“Anything for my best student.” Maurice disappeared down a back hallway. He returned a minute later with a sheaf of euros in an envelope and a key on a chain. He wrote an address down on the envelope and handed it to his protégé. “I think you’ll be pleased with the gear.”
Court pocketed the items.
“Another beer?”
“I’d love one, but I’d better get moving.”
“Understood.” Maurice poured several antiinflammatory pain pills from a bottle in a cabinet into Gentry’s hand. Court downed them with the last swig from his bottle. Then they walked together towards the back door.
Court said, “I wish I could say I’d see you again. If I make it through tomorrow, I’ll have to drop off the face of the earth for a while. Maybe if you don’t pay your doctor’s bill, we can have another beer someday.”
Maurice smiled, but this time he did not laugh. “I’m dying, Court. No sense in putting lipstick on a pig. I can’t make it any prettier than it is.”
“Is there anything I can do for you? Anybody you need me to see? Look in on after you’re gone?”
“There’s nobody. No family. No friends. There was just the Agency.”
“I know the feeling,” Court said. Spending time with hismentor was good in that Gentry had so few opportunities to talk to someone who’d gone through some of the same things in life as he had. But it was also bad. Depressing, because Court saw a measure of himself in the tired old cynical eyes of the man facing him in the living room and knew that, though no one likes to get old, in Gentry’s profession, mere survival was the absolute best one could hope for.
And this was success?
“You can do one thing for me.” Maurice smiled as he spoke. “When you get yourself extracted from this mess you’re in, I want you to get away to some tropical island somewhere. When you read in the paper about an older-than-dirt disgraced American banker dying in Switzerland, I want you to go out to your favorite cantina, find yourself a pretty girl, and drink the night away with her. I’m serious. Get through this and get out of this life. There are still corners of the world where no one gives a shit what you’ve done. Go there. Meet somebody. Live like a human. Do that for me, kid.”
“I’ll try.”
“Someday you will learn. All the things you’ve done, all the things in the past you thought were dead and buried—you think you’ve put them behind you, but you haven’t. You’ve just stored them away. Stored for the time when there is only you and a quiet room and your memories and the goddamned demons of those you killed.”
“I’ve got to go, Maurice.”
“I know I can’t stop you from doing what you have to do. But think about what I am saying. All the shit I taught you back at Harvey Point. Sooner you forget what I taught youthen, sooner you follow what I’m telling you now, the sooner the killing and the death will be dealt with. End of sermon, kid.”
They shook hands.
Court’s game face reappeared in a flash. He crammed the wad of cash into his pants pocket and the sat phone into his jacket and headed for the back door. He peered through the blinds out the front window, into the medieval passageway.
Instantly he sensed that something wasn’t right.
“What is it?” asked Maurice, picking up on his protégé’s unease.
“Check the back. See if the girl is still there.”
Maurice walked down the hall to the back living room and called out to Court, “She’s gone.”
“They pulled her.”
“Who pulled her?”
“Hitters.”
“Because they want her out of the way when it goes loud?”
“Exactly.”
“They’re here?” asked Maurice as he returned to Gentry’s side.
“Not here, but close,” confirmed the Gray Man. “I can fucking smell them.” Gentry’s eyes narrowed. “Tell me you didn’t set me up, Maurice.”
“Not on your life, Court.”
