The body did not stir at once. Finally a twitch in the shoulders, a slight turn of the head in new recognition of its surroundings. After another ring, the form slowly reached into a coat pocket, pulled out a plastic case, and fumbled with it with one hand. It popped open, and the satellite phone dropped into the grass. The body’s eyes remained on the sky.
After jumping from the bridge, Gentry had hit the water hard. The cold took away what breath remained in his lungs after the impact. He sank deep. When he found the surface, he had already been carried downstream, under the Pont Neuf and towards the west. He sucked air and water as he bobbed for a minute or so before seeing a small house barge churning upstream towards him. Though Court was weak, on the verge of losing consciousness, he hooked an arm around the bottom rung of a ladder hanging off the side of the slow-moving black boat as it passed him. He held on with one hand, kept his head low in the boat’s foamy wake as the craft towed him back under the bridge from which he had just fallen. He heard the shouts of men in the water around him as they dove down, looking for a body, or trained their flashlights around the spans of the bridge.
Ten minutes later, Court was free of immediate detection. With nearly his last ounce of strength, he tried to climb the ladder to get on board the boat, but he fell. His weak legs, the pain in his gut, his wet shoes, the numbing cold all worked against him, and he dropped back into the frigid current. He reached out for the barge, took nothing but a fistful of the river, while the black ship chugged away upstream.
Fortunately for Gentry, he was not far from the water’s edge. He made it to the Left Bank, struggled up onto the pavement, climbed to his feet, but fell again in the wet grass next to a tree in the Jardin Tino Rossi.
And here he lay for twenty minutes, eyes open but unfixed, the soft drops of rain falling and beating and exploding against his pupils.
The phone rang again, and he lifted it off the grass, his eyes still on the impossibly low rain clouds illuminated by city lights around him.
His voice was weak and distant. “Yeah?”
“Good evening. This is Claire Fitzroy calling. May I please speak with Mr. Jim?”
Gentry blinked away the rain. His eyes instead filled with tears. He controlled his voice as best as possible, did what he could to mask the pain and the exhaustion and the despair and the utter sense of failure. “It’s past your bedtime.”
“Yes, sir. But Grandpa Donald said I could call you.”
“You remember me?”
“Oh, yes, sir. I remember how you drove us to school. Slept on the little cot in the hall, but Mummy said you didn’t really sleep, you watched out for us all night. You drank coffee, and you liked my mummy’s eggs.”
“That’s right. Extra cheese.” Court’s pelvic bone had been gored, his abdominal wall punctured. He did not think the knife made it deep enough to slice through his intestines, but the pain burning into the center of his being was indescribable, nonetheless. He assumed he was still bleeding. He’d done nothing to stanch the flow since he’d dropped into the river nearly an hour earlier.
The sirens of emergency vehicles screeched past on Gentry’s right. He was hidden from their view by the stone wall and the darkness.
“Mr. Jim, Grandpa Donald said you are coming to save us.”
Tears streamed down the American’s face. He wasn’t dead, but this felt a lot like dying. He knew he could not make it to Bayeux, and even if he somehow could, what could he do but bleed to death on the castle’s doorstep?
“Where is your grandfather?”
“He’s in the bedroom. He can’t walk right now. He said he fell down the stairs, but that is not true. The men here hurt him. He gave me the phone and told me to go into the bathroom closet and call you.” She paused. “That’s why I have to whisper. You are coming, right? Please tell me you are coming. If you don’t come… You are our only chance, since Daddy’s gone to London. Mr. Jim… are you there?”
Typical of Fitzroy. If Sir Donald himself had made this call, Court would have told him all was lost. But the cagey bastard had known Gentry would be in dire straits right about now, so who better to entice him to keep up the fight than one of the twins?
“I’ll do my best.”
“Do you promise?”
Court lay there in the dark, his freezing, soaked suit askew on his body, the cold mud pressed into the back of his neck and his shaved head. Slowly, with a weak voice, he said, “I’ll be there very soon.”
“Do you promise?”
Court looked down at the wound in his belly. He pressed hard upon it now. “I promise,” he said, and he seemed to muster a little power in his voice. “And when I get there, I need you to promise you will do something for me.”
“Yes, sir?”
“When you hear a lot of noise, I want you to go to your room, crawl under your bed, and stay there. Can you do that for me?”
“Noise? What kind of noise? Do you mean guns?”
“I do mean guns.”
“Okay.”
“Stay there until I come to get you. Get your sister to do the same, okay?”
“Thank you, Jim. I just knew you would come.”
“Claire.” There was a shred of new strength in Gentry’s voice now. “I need you to sneak the phone back to your grandfather. I have to ask him a very important question.”
“All right, Jim.”
“And Claire? Thank you for calling. It was nice to hear from you.”
Sixteen minutes later, Gentry staggered along the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. The rain had picked up, and there was no one around, which was lucky for the Gray Man, because he walked with both hands pressed to the left side of his abdomen, his left leg ramrod straight as he kicked it forward. Every twenty-five yards or so he stopped, leaned against a wall or a car or a lamppost, bent forward from pain, recovered after a few seconds to push off and cover a few more steps before again seeking refuge from the exhaustion of the blood loss.
He found the address Fitzroy gave him. The door was closed and bolted as he knew it would be, so he found a dark alcove a few doorways down and tucked into it, sat on a piece of cardboard like a bum, and leaned his head on the stoop to rest. Singsong police sirens wailed in the distance, maybe a mile away now. Surely the cops and the hitters and the watchers were all along the Seine looking for him, though hopefully they were concentrating their search not upstream but down, and hopefully they were all hindering one another with their respective presence.
He was just on the verge of dozing, his fist pressed into his bloody stomach, when he heard a noise back by the address Fitzroy gave him. He peered out of the alcove and saw the locked door open slowly. He’d expected someone to come by car, but apparently whoever worked at the location lived in a flat above in the same building.
A woman appeared on the pavement, barely visible from a streetlamp twenty meters on. Court rose to his feet and staggered forward.
“Allez!” She shouted in a whisper. “Hurry.”
He passed her, staggering still, and found himself in a long hall. Steadying his weak and swaying body on the corridor’s walls, he saw immediately he was smearing his own blood with his hands as he walked. The woman quickly tucked her head under his arm and hefted him. She was tall and thin but strong. After each step he felt himself giving in to her more and more.
They went through a doorway and into a darkened room. Before she could flip on the light, encumbered by the 170-pound man, Court was startled by a barking dog, close. Then another, then ten or more dogs barking at once, all around him.
When the bright overhead snapped on, he realized immediately that the emergency clinic Donald had sent him to was, in actuality, a veterinarian’s office. His knees gave out, and his weight dropped on the girl by his side. With a boyish grunt she pushed him forward and down to a small chair.