The Gray Man Read online

  Song Park Kim thrashed in the alleyway and died in seconds, his lower torso ending up across the Gray Man’s body.

  Gentry dropped the knife on the cobblestones and pushed the dead man’s still-spasming legs off him. The body rolled unceremoniously onto its back, and all movement ceased. Court unfastened his tie with one hand and wadded it into a ball. He took a couple of deep breaths to steady himself and then pressed the ball down into the hole in his abdomen. Blood ran down his white shirt onto the pavement.

  “Jesus!” he screamed, tears and spit and snot covering a face contorted with pain. He felt the nausea brought on by abject agony but quelled it by focusing on his work.

  Normally he was careful about his DNA, but now he didn’t bother. It would take a bathtub of bleach, a five-man cleaning crew, and a full day to sanitize this scene, and Court had nothing of the sort.

  The pressure of the wadded necktie actually reduced the pain when he flexed his abs; without it, he would not have been able to stand. But he did stand, stumbled, steadied himself on the alley’s wall, and shuffled on. He heard voices behind him. Passersby had been alerted by the noise of the scuffle. Police and killers would be here in seconds. He stumbled around the corner to a shopping passage. The stores were closed for the night, and there were no window shoppers. With his body slumped over, his face white, he staggered away from the orgy of blood behind him.

  He moved north off into the cold night, his life’s blood draining down his leg and dripping onto the paving stones at his feet.

  Thirty seconds later, one of the Botswanans shoved his way through a panicking crowd and found the Korean’s body, the dark alley a blood-dripping horror show in the beam of light from the African assassin’s tactical flashlight. He called it in to the Tech.

  “There is a dead man here. He is Asian. Nearly decapitated.”

  Lloyd and Riegel stood behind the Tech as the Botswanan assassin’s accented English came over the speakers.

  Mr. Felix entered the room, stood back in the shadows, and watched intently.

  The Tech flipped a switch on his bank of electronics in front of him. “Banshee 1. Do you read? Banshee 1, how do you copy?”

  There was a shuffling sound on the speaker. Lloyd and Riegel looked up in hope.

  “He can’t come to the phone right now, don’t bother to leave a message,” said a mocking African voice. The Botswanan had obviously pulled the radio set off the dead Korean and was speaking into it.

  Riegel said, “The Korean was probably the best man we had on this job. His organization is going to be furious he was lost on this operation.”

  “Fuck ’em,” snapped Lloyd. “They should’ve sent us someone who could complete the task. When they gave us only one man, I knew their heart wasn’t in this game.”

  “You are an idiot, Lloyd. Do you have any idea what that assassin has done in his career?”

  “Sure do. He left a greasy stain in a Paris alleyway. The rest I couldn’t give a flying fuck about.”

  Just then the Botswanan hunter came back over the speakers. “There is a blood trail leading north. We’ll follow it; we’ll find him.”

  “You see,” said Riegel. “Banshee 1 served his purpose.”

  Three minutes later, a watcher came over the net. “Fifty-four to Tech.”

  “Go ahead, Fifty-four.”

  “I’m in a fourth-floor window near the Place Saint-Michel. I believe I am tracking the subject on my camera. I can send it to you for verification.”

  It took ten seconds to make the connection. When the plasma monitor in the control room sparked to life, the lights of Paris shone brightly, silhouetting the Notre Dame Cathedral. The Seine was a glimmering ribbon bisecting the city. The camera did not seem to be centered on anything in particular.

  “Where is he?” shouted Riegel the hunter, wild from the chase now, frantically searching for his quarry. “Fifty-four, tighten up on the subject!”

  “Oui, monsieur.” The image zoomed to the Pont Neuf bridge that ran over the river to the cathedral. A lone figure in a dark suit hobbled, stumbled, stopped, and stooped in the middle of the bridge. Clearly the man was wounded, fleeing, trying to cross from the Left Bank to the Île de Cité, the tiny island in the middle of the Seine upon which the cathedral of Notre Dame stands.

  “Look at him. He’s toast!” shouted Lloyd with excitement. “Who do we have close by?”

  The Tech answered before Lloyd finished posing the question. “The Kazakhs are thirty seconds out. You’ll see them coming up the bridge from the south. The Botswanans are close behind them, and the Bolivians are to the north of the Seine. The Sri Lankans are still ten minutes west.”

  The video image widened enough to see the buildings on the Quai des Grands Augustins, the Left Bank road that rimmed the Seine. Several men sprinted along the road and turned right onto the bridge. One of them slipped on the wet cobblestones and fell, but the others held their footing and raced up the incline of the Pont Neuf.

  “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’ll 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.”