by Mark Greaney
Back on the street now, Russ Whitlock climbed into his BMW after tossing his Pelican case in the trunk. He drove off through the cool, dry morning, heading toward Borg El Arab airport. There would be a Townsend jet there ready to take him to St. Petersburg.
But Dead Eye would not be boarding the airplane. He would, instead, take a domestic flight to Berlin, and from there he’d catch a second plane heading north. Lee Babbitt and Jeff Parks and the other Townsend suits would be pissed, but Dead Eye did not give a damn.
Russ Whitlock, like his primary target, Court Gentry, was a singleton asset, and singletons did things their way.
FIVE
Gregor Ivanovic Sidorenko sat at his desk, hard at work, even now at four in the morning. He was a night owl, partly due to natural tendencies and partly due to the large quantities of barbiturates he took for his various physical maladies, all of which—both the maladies and the pills to combat them—affected his mood and sleep patterns. He often did not go to bed until after breakfast, and then he remained there through most of the daylight hours.
Behind his back, the young skinheads who worked for him called him vampir, “vampire,” a moniker that also took into account his pasty white skin and sunken dark eyes.
Sid’s office here at his Rochino palace was a large open room with wooden flooring and high ceilings of smooth plaster. The bare floor looked like it would be more suitable for dance parties than mob business. It was half the size of a basketball court and had the acoustics to match, but Sid liked the regal feel of large open spaces. The echoes of the room were only partially muted by bloodred curtains on the wall to his right, and a large crackling fireplace on his left kept his end of the room not warm, but bearable.
Sid’s massive desk was centered at the back wall, facing the door to the hallway across the room. Another door was behind him, and this led to his sleeping chambers.
A large incense burner was perched on the desk near his laptop computer. These items, along with a telephone and a cup of tea, sat amid reams of paper, and Sid read through page after page of the document pile with only the light of the fireplace and the ambient glow of his laptop.
A portrait of Joseph Stalin hung from the wall behind his desk; the dark eyes of Uncle Joe seemed to look over Sid’s shoulder while he worked.
And Sid had been working since early evening. Though his home had been the site of a party tonight, Sid had not even gone downstairs; instead he took his meal here at his desk. The skinheads—he didn’t call them that, he called them “his boys”—threw their wild celebrations on the first floor and outside in the snow; they brought girls and booze and often a little coke, and they had a hell of a time, but Sid did not partake. He wasn’t like them, and they weren’t like him.
That was not to say he was bothered by the festivities. Much to the contrary, his boys could party at his place every night as far as he was concerned. He liked the fact that some fifty or sixty feared and loathed men, all of whom worked for him in one form or another, were here on the grounds. It made him feel safe, up on the fourth floor with only his extended family, his sister and her kids, and his cousins living up here with him. They avoided the freak show on the weekends as well, staying up here away from the skinheads.
Despite the slight inconvenience, Sid knew that no one would dare attack him with a small army of soldiers at the ready—well, sort of ready—to respond to any threat.
Sidorenko enjoyed spending his time at his desk counting his money. He had entered the underworld originally as an accountant for a large crime boss in the early nineties before taking over the reins of his own Bratva a few years later, and he still spent his days, or more precisely his nights, looking over the meticulously maintained ledgers of his various enterprises.
He slurped a sip of his sugary-sweet tea, and then, with a reed-thin finger, he scanned down a printout ledger showing receipts from his prostitution and human trafficking concerns in the Czech Republic.
The phone on his desk rang and he answered it, not surprised at all to receive a call at four in the morning, as he had employees all over the world who knew Sidorenko could be reached throughout the night St. Petersburg time.
“What?” Sid asked distractedly, the index finger of his right hand still skimming a balance sheet stacked on hundreds of others.
“Sir. Ivan at the north gate.”
Sid’s finger stopped moving and his eyes narrowed with concern.
“What’s wrong?”
“Probably nothing, sir. I almost did not call. But it is strange.”
“Well talk, damn you!” Sid shouted as he stood from his chair. He was a paranoid man, and it was a short trip for him to switch from comfortable relaxation to shaking terror. He was well on his way from the former to the latter; only his security man’s indecision kept him from bolting the door and reaching for his shotgun.
“Uh . . . A hang glider just crashed in the forest about twenty-five meters from the north wall. No one is with it.”
Sid cocked his head, his birdlike features pinched tighter in confusion.
“A hang glider?”
Ivan said, “We have two men searching the larch to see if a body—”
“It’s him!” Sid interrupted, his voice tight with tension. “It’s Gray. He’s here. Get everyone to the house! Send men to my office. A lot of men. Everyone else will search this building. You have to find him before he comes upstairs!”
“Sir, he did not pass the gate. I would have seen him. He must still be out—”
“Listen to me! He’s in the—”
Sid stopped speaking when he heard it: the slow creaking of old hinges, the sound of the heavy door to the hallway opening. He could not see the door across the room, as the light from the fireplace did not reach more than fifteen feet past the front of his desk. Normally when the door opened he knew it instantly, as there was a light in the hallway, and a long shaft of light across the cold hardwood floor accompanied the creaking hinges.
But not now. Clearly the hall light had been disabled.
Panic washed over his body; his knees weakened. He fought a wave of nausea and then croaked softly into the phone, “Hurry.” He placed the handset back in the cradle with a trembling hand and sat back down.
Sidorenko had thought of this moment for a long time. It was at the center of his every nightmare, true, but he had also taken the time when awake to put his mind to the situation. If, somehow, all his defensive measures came to nothing and it was down to Court and him, alone in a room somewhere, he had a plan.
Sid’s right hand wrapped around the cold grip of a double-barreled shotgun attached to a swivel hanger on the underside of the desk. He rotated the weapon’s business end to the left, toward the doorway, but he could see nothing past the firelight’s glow around his desk.
He heard no footsteps, but he knew the Gray Man was out there, approaching in the impenetrable darkness.
When Court entered the big dark room he saw the man standing at the desk at the far end in front of the Stalin portrait, illuminated by the light of the big fireplace. The man hung up a telephone and sat down slowly, clearly aware now that he was not alone.
The man looked like Sidorenko, but the distance and a long shadow cast by a chair in front of the fireplace made positive identification impossible.
Court shifted swiftly to his left and then began approaching up the wall along the curtains on Sid’s right, moving through black shadow on the opposite wall from the fireplace.
He saw the man peer into the dim in front of him, his right hand slipping casually under the desk.
Below the desk Gregor Sidorenko’s swivel-mounted shotgun scanned slowly to the left and to the right, searching for a target, belying the calm appearance he attempted to portray with his upper body. His face affected an air of nonchalance; he even smiled a little as he looked into the darkness before him.
And while his eyes searched for a target his mind raced. Sixty seconds, he told himself. Surely the men positioned on
the second-floor landing had already heard from the north guard shack and were on their way, and it should not take them more than a minute from receiving the alarm before they came bursting through the door.
Sid knew he needed to find Court downrange of his shotgun and put two barrels of lead into him, or else keep him busy for just a minute more.
The Russian relaxed a little. He could do this. He knew he could.
With a wider smile now he spoke to the darkness. “I knew you would come. It was inevitable.” A nervous chuckle. “I have been anxiously awaiting this moment. That might surprise you, but just listen. You will be glad to know that an opportunity has arisen, something I am certain you will find impossible to—”
A figure in black, a face obscured with a ski mask, moved into the glow of the crackling firelight by the curtains, far to Sid’s right in front of the desk. The figure held a suppressed pistol at the end of an outstretched arm; the long silencer was pointed directly at Sidorenko’s face. A tubular night vision device protruded from the figure’s forehead.
Though Sid could not see the man’s face, there was no question but this was Court Gentry. Sid was surprised by how silently the American had approached. Court was not three meters from him now. It would be impossible to miss with the shotgun; he just had to swivel the weapon all the way to the right and wait for the man to move a foot or two closer to place himself in the line of fire. Sid made no sudden move; he squeezed the grip tighter and slowly rotated the gun to the right while he spoke.
Sid said, “There is a mission only you could possibly achieve. By your actions tonight I am even more certain that you are the right man for the—”
Gentry shot Gregor Sidorenko through the forehead. Blood sprayed across the portrait of Stalin behind him as his head snapped back. He spun away, tumbled out of his chair behind his desk, and came to rest faceup, eyes wide open, dead on the cool wooden floor.
Court hadn’t come all this way to listen to Sid talk.
SIX
The Gray Man stepped past the desk and fired a second round into the Russian mob boss; the body jerked and blood sprayed, twinkling in the firelight. And then Court turned away, holstering his pistol and moving to the long row of curtains. He yanked them down with a single pull to gain access to the window.
But there was no window. The curtains had covered a massive brick wall.
Sid had been so scared of Gentry he’d had the windows removed, bricking himself away from the dangers of the outside world.
Court ran back around the desk, vaulted Sid’s body and the pool of blood growing on the floor, and ducked into the bedroom.
There were no windows here, either.
Oh shit.
In an instant, Court’s escape plan evaporated. He had planned to break or blow the glass of the first window he found after killing Sid, and then just rappel or bungee down the side of the building, bypassing all the security inside the mansion’s walls.
But Gentry had not allowed for the possibility that there would be no windows.
Hope in one hand, shit in the other.
There was only one way out. He turned and faced the hallway door just as the sounds of shouting men came from up the hall.
At the same time, sirens began to wail around the property.
Court sprinted for the door, reloading his pistol with a fresh magazine from his chest rig as he advanced on the danger.
“It’s getting lively.” Jeff Parks had finished his call to Dead Eye and returned to watch the monitor. Now he stood at the back wall, just behind the seated Leland Babbitt. Together they watched the main display along with the rest of the signal room. Tiny white spots moved in ones and twos toward the main building, no real coordination evident, but all the figures were obviously responding to orders.
Parks gave his reading of the events. “The guys who found the microlight called it in, and now the compound is on full alert.”
A woman near the front of the room had been listening to the audio feeds from the bugs set up outside the walls of the dacha. She turned away from her desk with her hand to her earpiece and spoke into her microphone. “Sirens sounding at the target location.”
Someone else said, “It’s going loud.”
Parks muttered to himself now, although his mic picked up the concern in his voice. “C’mon, Court, old buddy. I sure as shit hope you have an exfil planned that’s cleaner than your infil.”
Babbitt sat next to him, his tuxedo straining against his corpulent frame. With absolute confidence he said, “He’s got a plan.”
Court did not, in fact, have a plan.
He ran headlong up the narrow corridor toward what sounded like a half-dozen men, just on the other side of the corner not fifty feet ahead. Bouncing flashlight beams pulsed around the turn, the throw of the lights narrowing as the men drew closer. Court was hoping to improvise, to find some way to avoid contact with that number of enemy, but as he closed on them, and they on him, he realized his chances for something other than a six-on-one gunfight in a narrow hallway were rapidly diminishing.
Court sprinted, his night vision lens providing him a narrow monochromatic view. He held his weapon steady and his eyes scanned past the front sight, ready to engage the first armed man he saw.
A door opened twenty feet ahead on his right, opposite the door the child had appeared from a few minutes earlier. A man stepped out, facing in the direction of the noise of the men around the corner.
Gentry closed on the man, his Glock at the ready, and he scanned the man’s hands. The right hand was empty, but the left hand swung out with a silver automatic pistol clutched in it.
Court pressed the palm of his left hand into the back of his Glock’s side, and it fired once at the target in front of him. His left hand kept his suppressed pistol from cycling, and this held the spent shell casing in the weapon. It also lessened the noise made by firing the gun.
The man pitched forward into the hall, tumbling onto the carpet with a muted thud.
Court leapt over the fallen man and through the doorway, then grabbed the legs of the dead body, and pulled it back inside. He reached out into the hall, scooped up the silver pistol, and retreated back into the room just as the crew of skinheads made the turn.
He shut the door not one full second before their flashlights trained on it, and they rushed past seconds later, hurrying to surround their benefactor in his office.
There were no lights on in this bedroom, but through his monocle Gentry scanned the empty space. The dead man was a cousin of Sidorenko and a lieutenant in his organization, but Court neither knew nor cared. He was looking for a window, and he found two. He ran to them, pulled back the heavy curtains, and saw thick iron bars.
Fucking Sid, Court muttered under his breath.
He cleared the spent shell casing from his pistol and reholstered it, then reached into the cargo pocket of his pants, pulled out a mobile phone, and lit up the screen. With the touch of a three-button code, made difficult by a slight tremor in his hand brought on by adrenaline, he sent a wireless message to the detonators of both strands of fireworks.
Within ten seconds cracks and booms began in the forest more than one hundred yards beyond the southern gate of the compound. He knew in forty-five seconds the igniter would initiate in the second strand, and mortars would fire all over the southern side of the building.
He headed back to the door, cracked it open, then launched himself once again into the hallway, turned the corner and ran toward the atrium. He saw no one ahead, so he holstered his pistol and pulled the small flare gun from a Velcro pouch on his chest harness. It was loaded with a single smoke grenade, and he raised the device and fired a cartridge with a loud pop. The smoke grenade arced up the long passage, flew over the balcony, and dropped into the atrium, four stories below. Before the first grenade hit the ground and began extruding its thick red billowing cloud, Court had slammed a second ballistic smoke into the gun and snapped it closed, and he fired again. Another champagne-cork
pop echoed in the darkened hallway. He loaded a third smoke as he began running up the hall as fast as he could. He fired the third grenade, and he let the flare gun fall to the hallway carpet as he pulled his suppressed Glock once again.
Two men appeared at the balcony in front of him now; they were backlit with the dim glow from the glass dome roof of the atrium, and Court saw them easily in his night vision monocle, saw the rifles in their hands, saw them running in his direction.
Court, dressed in black and sprinting up a dark hallway, was invisible to the men. All they saw before them were a pair of bright orange flashes before both of their worlds went dark.
With less than fifty feet to the balcony Court reholstered his sidearm, then reached behind him and pulled a grappling hook from his hip bag. The spring-loaded spool spun as he drew out a length of bungee cord attached to it, looping it in his hand as it came out. As he ran he swung the hook in a forward motion, playing out longer lengths of the bungee with each whipping revolution.
Gentry heard shouting in the atrium, many men calling out to one another in confusion, fury, and resolve. They would see the red smoke, black in the dim light, and they would not know what it meant, but any men on the higher floors would have heard the pops of the grenade launcher or the supersonic cracks of the suppressed Glock, and they would know danger was seconds away.
They would be waiting for him, Court knew, and he could not prevent that. The only way he could help himself now was to do the unexpected, and to move as quickly as possible out of their line of fire.
Ten feet from the balcony he swung the grappling hook overhand, then let it go and dropped the loops. The weighted hook sailed away from him, drawing the springy black cord behind it.
With a loud metallic clang it hit the iron beam that ran the length of the dome over the atrium, then swung around over the top of the bar, where its claw grabbed the bungee.
Outside the building, to the rear of Court’s position, a series of low thuds began as the twelve Yanisars attached to the fuse ignited by the wireless signal began launching, skipping across the ground before booms as loud as shotgun blasts shook windowpanes, set off car alarms, and echoed off the walls of the property.
