Lastly, he pulled wads of soggy foam from a mattress to use as earplugs when the time was right.
Satisfied with his preparations, Court waited.
Soon Szabo leaned over and said good-bye, then disappeared. This was the Gray Man’s cue. Frantically, the American cut the water pipe. Within a minute the cistern had filled more than knee-deep with water as hot as a bath. Court stood and held the grenade with the pistol affixed to it and the pants with the air chambers, all in his hands.
He stood there in his underwear and waited for the water to rise.
Within three minutes he floated up with the water and the mattresses, treading in place. After six minutes, the cistern was filled nearly to the top. He fought panic; he knew there was no guarantee his contraption would work or, even if it did, that it would be powerful enough to blow open the trapdoor.
When the water was three inches from the Plexiglas ceiling, Court forced himself to hyperventilate in the little space. He filled his lungs to capacity and then ducked down below the surface, positioned the floating bomb at one of the hinges. He pushed a mattress between himself and his bomb, then he swam down to the bottom of the cistern, one hand holding the line of mattress fabric that led to the pistol’s trigger and the other hand wrapped around the water pipe to hold him at depth. Looking up to make sure everything was in place, he saw his contraption had floated away from the hinge. Quickly, with depleting air reserves, he shot up to the top. Now there was no air here left to breathe. He fought the mattress to the side, repositioned the bomb, and struggled again to the bottom. The day-old gunshot wound in his right thigh burned with the flexion of his muscles. Panic, frantic exertion, and oxygen depletion all seemed to compete with one another to squeeze on his heart and crush it tight deep inside his body.
Finally he reached the water pipe and took hold. He looked back up and saw his device was in place.
Shortly before he pulled the cord, he saw a dark figure step onto the riser and kneel down, then turn back to face someone in the room.
The team leader said, “He must be dead. This hole is filled with—”
With a muted pop, the black-clad operator lifted into the air. The Plexiglas burst below his feet, white water sprayed in all directions, pieces of sharp plastic tore into the ceiling above. The operator crashed to the left of the riser, a tidal wave of warm water sloshing over him.
The other armed men dived for cover. Szabo fell on his back in the middle of the room.
The leader was alive. He scrambled to his knees and retrained his weapon on the riser to his left.
“Jesus! All elements, stand fast!” he shouted, his ear-drums ringing from the explosion.
Just then, small men in civilian attire and rifles held high poured into the room from the hallway, and gunfire erupted all around.
Laszlo Szabo was the first to die.
FIFTEEN
Even with his ersatz plugs, Court’s ears screamed from the pressure of the blast. He pushed off with his feet at the bottom of the cistern and shot to the surface. He had no idea who was waiting above for him. The CIA? Laszlo back for a last check on him? Ultimately, it didn’t matter; he needed air.
He’d built momentum on the way up, so when his head broke the surface of the water, he shoved open the plastic door. Both hinges were broken off, and the Plexiglas was cracked through. He sucked in a huge breath of air and scrambled over the side, rolling off the riser and down to the floor, enveloped in a wave of the warm water. He found himself along the wall in the back corner of the room. All around was the sound of close gunfire and shouting men, but Court could see no one around the platform’s edge. He rolled to his knees, into a low crouch, and bolted towards the back hallway, his wet feet slapping the linoleum. He didn’t take time to look back. Whatever was going down in this room, Gentry had no intention of getting in the middle of it with no firearm and no idea who the players were.
The doorjamb to the hallway splintered with a burst of submachine gun fire just a step in front of Gentry’s face. He ran right at it, through the overpressure of the supersonic ammo and the flying splinters, down into the dark hall and to the bathroom where he’d shaved an hour and a half earlier. He ducked in quickly for his backpack and threw it over a shoulder.
Wearing only his underwear and a bandage on his thigh, he sprinted into a small bedroom at the end of the hall. Over the low twin bed was a window with a thin wire grating. He shattered the glass with a metal end table, lifted the mattress and pushed it over the windowsill to cover any remaining shards, then rolled out over it into a small courtyard. A door to the building behind Laszlo’s was locked, so Court ran to the far corner of the courtyard. He used iron security bars over a first-story window to climb his way to a second-story balcony where, after four or five tentative kicks from his left heel, he finally shattered a glass window.
Loud snaps of gunfire continued below and behind him. He took care to avoid the broken glass left in the pane as he stepped through the window, but as he climbed into the apartment, he cut both his feet stepping in on the carpet. He cried out in pain, fell to his knees, and cut them, too.
Crab-walking through the small bedroom, he finally stood, hobbled into the bathroom, and rifled through the medicine cabinet. A few seconds later, he sat on the toilet and dressed his fresh injuries. His right foot was okay, a little jab that he poured antiseptic into and wrapped with toilet paper. The ball of his left foot was much worse. It was a relatively deep puncture. He washed it quickly and cinched a hand towel tight around it to stanch the bleeding. It needed stitches but, Court knew, he wouldn’t be getting stitches any time soon.
Similar to his feet, his left knee was okay, but his right was badly injured. With a wince he pulled a shard of glass from his skin, an unlucky barb at the end hooked on his flesh as he removed it. Blood ran down to the floor.
“Fuck,” he groaned as he cleaned and dressed the gash as best he could.
Three minutes later, he realized the shooting had died down across the courtyard. He heard sirens, shouting, a baby crying in the next apartment, woken from its nap by the activity.
He’d thought the apartment was empty, but when he walked into the living room, still just in his wet boxers but now with wrapped feet and knees, he found an elderly lady sitting alone on a couch. She looked at him with eyes unafraid, bright and piercing and blue. He put a hand out to calm her but lowered it slowly.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said, but he doubted she understood. He mimicked pulling on pants, and she slowly pointed to a room down the hall. There he found men’s clothes. A dead husband, maybe? No, a son away at work. He found blue coveralls and climbed into them, and heavy steel-toed boots that were too big but serviceable with two pairs of white socks.
Gentry thanked the lady with a bow and a smile. She nodded back slowly. He pulled a wad of euros from his backpack and laid them on a table. The old woman said something he did not understand, and with another bow, he was out the door to the second-floor hallway.
Injured, unarmed, with neither means of transportation nor the documents he came all the way to Budapest to acquire, Court Gentry stepped outside and into a steady rain. He looked down to his watch. It was five in the afternoon, eight and one-half hours since beginning his journey. He seemed so much farther away now than when he started.
At LaurentGroup’s London office, Lloyd and Fitzroy waited for the news of the Indonesians. It came after four p.m., but not from the team itself. Sir Donald’s phone rang. It was Gentry.
“Cheltenham.”
“It’s me.”
Fitzroy had to compose himself before speaking. Finally he said, “Thank God! You’ve gotten clear of Szabo?”
“Yeah. Just.”
