Riegel’s connections to the upper levels of the company couldn’t be denied, but Lloyd’s political instincts demanded that he reassert his position. “I remain in charge of the operation. I will coordinate the movements of the watchers and the shooters. You just get me this manpower.”
“Agreed. I’ll arrange our little contest, get everyone on station, but I will let you guide the teams. Keep me posted on the progress, and don’t hesitate to seek out my counsel. I am a hunter, Lloyd. Hunting the Gray Man on the streets ofEurope will be the greatest expedition of my career.” He paused. “I just wish you didn’t fuck with Fitzroy.”
“Leave him to me.”
“Oh, I have every intention of doing just that. Sir Donald and his family are your problem, not mine.”
“No problem at all.”
NINE
Gentry allowed himself to admit that his fortunes seemed to be changing. After limping northward towards the Turkish border for less than an hour, he was picked up by a patrol of local Kurdish police. The Kurds in northern Iraq love Americans, especially American soldiers, and from his tattered uniform and injuries, they presumed him to be an American Special Forces operator. Court did nothing to dissuade them of this assumption. They drove him into Mosul and cleaned him up and rebandaged his leg wound in a clinic built by the U.S. government. Within seven hours of dropping from the ass of an airplane without a parachute on his back, the American assassin found himself dressed in pressed slacks and a linen shirt, boarding a commercial aircraft bound for Tbilisi, Georgia.
The improvement in his circumstances was not due entirely to luck. One of Court’s fallback plans involved him finding his own way out of Iraq, and to prepare himself for this eventuality, he’d sewn a forged passport, forged visas for Georgia and Turkey, cash, and other necessary documents into the legs of his pants.
No, Gentry benefited from a little luck from time to time, but he did not rely on it. He was nothing if not a man prepared.
After passing through Georgian customs with a Canadian passport identifying himself as Martin Baldwin, freelance journalist, he bought a ticket to Prague, Czech Republic. The five-hour flight was nearly empty, and Court landed at Ruzyne Airport just after ten in the evening.
He knew Prague like the back of his hand. He’d worked a job here once and often used the neighboring suburbs as a place to hide out.
After a cab and a metro ride, he walked through the cobblestone streets of the Stare Mesto District, then checked into a tiny attic hotel room a quarter mile from the Vltava River. After a long, soaking shower, he had just sat down to redress his thigh when the satellite phone in his new backpack began to beep.
Court checked it, saw that Fitzroy was calling, and continued to work on the gunshot wound. He’d talk to Don in the morning.
Gentry was understandably pissed about the extraction team turning on him.
He didn’t even entertain the possibility that Sir Donald himself had ordered his men to kill him. No, he was angry because Fitzroy’s operation was obviously compromised to the degree that the Nigerians were able to infiltrate a mission in progress and almost succeed in turning his rescuers into his executioners. Fitzroy had been strongly against Court going through with the hit on Abubaker after the death of the paymaster, and now Gentry wondered if Fitzroy had put together a half assed support structure for the op as a way to show his disapproval.
Fitzroy’s organized support structure was called the Network, and the Network was Gentry’s only lifeline in the field. It was made up of legitimate doctors who would patch up a wounded man, no questions asked, legitimate cargo pilots who would take a stowaway on board without looking over the gear on his back, legitimate printers who could alter documents. The list went on and on, grew over time. Gentry used the Network as little as possible, much less than the other men in Fitzroy’s stable. The Gray Man was, after all, a high-speed, low-drag operator. But everyone who works in Gentry’s arduous profession needs a little help from time to time, and Court was no different.
Gentry had worked for Fitzroy for four years, beginning within a few months of the night the CIA indicated that they no longer required the services of their most experienced and successful man hunter. Court thought back to the night. The indication of their dissatisfaction was followed immediately by a bomb in his car, a hit squad in his apartment, and an international arrest warrant processed from the Justice Department, distributed through Interpol to every law enforcement agency on the planet.
At that time, Gentry was desperate for work to fund his life in hiding from the U.S. government, so he contacted Sir Donald Fitzroy. The Englishman ran a seemingly aboveboard security business, but Gentry had had dealings with the black side of Cheltenham Security Services when performing hits and renditions with the CIA’s Special Activities Division, so it was a natural place for the recently unemployed gunman to seek work.
Since then, he had become something of a star in the worldof private operators. Although virtually no one knew his real name, or the fact that he worked for Fitzroy, the Gray Man had become a legend amongst covert operators across the Western world.
As with any legend, many of the details were enhanced, enriched, or wholly fabricated. One of the details of the myth of the Gray Man thatwastrue, however, was his personal ethic to only accept contracts against targets that he felt had earned the punishment of extrajudicial execution. This was entirely novel in the world of killers for hire, and though it enhanced his reputation, it also caused him to be extremely choosy about his operations.
Gentry took the toughest of the tough ops, went into bandit country alone, faced legions of enemies, and built a reputation and a bank account that was unrivaled in his admittedly low-profile industry. In four years he had satisfactorily performed twelve operations against terrorists and terrorist paymasters, white slavery profiteers, drug and illegal weapons runners, and Russian Mafia kingpins. Rumor had it he’d already made more money than he could ever need, so the inference was that he did what he did for the purpose of righting wrongs, protecting the weak, making the world a better place through the muzzle of his gun.
The myth was a fantasy, not reality, but unlike most fantasies, the man at the center of this onedidexist. His motivations were complex, not the comic-book stimuli that had been ascribed to him, but at his core he did consider himself one of the good guys.
No, he didn’t need the money, nor did he have a death wish. Court Gentry was the Gray Man simply because hebelieved there existed bad men in this world who truly needed to die.
—
Lloyd and his two Northern Irish henchmen put Fitzroy into a LaurentGroup limousine and motored through the city in a driving rain. There was no conversation. Fitzroy sat quietly, holding his hat in his hands between his knees, looking out the window into the rainy night like a beaten man. Lloyd worked his mobile phone, making and taking call after call, constantly checking in with Riegel, who was contacting men all over the globe to set their rushed plan into motion.
The limo arrived at LaurentGroup’s UK subsidiary just after one in the morning. The French corporation’s local office was housed in a three-building campus in Fulham. Lloyd, his men, and their cargo rolled through the front gates, past two rings of guards and guns, and down a road towards a single-story structure alongside a helipad.
“This will be home for a while, Sir Donald. I apologize if it’s not up to the standards of that to which you are accustomed, but at least you won’t go wanting for company. My men and I will not leave your side until we get everything settled and we can take you back to Bayswater Road and put you right back where we found you with a pat on your bald head.”
Fitzroy said nothing. He followed the entourage through the rain into the building and down a long hallway. He passed two more men in suits standing in a little kitchen, and he immediately identified them as plainclothes security officers. For a moment Fitzroy had a flicker of hope, and it showed on his face.
Lloyd read his thoughts. “Sorry, Sir Donald. These are not your boys. A couple of heavies from our Edinburgh office. These Scotsmen hold allegiance to me, not you.”
Fitzroy continued down the hall. He mumbled, “I know a thousand chaps like that. Those blokes hold no allegiance. They’re in it for the money, and they will turn on you if the price is right.”
