At two thirty a soft rain began to fall. Five hundred yards east-southeast of the cathedral of Notre Dame, on the Left Bank of the Seine, the Jardin Tino Rossi was barren in the dark. Fifty feet from the cobblestone quay, a grassy embankment ran along next to a low stone wall. There, between a tree and the wall, a figure lay on its back, knees raised slightly and arms askew. Anyone who walked up to the waterlogged body would see it had obviously come from the river. Perhaps a defiant final jolt of strength had allowed its weak arms to crawl clear of the river’s edge into the soft, wet grass; maybe it even found its feet for a moment, but then those arms and legs must have given out wholly, and the body had collapsed on the cold ground.
There was no movement at all from the body, no sound either, until an electronic noise began peeping, muffled by soaked clothing.
The body did not stir at once. Finally a twitch in the shoulders, a slight turn of the head in new recognition of its surroundings. After another ring, the form slowly reached into a coat pocket, pulled out a plastic case, and fumbledwith it with one hand. It popped open, and the satellite phone dropped into the grass. The body’s eyes remained on the sky.
After jumping from the bridge, Gentry had hit the water hard. The cold took away what breath remained in his lungs after the impact. He sank deep. When he found the surface, he had already been carried downstream, under the Pont Neuf and towards the west. He sucked air and water as he bobbed for a minute or so before seeing a small house barge churning upstream towards him. Though Court was weak, on the verge of losing consciousness, he hooked an arm around the bottom rung of a ladder hanging off the side of the slow-moving black boat as it passed him. He held on with one hand, kept his head low in the boat’s foamy wake as the craft towed him back under the bridge from which he had just fallen. He heard the shouts of men in the water around him as they dove down, looking for a body, or trained their flashlights around the spans of the bridge.
Ten minutes later, Court was free of immediate detection. With nearly his last ounce of strength, he tried to climb the ladder to get on board the boat, but he fell. His weak legs, the pain in his gut, his wet shoes, the numbing cold all worked against him, and he dropped back into the frigid current. He reached out for the barge, took nothing but a fistful of the river, while the black ship chugged away upstream.
Fortunately for Gentry, he was not far from the water’s edge. He made it to the Left Bank, struggled up onto the pavement, climbed to his feet, but fell again in the wet grass next to a tree in the Jardin Tino Rossi.
And here he lay for twenty minutes, eyes open but unfixed, the soft drops of rain falling and beating and exploding against his pupils.
The phone rang again, and he lifted it off the grass, his eyes still on the impossibly low rain clouds illuminated by city lights around him.
His voice was weak and distant. “Yeah?”
“Good evening. This is Claire Fitzroy calling. May I please speak with Mr. Jim?”
Gentry blinked away the rain. His eyes instead filled with tears. He controlled his voice as best as possible, did what he could to mask the pain and the exhaustion and the despair and the utter sense of failure. “It’s past your bedtime.”
“Yes, sir. But Grandpa Donald said I could call you.”
“You remember me?”
“Oh, yes, sir. I remember how you drove us to school. Slept on the little cot in the hall, but Mummy said you didn’t really sleep, you watched out for us all night. You drank coffee, and you liked my mummy’s eggs.”
“That’s right. Extra cheese.” Court’s pelvic bone had been gored, his abdominal wall punctured. He did not think the knife made it deep enough to slice through his intestines, but the pain burning into the center of his being was indescribable, nonetheless. He assumed he was still bleeding. He’d done nothing to stanch the flow since he’d dropped into the river nearly an hour earlier.
The sirens of emergency vehicles screeched past on Gentry’s right. He was hidden from their view by the stone wall and the darkness.
“Mr. Jim, Grandpa Donald said you are coming to save us.”
Tears streamed down the American’s face. He wasn’t dead, but this felt a lot like dying. He knew he could not make it to Bayeux, and even if he somehow could, what could he do but bleed to death on the castle’s doorstep?
“Where is your grandfather?”
“He’s in the bedroom. He can’t walk right now. He said he fell down the stairs, but that is not true. The men here hurt him. He gave me the phone and told me to go into the bathroom closet and call you.” She paused. “That’s why I have to whisper. You are coming, right? Please tell me you are coming. If you don’t come... You are our only chance, since Daddy’s gone to London. Mr. Jim... are you there?”
Typical of Fitzroy. If Sir Donald himself had made this call, Court would have told him all was lost. But the cagey bastard had known Gentry would be in dire straits right about now, so who better to entice him to keep up the fight than one of the twins?
“I’ll do my best.”
“Do you promise?”
Court lay there in the dark, his freezing, soaked suit askew on his body, the cold mud pressed into the back of his neck and his shaved head. Slowly, with a weak voice, he said, “I’ll be there very soon.”
“Do you promise?”
Court looked down at the wound in his belly. He pressed hard upon it now. “I promise,” he said, and he seemed to muster a little power in his voice. “And when I get there, I need you to promise you will do something for me.”
“Yes, sir?”
“When you hear a lot of noise, I want you to go to yourroom, crawl under your bed, and stay there. Can you do that for me?”
“Noise? What kind of noise? Do you mean guns?”
“Idomean guns.”
