The Gray Man Read online

  With that, Riegel started to the door. Without a backward glance, he called out to his prisoner, “I’ll send someone to clean up the body.”

  “Don’t bother. When Court gets here, there will be corpses all over the house.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Five soldiers of Saudi Arabia’s Al Mukhabarat Al A’amah, or General Intelligence Directorate, flew west over the Alps in a stolen Eurocopter EC145. The chopper was the property of a local owner-operator who’d made a good living ferrying snowboarders and extreme skiers to otherwise inaccessible peaks on Mont Blanc and other mountains in the area.

  Now the sleek black Eurocopter’s owner, a former French army major, was dead in his hangar, shot once through the heart with a silenced pistol, and the Saudis flew his craft north over the highway. The road below them rose and fell, weaved and disappeared into alpine tunnels and rushed past bright green forests and lakes so blue the bright sky around them looked positively dull in comparison.

  Only the Saudi pilot spoke English. He stayed in sporadic contact with the Tech, an open two-way communication between his headset and the command center that came and went with the jagged peaks on either side of the aircraft. The Tech simultaneously ran other hit teams in the area and relayed reports from the watchers at bus stations and taxi stands. No sign of the Gray Man had been reported since he slipped his coverage just after leaving the financier’s home in Geneva.

  The A40 is the obvious highway for a traveler to take from Geneva, Switzerland, through southwestern France, into the French heartland. There, at the city of Viriat, one could stay on the A40 to the A6, or one could go northeast on the A39 into Dijon. Either way it is roughly a five-hour drive to Paris, as compared with six or more hours by avoiding these routes.

  The Saudis in the helicopter knew where to look for their target. If he came over the roads, they knew he would pass below them on the A40.

  They just did not know what type of vehicle they were looking for.

  Thirty watchers positioned themselves at overpasses, rest stops, along the highway’s shoulders with the hoods up on their vehicles. Others drove along with the traffic. Each pavement artist watched the road, scanned the occupants of as many cars as possible for the most basic profile. It was a large operation to remain concealed to the police, and for that reason and others, Riegel had been against the enterprise entirely. When it became clear Gentry had not boarded a train or taken a bus, Riegel wanted all watchers, all kill teams, and all resources to be pulled back to Paris. He was certain the Gray Man would not bypass Paris altogether. Riegel presumed, and Lloyd did not dispute, that the CIA financier Court met in Geneva had probably supplied him with some equipment, weaponry, a vehicle, medical attention, and likely cash. Also, Riegel supposed that if the Gray Man had time to field a call from Sir Donald Fitzroy, then he had time to get other contacts from the well-connected ex-CIA banker. If Court had made arrangements to pick up men or matériel, he would have no time to go anywhere other than locations already on the way.

  Paris was the last major city on his route, and it was chock-full of shooters, document forgers, black-market gun dealers, former CIA pilots, and all other manner of ne’er-do-wells the Gray Man could employ to help him rescue the Fitzroys and take back the personnel files Lloyd stole from American intelligence.

  Riegel wanted all the operation’s resources to concentrate on Paris, but Lloyd demanded one final choke point ambush set up on the main highway to the north to stop Gentry before he made it any closer to the château.

  But Gentry did not take the A40 to the A6, nor did he take the A40 to the A39. These were, by far, the most efficient routes but, Court reasoned, they were only efficient to those travelers not targeted for termination by dozens of killers along these roads.

  No, Court decided the operation against him warranted his adding an extra two or so hours’ driving time on his tired and hurting body. It would suck, seven full hours behind the wheel just to make it to Paris, but he saw no alternative. Buses and trains were out of the question with all the gear in the trunk he had to transport. He had to drive.

  At least he was driving in style. The Mercedes S550 was sleek and solid, and the nearly new interior filled his nostrils with the luxurious scent of fine leather. The 382 horsepower engine purred at eighty-five miles an hour, and the satellite sound system kept Court company. From time to time Gentry put on local radio, struggled with the French to pick up tidbits of information about gun battles in Budapest, Guarda, and Lausanne, and something about a house explosion in the Old Town section of Geneva.

  By five in the afternoon, Gentry’s exhaustion threatened to run him off the road. He pulled into a rest stop just shy of the town of Saint-Dizier. He filled his tank and bought a ubiquitous French ham and cheese sandwich in a large baguette. He downed two sodas and bought a huge bottle of water after a bathroom visit. In fifteen minutes he was back on the road. His GPS resting on his dashboard told him he would not make it into Paris until nine p.m. Calculating all he needed to do before heading on to Normandy, Gentry determined he’d arrive at the château about two thirty in the morning.

  That was, he admitted to himself, only if he did not have any problems in Paris.

  “It’s time to pull everyone back to the capital,” said Riegel. He stood behind Lloyd and the Tech, having just returned to the command center after working for two hours with the two French security engineers on the electronic cordon around the château.

  Lloyd just nodded, repeated the German’s words to the Tech sitting next to him. He then turned back to the VP of Security Risk Management Operations.

  “Where the hell is he?”

  “We knew there was the possibility he would take another route. There are a hundred ways he could have gone. A drive through the countryside will delay his arrival to Paris, but it will still get him there.”

  “If he goes to Paris.”

  “We assume he is not going to attack a defended fortress full of gunmen and hostages by himself. He’s going to have to get some help before he comes here, and he has more known associates in Paris than anywhere else. If he stops at all, he stops in Paris. We have all the associates covered. Plus, since he’s injured, I’ve got men at all the hospitals in Paris to keep watch.”

  “He won’t go to a hospital.”

  “I agree. Probably not. He won’t expose himself like that.”

  “A doctor in Fitzroy’s Network, perhaps?”

  “Possibly. But the pavement artists are all over the place, staked out at every known contact.”

  “I don’t want him getting out of Paris alive.”

  “I gathered as much, Lloyd.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Gentry hit the eastern edge of Paris just after nine o’clock on Saturday night. His pains in his feet and knees and thigh and wrist and ribs were only exceeded by his overwhelming fatigue, but still he pushed into town, found an overpriced parking space in an underground garage next to the Gare Saint-Lazare train station. He put all the guns in the backseat, locked the vehicle, and headed up to street level.

  He’d had plenty of time to work out his Paris plan of action on the drive and had used the GPS to find a couple of shops in the area. After a few minutes on foot through the cold and misty evening, he hit a Mc-Donald’s, pushed through the crowd of kids of all nationalities, and made his way to the bathroom. Here he spent a minute and a half washing his tired face, slicking back his messy hair, using the bathroom, and wiping his clothing with a small gel air freshener.

  It was a feeble attempt to clean up, but it was better than nothing.

  Five minutes later, he stepped into a men’s store on the Rue de Rome just as the salesman was turning the sign at the door to Fermé. Court picked up a high-priced off-the-rack pinstripe suit, black, a white shirt, a muted blue tie, a belt, and shoes. He paid for these at the clothing counter, then headed across the street to a sporting goods shop with his suit bag over his shoulder. Here he bought a full wardrobe of rugged outdoor clothing in
subdued browns.

  He made his way back out into the street just as the last of the late-night clothing shops shut for the evening, found a pharmacy across from the station, and purchased an electric razor and a straight razor, scissors, shaving cream, and a few candy bars. He took a pair of black-framed costume glasses out of a rack and tried them on, decided they would suit his needs. Just as he stepped up to the counter to pay, he spotted a distinguished-looking long black umbrella hanging off a shelf by its hooked handle. The well-made accessory had caught his eye. Fumbling with his new wares and his other bags, he snatched up the umbrella and paid the bored Asian man at the register.

  Just after ten, Gentry hauled all his loot back to the train station, stayed close to the walls, and kept his head down and away from the security cameras around the long, open hall. He ignored a half dozen Bosnian women begging for change and entered an empty bathroom down a hallway from a platform that had accommodated its last train of the evening. He stowed all his bags in a stall and went to work.

  Quickly, he stripped to his undershirt and cut his hair. He tried to get as much in the toilet as possible but also laid plastic bags from his clothing purchases on the floor to catch the rest.

  Next he used the electric razor to shave his head down to the absolute stubble. The straight razor and cream finished the job. He popped out of the stall twice to check his work in the mirror but retreated back to privacy quickly to avoid arousing suspicion, should someone walk in.

  When he finished, he carefully pushed the bags of clippings into the waste bin and then flushed the toilet of hair. With his head cleanly shaved, he washed it again in the sink, quickly put on the suit and the shirt and the tie and the shoes. He slipped on his costume glasses, hefted his distinguished-looking umbrella, and collected the rest of his bags.

  Eighteen minutes after Gentry walked into the bathroom, a different man walked out.

  The hair and clothing had changed, of course, but also his gait was longer, his posture more erect. Court fought against his desire to limp off his right leg. The suited gentleman descended the stairs back to the parking garage and deposited his bags, retrieved one of the Glock pistols, then returned to the street, just a well-dressed Parisian strolling alone on his way home from a nice restaurant, his umbrella swinging along beside him as he moved with the pedestrians in the November mist. He climbed into a cab on the Rue Saint-Lazare at eleven thirty and instructed the driver in halting French to take him to the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood of the Left Bank.

  Song Park Kim had spotted the Kazakhs by the Notre Dame Cathedral. He had no doubt they were hunters after the same target as he. From his sharp eye they could not hide, and the Korean had no doubt the Gray Man would ID them just as easily. He also passed three or four static surveillance operatives; his training picked them out in the Saturday-evening crowds, but he determined them to be adequately skilled, nonetheless.

  Kim knew his target. If the Gray Man were to make a stop-off in Paris at all, he should have arrived by now. His already supersharp senses prickled a bit more as he listened to each dead-end report from the Tech over his earpiece, and the Korean walked from boulevard to boulevard, appearing nonchalant but remaining carefully equidistant to the known associate locations.

  Kim walked in complete silence on an empty street. A single Irish pub lit the cobblestones ahead of him; otherwise it was dark, and the Korean used the night as his confederate, moving quickly and comfortably like a nocturnal hunter. At the corner of Boulevard Saint-Michel and Rue du Sommerard he ducked down an alley, found a fire escape he’d spotted earlier in his full day of wandering the city, and leapt high to grab hold. The rucksack on his back swung, the HK machine pistol and the extra magazines causing the olive green bag to hang down as the Korean assassin pulled himself up the rungs. He climbed onto the metal staircase without a sound and scaled up to the sixth floor. Another heave with his strong arms, and he was over the top and on the roof. From here he could see the Eiffel Tower more than a mile away in front of him, the Seine was on his right, and the Latin Quarter all around him, stretching off to his left. The rooftops continued along the Boulevard Saint-Michel, touched one another, and made a path high above the streets below.

  This would be Kim’s starting point for the evening. If Gentry ventured anywhere on the Left Bank, Kim could move quickly and quietly over this row of buildings or others like it. If the Gray Man showed on the Right Bank, Kim could be there within minutes by dropping down and running across any one of the bridges a few blocks to the north that spanned the cold, swift river, its surface shimmering as it flowed through the City of Lights.

  Court Gentry climbed out of his taxi at an Internet café on the Boulevard Saint Germaine. He ordered an hour’s Web time and a double espresso from the bar, paid, and then politely nudged his way through the throngs of students towards an open computer at the back. His glasses low on his nose, his cup and saucer in his hands, his fancy umbrella hooked over his arm.

  Once online, he opened a search engine and typed in “LaurentGroup properties in France.” He clicked on a Web site that showed off the real estate holdings of the huge firm: ports, offices, truck farms, and a Web page for corporate retreats. Here he found Château Laurent, a family property used by the corporation northeast of the tiny village of Maisons in Lower Normandy. Once he had the name, he searched the Web for more information about the property, found a site showing private châteaus of Europe, looked over the glamour shots of the squat seventeenth-century manor house. He committed many of the facts to memory, ignored others that didn’t seem so important, like the fact that Mitterrand had shot rabbits on the grounds or that some of Rom mel’s senior officers had billeted their wives there when in town to make final preparations to the Atlantic Wall.

  He wrote the address down with a pen borrowed from a dark-skinned boy sitting next to him, then he surfed to LaurentGroup’s corporate Web site. It took him a few minutes to find the address in its corporate holdings—the château was listed just as a satellite office and not a company retreat—but from here Court found the listed phone number to the building. He wrote this on his forearm while the young kid who loaned him the pen laughed and offered him a sheet of paper, which Gentry declined.

  Next the American took a few minutes to look at a satellite map of the area around the castle. The layout of the forest, streams running nearby, the orchards behind the 300-year-old stone building, and the graveled country roads outside the encircling wall.

  He took one more look at the shots of the structure. A large turret was the high point of the building. Court knew a marksman would lurk there. He also knew there were 200 yards of open ground between Château Laurent and the apple orchard in the back. There was a shorter distance in front of the building, but a higher stone wall and better lighting. He imagined there would be patrolling men with dogs, watchers in the village, and maybe even a helicopter in the air.

  Lloyd clearly had the resources at his disposal to protect a mansion from one lousy, limping attacker.

  The fortification was not impenetrable; few places were impenetrable to Gentry. But if he left Paris right this very minute, he would not get to Bayeux before two in the morning. He had until eight to rescue the Fitzroys before Lloyd’s deadline, but this was false comfort. He knew if he was to have any chance for success, he’d have to make his move in the dead of night when the guard force would be groggy, and reaction times would suffer.

  So, even though there were surely ways to breach Château Laurent, Court knew it would be tough to breach without laying up for hours and hours to get a feel for the security measures.

  He would not have hours and hours. A couple hours’ watch at most before daylight.

  And again, that was only if he left Paris right now, and that was not his plan.

  At one a.m., Gentry sat in the Café le Luxembourg and drank his second double espresso of the evening among the young and the beautiful on the Rue Souf flot. A small ham sandwich sat untouched on a plate
in front of him. The coffee was bitter, but he knew the caffeine would help him through the next few hours. That and good hydration, so he chugged his second five-euro bottle of mineral water while he pretended to read a day-old copy of Le Monde. His eyes darted around, but they kept returning to a building across the street, number 23.

  Really, Court just wanted to get up and go, get out of town without pursuing his objective in Paris. He knew he would be taking a tremendous risk to pay a visit to the man in the apartment building across the little street, but he needed help, not just for himself but also a way to get the Fitzroys clear. The man across the street was named Van Zan, he was Dutch, a former CIA contracted ferryman and an awesome pilot of small prop planes. Court had planned to pay him a surprise visit, wave some cash under his nose, grossly underplay the danger in making a five a.m. trip up to Bayeux to pick up a family of four and Court himself, and then fly them low over the channel to the UK. Van Zan was a known associate, so Lloyd would have had his phone tapped within minutes of beginning this operation and would have planted surveillance outside his door. Court knew he couldn’t call Van Zan, but he figured he could duck past a watcher or two and drop in for a personal visit.

  Yeah, it was a good plan, Court told himself as he gulped bitter espresso and pointed his unfocused eyes at the newspaper in front of his face.

  But slowly he realized it wasn’t going to happen.

  Sure, Court knew he could slip a couple of surveillance goons and make it in to see Van Zan.