to Court, she climbed out of her tiny Uno and went back to the trunk. Gentry did not, could not, turn around to see what she was doing. A few seconds later she walked to the glass door of the building and looked quickly in both directions. A tire iron in her right hand crashed through the glass, and she reached through the sharp shards to open the door from the inside. As Court watched, completely helpless, she disappeared into the dark clinic as a piercing alarm filled the street.
Even with the impending danger, Court fell asleep again in the car. He awoke with the jolt of the tiny two-door as it lurched forward. In the glow from the streetlamps flickering above them as they moved away from the alarm bells, he caught a glimpse of the young woman’s face: intensity and determination.
“What did you get?” he asked.
“Three units of O positive, two bags of dextrose, morphine, Vicodin, transfusion equipment, antiseptics, and a suture kit.”
“And?”
“And the medicine you asked about.”
“Well done.”
“Yes,” she said with a little smile. “That was fun.”
In the parking garage below the Gare Saint-Lazare, Justine and Court climbed into the big Mercedes. Gentry took the wheel and sat there, woozy and grimacing from agony. Justine began the transfusion of blood and a bag of nutrients as they sat together in the dark and empty garage. She hooked the bags on the dome light above them to keep the drip going and the supple black leather interior gave way to the French girl’s movements as she knelt over Court, poured antiseptic freely on his waist to let it soak into his bandages and his wounds.
Justine instructed Court to just lie there and relax, and she left the car. She disappeared from his view while he sat alone and tried to think about the task still at hand. He knew these delays meant he would not make it to the château before six in the morning. He would have virtually no time to lay up and get a feel for the territory. No, as it now stood, he’d only have time to drive up to the front door and begin his attack if he wanted to do so under cover of darkness. Shit. Court realized his chances for success were never good, but after the stabbing in Paris, they had now become incal culably small.
Just then Justine returned with a bag of pastries and two large serving
s of coffee. Court pulled one foam cup from her hand and swigged it until his mouth burned.
“Arrêt! Stop,” she demanded. “Sip it slowly.”
Court took a croissant and ripped into it with abandon. She tried to butter it for him while he ate, but he just took the little pat of butter from her hands and gobbled it down, too.
Justine lectured him. “Your mother would not be proud. Relax. You are getting the fluids and nutrition you need from the IV. Too much food with the morphine, and you will throw up. Drink the coffee slowly. Can you drive?”
“We’re about to find out,” Court said with a look of grim determination, and he backed the Mercedes out of the space, exited the underground garage slowly, and rolled out into the night.
They took the A15 north out of the city, and just as Justine had promised, there was virtually no traffic at four on a Sunday morning. She cursed loudly when she noticed the blood bag empty just a few minutes out of town; she switched it out with a second full liter bag and switched out the dextrose just to keep the fluids dripping into the IV at the fastest rate possible.
The A13 was the most direct route to Bayeux, but Court avoided it. He knew surveillance could easily be set up on the main route to the château. Instead, Court took a series of back roads that would add a half hour or so to his journey.
For an hour they delayed the inevitable. Justine talked about her family and friends and her six cats. Her nervousness was evident to Court from her random conversation. With less than an hour to go till the château, Justine grew quiet, carefully injected a tiny dose of morphine into Gentry’s IV. If his blood pressure was too low, as it surely had been back at the vet clinic, the morphine could have stopped his heart. But after two and a half units of blood, she determined a small shot of the strong painkiller was worth the risk, considering what he was about to endure.
As they drove through the dark, Court began feeling better, the pain medicine and the blood and the sugar water boosting his strength and spirits. They discussed the procedure, and Justine took several minutes to ready her sutures and bandages on the dashboard in front of her. She cringed as she threaded the razor-sharp hooked needle and dipped it in a bottle of antiseptic, laid it down on sterile gauze. She opened his shirt and cut off his bandages and poured half the contents of the bottle on his stomach, and he recoiled from the sting.
They both unfastened their seat belts, and she rose to her knees in the passenger seat. Gentry put his hands high on the wheel to allow her access to his belly. He gulped down the last few swigs of cold coffee and tossed the cup over his shoulder into the back. Justine then used adhesive tape to fasten Court’s small flashlight to the bottom of the steering wheel, lighting the area of her focus perfectly as long she was careful to keep her hands from casting shadows over the stab wound.
“I have never done this before on a human, even in the correct conditions, but I have sutured cats before.”
“You will do fine,” Court said. He realized they were both trying to steady the nerves of the other.
But Justine’s resolve faltered first. She looked up at the American and asked, “Are you sure? I will have to go deep into the muscle to close the wound. If I just pierce the skin it will tear as soon as you move.”
Court nodded, his eyes already watering in anticipation of the agony. “Justine,” he said, softly. “Whatever I say or do… do not stop.”
She nodded, steeled herself. “Are you ready?”
He nodded shortly, pulled his seatbelt off his chest and placed it in his mouth. He bit down hard.
The roadway ran flat and straight, and the headlamps showed the way.
Justine pierced her patient’s flesh a half inch from the bloody knife wound. The hooked needle found its own path deep through his abdominal muscle. It passed through the slit, and fresh blood bubbled into the flashlight’s beam. The curvature of the sharp spike sent it back out of his skin, a half inch on the other side of the stab wound.
Court screamed into the seat belt wedged in his mouth.
Justine took the thread with her gloved hand, pulled the instrument backwards the way it came, and re-threaded the needle. Even with a quarter dose of morphine going through her patient, she felt his teardrops on her arms as she made her second suture, close to the first.
For ten kilometers she continued. She did not look away from her work as she sewed him up, but she spoke to him in soothing French throughout, just as she would an injured dog. Above her, her patient winced and groaned. Miraculously, to her way of thinking, he continued to drive, execute gentle turns as needed, once even braking slightly. Justine assumed the road ahead and his need to concentrate on it was the only thing keeping him coherent.
She used gauze to swab away the blood as she worked, poured antiseptic from the bottle she’d staged between his legs to get a better view of the pumping wound.
Finally she said, “Almost done. I only have to pull it tight and tie it off. Just a few more seconds now.” Above her she heard him panting and sobbing. There was a rhythm to his sounds that distressed her; she knew he could go into shock at any time. “Here we go… I will be as gentle as possible.” She pulled on the thread, the wound closed beautifully, and the last of the bleeding stopped immediately. “Yes, perfect. Now I just tie it and—”
The tires below her ran over a series of bumps. The Mercedes’s suspension was awesome; she barely felt the rough surface. But when the bumps did not stop after several seconds, she looked up to check on her patient.
She was horrified to see his head hanging down just above her, his eyes closed.
Jim had passed out.
The black Mercedes ran off the road and crashed at five thirty a.m.
THIRTY-ONE
All ten Belarusian guards were on station around the property: six outside, two at ground-floor windows, and two in the tower above. Serge and Alain, the two electronic security engineers, sat in the ground-floor library, their bloodshot eyes scanning back and forth across the screens, watching the infrared images around the perimeter of the building. Every five minutes, they used walkie-talkies to communicate with the patrols.
The Libyans were the only hunter-killer squad still in the area. They fought exhaustion as their van patrolled Bayeux. They were certain by now they were out of the big money. The other teams who had been in the area had since been sent to Paris to search for the target, as had every pavement artist within 300 miles. The Libyans had been given a clear chance at the target back on the hillside in Switzerland, and they had failed, so now they were ordered to sit tight and wait, were facing a hundred-to-one odds at best they would get another crack at the Gray Man.
No one expected Gentry to make it to Bayeux now.
Riegel, Lloyd, the Tech, and Felix sat in the control room in low light, sipped coffee, and watched computer monitors displaying the rocking and bouncing images broadcast from digital video cameras held by the watchers and kill teams in Paris. The Tech was still organizing the search around the Seine. By now Riegel and Lloyd both conceded Gentry must have made it out of the water downstream and staggered off, so the net was widened and then widened again on both sides of the river.
By five thirty a.m., there was fresh news in Paris that generated a flurry of activity around the château. A watcher listening to police radio had learned about a break-in at a minor emergency clinic in the Fifth Ar rondissement. This was upstream from where the target went into the river, but the Tech had sent a watcher over to find out what he could. The owners of the clinic had arrived and announced the medicines and blood and equipment stolen were all items necessary for wound management.
Riegel stood behind the Tech. “We’ll have to split the search. Keep the Bolivians and the Sri Lankans in Paris. Tell the Botswanans to come here via the highway, see if they can spot him on the way. Send a helicopter up to pick up the Kazakhs. They are the most skilled gunners; I want them here. They can patrol the back roads around the property, checking anything that moves. And alert the Libyans in Bayeux! T
hey need to stay there to watch the train station and the routes through town. If the Gray Man is somehow still in the fight, he’ll be here before daybreak.”
The Tech muttered to himself, “We bloody saw him. We bloody well saw him hurt. We bloody well saw him fall into the water.”
Lloyd slapped him on the back of the head as he stormed out of the room, heading downstairs to tell the men monitoring the infrared cameras that their target may be on the way.
* * *
“Please! Please, Jim! You must wake!”
Court Gentry opened his eyes. Above him, a figure loomed close in the dark. Instinctively, he reached out and took the figure’s neck and grabbed it tight and slammed it to the ground next to him as he tried to roll on top of it.
Court fell on Justine in the tall, wet grass.
“Sorry,” was all he could say as he climbed off of the French girl. He moved sluggishly, his body clearly impeded by drugs.
She was slow to get up as well. It was dark, and he could make out her wide eyes best of all. She sat up next to him finally, and he looked away uncomfortably. He took stock of his surroundings.
He was seated in wet grass, both of their backs leaned against the Mercedes. They were in a field, the black sedan four-fifths through a thicket. Gentry assumed the road was on the other side. The glow of the moon was diffused by the mist above him, but he could make out the lumbering movement of cows in the muddy field near the car.
The air was cold.
“What… what is… Where are we?”
“I could not wake you. We are west of Caen, still thirty minutes from Bayeux.”
“Shit. What time is it?” The American slowly remembered his mission, as if it appeared from out of the fog of his drug-addled brain.
“It is almost seven. The sun will be up in under an hour.”
“We crashed, didn’t we?”
“No, monsieur, we did not crash. You crashed.”
