Sid knew he needed to find Court downrange of his shotgun and put two barrels of lead into him, or else keep him busy for just a minute more.
The Russian relaxed a little. He could do this. He knew he could.
With a wider smile now he spoke to the darkness. “I knew you would come. It was inevitable.” A nervous chuckle. “I have been anxiously awaiting this moment. That might surprise you, but just listen. You will be glad to know that an opportunity has arisen, something I am certain you will find impossible to—”
A figure in black, a face obscured with a ski mask, moved into the glow of the crackling firelight by the curtains, far to Sid’s right in front of the desk. The figure held a suppressed pistol at the end of an outstretched arm; the long silencer was pointed directly at Sidorenko’s face. A tubular night vision device protruded from the figure’s forehead.
Though Sid could not see the man’s face, there was no question but this was Court Gentry. Sid was surprised by how silently the American had approached. Court was not three meters from him now. It would be impossible to miss with the shotgun; he just had to swivel the weapon all the way to the right and wait for the man to move a foot or two closer to place himself in the line of fire. Sid made no sudden move; he squeezed the grip tighter and slowly rotated the gun to the right while he spoke.
Sid said, “There is a mission only you could possibly achieve. By your actions tonight I am even more certain that you are the right man for the—”
Gentry shot Gregor Sidorenko through the forehead. Blood sprayed across the portrait of Stalin behind him as his head snapped back. He spun away, tumbled out of his chair behind his desk, and came to rest faceup, eyes wide open, dead on the cool wooden floor.
Court hadn’t come all this way to listen to Sid talk.
SIX
The Gray Man stepped past the desk and fired a second round into the Russian mob boss; the body jerked and blood sprayed, twinkling in the firelight. And then Court turned away, holstering his pistol and moving to the long row of curtains. He yanked them down with a single pull to gain access to the window.
But there was no window. The curtains had covered a massive brick wall.
Sid had been so scared of Gentry he’d had the windows removed, bricking himself away from the dangers of the outside world.
Court ran back around the desk, vaulted Sid’s body and the pool of blood growing on the floor, and ducked into the bedroom.
There were no windows here, either.
Oh shit.
In an instant, Court’s escape plan evaporated. He had planned to break or blow the glass of the first window he found after killing Sid, and then just rappel or bungee down the side of the building, bypassing all the security inside the mansion’s walls.
But Gentry had not allowed for the possibility that there would be no windows.
Hope in one hand, shit in the other.
There was only one way out. He turned and faced the hallway door just as the sounds of shouting men came from up the hall.
At the same time, sirens began to wail around the property.
Court sprinted for the door, reloading his pistol with a fresh magazine from his chest rig as he advanced on the danger.
“It’s getting lively.” Jeff Parks had finished his call to Dead Eye and returned to watch the monitor. Now he stood at the back wall, just behind the seated Leland Babbitt. Together they watched the main display along with the rest of the signal room. Tiny white spots moved in ones and twos toward the main building, no real coordination evident, but all the figures were obviously responding to orders.
Parks gave his reading of the events. “The guys who found the microlight called it in, and now the compound is on full alert.”
A woman near the front of the room had been listening to the audio feeds from the bugs set up outside the walls of the dacha. She turned away from her desk with her hand to her earpiece and spoke into her microphone. “Sirens sounding at the target location.”
Someone else said, “It’s going loud.”
Parks muttered to himself now, although his mic picked up the concern in his voice. “C’mon, Court, old buddy. I sure as shit hope you have an exfil planned that’s cleaner than your infil.”
Babbitt sat next to him, his tuxedo straining against his corpulent frame. With absolute confidence he said, “He’s got a plan.”
Court did not, in fact, have a plan.
He ran headlong up the narrow corridor toward what sounded like a half-dozen men, just on the other side of the corner not fifty feet ahead. Bouncing flashlight beams pulsed around the turn, the throw of the lights narrowing as the men drew closer. Court was hoping to improvise, to find some way to avoid contact with that number of enemy, but as he closed on them, and they on him, he realized his chances for something other than a six-on-one gunfight in a narrow hallway were rapidly diminishing.
Court sprinted, his night vision lens providing him a narrow monochromatic view. He held his weapon steady and his eyes scanned past the front sight, ready to engage the first armed man he saw.
A door opened twenty feet ahead on his right, opposite the door the child had appeared from a few minutes earlier. A man stepped out, facing in the direction of the noise of the men around the corner.
Gentry closed on the man, his Glock at the ready, and he scanned the man’s hands. The right hand was empty, but the left hand swung out with a silver automatic pistol clutched in it.
Court pressed the palm of his left hand into the back of his Glock’s side, and it fired once at the target in front of him. His left hand kept his suppressed pistol from cycling, and this held the spent shell casing in the weapon. It also lessened the noise made by firing the gun.
The man pitched forward into the hall, tumbling onto the carpet with a muted thud.
Court leapt over the fallen man and through the doorway, then grabbed the legs of the dead body, and pulled it back inside. He reached out into the hall, scooped up the silver pistol, and retreated back into the room just as the crew of skinheads made the turn.
He shut the door not one full second before their flashlights trained on it, and they rushed past seconds later, hurrying to surround their benefactor in his office.
There were no lights on in this bedroom, but through his monocle Gentry scanned the empty space. The dead man was a cousin of Sidorenko and a lieutenant in his organization, but Court neither knew nor cared. He was looking for a window, and he found two. He ran to them, pulled back the heavy curtains, and saw thick iron bars.
Fucking Sid, Court muttered under his breath.
He cleared the spent shell casing from his pistol and reholstered it, then reached into the cargo pocket of his pants, pulled out a mobile phone, and lit up the screen. With the touch of a three-button code, made difficult by a slight tremor in his hand brought on by adrenaline, he sent a wireless message to the detonators of both strands of fireworks.
Within ten seconds cracks and booms began in the forest more than one hundred yards beyond the southern gate of the compound. He knew in forty-five seconds the igniter would initiate in the second strand, and mortars would fire all over the southern side of the building.
He headed back to the door, cracked it open, then launched himself once again into the hallway, turned the corner and ran toward the atrium. He saw no one ahead, so he holstered his pistol and pulled the small flare gun from a Velcro pouch on his chest harness. It was loaded with a single smoke grenade, and he raised the device and fired a cartridge with a loud pop. The smoke grenade arced up the long passage, flew over the balcony, and dropped into the atrium, four stories below. Before the first grenade hit the ground and began extruding its thick red billowing cloud, Court had slammed a second ballistic smoke into the gun and snapped it closed, and he fired again. Another champagne-cork pop echoed in the darkened hallway. He loaded a third smoke as he began running up the hall as fast as he could. He fired the third grenade, and he let the flare gun fall to the hallway carpet as he pulled his suppressed Glock once again.