Gentry spoke up finally. “If you touch Claire or Kate, I will find you, and I will torture you so slowly that the only prayer on your lips will be for a quick death.”
Lloyd clapped his hands. “That’s what I like to hear! Emotion! Passion! Well, you’d better get here in time for eggs and biscuits tomorrow, because snapping the necks of those pretty little girls will be the first order of business after breakfast!”
Fitzroy had been silent, sullen. He’d sat to the side during the conversation like a forgotten dog. But when Lloyd spoke his last piece, Sir Donald launched from his Louis XV chair and onto the American and grabbed at the young man’s throat. Freshly led wires to the computers and speakers became caught up in their legs, and equipment was ripped from the table. Lloyd’s swivel chair flipped up as the two crashed to the ground. Sir Donald tore off Lloyd’s wire-rimmed glasses and smashed his fists into the taut cheekbones of his adversary’s face.
It took almost ten seconds for the two Northern Irish guards to enter the room and pull the heavy Englishman off the young American solicitor. When finally they were separated, Fitzroy was shoved back in his chair. The two Scottish guards next rushed in and held his head and his arms. Shouts and screaming echoed all over the third floor as one of the Belarusians came up with chains found in the garage alongside the greenhouse. Fitzroy was strapped roughly into his chair, but he still fought against them all as chains were run over the arms and legs of the Louis XV and tightly around the arms and legs of Sir Donald. The cold steel links were strung around his neck, another loop at his forehead. Everything was secured with a huge padlock.
All the while Lloyd remained on the floor. He’d sat up, breathing heavily, pushed his hair back in place, and retightened his necktie. He found his glasses on the floor, bent the arms a bit to approximate their original shape, and put them back on. His face was scratched slightly, his arms and chin and neck were bruised, but he was otherwise uninjured.
Finally he climbed back into his chair and rolled back up to the desk near the telephone.
“Sorry, Court. Some technical difficulties there. We’re back with you. You still there?”
But Gentry had hung up.
Lloyd looked to Fitzroy. Fitzroy looked to Lloyd, basically because he could look nowhere else with his head immobilized with chains.
“He’d better stay on track, Don. He’d better stay on track, or you and your family are going to die slow and miserable fucking deaths! You take me for some Ivy League lightweight? So did the CIA. I was shuffling policy papers while the door kickers got all the glory. Well, fuck them, and fuck you! I can play as dirty as the best of the dirty tricks boys. I can and I will do what I need to do to see this through. Abubaker will sign the contract, and we’ll be readying our natural gas operation by noon tomorrow. You and yours will be forgotten by me. Between now and then you can live or you can die, I could not give a rat’s ass which. It’s your decision, Donny boy. Pull that shit again, and see if I give you a third chance.”
“Court
“He won’t make it here. But even if he does, the Gray Man who makes it here will be a very different man than the one you know. He’ll be hurt, short on time, short on sleep, short on gear.”
“Gear?”
“Yes. These types are lost without their gear.”
Sir Donald chuckled angrily. “You haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. Court’s most valuable piece of kit is between his ears. The only weapon he needs is his mind. Everything else: guns, knives, bombs . . . they’re all just accessories.”
“Ridiculous. You’ve bought into the fairy tale of tactical operators. A glorified goon is all he is.”
“It’s no fairy tale, and there is no glory in what he does. He’s a man at work and as cold and as brutal and as efficient as a corner butcher going about his business. Get in his way, and you’ll see.”
“Oh, I have every intention of getting in his way.”
Fitzroy’s corpulent face was beet red and covered in sweat after struggling with five men. He was chained like a beast to the chair with the thick links covering a third of his head. Still, he smiled.
“I’ve dealt with talkers before, little wankers who move their mouths when their backs are to the wall. Pricks with power. I have seen many a chap like you come and go in my day. You will have your moment, and then your moment will pass. You don’t scare me.”
Lloyd’s face twitched as he leaned close to Fitzroy. “No? How ’bout I walk downstairs, say, ‘Eenie, meenie, minie, moe,’ come back up here with a little pigtailed prize? How ’bout I—”
“You little sod. Scared of the man in chains, so you threaten a child? The more you try to show me how dangerous you are, the more you fit into the mold of exactly what I took you for the first time I saw you. A weak little nancy boy. A pathetic prat. You can’t sort out an old man lashed to a chair, so you have to go after a weaker target. Bloody fucking wanker.”
Lloyd’s eyes narrowed with fury, and his breath was heavy in Fitzroy’s face. Slowly, the American sat up, smiled a little. He lifted a strand of hair away from where it had drooped on his forehead, pressed it back along his scratched scalp.
“I’ll show you what I can do to you. Just you and me.” He reached a hand out behind him, back to one of the security men from Minsk by the door. “Somebody give me a goddamned knife.”
NINETEEN
Song Park Kim awoke at dawn in his suite at the swank Plaza Athenee. His quarters surrounded him with opulence, but he did not sleep on the bed, did not drink from the minibar, did not partake of the room service. He’d slept in a back closet on the floor after rigging tripwires and telltales all around him.
He left his room at six in the morning and began walking through the streets of Paris, memorizing the roads that led from the Right Bank, over bridges, to the Left Bank: taking in the looks and mannerisms of the westerners: and memorizing the natural choke points of both automobile and pedestrian traffic.
He’d received a list of names and addresses on his GPS: the Gray Man’s known associates in Paris: a former CIA coworker who now headed a market intelligence firm in a skyscraper in La Defense, to the west of the city; an Afghani interpreter used by the Special Activities Division in Kabul in 2001, who now ran a swank Middle Eastern restaurant in the Left Bank on the Boulevard Saint Germaine; an informant in Fitzroy’s Network who was also a federal pen pusher at the Ministry of the Interior in an office near the Place de la Concorde; a pilot of renowned skill who had flown for the SAD in Europe and now lived semiretired in the Latin Quarter.
The Korean used public transportation to take a quick look at each site, checking them all out: access to the buildings, locations of nearby parking, and public transportation routes to and from each area. He knew there were local watchers hired by the people who had hired his government to send him, and in fact he’d seen men and women at every site on his list, men and women unable to remain undetected by an exceedingly well-trained operator. He had no doubt the Gray Man would see them, too. Kim knew he would have to supplant their support with his own tracking skills.
Afterwards, Kim patrolled the city center, still studying the map. He was prepared to rush back to any of the known associates’ locations if there was a Gray Man sighting, but he did not expect his adversary to use an associate on his current mission. If he could, Kim was certain, the Gray Man would bypass Paris altogether. It was too congested an area, with too many police and too many cameras and too many old acquaintances that would invariably be under surveillance. If the American assassin was forced to go into the city for some reason, Kim knew, he’d do his utmost to get what he needed from sources other than those who could be traced back to him.
Kim knew this because he himself was a lone assassin. A singleton. He himself had been hunted down like a dog, and he himself had been forced to avoid all those who might have been inclined to help him.
But Kim also knew that isolation, exhaustion, injury, necessity, and desperation all led to mistakes, and he knew that if his target somehow made it as far as Paris and had some need in the city, the Gray Man would be a desperate animal indeed, and all bets were off as to how he would act and react. This operator was perhaps already the most dangerous man in the world. Throwing in wild-eyed fear and a frantic race against time might make him slip up, but it would also make him even more dangerous to those around him. Kim knew that if the call came that the Gray Man was here, then blood would flow like a river through the streets of the City of Lights.
