“Kiss my ass. Want a beer?”
Gentry tossed the revolver underhanded onto the leather sofa. “More than anything else in the world.”
Two minutes later Court sat on the kitchen counter. He held a fat bag of frozen blueberries over his left wrist. The cold burned his skin, but it reduced the swelling. He could still move his fingers, though, so the hand was functional, if barely.
His host was Maurice, just Maurice. Court didn’t knowhis real name, could only be certain that it wasnotMaurice. He was an old agency man, Gentry’s primary instructor at the Special Activities Division’s Autonomous Asset Development Program training center at Harvey Point, North Carolina. Court only knew tidbits about the man and his history. He knew he’d cut his teeth in Vietnam, performed targeted killings in the Phoenix Program, then spent the next twenty years as a Cold War spook in Moscow and Berlin.
He’d been demobilized for years, working as a trainer for the CIA when a twenty-year-old convicted murderer was brought into his prefabricated aluminum classroom within sight of the Atlantic Ocean. Gentry was both cocky and quiet, raw beyond belief, but in possession of intelligence, discipline, and zeal. Maurice turned him out in under two years and announced to Operation’s leadership that this kid was the best hard asset he’d ever built.
That was fourteen years ago, and their paths had seldom crossed since. Maurice had been lured back into the game after 9/11, as were most high-level retired assets still in possession of a pulse. Because of his age and uncertain health, he was sent to Geneva to work in the finance end of the CIA’s Directorate of Clandestine Services. His knowledge of Swiss banking and bankers, accrued through forty years of utilizing numbered accounts for CIA shell corporations in his operations, made him an effective paymaster for operatives and operations around the globe.
It was easy work—clean, compared to some of the jobs he’d done as a younger man—but it was not without danger or controversy. Shortly after Court had been drummed out of the agency, Maurice himself was cashiered by the brass.Something about misappropriated funds, though Court did not believe the official story for a minute.
The word from Langley was that Maurice was now completely retired from the CIA. Court did not know that for sure, wasn’t 100 percent certain Maurice wouldn’t turn on him, which explained the pupil’s initial suspicion of his teacher.
—
Maurice handed Gentry a bottle of French beer, so the younger man cradled the frozen bag of blueberries in his lap and let his wrist rest upon it. The stinging cold slowly numbed the ache. The old man asked, “You hurt bad?”
“Not really.”
“You always were a tough bastard.”
“I learned from the best not to whine. It never worked around you.”
“I haven’t seen you in six years. Cyprus, was it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You saw the watcher outside?”
“Yeah. Girl with the braids.”
“Good boy. She’s pretty good, dressed like a tourist. We get a lot of tourists here in the Old Town. I hate tourists.”
“Transitory faces.”
“That’s right. Do yourself a favor, Court. If you make it to retirement, move someplace so damn god-forsaken no tourist would set foot there.”
“Will do.”
Maurice coughed. Cleared his throat. “There’s news floating about. Not connected yet, just bouncing around in the ether, waiting for dots to be connected. Prague, Budapest,and then this morning up by the Austrian border. I knew something big was going down, didn’t figure I knew any of the players until the coverage on my house started about eleven thirty. ’Bout an hour after she showed up, all the local stations began broadcasting the news of the gunfight just north of Lausanne. At that point, I knew you were heading this way.”
“How did you know it was me?”
“I connected the dots. A hunted man who just kept on living. Death and destruction in his wake. As the bodies got closer, I told myself, ‘Here comes Court.’ ”
“Here I am,” Gentry confirmed distantly, looking at the bottle in his hand.
“Tell me you didn’t shoot those poor cops.”
“You know me. I wouldn’t kill a cop.”
“Iknewyou. People change.”
“Ididn’t change. The police were holding me when a wet team showed up. I tried to convince themIwas no longer their biggest problem. They wouldn’t listen.”
“A lot of people want you dead, Court.”
