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  Eduardo looked back at the hallway door. Both of his men stared at the television with wide eyes.

  Over his earpiece the major heard Team One check in. “All four targets eliminated.”

  And then Team Two. “Major… most of these bunks are empty. There are only three men up here. No capitán.”

  And then, from the television, de la Rocha continued to address the stunned federal officer. “Major Gamboa, let me ask you something. If you work for the federales, and I own the federales, where does that leave you and your men?”

  Gamboa looked to the lump in the bed, he lifted back the sheets with a gloved hand.

  C4 plastic explosives, easily one hundred pounds in bricks wired together with a red detonator attached. “¿Qué chingados?” muttered Gamboa. What the fuck?

  “Do you have your answer yet? Dead! It leaves you and your fucking team muerto, pendejo!”

  Eduardo Gamboa turned away from the bomb, pushed the transmit button on his radio. “It’s a trap! Off the boat!”

  Eduardo’s men turned in front of him, began running down the hallway. He sprinted behind them; they had just made it into the saloon, had just passed the television playing the movie exalting the crimes of Daniel Alonzo de la Rocha Alvarez, when a flash erupted from behind them. The hot blast of fire enveloped them, and they died in the spectacular explosion of the thirty-three-million-dollar vessel.

  * * *

  Daniel de la Rocha bobbed in the water, one hundred yards from the wreckage of his beautiful La Sirena. He waited patiently while Emilio and Felipe, his two bodyguards, got the emergency life raft inflated, and then they helped him aboard. Once all three men had climbed onto the tiny dinghy, they tossed away the snorkeling gear they had been wearing since they slipped out of the wooden life raft on the upper deck and into the water of Banderas Bay. They’d managed to swim one hundred yards before the four men left behind on the sundeck were shot, and this told Daniel it was time to press the waterproof remote control that began the sequence both on his DVD player and on his bomb.

  Now he and his men watched the flames burning on the water. He hoped it would not be long before the local harbor fire patrol came to rescue the three survivors. Daniel knew he would be a living martyr after this act of aggression by the federales; indeed, he had worked for months so that he could capitalize on this moment.

  He would miss La Sirena, without question. But it was insured, his Eurocopter was insured, and a great deal of artwork that was not even on board was insured. It was time for an upgrade anyway. There was a one-hundred-sixty-foot gem that he’d seen a few months earlier in Fort Lauderdale, and he’d have his people begin working immediately on the owner to encourage him to sell it.

  * * *

  Sergeant Martin Orozco Fernandez and Sergeant Ramses Cienfuegos Cortillo bobbed in the black water. Both men were injured: burns to Ramses’s legs that would scream in the salt water as soon as his adrenaline dissipated enough for him to feel them, and a slightly sprained left wrist for Martin that would make seven miles of swimming a special kind of hell. But they were excellent swimmers, and their wetsuits were buoyant. They would not drown.

  But that did not make either of them feel much better. Because the rest of their team was dead, and it was obvious to both of them that they had been set up by their leaders, and their leaders were somewhere on the shore they swam towards. Only a few knew of tonight’s attack, and Ramses and Martin knew that at least one of those few had tipped off de la Rocha.

  SEVEN

  As a general rule, Court liked third-world bus stations. Here he could people-watch with a minimum of return scrutiny, sit by himself in a dark corner, and soak up the experiences of others. His personal predicament, the fact that many highly dangerous people wanted him dead, necessitated a solitary existence, a distance from and a general mistrust of other human beings. For this reason the thirty-seven-year-old American by and large learned about normal everyday life and family and relationships by proxy, often in bus stations. Watching a father scold a misbehaving child, a young couple cuddle and laugh together, an old man eat his dinner alone. Court had been living this way exclusively for five years, the time that the former CIA asset had been on the run from the Central Intelligence Agency, ducking a shoot-on-sight sanction. But to one extreme or another, sitting alone and watching others live their lives had been Court’s life as long as he could remember.

  Nine days had passed since Brazil; he’d traveled overland ever since — bicycles and buses and shoe leather into Central America. He hadn’t remained for more than six hours in a single place. He now sat at a bus station in Guatemala City, waiting on a chicken bus that would take him into the northern jungle near the border with Mexico and Belize.

  He had a little money now but not much. He’d sold the manhunter’s pistol in El Salvador, and he still had some of the euros he’d pulled from the Dutchman’s wallet. But he’d bought secondhand clothing in Panama and a green canvas gym bag to carry it in. That and food and bus tickets had not been much. Gentry could get by with less than virtually any other American; nevertheless, cash would become an issue before too long.

  A black-and-white television hung from a metal pole in a corner of the waiting room. It broadcast a talk show from Mexico City featuring transsexuals shouting at one another over some nonsense. Court didn’t pay much attention to the TV; instead his eyes were fixed on the old man and his plate of rice. It was the man who mopped the dirty floor and perfunctorily wiped the toilets here at the bus station; the American assassin had been sitting here long enough to see the man at work. Now the janitor sat at a table by the café and picked at his food, sucked the rice because he did not have enough teeth to do anything else with it. Did he have to work all night? Was there anyone to come home to in the morning?

  Court found himself imagining a story for the man, and in many ways it mirrored his own.

  Court did not expect to live as long as the old man, and he found perverse comfort in that because he did not want to be both lonely and old.

  The village in the Amazon had been an eye opener for him. When Court arrived there, he’d been traveling for five months straight. A couple of weeks in Rio, a couple of weeks in Quito, a few days in two dozen other towns. All that time he thought of stopping; it never left his thoughts. He thought he wanted to find a place to stay, a job to do, people around him who, obviously, would never know his true identity but who would know him as someone, which was quite unlike traveling, where he was neither known nor noticed by those around him.

  And the Amazon village had provided all this for him. The people were kind, and they weren’t too inquisitive. The austerity had helped him focus and pushed him further away from the painkiller addiction that he’d left behind him, bit by bit, in each town he’d passed through since Caracas the previous April. He’d been clean for two months by the time he arrived in the Amazon, and the constant exercise and work and danger from nothing more nefarious than God’s nature had helped his body forget about such banal trivialities as the desire for a pill’s relaxation.

  But there was a downside. He had come to the realization that the things which he had sought — stability, relative safety, a routine — did not satisfy him. It disgusted him to admit it, but when young Mauro came and told him about the arrival of the manhunter, he’d felt an undeniable sense of relief wash over his body.

  Action. Adrenaline. Purpose.

  Court Gentry did not like it, but he could no longer deny it. After the Amazon village, after the absurd relief of an attack by choppers full of gunmen, one thing was obvious to him.

  Court Gentry was the Gray Man, and the Gray Man lived for this shit.

  * * *

  Court had been sitting on a plastic chair with his head back on the greasy wall and his feet up on his canvas bag. But he sat up to move his back, to flex and then stretch the muscles high in his left shoulder where scar tissue from an arrow wound bothered him, the adhesion of the tissue needing a good daily stretch to stay
pliant.

  The evening news came on the little television, and Court distractedly listened to it without looking at the screen, just picking up words here and there as he leaned forward and wrapped his arms around his body to stretch the muscles under his scapulas.

  The words Puerto Vallarta did not catch his attention, neither did yacht nor explosion.

  But the Spanish word asesinato caused him to turn his head. He had an acute professional interest in stories about assassination.

  He watched video of smoldering wreckage in the ocean, taken from a helicopter at dawn. Then a picture of a handsome Hispanic male in an impeccable black three-piece suit. The newscaster said the man’s name was Daniel de la Rocha, and there was speculation that he was the target of a sanctioned murder by the Mexican Federal Police. Court couldn’t understand it all, but he did pick up that de la Rocha had survived and the police who had bombed the yacht had all died.

  Wow, Court thought. That was a fucked-up hit. Why blow up the yacht? Why not just shoot the son of a bitch on land?

  The image on the screen changed again, displayed an official photo of a man in a police uniform sitting in front of the Mexican flag. He wore a smart hat, medals adorned his uniform coat, and his clean-shaven face was serious and stern.

  Court cocked his head a fraction of an inch. Blinked twice rapidly. Otherwise, he did not move a muscle. He just watched.

  The newscaster continued speaking over the cop’s image, and Gentry concentrated on the words, tuned into the grammar, and did his very best to understand.

  “Sources say Major Eduardo Gamboa of the Policía Federal’s special operation’s group led the attempt on the life of Daniel de la Rocha. As previously stated, Gamboa and all his men perished in the explosion of the yacht, along with four of DLR’s bodyguards and three crewmen of La Sirena. Only de la Rocha and two associates survived.”

  Eduardo Gamboa. “Eduardo Gamboa.” Court whispered it softly. The image left the screen, a commercial selling mobile phone plans appeared, but Gentry still saw the face.

  “Eduardo Gamboa.” He said it again softly. Then said, “Eddie.”

  Court blinked again, dropped his bearded face into his hands, and thought back to the month he spent in hell.

  LAOS

  AUGUST 2000

  Four soldiers in army green ponchos pulled the American out of the back of the truck and shoved him through the thunderstorm, up the muddy trail. He stumbled once on the pathway to the wooden shack: his manacled hands and feet forced him to move slower than his minders found reasonable, and his long, rain-soaked hospital gown and bare feet hardly promoted sure footwork on the slick stones. One Laotian prodded him in the back with his old SKS rifle to encourage Gentry to pick up the pace. Once under the porch roof of the shack, Court dropped to his knees, but the guards yanked him back up and left him teetering there while the door was unlocked. He swayed with the wind of the storm as he stood and waited; finally, they moved him inside the building.

  The soldiers took off their ponchos and hung them on wall pegs while an officer came out from behind his desk and unlocked a door to a stairwell that descended into darkness. Court teetered again, nearly tipped over, but strong hands on his back and shoulders guided him down the narrow stairs. At the bottom another locked door was opened, Gentry was pushed forward onto a brick floor, and his shackles were removed. The four soldiers unlocked an iron cell and shoved him inside.

  He dropped in the corner of the cell, and they left him there in his wet hospital gown, the metal bars clanging shut behind him. The soldiers slammed the basement door behind him, locked it, and then retreated up the steps.

  Gentry had landed on moldy sawdust; he’d caught a mouthful of it and spat it back out as he lay on his side. He opened his eyes and struggled to look around. A folded up pair of baby blue pajamas lay on the floor next to him; he could just make them out. There was a faint light emanating from a ventilation slit high on the wall above him; only a trace of dim illumination tracked down softly to where Gentry lay, but it did nothing to reveal the room around him.

  He couldn’t see an inch beyond his arm where it lay outstretched on the sawdust.

  “Shit,” he mumbled to himself. “Fucking perfect.”

  “English?” A man’s voice called hopefully from the dark in front of him, from inside the bars of the cell, maybe a dozen feet from the tip of Court’s nose.

  Gentry did not respond.

  After a while he heard movement, the sound of a person sitting up, clothing rubbing against the stone wall.

  “You speak English?” The accent was American, with perhaps a foreign background.

  Court ignored the question.

  The voice in the blackness continued. “I’ve been here for two weeks. Spent the first couple of days checking for cameras or listening devices. Trust me, these pendejos aren’t that sophisticated.”

  Court slowly moved himself into a sitting position, leaned back against the iron bars. He nodded to the dark. Shrugged his shoulders. “I speak English.” He was surprised by how weak and raspy his voice had become.

  “You American?”

  “Yep.”

  “Same here.”

  Court said, “You talk funny.”

  A chuckle from the disembodied voice. “Born in Mexico. Came to the States when I was eighteen.”

  “Then you’re a long way from home.”

  “Yeah. How bout you? What did you do to end up here?”

  “Not sure where ‘here’ is, exactly.”

  “We’re a couple hours northwest of Vientiane in a military camp where they dump foreign heroin smugglers. It’s not an official prison; there is no judge or trial or Red Cross or anything like that. They bring the traffickers here to interrogate them, pull the names of their suppliers from them, and then when they’re sure they’ve squeezed out everything they have to offer, they take them to a work camp and have them build roads until they drop dead. They say in three weeks the rainy season will be over and the roads will be passable, then everyone here is off to the labor camps.”

  “Bummer,” Court said after another cough.

  “How much dope did they catch you with?”

  Court closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the cold brick wall. He shrugged. “I wasn’t running drugs.”

  “Sure you weren’t, homes. Just tell them it was a misunderstanding.”

  “Actually I came to rescue some dipshit DEA dumbass who got himself captured by the boneheads running this place.”

  An extremely long pause. Then a fresh chuckle. Then a hearty laugh that seemed utterly out of place in this black dungeon. Then the sound of movement in the dark. In the low light close to Court’s face, a bearded man appeared. He looked Mexican, late twenties, and several inches shorter than Court. He wore baby blue pajamas, and the skin around both of his eyes was tainted with fading bruises, obvious even in the deep shadow. He stuck out a hand. “Eddie Gamble. DEA, Phoenix Field Office, on special assignment to the Bangkok Field Division.”

  Court shook the hand weakly. “Hey, Gamble? How’s that special assignment of yours working out?”

  “How’s your assignment working out, ese?”

  Court smiled; the muscles in his jaw hurt. “No better than yours, I guess.”

  “So you are here to save me, huh?”

  Gentry nodded.

  Eddie Gamble swatted a bug from his forehead. “Is this the part where the rest of your unit rappels down from the rafters and we all blast out of here with jet packs?”

  Court looked up towards the low ceiling. “God, I hope so.” Nothing happened. He looked back to Gamble. Shrugged. “Guess not.”

  Eddie asked, “Who are you with?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “I’m cleared top secret.”

  “Chicks dig that, don’t they?” quipped Gentry; his eyes were becoming accustomed to the low light, so he scanned the cell now, found nothing but a shit bucket and a water trough and a couple of tattered blankets as fu
rniture.

  “I mean… I’m sure you can tell me who you’re with.”

  “Sorry, stud. I’m codeword-classified.” Codeword-classified meant only those who knew a specific code could be privy to a set of information.

  “I bet chicks dig that.”

  “They would if I could tell them, but they’d have to know the codeword.”

  Gamble laughed at this, and at the situation. “You can come rescue me, but you can’t tell me who you work for?”

  “The DEA is looking for you. I just happened to be in the area, sort of, so I was sent by my people to nose around.”

  “And then?”

  Court shrugged. “Bad luck. I got sick. I was meeting with some contacts, and I passed out. I woke up in the hospital. I had cover for status only; my papers weren’t good enough for the scrutiny of the hospital, so they called the cops. My papers weren’t even close to good enough for the cops, so they called military intelligence. Military intelligence wiped their asses with my papers, basically, so here I am.”

  Gamble reached out and put his hand on Gentry’s forehead. “You get stung by any mosquitoes?”

  “I crossed over the Mekong about a week and a half ago. Damn bugs ate my ass up. Guess they don’t get a lot of white meat around here.”

  “Backache, muscle aches, stomach cramps, dizziness?”

  “Fatigue, joint pain, vomiting,” Court finished his list of symptoms.

  “You have malaria,” Eddie said gravely.

  “Thanks, doc, but I already figured that out.”

  Gamble looked at Gentry a long time before saying, “Brother, that’s a death sentence in a place like this. You need meds. Clean water. Solid food that doesn’t have cucarachas crawling in it. You aren’t gonna get that here.”

  Court shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll be okay.”

  Eddie stood quickly, so quickly Gentry flinched. Gamble moved to the bars and started shouting for the guards up the stairs. Court couldn’t understand a word of it. The guards did not come down, and after a moment Gamble sat back down, visibly angry.