Lloyd waved a card key over a reader alongside the last door in the hall. “Well, then, lucky for me I pay so well.”
It was a large conference room, with an oak table and high-backed chairs, the walls lined with flat screen monitors, computers, and a big LCD display showing a map of western Europe.
Lloyd said, “Why don’t you take the head of the table? Considering your knighthood, I apologize we couldn’t arrange something round for you. I’m afraid oval was the best we could manage.” The American chuckled at his own joke.
The two Scottish security men took places near the door, and the Northern Irishmen found corners in which to stand. A thin black man in a chestnut brown suit entered and sat at the table with a bottle of water in front of him.
“Mr. Felix works for President Abubaker,” Lloyd explained. It was far short of an introduction. “He’s here to verify we kill the Gray Man.”
Mr. Felix nodded to Fitzroy from across the table.
Lloyd conferred with a young man with a ponytail and a nose ring whose thickly rimmed glasses reflected the light from the computers on the desk in front of him. He looked up to Lloyd and whispered.
Lloyd turned to Sir Donald. “Everything is on schedule. This man will be in charge of all communication between the watchers, the hunters, and myself. We will call him the Tech.”
The young man stood and proffered a hand politely, as if he had no idea he was being introduced to a kidnapping victim.
Fitzroy turned away.
Just then the Tech took a call in his headset. He spoke softly to Lloyd in a British accent.
Lloyd replied, “Perfect. Get assets there immediately. Pin down his location.”
Lloyd smiled at Fitzroy. “It was time I had a little luck. Gentry was spotted in Tbilisi, boarding a plane to Prague. The flight has already landed, so we can’t tail him from the airport, but we have men checking the hotels. Hopefully, we’ll have a hit team there waiting for him when he gets up in the morning.”
An hour later Lloyd sat at the table opposite Fitzroy. The lights were dimmed, and the Tech placed a backlight behind the American. A camera on the ceiling spun under motor power to face him. A monitor displayed a silhouette of Lloyd so obscured that the young attorney had to lift his arm in the air in a wave to be sure he was looking at himself in real time.
Next, one by one, LCD screens along the wall across the table came to life. At the bottom of each screen were a title and the local time. Luanda, Botswana, was first online. Four men sat in a conference room similar to the one in England. They were backlit and in silhouette, similar to Lloyd. Then Jakarta, Indonesia, came up. This time, there were six darkfigures sitting shoulder to shoulder at a table and looking at a monitor. Then Tripoli, Libya. A minute later Caracas, Venezuela; Pretoria, South Africa; and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia all illuminated simultaneously. Within the next five minutes the feeds from Albania, Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, and Bolivia were up and running. Freetown, Liberia, took another minute for the Tech to patch through. Finally the transmission from South Korea appeared. A single Asian man sat alone at a desk.
These were the government kill teams Kurt Riegel had arranged for the hunt. Riegel had already spoken to the head of each team’s agency, so he declined speaking to the operators directly. That was Lloyd’s job. As Riegel had said, he was just helping with arrangements and consultation.
Before the audio came online, Lloyd called across the room to the Tech, “Where are the rest of the Koreans?”
The Tech checked a paper on his desk quickly. “They just sent one guy. Don’t guess it will matter. All in all, there are over fifty men total on the twelve teams.”
The Tech next assured Lloyd his voice would be altered with both hardware and software to make it completely unrecognizable.
After a final moment for the Tech to check the audio link with the translators sitting off camera in each location that needed them, Lloyd cleared his throat, his silhouette brought a hand to his mouth and then lowered it.
“Gentlemen, I know you have been briefed in general about the mission we have for you. It’s very simple, really. I need a man found, but that is not your problem. I have nearly one hundred pavement artists either on call or alreadyon the job combing the area of operations at this very moment. Once found, I will need this man neutralized.Thiswill be your objective.” The image in the monitors at the twelve remote locations changed. A color photo of a clean-shaven Court Gentry in a sport coat and wire-rimmed glasses appeared on the screen. Lloyd had taken it from a forged passport in his CIA file. “This is the Gray Man, Court Gentry. The photograph before you is five years old. I am afraid I do not know how he might have changed his appearance. Don’t let his normalcy fool you. He was the best scalp hunter who ever worked for the CIA.”
Someone mumbled something in Spanish. Lloyd understood only one word: “Milosevic.”
“Yes, I thought some of you may already know this man by his reputation. Rumors abound regarding his operations. Some say he killed Milosevic, some say he did not. Some say he was responsible for the events in Kiev last year... Most reasonable minds recognize that to be impossible. Nevertheless, I know enough about specific jobs that he has carried out, both working for the U.S. government as well as his private work, to assure you Mr. Gentry is the most formidable singleton operator you will ever encounter.”
A new disembodied voice spoke. “Looks like a faggot.” From the accent, Lloyd immediately turned his attention to the South African feed.
Lloyd’s altered voice reverberated through the speakers. “He will be the faggot who walks right up to you and slips an ice pick between your ribs, pops your lung, and stands above you while you choke to death on your own blood.” There was anger in the American lawyer’s voice. “You kill him, andthen you can tell me what a fucking joke he is. Until you kill him, you keep your goddamn juvenile comments to yourself.”
The South African feed fell silent.
Lloyd continued, still glaring at the silhouettes in Pretoria. “The Gray Man is trained in long-distance sniping, in close quarters battle, in edged weapons, Krav Maga, the martial art used by Israeli Special Forces. He can kill with a long gun, a short gun, or no gun at all. He can take you out from a mile away, or you can die with his breath in your ear. He has extensive training in explosive ordnance and even poisons. There was a rumor going around the CIA that once in Lahore, Pakistan, he used a blowgun to take down a target in a restaurant, while he went unnoticed by the target’s security detail.” Lloyd paused for effect. “Gentry was at the next table. Kept right on eating his meal as the target dropped dead.
“As soon as we finish here, you will all board aircraft. We will send a dozen teams in a dozen planes to a dozen airports along the route we expect Gentry to take across Europe in the next forty-eight hours. I will oversee and coordinate the activities from here, and I will pass on any intelligence I may be able to obtain. Each team that takes part in the hunt and survives will be paid one million dollars plus any expenses incurred. The team that kills Gentry will be paid a bonus of twenty million dollars.”
“What’s America going to do if we kill him?” asked a man with a booming African voice.
Lloyd turned to the Liberian feed, but he was not certain. “This has been addressed by the leaders of your organizations. This man is already marked for death by the U.S.government. There is shoot-on-sight sanction at the CIA. He has no friends, no close family. No one on this earth will cry for him when he dies.”
