On Target Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  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

  EPILOGUE

  Teaser chapter

  PRAISE FOR

  MARK GREANEY AND 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

  Gone Tomorrow

  “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—on a fictional basis, at the very least—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 Doomsday Key

  “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

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  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. The publisher does not have control over and does not have any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  ON TARGET

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Jove premium edition / October 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Mark Strode Greaney.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-44360-6

  JOVE®

  Jove Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  JOVE® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “J” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my aunt,

  Dorothy Greaney.

  Thank you for a lifetime of love and support

  (and sorry about all the bad words).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Much thanks and appreciation to Karen Mayer, John and Wanda Anderson, Devin Greaney, Mireya Ledezma, Trey and Kristin Greaney, John and Carrie Echols, Nichole Roberts, David and Suzanne Leslie, Chris and Michelle Burcky, Bob Hetherington, April Adams, Dana and Nancy Adams, Jeff and Stephanie Stovall, Keith Cleghorn, and Jenny Kraft.

  Thanks also to Svetlana Ganea, Gavin Smith, James and Rebecca Yeager, Jay Gibson, Alan Webb, Paul Gomez, and the rest of the cadre and support staff at Tactical Response in Camden, Tennessee. To ALL the guys and girls on getoffthex: you’ve taught me more than you’ll ever know, and have helped me more than I’ll ever admit.

  I’d also like to thank my badass editor, Tom Colgan, and my kickass agent, Scott Miller. You guys are the best.

  MarkGreaneyBooks.com

&n
bsp; PROLOGUE

  Dark clouds hung low above the Irish Sea, fat in the moist morning air, and tracked slowly over the assassin as he stood on the wooden foredeck of the fishing boat. A few screeching herring gulls had encircled the vessel while it was still miles offshore; now that it had entered the harbor channel, a flock one dozen strong swarmed above and around, churning the mist with their white wings.

  The seabirds shrieked at the vessel, bleated warnings to the Irish coast of the arrival of a killer to its shores.

  But their warnings were lost in the vapor.

  The boat docked in its harbor slip just before eight a.m. The assassin climbed off the deck and onto the quay without a glance at the two crewmembers. Not a single word had been exchanged in the three hours since the forty-foot Lochin had picked its passenger up from a Lithuanian freighter in international waters. He remained on the deck, moving fore and aft, vigilantly scanning the roiling sea around him, his black hooded raincoat protecting him from the salty spray and the occasional shower, as well as the curious eyes of the father and son who operated the boat. The crew remained in the wheelhouse during the journey, following strict instructions. They had been told to pick up a passenger and then keep away from him, to return with him to Howth Harbor, just north of Dublin. After delivering this odd catch of the day, they were to enjoy their payment and hold their bloody tongues.

  The assassin walked through the seaside village to the tiny train depot and bought a ticket to Connolly Station in central Dublin. With half an hour to kill, he stepped down the station steps and into the basement pub. The Bloody Scream served a full Irish breakfast for the fishermen in the harbor; the long narrow room was more than half-full of men wolfing down plates of eggs and sausage and baked beans, washing it all down with pints of ink-dark foamy Guinness Stout. The assassin knew how to assimilate in unfamiliar surroundings; he grunted and gestured to hide his foreign accent, and ordered the same as those around him. He dug into his plate and drained his beer before leaving the Bloody Scream to catch his train.

  A half hour later he trudged through Dublin. He wore his brown beard thick and a blue watch cap down over his ears and forehead, a scarf tight around his neck, and a dark blue peacoat into which his gloved hands dug deep to hide from the frigid air. Hanging over a shoulder, a small canvas bag swung with his footsteps. He headed south away from the train station, then turned right at the quay of the River Liffey and followed it as chilled rain began to fall.

  The assassin walked on.

  He looked forward to getting this errand behind him. He had not been comfortable at sea, nor was he comfortable now in the morning crowd growing around him as he neared O’Connell Street.

  But there was a man here in Dublin who, it had been decided by someone with money and influence, should cease to exist.

  And Court Gentry had come to see to that.

  ONE

  At a pharmacy he bought a pack of acetaminophen tablets and a bottled water. He’d been injured a few months back, a bullet through the thigh and a knife blade into his gut. The pain had lessened by the week. The body had incredible power to heal, so much greater than that of the mind. Court had grown dependent on the pills and injections: Vicodin and OxyContin, Demerol and Dilaudid. A surgeon in Nice had kept him supplied since the operation to clean and close his abdominal wound, and Gentry had popped pills each day since. But he’d purposely left them behind when he boarded the freighter; he’d gone over a week now without his meds, and this self-imposed detox was making him miserable.

  The acetaminophen was no substitute for a heavy narcotic, but his mind found comfort in the ritual of swallowing the tablets nonetheless.

  Three hours after leaving the boat, he checked in to a Chinese-run budget hotel in a narrow alley off Parnell Street, a half mile north of the river. His room was dark and dank and smelled of mold and frying grease; the restaurant two floors below him blew the stench through the vents. A near-horizontal rain beat steadily on the dirty window but failed to clean it; the oily grime covered the inside of the glass.

  Gentry lay on his back on the sagging mattress and stared at the ceiling, his thoughts unfocused. He’d been on a boat for over a week; it felt odd not swaying back and forth, rising slowly up and down.

  It took hours to drift asleep, the cold rain unceasing on the pane next to his head.

  In the mid-afternoon he sat at the Chinese restaurant in the tiny hotel, ate noodles and pork, and used a store-bought mobile phone to log on to the Internet. He accessed a bulletin board on a Web site that sold adventure tours of the Ural Mountains, entered a password to log on to a forum for employees; with a further code he gained entry to a thread with one other viewer.

  Court typed on his phone with his thumb while he drank tepid orange juice.

  I’m here.

  A few seconds later the tiny window in the phone refreshed. Someone had replied on the forum.

  In Bangkok, I trust? This was the code that confirmed the identity of the other party. Gentry’s identity was established with his reply.

  No. Singipore. Only by the misspelling was the identity check complete.

  Nice journey, my friend? came the next reply. Court read it, bit into a fried wonton as greasy as the window in his upstairs room.

  He tried not to roll his eyes.

  It had not been a nice journey, and Gregor Ivanovic Sidorenko was not Court Gentry’s friend. Court had no friends. And it was unlikely Sidorenko, or Sid to all those in the West who knew of him, had any himself. He was Russian mob, an overboss in Saint Petersburg. He ran an organization that controlled illegal gambling and drugs and hookers and hit men and . . . out of desperation on the part of the American assassin, he now ran Court Gentry, the Gray Man.

  While ostensibly in the same line of work, Gregor Sidorenko was no Donald Fitzroy. Sir Donald had been Court’s handler for years, ever since the CIA had chased Gentry out of the U.S. with a burn notice and a shoot-on-sight directive. Fitzroy had taken him in, had offered him good jobs against bad men, had paid him fairly for his work, and had even once hired him to protect his own family. But then Fitzroy had been pushed into a corner, had turned on Court, and though he’d apologized profusely and even offered up his life to his American employee in recompense, Gentry knew he could never trust him again.

  He would never trust anyone again.

  Sid was scum, but he was a known quantity. Court knew he couldn’t trust the forked-tongued Russian fuck as far as he could throw him, but Sid could supply access to some of the most lucrative contracts in the industry. And Sid agreed to Gentry’s caveat that he would only accept those hits he deemed righteous, or at least those that tipped slightly to the good side of the “morally neutral” category.

  Which had led Court here to Ireland.

  This trip to Dublin was Court’s first op for Sid. He’d read the dossier of the target, agreed to the job, argued online about the low wages offered for the contract, and then reluctantly accepted.

  He needed to stay operational. The downtime and the wounds and the drugs were softening him, and he was a man who absolutely could not afford to soften.

  Court had memorized the relevant portions of the target’s dossier. Standard operating procedure before a wet operation. Name: Dougal Slattery. Age: fifty-four years. Nationality: Irish. Height: big. Weight: fat. He’d been a boxer as a young man but couldn’t break out of the thick midlist of local pugilistic talent. Then he found work as a tough guy, a bouncer in Dublin nightclubs. He branched out, did some rough stuff for a local syndicate, slapping around lazy Polish hookers and knocking Turkish drug dealers’ heads together for not making quota. He graduated to some low-level killings: gang versus gang stuff, nothing fancy till he was sent on an errand to the Continent. In Amsterdam he’d made the big time, killing his boss’s rival in a hail of bullets after using his gnarled fists to bash in the faces of two of his bodyguards.

  From there he’d climbed to the second tier of the killer-for-hire trade. Wet jobs in Ankara, in Sard
inia, in Calcutta, in Tajikistan. He did not run solo, Court had noticed in his file; he wasn’t the brains behind his operations, but his curriculum vitae included some respectable kills. Not respectable in the moral sense; no, he’d reportedly killed a police detective, an honest businessman, a journalist or two. But Court appreciated that the operations themselves had been, if not spectacular, at least competently executed.

  But his last hit on file was six years ago. Court couldn’t help but notice that Sid’s dossier on Slattery went wafer thin after that. A few speculative inferences aside, all that was known about his life since then was that he played the drum in a traditional Irish band that performed five nights a week in the touristy Temple Bar section of Dublin.

  Hardly work that got your name scribbled onto a termination order.

  Gentry found this to be one of his more morally neutral operations. The man was a killer, but so was Court. Court rationalized the difference; he vetted his targets, made sure their deeds warranted extrajudicial killing. Dougal Slattery clearly did not. According to Sid, the Irishman was now on retainer for an Italian-run international criminal organization. His next victim might well be a recalcitrant prostitute or the owner of a restaurant that failed to pay protection money to the Mafia.

  Killing Dougal Slattery wouldn’t much improve the evil ways of the world, Court decided, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

  Well, it wouldn’t hurt anyone who was not named Dougal Slattery.

  Hello? You still there? Sid’s previous post was three minutes old. Court had drifted off-mission for a moment. He forced himself to concentrate on his phone’s tiny screen.

  I’m here. No problems.

  How long will you need?