Movement in the train station caught Gentry’s eye. The few civilians at the station had long since hit the road or hit the deck, so when he saw two men running towards the platform inside the building, Court knew some of the attackers had managed to flank his position.
The door to the platform flew open, and two black-masked men appeared over the policeman with the injured hand.
Court raised the Beretta in his right hand; his left was useless with its new injury. At twelve yards’ distance, Gentry shot both masked men in the face. Their forward momentum coupled with the bullets’ impact caused them to stumble into each other and fall out the door together to the cold platform.
Court’s borrowed Beretta 92 locked open with the second shot. Empty.
“Hey! Slide me that rifle!”
This was the third time he’d called for a weapon. The difference this time, of course, was that the first two times were before the two surviving policemen had seen him at work. The young cop with the bloody hand quickly skidded one of the gunmen’s small black rifles across the platform to Gentry. Court grabbed it and ducked back down.
It was an HK MP5, the most ubiquitous submachine gun in the world. It felt comfortable in the Gray Man’s hands. The American pulled the mag and found it full, with thirty rounds of nine-millimeter ball ammo. He shouted to the injured cop to slide the other rifle to the uninjured man. When the transfer was made, Court said, “Put it on semiauto! Fire one round at a time in each direction! Do that until it’s empty! Do you understand?”
In a crouch, Court hurried along the platform’s edge, moving north, closing the distance between himself and the four who’d come from the truck on the hill.
A train was approaching in the distance from the north. Court heard sirens from the direction of the village. He tried to push everything from his mind as he crawled forward alongside the track through the snow. Everything but the men he knew would now be closing on the platform, just around the corner of the cement ahead. His wrist throbbed, and his knees stung from the window glass lacerations he received escaping from Laszlo Szabo in Budapest the afternoon before. The ever-present pain in his thigh from Thursday’s gunshot wound was the least of his maladies at the moment.
Ten feet from the corner of the cement platform, he heard them: men speaking Spanish.
When he stood, he encountered two masked men, also just standing up. Court fired the HK one-handed, fully automatic, at a distance of less than ten feet. Both attackers dropped, and Court fired another short bust into each twitching body. He dropped the submachine gun from his hands and hefted a new one off a dead gunman, then spun around and ran back up onto the platform.
He never even considered making a run for it, though he had the perfect opportunity to escape both the Spanish-speaking kill squad and the Swiss police. But there was a fight going on, Court was already in it, and disengaging at this point did not seem right. A couple of innocent cops were still alive, and they would not last long on their own. As the sirens approached, flashing lights beat off the few remaining panes of glass in the train station. Court Gentry ran back to the aid of the two policemen, his one good arm holding the HK out in front of him, searching for fresh targets.
TWENTY-ONE
Claire Fitzroy sat on her bed and looked out the window at the lawn and the thick forest beyond. The sky had been drab and gray since they’d arrived at the chateau the previous afternoon, but during the morning the low cloud cover had scattered, and now she could see a great distance.
Her lunch was beside her, all but untouched. Her sister was downstairs in the kitchen with Mummy and Daddy and the men in leather coats who followed around wherever her father went, but Claire had been excused from the table. She told her parents about her tummy ache, asked permission to go back to her room.
The tummy ache was real. It came from the worry that had sat heavily inside her for over a day now. The hurried shuffle out of school, the worried faces of Mummy and Daddy, the argument on the phone between her father and grandfather, the arrival of the men with guns, and the trip in the big black cars to the chateau in the countryside.
Something outside caught her attention. She leaned closer to the bedroom window, squinted. Then she stood excitedly. In the distance she could see the steeples. She knew those steeples! The steeples were from the huge Notre Dame Cathedral in Bayeux, and she knew Bayeux had a police station. It was near the big water wheel her Daddy had taken her and her sister to. She remembered the policemen in their smart uniforms smiling at her the previous summer.
If she could just get out of the house, maybe she could run across the huge back lawn, through the apple orchard, make her way through the woods and to Bayeux in the cold distance. Once there, she could find the police station and tell them what was happening. They could come help, make the men with the leather coats and the ugly foreign language let her family go.
Mummy and Daddy would be so happy.
It was a long way away, but she knew she could make it. She was the fastest winger on her football team. She could slip down to the cellar and out the little open window she and her sister chased the cat through the previous evening.
Resolute, eight-year-old Claire Fitzroy buttoned up her coat, pulled on her mittens, and cracked open the door to the bedroom. As soon as she stepped into the long and dimly lit hallway, she heard voices at the stairwell, but they came from upstairs. She scurried down the corridor and onto the staircase. Lowering her weight on each step, her little feet moved delicately to avoid making noise.
She heard a sudden cry above her. She stopped dead in her tracks and looked up. There was another shout. It came from the third floor. She started to descend again but looked back up to the source of the noise and heard a low, guttural sound.
It was Grandpa Donald. He sounded as if he was sobbing.
Quickly now she made her way to the first floor, bypassing the kitchen and the dining hall carefully, because her parents and sister were having lunch just now. If they saw her, her father would be angry, and he would just tell her to return to her room.
The hall turned ahead to the right on the way to the stone steps that led down to the wine cellar. Claire moved quickly but took care to avoid any noise that would give her away.
She turned the corner at a run and nearly crashed into the rear of a huge guard.
Claire stopped cold. The man wore a brown turtle-neck, and from behind she could see the black strap of the rifle that hung in front of him on his chest. A handgun and a radio were attached to his belt. He patrolled down the hall, away from her, perfectly silent in his movements. Little Claire did not dare back up or turn and run away. She just stood there, silently, in the middle of the hallway behind him. He walked slowly. Five feet away at first. Then ten. Then twenty.
The guard opened a door to his left. Claire knew from her explorations with her sister the evening before that it was a small bathroom.
He pulled the door shut behind him.
Behind her she heard more men talking to one another. Quickly she hurried past the bathroom door and to the stone steps of the cellar.
One minute later she climbed up onto the shelf, pushed her little body through the window, and squeezed out onto the back lawn. She rose to a crouch, looked to her left and right, and saw a man walking a big dog on a leash in the distance. Just like the man in the hallway, he was moving in the opposite direction. Claire looked out past the white stone fountain, past the apple trees to the horizon line.
There they were: the steeples of Bayeux Cathedral.
One more look around satisfied her, and then she was off. She rose and sprinted as fast as her little legs
