backside, and landed on the snow. The grade was especially sheer at the beginning. He’d lost control almost immediately but found his position again at a slightly less severe stretch of trail that proved to be all too short.
On the hillside to his left he could hear the gunfire and sense the flashes of light, but he did not turn his head away from his feet and what was in front of him.
For nearly a hundred yards he’d been happy with his plan. He sledded quickly out of the kill zone. And in truth, it wasn’t a bad plan really, but, as it turned out, its execution was wanting. When he skidded into the woods, the pine roots crossed the sheep trail, and he was sliding too fast to stop.
He went airborne at an ice patch over a root knob, and his body flung ninety degrees in the air. He landed on his side, perpendicular to the direction in which he was traveling, and this sent him spinning, rolling over and over. His bandaged knees took his body weight in a glancing blow as he spun, his feet caught a snowdrift, and this jerked his body around ninety degrees more. He found himself headfirst, his duffel bag sled was long lost behind him now, and he shot out of the forest and into the meadow above the old village of Guarda with his hands out in front of him like Superman and with absolutely no control over his momentum.
The slide, in its entirety, lasted just over forty-five seconds. To Gentry it seemed like a lifetime.
When it was over, he lay on his back in the snow. After taking a few seconds to control his vertigo, he sat up, checked his body for functionality, and then stood unsteadily in the black morning. He took stock of his pain. The bullet wound in his right thigh throbbed more than usual; he was certain he’d reopened any flesh that had rejoined in the last two days. His knees stung; they were likely bleeding. His ankles hurt but seemed to be operational. His rib cage on the right side flared with ache when he sucked in a breath of the cold mountain air. He thought it likely he’d cracked one of his floating ribs, which would be painful but not particularly burdensome. His left elbow seemed to have hit something, or a series of somethings, or every goddamn something on the mountainside, and the area along his funny bone was stiff and swelling.
With all that taken into account, the Gray Man knew he was fortunate to find himself in such good condition. Sliding, rolling, and bouncing down a steep hillside in the dark could have gone much worse, even without the gunmen firing machine guns at him.
Then he took stock of his belongings. His buoyed spirits sank anew. He’d lost everything but the small Walther handgun in his ankle holster, his wallet snapped shut in his back pocket, and a folding knife in his front pocket. Everything else—sat phone, medical equipment, extra ammo, guns, grenades, binoculars—all gone.
It took him another twenty minutes to get to the bottom of the valley, down to the one road and the one railroad track, to the one-room train station. The snow had turned to sleet, and he shivered, his ungloved hands buried deep in his pockets.
He saw a minivan, the only vehicle parked in the tiny lot. He took this as the kill squad’s vehicle. He broke the driver’s-side window and climbed in quickly, then smashed the steering column apart with two kicks of his boot heel. In seconds he had the ignition barrel out, and in under a minute he’d sparked the ignition wires. But the van would not start. Hurriedly he felt around under the dash for a kill switch. Finding none, he climbed back out of the van, slammed the door shut, and jabbed his knife into each of the tires. He knew sabotaging it would show the gunners he’d made it down this far and was certainly on the road by now but, he decided, they would have to leave Guarda immediately anyway. The police would be arriving within minutes. The kill team wouldn’t be able to search the forest for him all morning, so there was little use in trying to mis lead them that he was still on the mountain.
As it stood, he figured they were no more than ten to twenty minutes behind him now, depending on how concerned they were about being detected by the villagers or how nervous they were about bumping into the first police cars coming up the hillside.
Court broke a small windowpane in the door to the train station, reached around, and opened the latch. First he checked a schedule on a wall, a timetable for all the trains in the country. Then he pulled a heavy brown coat off a coat stand. Gentry slipped it on. It was a little tight at the shoulders, but it would keep him alive. A woman’s bicycle with thick tires leaned against a wall, and Gentry took it, closed the door behind him, and winced along with the flare-up of pain in his lower rib cage when he kicked a leg over to mount it.
It was after six, and he knew the trains would not begin running through the valley until seven. He needed to make it to a larger village to get the first express train of the morning to Zurich.
So he biked west on the Engadine Road away from the hint of a faint orange daybreak behind him. His lower back, right thigh, and left knee burned with each revolution of the pedals. His face stung in the cold. He leaned into the snowfall, dead tired and wounded and disheartened. He’d wasted an entire day going after documents and weapons, and he’d acquired nothing but injuries. Still, there were few men on earth who could summon determination in the face of adversity as well as the haggard and bloody man in the ill-fitting coat on the woman’s bike. He had no plan, no gear, no help, and now he was certain he had no friends. Fitzroy had lied to him, had set him up. Court knew he had every right to disappear and leave Don to whatever had hold of him, whatever made him burn his number one asset.
But Court decided to continue to the west, if only for now. He knew he needed a better understanding of what was going on, and he only knew one way to get it.
EIGHTEEN
Shortly before six a.m. London time, Sir Donald Fitzroy looked out the portside window of the Sikorsky and down at a green meadow. As the helicopter raced at an altitude of just a few hundred feet, the landscape dropped away, and whitecaps and dark water appeared a thousand feet down. Below him were the white cliffs of Dover, the end of the British Isles and the beginning of the English Channel. He and Lloyd and Mr. Felix, the representative of President Abubaker, along with the Tech and the four LaurentGroup henchmen, flew south towards Normandy. The sixty-eight-year-old Englishman did not know why. “Additional incentive,” Lloyd had said an hour earlier. “On the off chance the Libyans botch the job in Switzerland and Court changes his mind, tells you that for all he cares your family can go to hell, then I have another lure I will use to reel him in.”
Before Fitzroy could question further, Lloyd was on the phone ordering a helicopter fueled for a flight across the channel to be sent immediately to the Bat tersea Heliport.
Sir Donald traveled to the Continent often, occasionally by aircraft from Gatwick or Heathrow, sometimes by the Eurostar high-speed train through the channel, but he much preferred the overland and over-sea route. A train south through Chatham and then to Dover, onto a ferry to Calais in France or Oestende or Zebrugge in Belgium. This was the old way, the way of his youth, and neither the quick and easy airlines nor the modern expediency of the tunnel under the North Sea could compare with the feeling of pride and love that he felt when he returned to England on the ferry and, in the distant haze over the water, he could see the white cliffs of Dover in all their majesty.
Was there anything so beautiful in the world to an Englishman?
And above the cliffs, white birds soared, welcoming travelers over the channel much as they had the returning aircraft of the Royal Air Force seventy years before, the thin airframes pocked with holes and filled with young boys who had just killed and died and risked all for Her Majesty in the air war against fascism.
Now Donald gazed with melancholy out the portside window, watched the beauty of Dover slip away behind him in the moonlit predawn, and knew he would likely never see this view again.
“I just got the word from Riegel. The Libyans have failed.” It was Lloyd speaking over the intercom, his voice bleating through the earphones of the headset that pinched the tufts of white hair on either side of Sir Donald’s head.
Fitzroy looked around the cabin and found Lloyd on the other side, facing back to him. Their eyes met in the dim red glow of the cabin lights. Fitzroy noticed the young American’s suit had wrinkled in the past twenty-four hours, his necktie now hung loose around an open collar.
“How many lives lost?” asked the Englishman.
“Zero, surprisingly. One man injured. They are saying the Gray Man is a ghost.”
“The comparison is not without merit,” said Fitzroy into his microphone.
“Sadly, no. Ghosts are
Fitzroy shook his head. “Forget it. I was the only one who knew about the cache in Switzerland. He will know
