The Gray Man cg-1 Read online

“This is it!” Riegel proclaimed victoriously. “Tell them to finish him, get the body into a car and on the way to the heliport. We’ll have it ferried here for Mr. Felix to see up close.”

  “That would be satisfactory, Mr. Riegel, thank you,” said Felix, standing like a statue behind the animated men in front of the bank of monitors.

  The watcher’s camera tightened back in on Gentry. He’d turned around and was facing the Kazakhs, who were not more than forty yards away now. The injured American stood upright, though it obviously pained him to do so. He looked back over his shoulder to the other end of the bridge.

  Lloyd said, “You won’t make it, Court. You can’t run anymore. You are so fucked.” There was mirth in his voice.

  But Riegel muttered, “Shit.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Lloyd.

  “Scheisse,” Riegel repeated himself in German.

  “What’s wrong with you? We’ve got him!”

  Just then, the Gray Man stepped to the cement railing. He looked back up to the men closing on him, twenty-five yards off.

  “No!” said Lloyd, understanding Riegel’s worry. “No, no, no, no—”

  Kurt Riegel pulled the microphone off the Tech’s table, jammed the button down, and shouted “Schiest ihn sofort!” He caught himself speaking German in his excitement. He screamed, “Shoot him now!”

  But it was too late. Court Gentry tipped himself over the railing, fell thirty feet to the shimmering water, its crystalline surface exploding as his body crashed through it, his dark form disappearing as the current re-formed into a swiftly flowing mirror.

  Lloyd spun away from the monitor. He put his hands on his head in shock. Then he turned to Felix, who remained silently behind.

  “You saw that! You saw him! He’s dead!”

  “Falling into water does not kill a man, my friend. I’m sorry. I need confirmation for my president.”

  Lloyd turned back to the Tech and screamed loud enough to be heard all over the château, “Goddammit! Tell them to get their asses in the water! We need his corpse!”

  The image on the plasma screen showed the Kazakhs converging on the portion of the Pont Neuf just vacated by the target not five seconds earlier. They all looked over the side. Five men were on the bridge. Two jumped over the railing and dropped into the cold, black water, while three ran back to the Left Bank.

  Riegel belted out instructions to the Tech. “He’s injured badly, and that fall didn’t help him. Get the Botswanans there; move the Bolivians and the Sri Lankans, too. Put somebody in a boat in case his body doesn’t wash up immediately. Brief everyone to search both banks. Move all the watchers downstream to hunt for where he washes up. We need his body, and we need it now!”

  THIRTY

  At two thirty a soft rain began to fall. Five hundred yards east-southeast of the cathedral of Notre Dame, on the Left Bank of the Seine, the Jardin Tino Rossi was barren in the dark. Fifty feet from the cobblestone quay, a grassy embankment ran along next to a low stone wall. There, between a tree and the wall, a figure lay on its back, knees raised slightly and arms askew. Anyone who walked up to the waterlogged body would see it had obviously come from the river. Perhaps a defiant final jolt of strength had allowed its weak arms to crawl clear of the river’s edge into the soft, wet grass; maybe it even found its feet for a moment, but then those arms and legs must have given out wholly, and the body had collapsed on the cold ground.

  There was no movement at all from the body, no sound either, until an electronic noise began peeping, muffled by soaked clothing.

  The body did not stir at once. Finally a twitch in the shoulders, a slight turn of the head in new recognition of its surroundings. After another ring, the form slowly reached into a coat pocket, pulled out a plastic case, and fumbled with it with one hand. It popped open, and the satellite phone dropped into the grass. The body’s eyes remained on the sky.

  After jumping from the bridge, Gentry had hit the water hard. The cold took away what breath remained in his lungs after the impact. He sank deep. When he found the surface, he had already been carried downstream, under the Pont Neuf and towards the west. He sucked air and water as he bobbed for a minute or so before seeing a small house barge churning upstream towards him. Though Court was weak, on the verge of losing consciousness, he hooked an arm around the bottom rung of a ladder hanging off the side of the slow-moving black boat as it passed him. He held on with one hand, kept his head low in the boat’s foamy wake as the craft towed him back under the bridge from which he had just fallen. He heard the shouts of men in the water around him as they dove down, looking for a body, or trained their flashlights around the spans of the bridge.

  Ten minutes later, Court was free of immediate detection. With nearly his last ounce of strength, he tried to climb the ladder to get on board the boat, but he fell. His weak legs, the pain in his gut, his wet shoes, the numbing cold all worked against him, and he dropped back into the frigid current. He reached out for the barge, took nothing but a fistful of the river, while the black ship chugged away upstream.

  Fortunately for Gentry, he was not far from the water’s edge. He made it to the Left Bank, struggled up onto the pavement, climbed to his feet, but fell again in the wet grass next to a tree in the Jardin Tino Rossi.

  And here he lay for twenty minutes, eyes open but unfixed, the soft drops of rain falling and beating and exploding against his pupils.

  The phone rang again, and he lifted it off the grass, his eyes still on the impossibly low rain clouds illuminated by city lights around him.

  His voice was weak and distant. “Yeah?”

  “Good evening. This is Claire Fitzroy calling. May I please speak with Mr. Jim?”

  Gentry blinked away the rain. His eyes instead filled with tears. He controlled his voice as best as possible, did what he could to mask the pain and the exhaustion and the despair and the utter sense of failure. “It’s past your bedtime.”

  “Yes, sir. But Grandpa Donald said I could call you.”

  “You remember me?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. I remember how you drove us to school. Slept on the little cot in the hall, but Mummy said you didn’t really sleep, you watched out for us all night. You drank coffee, and you liked my mummy’s eggs.”

  “That’s right. Extra cheese.” Court’s pelvic bone had been gored, his abdominal wall punctured. He did not think the knife made it deep enough to slice through his intestines, but the pain burning into the center of his being was indescribable, nonetheless. He assumed he was still bleeding. He’d done nothing to stanch the flow since he’d dropped into the river nearly an hour earlier.

  The sirens of emergency vehicles screeched past on Gentry’s right. He was hidden from their view by the stone wall and the darkness.

  “Mr. Jim, Grandpa Donald said you are coming to save us.”

  Tears streamed down the American’s face. He wasn’t dead, but this felt a lot like dying. He knew he could not make it to Bayeux, and even if he somehow could, what could he do but bleed to death on the castle’s doorstep?

  “Where is your grandfather?”

  “He’s in the bedroom. He can’t walk right now. He said he fell down the stairs, but that is not true. The men here hurt him. He gave me the phone and told me to go into the bathroom closet and call you.” She paused. “That’s why I have to whisper. You are coming, right? Please tell me you are coming. If you don’t come… You are our only chance, since Daddy’s gone to London. Mr. Jim… are you there?”

  Typical of Fitzroy. If Sir Donald himself had made this call, Court would have told him all was lost. But the cagey bastard had known Gentry would be in dire straits right about now, so who better to entice him to keep up the fight than one of the twins?

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Do you promise?”

  Court lay there in the dark, his freezing, soaked suit askew on his body, the cold mud pressed into the back of his neck and his shaved head. Slowly, with a weak voice, he said, “I’l
l be there very soon.”

  “Do you promise?”

  Court looked down at the wound in his belly. He pressed hard upon it now. “I promise,” he said, and he seemed to muster a little power in his voice. “And when I get there, I need you to promise you will do something for me.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “When you hear a lot of noise, I want you to go to your room, crawl under your bed, and stay there. Can you do that for me?”

  “Noise? What kind of noise? Do you mean guns?”

  “I do mean guns.”

  “Okay.”

  “Stay there until I come to get you. Get your sister to do the same, okay?”

  “Thank you, Jim. I just knew you would come.”

  “Claire.” There was a shred of new strength in Gentry’s voice now. “I need you to sneak the phone back to your grandfather. I have to ask him a very important question.”

  “All right, Jim.”

  “And Claire? Thank you for calling. It was nice to hear from you.”

  * * *

  Sixteen minutes later, Gentry staggered along the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. The rain had picked up, and there was no one around, which was lucky for the Gray Man, because he walked with both hands pressed to the left side of his abdomen, his left leg ramrod straight as he kicked it forward. Every twenty-five yards or so he stopped, leaned against a wall or a car or a lamppost, bent forward from pain, recovered after a few seconds to push off and cover a few more steps before again seeking refuge from the exhaustion of the blood loss.

  He found the address Fitzroy gave him. The door was closed and bolted as he knew it would be, so he found a dark alcove a few doorways down and tucked into it, sat on a piece of cardboard like a bum, and leaned his head on the stoop to rest. Singsong police sirens wailed in the distance, maybe a mile away now. Surely the cops and the hitters and the watchers were all along the Seine looking for him, though hopefully they were concentrating their search not upstream but down, and hopefully they were all hindering one another with their respective presence.

  He was just on the verge of dozing, his fist pressed into his bloody stomach, when he heard a noise back by the address Fitzroy gave him. He peered out of the alcove and saw the locked door open slowly. He’d expected someone to come by car, but apparently whoever worked at the location lived in a flat above in the same building.

  A woman appeared on the pavement, barely visible from a streetlamp twenty meters on. Court rose to his feet and staggered forward.

  “Allez!” She shouted in a whisper. “Hurry.”

  He passed her, staggering still, and found himself in a long hall. Steadying his weak and swaying body on the corridor’s walls, he saw immediately he was smearing his own blood with his hands as he walked. The woman quickly tucked her head under his arm and hefted him. She was tall and thin but strong. After each step he felt himself giving in to her more and more.

  They went through a doorway and into a darkened room. Before she could flip on the light, encumbered by the 170-pound man, Court was startled by a barking dog, close. Then another, then ten or more dogs barking at once, all around him.

  When the bright overhead snapped on, he realized immediately that the emergency clinic Donald had sent him to was, in actuality, a veterinarian’s office. His knees gave out, and his weight dropped on the girl by his side. With a boyish grunt she pushed him forward and down to a small chair.

  “Parlez vous français?” she asked, looking down to him. He looked up and saw, apropos of nothing, that she was rather pretty.

  “Parlez vous anglais?” he asked.

  “Yes, some. You are English?”

  “Yeah,” he lied, but he had no intention of trying to fake an accent.

  “Monsieur. I tried to tell Monsieur Fitzroy. Zee doctor is out of town, but I called him; he’s on his way here now. He will arrive in a few hours. I am sorry, I did not know how badly you were hurt. I cannot help you. I will call an ambulance. You need a hospital.”

  “No. You are in Fitzroy’s Network. You at least have medicine and blood and bandages.”

  “Not here, I am sorry. Dr. LePen has access to a clinic nearby, but I do not. I only work here with zee animals. You need a hospital. You need emergency aid. Mon Dieu, you are cold. I will find you a blanket.” She turned from him and left the room, returned with a thick wool blanket that smelled like cat piss. She draped it over his shoulders.

  “What is your name?” Court asked, his voice at its weakest point yet.

  “Justine.”

  “Look, Justine. You’re a vet. That’s close enough. I just need some blood and—”

  “I am a veterinary’s assistant.”

  “Well, that’s close to close enough. We can make this work. Please help me.”

  “I give baths! I hold zee dogs down for zee doctor! I can’t help you. Zee doctor is on his way, but you cannot wait for him. You are completely white. You need blood. Fluids.”

  “I don’t have time to wait. Look, I know battlefield medicine. I can talk you through what I need. We’ll have to get some blood, just a couple units of O positive, some antibiotics, and your hands. When the weakness and pain get to be too much, I won’t be able to do what needs to be done.”

  “Battlefield medicine? This is no battlefield. This is Paris!”

  Court grunted. “Tell that to the guy who did this.” He opened the blanket and took his hand from his knife wound. His blood pressure was low enough now to where the blood no longer pumped from his waist, but it oozed and glistened in the harsh light of the treatment room.

  Justine gasped. “That looks bad.”

  “Could be worse. It’s through the muscle, bloody, but I’ll be okay if I can get some O positive. If you can help me, I’ll be on my way. Fitzroy will pay you and your doctor for the trouble.”

  “Monsieur. Are you not listening? I work with zee dogs!”

  He shut his eyes, seemed to drift off a bit, but he said, “Just picture me with fur.”

  “How can you joke? You are bleeding to death.”

  “Only because we’re arguing. Where is this clinic? We can go there, get what I need. I can’t go to a hospital. Have to do it this way.”

  She breathed out a long sigh, nodded, and tied her brown hair in a ponytail behind her head.

  “Let me put a bandage on that so you do not lose more blood.”

  The barking of the dogs began to subside.

  * * *

  The small surgical center in the vet’s office was filthy. It had not been well cleaned after the close of business on Friday.

  “I am sorry, monsieur. If I knew you were coming—”

  “It’s fine.” Court made to pull himself onto the metal stand in the middle of the room, but Justine stopped him, grabbed a spray bottle, and perfunctorily wet and wiped down the brushed aluminum surface while her patient leaned against a shelf of bandages. She ran out through the door and came back with a cushion from the sofa in the waiting room.

  “You must let your legs hang off zee side. It is not made for persons.”

  “Okay.”

  He used his last bit of strength to rip open his shirt. Buttons flew and bounced over the tiled room. Justine pulled off his rain-soaked shoes and used shears to cut his pants off, left him in his shorts.

  “I… I am not so experienced with humans,” she said.

  “You’re doing great.”

  She fought her timidity and looked Gentry over from head to toe.

  “What happened to you?”

  “I got shot in the leg. A couple of days back.”

  “With a gun?” She looked down at the open three-day-old wound in his thigh, then back up to the bloody hip. She quickly pulled rubber gloves on over her small hands. “Mon Dieu.”

  “And then my legs and feet got cut with broken glass.”

  “I see that.”

  “Then I snapped a rib rolling down a mountain in Switzerland.”

  “A mountain?”

  “Yes. Then I fucked up
my wrist busting out of some handcuffs.”

  Justine was silent. Her jaw had dropped open slightly.

  “And your stomach?”

  “Knife wound.”

  “Where?”

  “Here in Paris. About an hour ago, I guess. And then I fell into the Seine.”

  She shook her head. “Monsieur, I do not know what you do for a living, and I do not want to know. But whatever it is, I think you should find some other type of job.”

  Court laughed a little, setting fire to the stab wound. “My skill set is not conducive to honest work.”

  “I’m sorry. I do not understand these words.”

  “Never mind. Justine, we can stanch the knife wound with this bandage, more or less, but if I don’t get some blood in me, I’ll pass out.”

  “The clinic is close by, but it is closed.”

  “We’re going to open it,” Court said. “Let’s go. I need to be on the move in under an hour.”

  Justine had been wrapping a compression bandage tight around Court’s waist to hold the thick square of gauze she’d placed over the knife wound. “Move? You don’t need to move at all! For days. Do you not understand how badly injured you are?”

  “You don’t understand. I have someplace I have to be! I just have to get patched up so I can leave!”

  She clenched her teeth, and her eyes widened. “Monsieur, I am no doctor, but I can promise you there is no place you need to be right now other than in medical care. You could die within zee hour.”

  “I’ll be okay. I have to be.”

  Justine knelt down, unlocked a low cabinet, and began pulling equipment from it. “That is impossible! If we give you a transfusion, zee blood will just leak out of your stomach if you move. You need stitches. When you get the stitches they will just break if you try to move.”

  Court thought it over. He looked down to his wrist-watch to find it was three a.m. “I… I need to get to Bayeux, up in Normandy.”

  “Tonight? Are you crazy?”

  “It’s life or death, Justine.”

  “Yes, your death, monsieur.”

  Court pulled Maurice’s envelope of cash from his pocket. It was soaked, but it was a miracle it had survived the river, as had his car keys. He handed the soggy envelope to Justine. “How much is it?” he asked as she looked through it.