But Elise refused to treat the man as an inanimate object. She was polite and found him to respond in kind. He never looked at her; this she insisted when her husband asked. “He looks out the window to the street, out the window to the back garden, at the door to the twins’ room. Never
The introduction of an additional man to the Fitzroy household inevitably caused friction between husband and wife.
Claire and Kate took to Jim. They mimicked his American accent, and he was good-natured about it. He drove them to school each day in the Saab while Elise rode along. Young Kate teased him once about being a bad driver, and he surprised mother and daughters with a burst of laughter, admitting he usually traveled by trains or rode a motorcycle. Within a second his face rehardened, and his eyes returned to the mirrors and the road ahead.
For almost two months he was at the girls’ sides every moment they were awake, and he was on a cot in the hallway by their door while they slept. The only moment of excitement in the eight weeks came one Sunday on the way to the market when a car accident blocked the road. As soon as traffic stopped, Jim bumped the car up onto the pavement. He opened his sport coat, and Elise saw the butt of a handgun nestled under his arm. He drove down the pavement with his left hand, through a scrambling crowd, while his right hand curled around the pistol in its shoulder holster. Ten seconds later they were in the clear. He said not a word to the passengers, like it was just another normal Sunday jaunt out for milk and cakes. Mum and her girls stared at him wide-eyed for the rest of the drive.
And then one morning he was gone. The quilt was left folded on the cot, the pillow laid on top. It was in the papers that the Pakistani mobsters had been arrested by the dour-faced men at Scotland Yard, the danger had passed, and Sir Donald had sent his Yank away.
Phillip and Elise breathed an incredible sigh of relief that the threat was no more, and the ridiculous law had been defeated.
But the little girls cried when their father told them Uncle Jim had to go back to America and, no, he was not likely to return.
Court bought a motorcycle less than an hour after he closed his call with Fitzroy. It was an ’86 Honda CM450 with a decent enough engine and tires that looked like they could make it for a few days of heavy use.
The seller was a local boy who worked at a petrol station alongside the road in Seberov, just southeast of Prague. No paperwork, just a cash transaction, a few hundred crowns extra for a helmet and a map, and Court was on the road.
He hadn’t hesitated a moment since hanging up the phone with Don. Court knew there was a day or so of travel ahead of him if he was to go to Normandy. He could work on a plan while on the move and check in with Fitzroy en route. No, there was no time to sit on a park bench here, six hundred miles away, and contemplate.
After buying the bike, he stopped at his cache in a long-term rental unit four miles south of the city center. He no longer had a key for the door, so he merely picked the lock. He could recite the credit card number used to pay the monthly rent if he had been questioned, but in fact there was no one around. He’d established the cache nearly three years earlier, had only been back once, and now the small, unlit room was dusty and moldy and cold. It was an eight feet square, empty except for four duffel bags stacked one on top of the other, each wrapped in a white garbage bag covered in dust. The cache contained pistols, rifles, ammo, clothing, and vacuum-packed food and medical supplies. He tossed the CZ he’d picked up in the gunfight in the metro into one of the bags and retrieved a small Walther P99 Compact pistol and two extra magazines. The weapon was clean and well-lubricated, but still he checked the ammunition and the operation of the slide and the striker. He ignored the rest of his guns. He knew he could hardly cross the border into the European Union with an arsenal on his back.
The handgun would just have to do.
Next he ripped open a medical kit, dropped his pants, and sat on the cold, dirty floor. The scratching of a rat in the aluminum walls let him know just how unsanitary these conditions were. He examined his day-old injury with a professional fascination. Court had never before been shot, but he’d picked up dozens of other injuries in his work. His leg throbbed like a bitch, but he’d been hurt worse from burns, broken bones, a chunk of shrapnel in his neck. It came with the job.
He poured a generous splash of iodine on the entrance and exit wounds. He tore open packages of bandages and antiseptic cream, redressed his injury as well as possible in the low light, and then crumpled all his supplies back into a small bag and shoved it into his pocket. In his second duffel he found cold weather gear. He changed out of his light clothing into thick corduroys, a grease-stained brown cotton shirt, and a thick canvas jacket. A pair of work gloves went on his hands, and they warmed his fingers instantly. Leather hiking boots. A black watch cap that could be pulled down as a ski mask was positioned on his head. He zipped up all his cases, left them as he’d found them, closed the door, and climbed back on his bike.
Minutes later he found himself at a crossroads south of the city. A few hours west was the German border, then the French border, then Normandy.
He blew out a sigh masked by his engine’s rumble. Steam from his exhalation poured through the microfiber ski mask covering his mouth.
If it were only that easy.
No, he had to make a few crucial pit stops along the way. Gentry needed to pick up some materiel before he arrived in Normandy. He knew where to get what he needed, but he also knew it would involve an extra half day on the road.
For one, Court needed a new “escape,” new forged identity papers. He still had the passport he’d used to get into the Czech Republic, and he knew it would get him around in Central Europe, where they did not have all their immigration processes computerized and integrated, but he’d already been burned once under the legend Martin Baldwin, Canadian freelance journalist. Only a hopeless optimist or a damn fool would try to use it to get into the European Union, and Gentry was neither. But more than entree to the EU, he needed an escape solid enough to get him out of Europe when the shooting stopped. He knew that after he did what he had to do in Normandy, he would need to disappear somewhere far away, and clean identity papers would be the easiest way to achieve this end.
Court knew a man in Hungary who could provide him with documentation quickly. With well-made docs, he could cross quickly and efficiently into the EU and, should he have to produce papers for any reason along the way, he could safely do so. And then, once he’d finished his operation, he’d be able to dump all his guns and gear, hop on a plane to South America or the South Pacific, or fucking Antarctica if the heat on him remained as hot as it had been the last two days.
There’d be no time to run around and buy dirty docs after Normandy, and no way to quickly get off the Continent without them.
A cold November wind blew from the west as Gentry turned onto the E65, the highway that would take him past Brno, into Slovakia, around Bratislava, and then south to the Hungarian border. From there it would be a quick trip down to Budapest. Six hours’ travel time, factoring in a couple of quick stops for gas and two poorly guarded borders.
As he opened the throttle and leaned into the cold wind, he forced himself to think about the next forty-eight hours. It was grim contemplation, but necessary, and a hell of a lot better than dwelling on the past forty- eight.
TWELVE
Gentry entered the capital of Hungary at three in the afternoon. Rain clouds hung low and gray white, just tickling the rounded green tips of the hills of Buda on the west side of the Danube River that bisected the city of four million. Court had last visited Budapest four years earlier on his first job for Fitzroy, a simple domestic op against a Serbian hit man who’d put a bomb in a local restaurant to kill a mob gunrunner but in so doing also took out an American man’s brother. The surviving brother had money and ties to the underworld, so it was a simple thing for him to connect with Fitzroy and hire a triggerman. And it was a simple thing for Fitzroy to send his newest
