by Mark Greaney
Praise for Mark Greaney and the Gray Man novels
BALLISTIC
“The story is so propulsive, the murders so explosive, that flipping the pages feels like playing the ultimate video game.”
—The New York Times
“Greaney once again pumps new life into familiar thriller conventions in his third Gray Man novel . . . An extremely capable warrior with multiple tricks and tradecraft, Courtland has a complicated past and a long list of mortal enemies, so readers can look forward to plenty of dangerous adventures.”
—Publishers Weekly
ON TARGET
“Court is endearing in his perseverance even as his schemes are undermined by sympathetic victims, misleading information, outright lies, poor planning, betrayal, conflicting agendas, and simple bad luck . . . An action-filled yet touching story of a man whose reason has long ago been subsumed by his work ethic.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Fine characterization, witty dialogue, breathtaking chase and battle scenes, and as many unforeseen twists and turns as your favorite Robert Ludlum or Vince Flynn novel—combined. Moreover, author Mark Greaney supplies verisimilitude as well as anyone in the writing business, along with singular attention to detail that doesn’t merely bring the exotic locales to life: You will feel the bullets whizzing past.”
—Keith Thomson, New York Times bestselling author of Twice a Spy
“Greaney writes smart, sharp, perfectly-paced thrillers. Intense, intelligent, and loads of fun. Pick one up and you won’t want to put it down until the last page.”
—Steven James, bestselling author of Placebo
“Discovering The Gray Man was like falling in love for the first time. Reading On Target is like going on a second date and realizing this relationship might last the long haul.”
—Eric Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Three Fatal Blows
THE GRAY MAN
“There’s probably a cheetah on the Serengeti who can get a gazelle moving faster than Mark Greaney gets The Gray Man into overdrive . . . Greaney keeps this vengeance story red-lined and blistering as a hired killer known as the Gray Man burns like det cord through a small army of trained killers in Prague, Zurich, Paris, and beyond as he zeroes in on the wealthy French aristocrat who betrayed him . . . Writing as smooth as stainless steel and a hero as mean as razor wire . . . The Gray Man glitters like a blade in an alley.”
—David Stone, New York Times bestselling author of The Skorpion Directive
“Hard, fast, and unflinching—exactly what a thriller should be.”
—Lee Child, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Never Go Back
“A high-octane thriller that doesn’t pause for more than a second for all of its 464 pages . . . Greaney has a good understanding of weapons and tactics . . . and he uses that to enliven his storytelling, including lots of the kinds of details that action junkies love . . . For readers looking for a thriller where the action comes fast and furious, this is the ticket.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Here is a debut novel like a well-honed dagger: sharp, merciless, and deadly. Mark Greaney’s The Gray Man is Bourne for the new millennium . . . Never has an assassin been rendered so real yet so deadly. Strikes with the impact of a bullet to the chest . . . A debut not to be missed.”
—James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of The Eye of God
“Take fictional spy Jason Bourne, pump him up with Red Bull and meth, shake vigorously—and you’ve got the recipe for Court Gentry, hero of The Gray Man . . . Gentry’s such a souped-up, efficient killing machine, Bourne’s a piker by comparison . . . Greaney’s writing is crisp.”
—The Memphis Commercial Appeal
“From the opening pages, the bullets fly and the bodies pile up. Through the carnage, Gentry remains an intriguing protagonist with his own moral code. The villain’s motives are fuzzy, though he is quite nasty. Comparisons will be made to Jason Bourne, but the Gray Man is his own character. The ending screams for a sequel, but it will be difficult to maintain the intensity level of this impressive debut.”
—Booklist
“[A] fast-paced, fun debut thriller . . . With unbelievable powers of survival, the Gray Man eludes teams of killers and deadly traps, while the reader begins to cheer for this unlikely hero. Cinematic battles and escapes fill out the simplistic but satisfying plot, and Greaney deftly provides small details to show Gentry’s human side, offset by the petty rivalries and greed of his enemies.”
—Publishers Weekly
TITLES BY MARK GREANEY
The Gray Man
On Target
Ballistic
Dead Eye
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China
penguin.com
A Penguin Random House Company
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
Copyright © 2013 by Mark Strode Greaney.
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.
The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-63249-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Greaney, Mark.
Dead eye / Mark Greaney.—Berkley trade paperback edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-425-26905-3
1. Assassins—Fiction. 2. Revenge—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.R4285D43 2013
813'.6—dc23
2013008943
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / December 2013
Cover photograph of Gargoyle © Alexsvivid / Shutterstock; photograph
of Street of City of Tallinn © Igor Sokolov (breeze) / Shutterstock.
Cover design by Jae Song.
Interior text design by Laura K. Corless.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
Contents
Praise
Titles By Mark Greaney
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
FORTY-FOUR
FORTY-FIVE
FORTY-SIX
FORTY-SEVEN
FORTY-EIGHT
FORTY-NINE
FIFTY
FIFTY-ONE
FIFTY-TWO
FIFTY-THREE
FIFTY-FOUR
FIFTY-FIVE
FIFTY-SIX
FIFTY-SEVEN
EPILOGUE
For my awesome nephew,
Kyle Edward Greaney
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Nick Ciubotariu, Christopher Clarke, Nichole Geer Roberts, J. T. Patten, Hooligan 003, James Yeager and his team at Tactical Response, Jeff Belanger, Dalton Fury, Keith Thomson, Igor Veksler, Michael Hagan, Chris Owens, Devon Gilliland, Devin Greaney, the Tulsa Greaneys, Dan and Judy Lesley, Jennifer Dalsky, John and Wanda Anderson, Captain Michael Hill, United States Army, the Echols family, the Leslies, Amanda Ng and Caitlin Mulrooney-Lyski at Penguin, Stephanie Hoover at Trident, Jon Cassir at CAA, Mystery Mike Bursaw, and George Easter.
Special thanks to Scott Miller at Trident Media Group and Tom Colgan at Penguin.
But the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.
THUCYDIDES
PROLOGUE
Leland Babbitt shot through the doors of the Hay-Adams Hotel and ran down the steps to the street like he had someplace to be.
The White House was just across Lafayette Square, awash in lights and radiant in the cold rainy evening, but Babbitt ignored the view, looked to his right, and began racing toward the limo waiting for him there.
The chauffeur hadn’t been expecting his passenger for another hour and a half, but he was a pro; he quickly extracted himself from the warm Town Car and opened the back door. He noticed that the man seemed to have forgotten his overcoat in his haste—to say nothing of his wife.
The thickly built passenger folded quickly into the limo; the driver climbed back behind the wheel and looked into the rearview mirror for instructions.
In a voice commanding yet hurried, Babbitt said, “Sixteen twenty-six Crescent Place. Break every law you need to break, but get me there now!”
The chauffeur didn’t know his passenger; he’d only been hired for the night to ferry Mr. Babbitt and his wife from their home in Chevy Chase to a black-tie gala here at the Hay-Adams, and then back home again. But the driver knew this town. He’d been shuffling VIPs around D.C. for a quarter century; this wasn’t the first time some suit had told him to blow through the lights to get to a destination on the double.
He started the engine. “You got a badge?” he asked, still making eye contact with the man in the backseat via the rearview mirror.
“Play like I said yes.”
The chauffeur’s eyebrows rose now. He’d danced this dance before. “National security?” he asked.
“You bet your ass.”
With a shrug the driver said, “That’ll work,” and he shoved the transmission into gear and squealed the tires. Behind him, his passenger lifted his cell phone to his ear.
“En route.”
The chauffeur couldn’t imagine what was so important on Crescent Place, a two-lane road of majestic Georgians and neo-Colonials, and he was certain he would never know. This was D.C., after all. Shit went down behind the gates of tony residences all over the city that was far above the driver’s pay grade.
His job began at the front door of one building, and it ended at the front door of another, and whatever went on inside was not his problem.
Babbitt had his phone clutched to his ear now, and even at speed the driver could hear the man’s voice clearly over the engine of the whisper-quiet Lincoln—short, soft blasts of interrogatives and shorter bleats that sounded like commands. The man behind the wheel did his best to tune the words out, standard operating procedure for a limo driver in Washington. Twenty-five years hauling dips, pols, spooks, K Street douchebags, and foreign dignitaries around the nation’s capital had taught the driver discretion, to ignore his passenger’s voice unless he himself was being addressed.
He could have listened in; surely the fate of nations had been decided in the backseat of his limo more than once in his career.
But the driver, quite frankly, didn’t give a damn.
And tonight, even if he had tried to pick up any of his passenger’s side of the conversation, he would have heard only generic phrases, cryptic-speak, and alphanumeric references. The man in back had himself spent a lot of time in limos, and he had his own standard operating procedure when being chauffeured around—if he did not know good and well that the guy behind the wheel had Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance with a full-scope polygraph and codeword access to the relevant program, then it was cryptic-speak or nothing at all.
Leland Babbitt had been in this game too damn long to rely on the professional discretion of a fucking limo driver.
ONE
The Lincoln squealed through a hard left turn, drifting in the slick intersection awash in the glow of headlights from angry oncoming traffic. It raced up Crescent Place and then past a small, unlit sign that read Townsend Government Services. After squeezing through electronically operated iron gates still in the process of opening, it rolled up a winding driveway lined with bare cherry trees to a huge peach-hued brick mansion bathed in floodlights. Lee Babbitt climbed out of the Lincoln without a word to the driver and ran through the cold rain up the stone steps of the residence, passing through a door held open by a lean man in a sport coat.
In the round marble foyer of the building, two more young men with military haircuts and civilian clothing stood with Heckler & Koch automatic weapons hanging from slings over their shoulders. Before anyone spoke, a man in his late thirties, some decade younger than Babbitt, came rushing up a long hallway that led to the rear of the building. He wore a cardigan sweater and corduroy slacks, and an assortment of card keys and laminated badges bounced on his chest from a chain around his neck.
Babbitt met the younger man in the middle of the foyer, and his voice echoed off marble. “It’s happening?”
“It’s happening,” the man in the cardigan confirmed.
“The assault is underway?”
“Infiltrating to target as we speak.”
“One man? One man is going to hit that fucking fortress?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And it’s him? It’s our boy?”
Jeff Parks took his boss by the arm and quickly ushered him back up the hall. “We think so.”
“You’ll have to do better than that,” Babbitt said. While he walked, he unfastened his bow tie and opened the top button on his shirt, freeing his thick neck. “There is more than one motherfucker out there who wants to stick a knife into the neck of Gregor Sidorenko.”
The long hallway was trimmed in stained cherry, and the tastefully lit walls were adorned with fine art of the American West. There were Russell watercolors of cowboys on a cattle drive, regal George Catlin portraits of Native Americans, and a pair of Frederick Remington desertscapes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, as well as a Remington bronzed buffalo statue on a side table lit by antler lamps.
As they rushed up the corridor, Babbitt pulled off his damp jacket and slung it over his arm. He asked, “How did we pick him up?”
“One of the UAVs was up on a calibration flight. No one expected activit
y tonight. It’s Saturday; a party was in full swing at the target location until about an hour ago, which put three times the number of personnel on scene as normal. Plus, the weather’s shit and the next illumination cycle isn’t for two days.”
“Right.”
“The ScanEagle pilot spotted movement a half mile off the coast. We tracked the signature for less than a minute before determining we were most likely looking at a singleton attack on Sid’s property.”
“Speedboat?”
“Negative.”
“Scuba? That water must be less than forty deg—”
“He’s not swimming.”
“Then how—”
Parks stopped at a door and looked up to his boss with a grin. “You need to see this shit for yourself.”
Parks scanned a card from his chain through a reader next to a heavy oaken door, then opened the door to reveal a staircase. He followed his boss down, the older man’s patent leather shoes echoing in the stairwell. At the base of the stairs was another corridor; this one went back in the opposite direction, and it was, in contrast to the hallway above, narrow, dimly lit, and utilitarian, though its walls were also adorned.
As the two men hurried up the hall they passed several lighted shadow boxes of differing size. Inside the first ones were tintypes and wet-plate prints of severe, bearded men in black coats and top hats, hefting shotguns and standing alongside caskets propped up, dead men inside pine boxes looking back at the photographer with eyes covered with coins. With these photos were mounted artifacts of the Old West—faded telegrams, single-action revolvers, stirrups and handcuffs, even a man’s dress shirt, torn and stained with old black blood.
Babbitt and Parks ignored the shadow boxes as they walked. They’d passed them countless times. “So we have no assets in place?” Babbitt asked.
“I established comms with Trestle Actual, told him he had twenty mikes to assemble his boys and kit up. They are thirty miles away in St. Pete on R & R, but no worries. The UAV will track the target through the exfil. We’ve found him.” A satisfied smile. “We’ll get him.”
