The Gray Man Page 6

  “What good will that do?”

  “I know Gentry. He is loyal like a fucking puppy. Even though he’s been kicked around a few times, he will defend his master to the death.”

  “He won’t.”

  “He will. He’ll take it upon himself to save the day. He’ll understand the police are useless, and he will move heaven and earth to get to France.

  “You see, Sir Donnie, Court Gentry’s compass never has pointed true north. He’s a hit man, for God’s sake. But all his operations, both with the CIA as well as in his private practice, have been against those he deems worthy of extrajudicial execution. Terrorists, Mafia dons, drug dealers, all manner of nefarious ne’er-do-wells. Court is a killer, but he thinks himself to be a righter of wrongs, an instrument of justice. This is his flaw. And this flaw will be his downfall.”

  Fitzroy knew the same about Court Gentry. Lloyd’s logic was sound. Still, the older man tried to appeal to the young solicitor. “You needn’t involve my family. I will do as you say. I’ve already shown you that. You don’t have to hold them for me to tell Gentry they are held.”

  Lloyd waved a hand in the air, striking down Sir Donald’s offer. “We will take good care of them. If you try to trick me, some sort of double cross, then I will need leverage against you, won’t I?”

  Fitzroy stood and crossed the room towards Lloyd, slowly and with menace. Although he was easily thirty years older than the American lawyer, the former MI-5 man possessed a larger frame. Lloyd took a step back and called out, “Mr. Leary and Mr. O’Neil! Would you step in, please?”

  Fitzroy had given his secretary the day off; he was all alone in his workplace. But Lloyd had brought associates. Two athletic-looking men entered the office and stood by the door. One was redheaded and fair-skinned, on the downside of forty, with a simple business suit that bulged at the hip with the impression of a gun’s butt. The second man was older, near fifty, with salt-and-pepper hair cut in a military high and tight, and his jacket hung loose enough on his body to hold an arsenal tucked away from view inside.

  Fitzroy knew muscle goons when he saw them.

  Lloyd said, “Irish Republicans. Your old enemies, though I shouldn’t think we’ll give them much to do. You and I will be seeing a lot of each other in the next few days. There is no reason our relationship should be anything less than cordial.”

  Claire Fitzroy had just turned eight years old the previous summer. It was the end of November now, and she and her twin sister Kate had expected to stay in London throughout the wet, gray, and chilling autumn without a break from the routine. Up each weekday morning early for the walk to her primary school on North Audrey Street, out of class and into thrice-weekly piano practice for Claire and vocal lessons for Kate. Weekends spent with Mummy in the shops or Daddy at home or on the football pitch. Each fortnight one of the girls would have a friend over for a slumber party and, as the dreary London skies of fall morphed into the drier but drearier skies of winter, all Claire’s dreams would turn to Christmas.

  Christmas was always spent in France at her father’s holiday cottage in Bayeux, just across the channel in Normandy. Claire preferred Normandy to London, fancied a future for herself on a farm. So it had been a great moment of surprise and adventure when the head-master of her school stepped into the girls’ class Thursday morning, just after roll, to call Claire and Kate out and back to the office. “Bring your schoolbooks, ladies, please. Lovely. Sorry for the intrusion, Mrs. Wheeling. Do carry on.”

  Father was in the office, and he took each girl by the hand and led them out to a waiting taxi. Daddy had a Jaguar and Mummy drove a Saab, so the girls could not imagine where they were going in a taxicab. Mummy sat in the vast backseat, and she, like Daddy, was serious and distant.

  “Girls, we’re off on a little holiday. Down to Normandy, taking the Eurostar. No, of course nothing’s wrong, don’t be daft.”

  On the train the girls barely sat in their seats. Mummy and Daddy stayed huddled together talking, leaving Claire and Kate to run amok up and down the car. Claire heard Daddy ring Grandpa Don on his mobile. He began speaking quietly but angrily, a voice she had never heard him use with Grandpa Don. She stopped following her sister as they attempted to hop down the complete length of the car on one leg. She looked to her father, his worried face, the biting tone of his voice, words impossible to hear but impossible to interpret as anything other than anger.

  Daddy snapped the phone shut and spoke to Mummy.

  The only time young Claire had ever seen her daddy so visibly upset was when he yelled at a worker fixing the sink in their town house after he’d said something to Mummy that made her face turn red as a strawberry.

  Claire began to cry, but she did not let it show.

  Claire and her family left the Eurostar in Lille and took another train west to Normandy. By noon they were in their cottage. Kate helped Mum in the kitchen wash fresh corn for dinner. Claire sat on her bed upstairs and looked out to the drive below, to her father. He marched up and down the gravel speaking into his mobile. Occasionally he rested a hand on the picket fence along the garden.

  Her father’s anger and consternation twisted her tiny insides into knots.

  Her sister was downstairs, unaware and unworried, but Claire considered Kate the less mature of the two eight-year-old twins.

  Finally Daddy put his phone in his pocket, shivered against the chill in the air, and turned to walk back up the drive. He’d not gotten more than a few steps when two brown cars pulled in behind him. He turned back to the cars as men began pouring out. Claire counted six in all, big men, leather jackets of different colors and styles. The first man to Daddy smiled and stuck out a hand, and Daddy shook it.

  The other men filed around her father, up the drive and towards the cottage. Daddy looked to the men as they passed, and for an instant Claire saw his expression. It was first confusion, and then it was terror, and young Claire leapt to her feet in her little room.

  And when the six men, all as one, reached into their coats and drew big black and silver guns, eight-year-old Claire Fitzroy screamed.

  EIGHT

  Kurt Riegel was fifty-two years old, and as tall, blond, and broad as his Germanic name implied. He had joined LaurentGroup just out of the German Bundeswehr, seventeen years prior, worked his way up from associate director of security in the Hamburg branch office, through a half dozen third-world foreign postings, each dingier and more dangerous than the last, and now he sat firmly ensconced in the Paris home office as vice president of Security Risk Management Operations. It was a long title, a fancy heading that belied a simple explanation of his job.

  Riegel was the man one called if one needed something bad to happen. Off-the-books projects, black arts, human resource problems that required a visit from the heavies. Black bag, sneak-and-peek burglary squads, corporate espionage teams, media disinformation experts. Even hit men. When Riegel’s agents came to your office, it either meant they were there to help you clean up a difficult problem, or you yourself were the difficult problem someone had sent them to clean up.

  Leading the “Department of Malicious Measures” virtually assured Riegel would climb no higher up the corporate ladder. No one wanted the chief head knocker out in the daylight, running the show. But Riegel did not mind the glass ceiling above him. On the contrary, he saw his position as virtually a tenured one, as he had erected a security dynasty around himself. In his four years as VP of SRMO, his agents had eliminated three political candidates in Africa, three human rights leaders in Asia, a Colombian general, two investigative journalists, and nearly twenty LaurentGroup employees who, for one reason or another, failed to tow the firm’s heavy line. Only one man at LaurentGroup knew of all the operations; Riegel compartmentalized those below him well, and those above him in the corporation knew enough of his tactics to recognize that they really didn’t want to know any more.

  Problems arose, Riegel was called, problems disappeared, and Riegel was quietly appreciated.
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br />   This made Kurt Riegel an extremely powerful man indeed.

  The big German’s teak-paneled office in the Paris HQ suited him well. It was, like Riegel himself, large and blond and strongly built but quiet and discreet, tucked near Competitive Intelligence and IT in LaurentGroup campus’s southern wing. Along his office walls hung over a dozen hunting trophies. There was a taxidermist in Montmartre who virtually made a living on Kurt’s African safaris and Canadian expeditions. Rhino, lion, moose, and elk all stared vacantly from their perches high on the walls around the room.

  It was also here where he did his daily calisthenics every afternoon at five. He was nearly to his one hundredth sweat-inducing knee bend when his outside line chirped. Several lines he could ignore until he finished his set, but this was the encrypted number, the hotline, and he’d awaited this call for most of the day.

  He grabbed a towel, walked to his desk, and turned on his speakerphone.

  “Riegel.”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Riegel. This is Lloyd, from Legal.”

  Riegel sipped from a bottle of vitamin-infused water as he sat down on the edge of his desk.

  “Lloyd from Legal. What can I do for you?” Riegel’s voice was powerful, like the artillery officer he once was.

  “I was told you would be expecting my call.”

  “I was contacted by the chief executive officer, no less. Marc Laurent himself told me to drop everything and focus all my efforts on a project you will have for me. He also told me to supply you with some muscle and a communications specialist. I hope the technician and the team of Belarusian paramilitaries I sent have been helpful to your situation.”

  “Yes, thank you for that. The tech is here with me. The muscle is down in France at the moment, and they are doing as they are told,” said Lloyd.

  “Good. This is the first time Marc Laurent himself has called and asked me to pay special attention to an operation. I am intrigued. What kind of mess have you boys over in Legal gotten yourselves into?”

  “Yes. Well, this matter needs to be cleared up quickly, for the good of the company.”

  “Then let’s not waste another moment. What else can I provide other than the team I have sent?”

  Lloyd paused. Then he said, “Well, I hate to shock you with this, but I urgently need a man killed.”

  Riegel said nothing.

  “Are you there?”

  “I am waiting for you to say something shocking.”

  “I take it you have done this sort of thing before?”

  “Here in Risk Management Operations we like to say that every problem can be dealt with one of two ways. A problem can be tolerated, or a problem can be terminated. If a problem can be tolerated, Mr. Lloyd, my phone does not ring.”

  Lloyd asked, “Are you familiar at all with the Lagos Natural Gas contract?”

  Riegel answered immediately. “I suspected this would be in reference to the Nigerian fiasco. Rumor has it some fool attorney over there in Legal forgot to proofread a contract, and the Nigerians are backing out of a ten-billion-dollar deal we have already put two hundred million into. I had a feeling I would be contacted on the matter.”

  “Yes, well, it’s a little more complicated than that.”

  “Doesn’t sound so complicated. I just need the offending attorney’s address. We’ll make it look like suicide. The stupid bastard should be enough of a good company man to go ahead and kill himself, but you can’t expect that kind of loyalty from a lawyer. No offense, Lloyd from Legal.”

  “No! No, Riegel, you’ve got it wrong. We need someone else killed.”

  Riegel cleared his throat. “Go on, then.”

  Lloyd told the VP of Security Risk Management Ops of the assassination of Isaac Abubaker, the president’s refusal to sign the repaired contract without proof of his brother’s killer’s own death.

  Kurt snorted. “We climb into bed with these dictators, and then we act surprised when they grab us by the nuts.” Riegel’s English was flawless, idiomatic American. He sat down behind his desk, grabbed a pen, and pulled a notepad across the leather blotter to him. “So we need to ID the hit man and dispose of him?” asked Riegel.

  “He has already been identified.”

  “You just need him eliminated? I was expecting something more complicated than this after Mr. Laurent’s phone call.”

  “Yes, well, this assassin is no slouch.”

  “The trouble with private killers is all in the identification. If you know who he is, I’ll have him found and dead within twenty-four hours.”

  “That would be ideal.”

  “I mean, unless we’re talking about the Gray Man. He’s a couple of cuts above the rest.”

  Lloyd said nothing.

  After the American’s long hesitation, Riegel said, “Ach, so! We are talking about the Gray Man, aren’t we?”

  “Is that going to be a problem?”

  It was Riegel’s turn to pause. Finally he said, “Certainly a complication . . . but not a problem. He is extremely good at keeping a low profile, hence his moniker. He’ll be hard to find, but the good news is he will have no reason to expect we are coming after him.”

  Lloyd remained silent yet again.

  “Or will he?”

  “I arranged an attempt on his life last night. It failed. He survived.”

  “How many men did he kill?”

  “Five.”

  “Idiot.”

  “Mr. Riegel, the Gray Man is clearly no idiot. His history shows us—”

  “He is not the idiot! You are the idiot! A damn lawyer who tries to orchestrate a hit on the greatest alpha killer in the world. Some poorly planned, cobbled-together, hurriedly executed disaster of an operation, no doubt! You should have come to me immediately. Now he will be on guard, expecting whoever it was who organized the attempt on his life will just try again.”

  “I am no idiot, Riegel. I have his handler in my custody. I have persuaded him to help us locate Gentry.”

  “Who’s Gentry?”

  “Courtland Gentry is the Gray Man.”

  Riegel sat up as erect and broad and square as the desk in front of him. “How is it you know his identity?”

  “I am not at liberty to say.”

  “Who’s his handler?” Riegel did not like being the one on the receiving end of such information inside LaurentGroup. He had his own intelligence network for that. That some shit American barrister was passing this intel around like it was common knowledge made Riegel ball his fists in anger.

  “His handler’s name is Don Fitzroy. He’s a Brit, has a straight operation here in London, even does some work for us occasion—”

  Riegel’s balled fists closed together tighter. “Tell me, Lloyd from Legal, that you have not kidnapped Sir Donald Fitzroy!”

  “I have. And I have his son and his son’s family held at a LaurentGroup property in Normandy.”

  Riegel dropped his huge shoulders and put his head in his hands. After several seconds he looked to his speakerphone. “I have been notified, in no uncertain terms, that you are in charge of this operation. I am to provide you men, matériel, intelligence, and any advice I have.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Then why don’t I start with some advice?”

  “Excellent.”

  “My advice, Lloyd from Legal, is to apologize to Sir Donald for the gross misunderstanding, release him and his family, retire to your home, put a gun in your mouth, and pull the goddamn trigger! Crossing Fitzroy was a huge mistake.”

  “You can dispense with the advice then and just supply me with more men. Right now I don’t know where the Gray Man is, but I do know where he will go. Fitzroy will send him to Normandy. He’ll be traveling overland, east to west. I don’t know his starting point yet, but if you give me enough support, I’ll send them everywhere across Europe to hunt him down as he gets closer.

  “Why will he go to Normandy? To rescue Fitzroy’s family?”

  “Exactly. He will be told Nigerian
s have kidnapped them and are holding them until Fitzroy turns him over. He will take it upon himself to rectify the problem.”

  Riegel drummed on his desk. “I agree with your assessment. He does have a reputation as a paladin, and he won’t trust the French authorities.”

  “Precisely. I just need from you a surveillance team and a kill team. Right now your crew from Minsk is guarding his family in France, but I’d like Gentry dead before he gets to Normandy, as time is of the essence.”

  “This is the Gray Man. You need more than this.”

  “What do you suggest? I mean, other than me killing myself.”

  Riegel looked up to the far wall of his office. The head and shoulders of a wild boar stared back at him. Slowly Kurt nodded to himself. “To get this done in the time allowed, you’ll need a hundred watchers.”

  “You can get me a hundred surveillance experts?”

  “Pavement artists, we call them.”

  “Whatever. You can provide that?”

  “Of course. And you will need a dozen teams of hunter-killers, spread out and placed all along each possible route, coordinated by a central command center, each with an incentive to be the unit that finds and kills the target.”

  Lloyd’s voice showed his astonishment at the scale of the undertaking Riegel proposed. “A dozen teams?”

  “Not company men, of course. Too many chances for comebacks on LaurentGroup. Not local talent, either. Local boys would be known to local police, and that would compromise the hunt. No, we need foreign operators from parts unknown, as you Americans like to say. Hard men, Lloyd from Legal, if you get my meaning. Hard men who do hard jobs when no other solution can be found.”

  “You are speaking of mercenaries.”

  “Absolutely not. The Gray Man has either dodged or dispatched every gang of hired hit men sent after him in the past. No, to be certain, we will need established field units. Government hit teams.”

  “I don’t understand. Whose government?”