“I really appreciate it.”
“Anything for my best student.” Maurice disappeared down a back hallway. He returned a minute later with a sheaf of euros in an envelope and a key on a chain. He wrote an address down on the envelope and handed it to his protege. “I think you’ll be pleased with the gear.”
Court pocketed the items.
“Another beer?”
“I’d love one, but I’d better get moving.”
“Understood.” Maurice poured several antiinflammatory pain pills from a bottle in a cabinet into Gentry’s hand. Court downed them with the last swig from his bottle. Then they walked together towards the back door.
Court said, “I wish I could say I’d see you again. If I make it through tomorrow, I’ll have to drop off the face of the earth for a while. Maybe if you don’t pay your doctor’s bill, we can have another beer someday.”
Maurice smiled, but this time he did not laugh. “I’m dying, Court. No sense in putting lipstick on a pig. I can’t make it any prettier than it is.”
“Is there anything I can do for you? Anybody you need me to see? Look in on after you’re gone?”
“There’s nobody. No family. No friends. There was just the Agency.”
“I know the feeling,” Court said. Spending time with his mentor was good in that Gentry had so few opportunities to talk to someone who’d gone through some of the same things in life as he had. But it was also bad. Depressing, because Court saw a measure of himself in the tired old cynical eyes of the man facing him in the living room and knew that, though no one likes to get old, in Gentry’s profession, mere survival was the absolute best one could hope for.
And this was success?
“You can do one thing for me.” Maurice smiled as he spoke. “When you get yourself extracted from this mess you’re in, I want you to get away to some tropical island somewhere. When you read in the paper about an older- than-dirt disgraced American banker dying in Switzerland, I want you to go out to your favorite can tina, find yourself a pretty girl, and drink the night away with her. I’m serious. Get through this and get out of this life. There are still corners of the world where no one gives a shit what you’ve done. Go there. Meet somebody. Live like a human. Do that for me, kid.”
“I’ll try.”
“Someday you will learn. All the things you’ve done, all the things in the past you thought were dead and buried—you think you’ve put them behind you, but you haven’t. You’ve just stored them away. Stored for the time when there is only you and a quiet room and your memories and the goddamned demons of those you killed.”
“I’ve got to go, Maurice.”
“I know I can’t stop you from doing what you have to do. But think about what I am saying. All the shit I taught you back at Harvey Point. Sooner you forget what I taught you then, sooner you follow what I’m telling you now, the sooner the killing and the death will be dealt with. End of sermon, kid.”
They shook hands.
Court’s game face reappeared in a flash. He crammed the wad of cash into his pants pocket and the sat phone into his jacket and headed for the back door. He peered through the blinds out the front window, into the medieval passageway.
Instantly he sensed that something wasn’t right.
“What is it?” asked Maurice, picking up on his protege’s unease.
“Check the back. See if the girl is still there.”
Maurice walked down the hall to the back living room and called out to Court, “She’s gone.”
“They pulled her.”
“Who pulled her?”
“Hitters.”
“Because they want her out of the way when it goes loud?”
“Exactly.”
“They’re here?” asked Maurice as he returned to Gentry’s side.
“Not here, but close,” confirmed the Gray Man. “I can fucking smell them.” Gentry’s eyes narrowed. “Tell me you didn’t set me up, Maurice.”
“Not on your life, Court.”
A moment’s pause. “I believe you. Sorry.”
“Who’s out there? Any idea?”
Court and Maurice barricaded the doors with an armoire and a bookcase. “God only knows. In the past three days I’ve had everyone but killer Martians on my ass.”
“This must be the killer Martians, then. I hear they’re real bastards. You can get out through the ceiling. There are boards in the crawl space laid out to a vent. Push the vent out, and you should just about fit through. This will drop you into the attic of the preschool behind my house. They are closed on Saturdays. They have a basement that leads into the nail salon next door. You look like you could do with a manicure, but try to fight the urge. Slip out their front door to the Rue du Purgatoire, then down the little alleyway, Rue d’Enfer. That should get you clear.”
“What about cops?”
“The closest station is at the Palais de Justice, but we aren’t talking frontline troops. Better we don’t call them at all lest a bloodbath ensues.”
Gentry stood motionless and just stared at Maurice.
The elderly man laughed heartily, fought his wheezing. “I set the escape route up long ago. For me, back when I could have managed. I had a neighborhood boy test the crawl space just a few months back. No problem. Go on then.”
“Come with me.”
“You aren’t getting my feeble ass into that crawl space. I’m not running from anyone. Now go.”
“Maurice, in a few seconds an alpha team is coming through those doors. They will know you helped me. They’ll do whatever it takes to get intel from you.”
Maurice smiled, shrugged. “I’ve never been afraid of dying, Court. But the thought of dying for nothing really chaps my ass. If I’d taken a bullet back in Nam like every goddamn friend I had back there, then it would have been worthwhile. If I’d died on the job with the company, that would have been honorable. I mean, depending on what we were doing at the time, you know what I’m saying. But sitting here in my house in Geneva, flipping channels on the television and waiting for the moment my lungs cough up or my liver pisses out . . . there’s just no nobility in that.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I’ll die for you, kid. You’ve done more righteous hits than the entire damn agency in the past four years. You deserve someone to help you when you’re down.”
Gentry did not know what to say, so he said nothing.
“Don’t fuck it up, boy. Get out of here. I’ll slow them down, maybe bloody a nose or two in the process. No promises, but I’ll try to thin their ranks a bit.”
“I’ll never forget you.”
Maurice smiled and pointed upwards. “If I get past security and make it up there to heaven, I’ll put in a good word for you with the Man. See if I can’t save your scrawny ass in the afterlife, too.”
An awkward hug between two men whose minds were tightening for impending action. Maurice said, “One more thing. I hope you will remember me in a positive light. Not think bad things about me if . . . if you should learn that I made a mistake or two along the way.”
“You are my hero. That’s never going to change.”
“Thanks, kid.”
There was the sound of a truck’s brakes out front. “Go!”
Gentry nodded. He squeezed the frail man on the shoulder and leapt to the rafter overhead without another word. Quickly he pulled himself up and into the attic, his broken rib and his swollen wrist both shrieking with pain. He had just replaced the tile when a crash at the front door knocked the armoire a foot into the room.
Maurice spun around and moved into the kitchen as quickly as his old legs and scarred lungs would take him.
