“Graubünden.”
“Where the fuck is that?”
SIXTEEN
Song Park Kim had sat motionless in a meditative state while airborne, but his eyes opened, awake and alert, upon touchdown at Charles de Gaulle Airport. The only passenger of the Falcon 50 executive jet, his small, rough hands rested on his knees, and his eyes remained hidden behind stylish sunglasses. His perfectly tailored pinstripe suit fit his environment precisely. The cabin was appointed for executive travel, and he appeared to be a youngish but otherwise unremarkable Asian executive.
The Falcon taxied off the runway, down and off the taxiway, past a long row of parked corporate jets, finally turning into an open hangar door. A waiting limousine, still wet from the drizzle of the gray evening, idled in the middle of the hangar. A driver stood alongside.
As soon as the jet came to a complete stop and the turbines slowed, the copilot made his way back to the seven-seat cabin carrying a nylon gym bag. He sat in front of Song Park Kim and lowered the bag onto a mahogany table between them.
Kim said nothing.
“I was told to give you this upon touchdown. Immigrationhas been dealt with. No customs problems. There is a car waiting for you.”
A curt nod, nearly imperceptible, from the short-haired Korean.
“Enjoy Paris, sir,” said the copilot. He stood and retreated to the cockpit. The small partition closed behind him.
Alone, Song Park unzipped the bag. Pulled out a Heckler & Koch MP7A1 machine pistol. He ignored the telescoping stock and held the weapon like a handgun out in front of him, looking through the gun’s simple sight system.
Two long, thin magazines, each filled with twenty 4.6x30mm hollow-point cartridges, were attached to one another by means of a nylon cinch.
He replaced the weapon in the bag.
Next he pulled out a mobile phone and an earpiece. He tucked the earpiece in place on the side of his head and turned it on. The phone he also turned on before slipping it into his coat pocket. A handheld GPS receiver went into another pocket. More MP7 magazines, a suppressor, and a change of clothes remained in the bag untouched.
A black-handled, black-bladed folding knife emerged from the bag, and he slipped this into his pocket.
Two minutes later he sat in the limousine. The driver looked straight ahead as Kim said, “City center.”
The limo rolled forward towards the hangar doors.
Kim was South Korean, an assassin with the National Intelligence Service.
He was their best. Five wet jobs inside North Korea, most of them with no support whatsoever, had built a legend for him in his unit. Seven more operations in China againstNorth Korean sanctions violators, two in Russia against purveyors of nuclear secrets, and a few hits on fellow South Koreans in need of permanent attitude adjustments vis-à-vis their nefarious northern neighbors had made Song Park Kim, at thirty-two, the obvious choice when his leaders were asked to furnish a killer to send to Paris to hunt a killer in exchange for cold, hard cash.
Kim did not voice opinions on his assignments. Working alone, he had no one to voice them to, but were his thoughts solicited, he would have said this mission smelled rotten to the core. Twenty million dollars for the head of the Gray Man, a former CIA operative who, he’d heard through the grapevine, had not deserved the sellout he had gotten from his masters. The twenty million was being offered by some European corporation. This was nothing like the nationalistic operations Kim worked throughout his career.
Still, Kim knew he was an instrument of South Korea’s domestic and foreign policy, his counsel had not been sought, and those whose judgment was valued had decided he should come here to Paris, settle in, wait for a call giving him the Gray Man’s whereabouts, and then pour hot bullets into the poor bastard’s back.
—
Graubünden is an eastern canton of Switzerland, tucked into a little niche near where the southwestern Austrian border concaves. It is known as the canton of a hundred and fifty valleys, and one of these valleys runs east to west in an area called the Lower Engadine. There the tiny village of Guarda rests atop the sharp ledge of a steep hill high above the valley floor, just miles from both the Austrian and Italian borders.There is only one sheer, winding road up to the little village, and it connects the one-room, whistle-stop train station below to the half-timbered houses above, a laborious forty-minute hike.
There are almost no cars in the village, and farm animals greatly outnumber the human residents. Narrow cobblestone roads wind steeply up and between the white buildings, alongside water troughs and fenced gardens. The town ends abruptly, and the steep hill resumes, a meadow that rises to a thick pine forest that itself gives way to rocky cliffs that loom above the town that surveys the valley floor below and all who pass or approach.
The villagers understand German but among themselves speak Romansch, a language spoken by barely 1 percent of the seven and a half million Swiss, and virtually no one else on earth.
At four a.m., a few snow flurries swirled around the little road that led from the valley floor up to Guarda. A lone man, dressed in thick jeans, a heavy coat, and a black knit cap limped up the steep, winding switchback. A small backpack hung off his shoulders.
Ten hours earlier, minutes after speaking with Don Fitzroy from a pink cell phone he’d snatched from the open purse of a staggeringly drunk female university student meandering alone on the sidewalk, Gentry found an outdoor clothing store in Budapest and purchased a full wardrobe, new from the bottom of his leather boots to the top of his black knit cap. Within an hour of leaving Szabo’s building, he was boarding a bus at Népliget Bus Terminal for the Hungarian border town of Hegyeshalom.
He climbed out of the bus a half mile from the border, walked north out of the village into a field, and turned left.
There was no moon; he had a tactical flashlight in his pack but did not use it. Instead, he stumbled to the west, walked a mile on his cut feet, could feel the sting and the warm blood squish in his socks and between his cold toes.
Finally, just before eight in the evening, he crossed a field full of modern windmills and found himself in the Austrian border town of Nickelsdorf.
