The handgun would just have to do.
Next he ripped open a medical kit, dropped his pants, and sat on the cold, dirty floor. The scratching of a rat in the aluminum walls let him know just how unsanitary these conditions were. He examined his day-old injury with a professional fascination. Court had never before been shot, but he’d picked up dozens of other injuries in his work. His leg throbbed like a bitch, but he’d been hurt worse from burns, broken bones, a chunk of shrapnel in his neck. It came with the job.
He poured a generous splash of iodine on the entrance and exit wounds. He tore open packages of bandages and antiseptic cream, redressed his injury as well as possible in the low light, and then crumpled all his supplies back into a small bag and shoved it into his pocket. In his second duffel he found cold weather gear. He changed out of his light clothing into thick corduroys, a grease-stained brown cotton shirt, and a thick canvas jacket. A pair of work gloves went on his hands, and they warmed his fingers instantly. Leather hiking boots. A black watch cap that could be pulled down as a ski mask was positioned on his head. He zipped up all his cases, left them as he’d found them, closed the door, and climbed back on his bike.
Minutes later he found himself at a crossroads south of the city. A few hours west was the German border, then the French border, then Normandy.
He blew out a sigh masked by his engine’s rumble. Steam from his exhalation poured through the microfiber ski mask covering his mouth.
If it were only that easy.
No, he had to make a few crucial pit stops along the way. Gentry needed to pick up some matériel before he arrived in Normandy. He knew where to get what he needed, but he also knew it would involve an extra half day on the road.
For one, Court needed a new “escape,” new forged identity papers. He still had the passport he’d used to get into the Czech Republic, and he knew it would get him around in Central Europe, where they did not have all their immigration processes computerized and integrated, but he’d already been burned once under the legend Martin Baldwin, Canadian freelance journalist. Only a hopeless optimist or a damn fool would try to use it to get into the European Union, and Gentry was neither. But more than entrée to the EU, he needed an escape solid enough to get him out of Europe when the shooting stopped. He knew that after he did what he had to do in Normandy, he would need to disappear somewhere far away, and clean identity papers would be the easiest way to achieve this end.
Court knew a man in Hungary who could provide him with documentation quickly. With well-made docs, he could cross quickly and efficiently into the EU and, should he have to produce papers for any reason along the way, he could safely do so. And then, once he’d finished his operation, he’d be able to dump all his guns and gear, hop on a plane to South America or the South Pacific, or fucking Antarctica if the heat on him remained as hot as it had been the last two days.
There’d be no time to run around and buy dirty docs after Normandy, and no way to quickly get off the Continent without them.
A cold November wind blew from the west as Gentry turned onto the E65, the highway that would take him past Brno, into Slovakia, around Bratislava, and then south to the Hungarian border. From there it would be a quick trip down to Budapest. Six hours’ travel time, factoring in a couple of quick stops for gas and two poorly guarded borders.
As he opened the throttle and leaned into the cold wind, he forced himself to think about the next forty-eight hours. It was grim contemplation, but necessary, and a hell of a lot better than dwelling on the past forty-eight.
TWELVE
Gentry entered the capital of Hungary at three in the afternoon. Rain clouds hung low and gray white, just tickling the rounded green tips of the hills of Buda on the west side of the Danube River that bisected the city of four million. Court had last visited Budapest four years earlier on his first job for Fitzroy, a simple domestic op against a Serbian hit man who’d put a bomb in a local restaurant to kill a mob gunrunner but in so doing also took out an American man’s brother. The surviving brother had money and ties to the underworld, so it was a simple thing for him to connect with Fitzroy and hire a triggerman. And it was a simple thing for Fitzroy to send his newest asset to Budapest to find the offending Serb in a dockside bar, fill him with drink, then slip a knife into his spine and let his lifeless form slip silently into the black waters of the Danube.
Gentry also knew Budapest from before, back in his time with the agency. He’d been in and out of the city once every couple of years for nearly a decade, tailing diplomats, running sneak-and-peeks against shady Russian businessmen in the mansions of Buda or the hotels in Pest. He’d once chased off a Tajik assassin targeting the local CIA chief of station because there was no one else handy to deal with the matter.
In Court’s work in the city he’d had multiple run-ins with a local fraudster named Laszlo Szabo. Szabo was an amoral, devious scumbag; he’d do anything for anyone waving a big enough wad of crumpled Hungarian forints in his face. His specialty was forgery, buying and selling identity papers and modifying them for whoever needed their identity changed on the fly. He’d helped a dozen wanted Serb war criminals flee Central Europe just ahead of the International Court of Justice and had made a shitload of money cleaning up the dirty loose ends of that war and others. Then in 2004 he ran afoul of Gentry himself when he agreed to create papers for a Chechen terrorist who’d slipped out of Grozny and the Russians’ grasp and into Budapest on his way farther west. Court and his Goon Squad caught up with the Chechen in a warehouse Laszlo owned in the suburbs. It had gone loud, and in the melee a tub of Szabo’s photographic chemicals had blown up, killing the terrorist. Court and his team had to disappear before the fire trucks arrived, leaving Laszlo to slip away. Immediately thereafter, Court was sent after bigger fish, but he remembered Szabo, kept tabs on the forger, just in case someday he needed his services. Court normally used documentation assets from Sir Donald Fitzroy’s Network, but it was nice to know there was also a man in Budapest who could, for the right price, turn him into anyone he wanted to be, at least on paper.
Laszlo Szabo was an irredeemable piece of shit. Court knew this beyond a shadow of a doubt. But Court also knew Szabo was damn good at his work.
It was three thirty by the time Court had filled his gas tank, bought a gyro and lemonade at a little Turkish stand on Andrassy Street, and parked his bike a block away from Laszlo’s lair in Pest, just a kilometer or so from the shores of the Danube. Icy sheets of cold rain poured down, but Gentry did nothing to shield himself from the weather. His muscles were tiring from the already long day; the rain soaked his hair and his beard and his clothes, but it also kept him alert.
The door to Laszlo’s building was a deception. A rusty iron plate on hinges sunken in a stone building on Eotvos Utka Street, it was covered with yellowed and torn handbills and stood no more than five feet high. It looked like no one had passed through since the Second World War, but Court had just finished his soggy meal of lamb chunks and cucumber sauce folded into a pita when the door creaked open and disgorged two thin black men. Somalis, Court guessed. In Europe illegally, obviously, since no one who had access to legitimate papers would have need to come see Laszlo. Court knew how easy it was for Africans and Middle Easterners to immigrate legally to the Continent these days. The two knuckleheads walking past him in the rain somehow didn’t qualify for the near-universal rubber stamp entry, which indicated to Gentry that these were some seriously shady fuckers.