The Gray Man Read online

  Finally she said, “Almost done. I only have to pull it tight and tie it off. Just a few more seconds now.” Above her she heard him panting and sobbing. There was a rhythm to his sounds that distressed her; she knew he could go into shock at any time. “Here we go . . . I will be as gentle as possible.” She pulled on the thread, the wound closed beautifully, and the last of the bleeding stopped immediately. “Yes, perfect. Now I just tie it and—”

  The tires below her ran over a series of bumps. The Mercedes’s suspension was awesome; she barely felt the rough surface. But when the bumps did not stop after several seconds, she looked up to check on her patient.

  She was horrified to see his head hanging down just above her, his eyes closed.

  Jim had passed out.

  The black Mercedes ran off the road and crashed at five thirty a.m.

  THIRTY-ONE

  All ten Belarusian guards were on station around the property: six outside, two at ground-floor windows, and two in the tower above. Serge and Alain, the two electronic security engineers, sat in the ground-floor library, their bloodshot eyes scanning back and forth across the screens, watching the infrared images around the perimeter of the building. Every five minutes, they used walkie-talkies to communicate with the patrols.

  The Libyans were the only hunter-killer squad still in the area. They fought exhaustion as their van patrolled Bayeux. They were certain by now they were out of the big money. The other teams who had been in the area had since been sent to Paris to search for the target, as had every pavement artist within 300 miles. The Libyans had been given a clear chance at the target back on the hillside in Switzerland, and they had failed, so now they were ordered to sit tight and wait, were facing a hundred-to-one odds at best they would get another crack at the Gray Man.

  No one expected Gentry to make it to Bayeux now.

  Riegel, Lloyd, the Tech, and Felix sat in the control room in low light, sipped coffee, and watched computer monitors displaying the rocking and bouncing images broadcast from digital video cameras held by the watchers and kill teams in Paris. The Tech was still organizing the search around the Seine. By now Riegel and Lloyd both conceded Gentry must have made it out of the water downstream and staggered off, so the net was widened and then widened again on both sides of the river.

  By five thirty a.m., there was fresh news in Paris that generated a flurry of activity around the château. A watcher listening to police radio had learned about a break-in at a minor emergency clinic in the Fifth Ar rondissement. This was upstream from where the target went into the river, but the Tech had sent a watcher over to find out what he could. The owners of the clinic had arrived and announced the medicines and blood and equipment stolen were all items necessary for wound management.

  Riegel stood behind the Tech. “We’ll have to split the search. Keep the Bolivians and the Sri Lankans in Paris. Tell the Botswanans to come here via the highway, see if they can spot him on the way. Send a helicopter up to pick up the Kazakhs. They are the most skilled gunners; I want them here. They can patrol the back roads around the property, checking anything that moves. And alert the Libyans in Bayeux! They need to stay there to watch the train station and the routes through town. If the Gray Man is somehow still in the fight, he’ll be here before daybreak.”

  The Tech muttered to himself, “We bloody saw him. We bloody well saw him hurt. We bloody well saw him fall into the water.”

  Lloyd slapped him on the back of the head as he stormed out of the room, heading downstairs to tell the men monitoring the infrared cameras that their target may be on the way.

  “Please! Please, Jim! You must wake!”

  Court Gentry opened his eyes. Above him, a figure loomed close in the dark. Instinctively, he reached out and took the figure’s neck and grabbed it tight and slammed it to the ground next to him as he tried to roll on top of it.

  Court fell on Justine in the tall, wet grass.

  “Sorry,” was all he could say as he climbed off of the French girl. He moved sluggishly, his body clearly impeded by drugs.

  She was slow to get up as well. It was dark, and he could make out her wide eyes best of all. She sat up next to him finally, and he looked away uncomfortably. He took stock of his surroundings.

  He was seated in wet grass, both of their backs leaned against the Mercedes. They were in a field, the black sedan four-fifths through a thicket. Gentry assumed the road was on the other side. The glow of the moon was diffused by the mist above him, but he could make out the lumbering movement of cows in the muddy field near the car.

  The air was cold.

  “What . . . what is . . . Where are we?”

  “I could not wake you. We are west of Caen, still thirty minutes from Bayeux.”

  “Shit. What time is it?” The American slowly remembered his mission, as if it appeared from out of the fog of his drug-addled brain.

  “It is almost seven. The sun will be up in under an hour.”

  “We crashed, didn’t we?”

  “No, monsieur, we did not crash. You crashed.”

  It was coming back to him, but slowly. He put his hand down to his injured belly, though it was barely hurting at the moment. He wore a clean brown shirt. Through it he could feel bandages cinched tight.

  He looked down at his new pants. “You dressed me?”

  Justine looked away, out to the dark field. “I found the clothes in a bag in the car. After the wreck.”

  “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  “Not bad. Some bruises. We were lucky. You ran off the road onto a cow path through the hedgerow. We crashed through these trees. The car is stuck. After the wreck I gave you a little medicine, bandaged you, and dressed you. We have been here ever since. A little while ago a helicopter flew over. It scared me. I thought maybe they are looking for us.”

  Court’s head was clearing by the second; he was back with it now. “I’ll never make it in time.”

  “You told me eight a.m. We can still make it before then.”

  “I needed to be in position before the sun came up.” Gentry sighed, let it go. He stood slowly, found it less difficult than he expected. “What did you give me?”

  I gave you some painkillers, and I put bandages very tight around your waist to lower the pain.”

  Gentry was checking the wrappings through the shirt as she spoke. “Good. I don’t feel too bad.”

  “It won’t last. The pain will return soon. I did not give you the other drug. Zee DextroStat. I read zee bottle. It is a very strong amphetamine. If you take one of those pills, your blood pressure will increase. If my stitches are not perfect, you will bleed very badly. You could bleed internally, as well. It would be crazy for you to swallow one of those pills.”

  “I’m not going to swallow one of the pills. I am going to break open three of them, pour the contents into a cup of hot coffee. That will break down the time-release coating, so I will get all of the effect instantly.”

  “That is suicide!” she said. “I am not a doctor, but I know what that will do to your body.”

  “This will help me stay sharp for a half hour or so. If I bleed out after that, well, that’s okay. I just have to do my job first.”

  She began to protest, but he interrupted her. “We need new transport. Something local, something that will not draw attention.”

  Justine shook her head in frustration. “There is a farmhouse just over there. Maybe you can borrow their vehicle.”

  Court looked around the side of the hedgerow to the farmhouse, seventy-five yards away. Already a light was on in the window. An old, white, four-door, splattered waist-high with mud and manure, sat outside glowing in the window’s light. “Yeah, I’ll go borrow their vehicle.” He reached slowly into the trunk of the Mercedes and retrieved the second Glock pistol. The first he had lost in the Paris passageway. Without looking, he pulled back the slide an inch and used a fingertip to make sure the gun was loaded. “I’ll be right back.”

  In the last hour before daw
n, Riegel had the entire force at the château at full battle stations, because he fully expected the Gray Man to come then, if he was to come at all. The ten gunmen from Minsk were divided into three groups of two, patrolling the garden and driveway to the main gate, their Kalashnikov battle rifles in hand. Two more manned AK-47s on the first floor of the château; one watched out a window to the drive and the other a window towards the garden in the back.

  The final two Belarusians were in the château’s turret above: one sniper with a Dragunov scoped rifle, the same man and the same weapon used to end the life of Phillip Fitzroy, and one spotter who wore an AR-15 on his back and looked out in all directions into the night with binoculars.

  In addition to the ten Belarusians there were Lloyd’s three men from London, the Northern Irishman and the two Scots. The other Northern Irishman now lay discarded in the basement next to Phillip’s body. Two were in the kitchen, radios in their ears and submachine guns in their laps, waiting in reserve to be sent by Riegel himself to wherever the Gray Man appeared. The third, McSpadden, was in the hall outside of the second-floor bedroom covering the Fitzroy family.

  There were also the two French engineers in the first-floor library, watching over the monitors of the infrared cameras positioned around the yard. These were both ex-infantrymen in their forties; they wore pistols on their hips and knew how to use them.

  Finally there was the Tech, Lloyd, Felix, and Riegel in the control room. Of the four, only Riegel could be considered a real gunfighter. He wore his pistol in a shoulder holster underneath his suede jacket. Dangerous to others or not, Lloyd was armed with his small automatic, and a charged Uzi had been placed on the Tech’s computer desk, though the ponytailed Brit had never before been so close to a loaded weapon.

  This made the odds nineteen defenders versus one attacker, but this was merely the inner line of coverage around the château. The four Libyan Jamahiriya Security Organization operators were in constant radio contact with the Tech, ten kilometers away in Bayeux. They watched the road from town to the château and the soon-to-open train station, the only reasonable route from Paris. The sleek, black Eurocopter flew lazy eights at high altitude, carrying the five Saudis. The chopper watched the roads down from Caen to the east and even along the coast to the north in case the Gray Man magically appeared on a Normandy beach like a one-man replay of the D-day invasion.

  And the four Kazakhs, just in from Paris, patrolled in a small blue Citroën, their Kalashnikovs in their laps with the stocks folded. They drove through the countryside, pulled up behind early-rising drivers and checked their plates, shone bright lights into cars to scan the vehicle’s occupants.

  The Kazakhs did not use their radios. Yes, they listened in to the Tech’s communication with the other teams, but they never acknowledged or responded to the Tech’s calls for them to check in. They were there to kill the Gray Man and make the money and go home. They would communicate with the men in the château only when they dumped Gentry’s body at the front gate and demanded their money.

  Riegel oversaw the entire operation from the third-floor control room. He’d be the first to admit it was no fair fight, more than thirty armed men against one horribly wounded adversary who was operating with limited resources and little sleep.

  But Riegel was a hunter, and a fair fight was not his game.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The early morning glow shone off the English Channel, and a hint of the morning’s first hues brushed the back of Justine’s shoulders as she drove the dirty white four-door west along the coastal road. She kept to the marked speed limit, read the signs carefully.

  Her passenger seat and her backseat were empty except for several aluminum suitcases.

  She motored alone, made a left in the coastal village of Longues-sur-Mer, did not speed up or slow down when a black helicopter swooped a couple hundred feet above her. It made a second pass and then a third before disappearing from her view, heading to the southwest.

  She had the road all to herself for a while, but not long after the helicopter’s departure, a blue Citroën pulled behind her from a gravel lane to her left, dust and exhaust rising behind it. She chanced a glance into her rearview and saw nothing but bright headlights. They stayed close behind her for several hundred meters, and then the car pulled alongside. Justine gripped the thin steering column so hard she thought it would break off in her hands as a flashlight beam illuminated her, then scanned around behind her in the backseat. Then the light turned off, the Citroën pulled ahead of her, and she was certain she would see its brake lights come on, forcing her to stop. But the car sped away. Its taillights disappeared in the mist ahead after another minute.

  After heading south for a few kilometers, she looked down at the map in her lap, noted the pencil marks Jim had put there for her. There was a left turn ahead, and she took it after flipping off her lights. The narrow road ran straight; thick hedgerows reached high on each side of her. After three minutes of driving through the darkness, the road turned to the south, but she slowed, bumped the little car off the pavement, and revved the engine just enough to send it into a deep thicket.

  A large stone wall rose from the ground on the other side of the thicket, three meters high. From her view, it filled the windshield and seemed to reach up into the infinite sky. She bumped the sedan’s front bumper against it and turned off the engine.

  It was nearly pitch-dark here with the high trees on either side of the narrow road. Quickly, she climbed from the driver’s seat. She was careful not to slam the door behind her. She knocked four times slowly on the trunk of the Fiat, a prearranged signal that all was well.

  A moment later, the trunk lid lifted. Jim looked up at her from his tight squeeze inside, an empty paper coffee cup by his side and a black rifle in his arms.

  “No problems?” he asked as he slowly climbed out. She could see the pain on his face that came with the movement’s effect on his injuries. He left the rifle in the trunk of the car, walked around to the side, stretching out after suffering the cramped confines of the trunk.

  “There are men around. In a car and in a helicopter. I am sure there are more inside the property. They must think you are a very dangerous man to have so many people waiting for you,” Justine said as she stood behind the car in the road.

  The American had pushed through the tall bushes on the passenger side to pull open the door to the backseat. “My reputation is exaggerated.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. I want to thank you for all you’ve done. You’ve earned every cent of that money. I could not have done this without you.”

  Justine smiled in the low light. “You haven’t really done anything yet, Jim.”

  “That’s a fair point.”

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Like I just downed a triple dose of speed with a double espresso. Your stitches are holding fine.”

  Without warning, a car’s headlights raked over Justine’s body. She turned to look to the light, then quickly she spun back to look to Jim for guidance, but he was gone.

  Seconds later, the blue Citroën pulled to a stop behind her, and four men quickly climbed out.

  Justine stood in the bright light and raised a hand up to shield her eyes. The light washed over her, and she felt naked in the bright beams. The four men moved in front of the lights and were silhouetted in them. She saw the profiles of long guns in the men’s arms. Someone shouted at her, but she did not understand, and she could not speak. Instead, she looked to her left and to her right, into the predawn’s dimness all around.

  Somewhere in the safety away from the shafts of light, she knew Jim had run away and gotten free from the men in front of her. She thought he must have somehow made it over the stone wall. He’d left her here to explain the trunks of equipment in the car and to come up with some plausible reason she should be right here right now.

  The terror in her body threatened to burst her heart open inside her chest.

  “Bo
njour,” she said to the four silhouettes, her meek voice little more than a whimper.

  The figures moved closer to her as one, guns still pointed forward.

  Fifteen meters, ten meters, the shadows converged as they closed.

  Then the steady movement forward of the silhouettes changed suddenly, a fast shadow from the left, a profile turned towards the movement, the shape of a long gun beginning to rise and then a cry of surprise from the specters in front of her as one tall figure crumpled into a ball.

  Quickly she backed up, bumped into the trunk of the car, watched the dancing movement of light and dark in front of her. Through the confusion on the road she distinguished the outlines of arms and legs as punches rained down and kicks flew, guns spun free through the air and clanked to the dusty gravel amid the shouts and cracks of fists on flesh and bone on bone.

  A second figure dropped and stilled, this one flat under the headlights’ beams. She saw that it was not Jim. More convergence of shadows in the rising dust cloud, and a man’s outline wrapped its dark appendages around the head and neck of another profile and spun, lifted the silhouette off the pavement, and Justine heard the snap of a neck as cervical vertebrae shattered from obscene torsion.

  Justine had seen fistfights on television action shows. This was nothing of that. The movements were faster, more brutal, crueler. There was no ballet or poetry in the relationship between the adversaries, no choreography. No, it was unyielding surface on unyielding surface, the jerking reactions and the grunts and cries of wild beasts, labored breathing from exertion and panic. The sounds of cracking impacts and the frenzy of a combat so pitiless, she was sure all the men would tear to pieces in the street in front of her.

  Three men were down now, and a fourth ran out of the shafts of light to go for a rifle that had fallen and skidded free of the fight. Justine saw Jim now as he pursued in the dusty street and knocked the other man down from behind. Blows were exchanged by each, and Jim was thrown flat on his back in the cold road. Quickly the Frenchwoman turned to the trunk to lift the rifle the American had left there, though she had no idea how to turn it on so that she could use it. As she looked away from the fight, she heard a sick cry of pain. She hefted the big gun and turned back to find Jim up on his knees and the fourth man rolling away from him, hands over his eyes. Jim regained his feet, bringing a long gun up with him and then over his head. While Justine watched, Jim beat the writhing man with the butt end of the gun. One after another, like an axe chopping wood, the blows fell onto the struggling man’s back. His hands raised in defense, but the rifle’s butt beat its way to the horror-stricken eyes. The eyes erupted in blood and his jaw broke and hung open sickeningly. It must have taken a dozen merciless blows to the crushed head to still the man on his back in the cold road, and Justine could not look away.