“We’re about to find out,” Court said with a look of grim determination, and he backed the Mercedes out of the space, exited the underground garage slowly, and rolled out into the night.
They took the A15 north out of the city, and just as Justine had promised, there was virtually no traffic at four on a Sunday morning. She cursed loudly when she noticed the blood bag empty just a few minutes out of town; she switched it out with a second full liter bag and switched out the dextrose just to keep the fluids dripping into the IV at the fastest rate possible.
The A13 was the most direct route to Bayeux, but Court avoided it. He knew surveillance could easily be set up on the main route to the château. Instead, Court took a series of back roads that would add a half hour or so to his journey.
For an hour they delayed the inevitable. Justine talked about her family and friends and her six cats. Her nervousness was evident to Court from her random conversation. With less than an hour to go till the château, Justine grew quiet, carefully injected a tiny dose of morphine into Gentry’s IV. If his blood pressure was too low, as it surely had been back at the vet clinic, the morphine could have stopped his heart. But after two and a half units of blood, she determined a small shot of the strong painkiller was worth the risk, considering what he was about to endure.
As they drove through the dark, Court began feeling better, the pain medicine and the blood and the sugar water boosting his strength and spirits. They discussed the procedure, and Justine took several minutes to ready her sutures and bandages on the dashboard in front of her. She cringed as she threaded the razor-sharp hooked needle and dipped it in a bottle of antiseptic, laid it down on sterile gauze. She opened his shirt and cut off his bandages and poured half the contents of the bottle on his stomach, and he recoiled from the sting.
They both unfastened their seat belts, and she rose to her knees in the passenger seat. Gentry put his hands high on the wheel to allow her access to his belly. He gulped down the last few swigs of cold coffee and tossed the cup over his shoulder into the back. Justine then used adhesive tape to fasten Court’s small flashlight to the bottom of the steering wheel, lighting the area of her focus perfectly as long she was careful to keep her hands from casting shadows over the stab wound.
“I have never done this before on a human, even in the correct conditions, but I have sutured cats before.”
“You will do fine,” Court said. He realized they were both trying to steady the nerves of the other.
But Justine’s resolve faltered first. She looked up at the American and asked, “Are you sure? I will have to go deep into the muscle to close the wound. If I just pierce the skin it will tear as soon as you move.”
Court nodded, his eyes already watering in anticipation of the agony. “Justine,” he said, softly. “Whatever I say or do… do not stop.”
She nodded, steeled herself. “Are you ready?”
He nodded shortly, pulled his seatbelt off his chest and placed it in his mouth. He bit down hard.
The roadway ran flat and straight, and the headlamps showed the way.
Justine pierced her patient’s flesh a half inch from the bloody knife wound. The hooked needle found its own path deep through his abdominal muscle. It passed through the slit, and fresh blood bubbled into the flashlight’s beam. The curvature of the sharp spike sent it back out of his skin, a half inch on the other side of the stab wound.
Court screamed into the seat belt wedged in his mouth.
Justine took the thread with her gloved hand, pulled the instrument backwards the way it came, and re-threaded the needle. Even with a quarter dose of morphine going through her patient, she felt his teardrops on her arms as she made her second suture, close to the first.
For ten kilometers she continued. She did not look away from her work as she sewed him up, but she spoke to him in soothing French throughout, just as she would an injured dog. Above her, her patient winced and groaned. Miraculously, to her way of thinking, he continued to drive, execute gentle turns as needed, once even braking slightly. Justine assumed the road ahead and his need to concentrate on it was the only thing keeping him coherent.
She used gauze to swab away the blood as she worked, poured antiseptic from the bottle she’d staged between his legs to get a better view of the pumping wound.
Finally she said, “Almost done. I only have to pull it tight and tie it off. Just a few more seconds now.” Above her she heard him panting and sobbing. There was a rhythm to his sounds that distressed her; she knew he could go into shock at any time. “Here we go… I will be as gentle as possible.” She pulled on the thread, the wound closed beautifully, and the last of the bleeding stopped immediately. “Yes, perfect. Now I just tie it and—”
The tires below her ran over a series of bumps. The Mercedes’s suspension was awesome; she barely felt the rough surface. But when the bumps did not stop after several seconds, she looked up to check on her patient.
She was horrified to see his head hanging down just above her, his eyes closed.
Jim had passed out.
The black Mercedes ran off the road and crashed at five thirty a.m.
THIRTY-ONE
All ten Belarusian guards were on station around the property: six outside, two at ground-floor windows, and two in the tower above. Serge and Alain, the two electronic security engineers, sat in the ground-floor library, their bloodshot eyes scanning back and forth across the screens, watching the infrared images around the perimeter of the building. Every five minutes, they used walkie-talkies to communicate with the patrols.
The Libyans were the only hunter-killer squad still in the area. They fought exhaustion as their van patrolled Bayeux. They were certain by now they were out of the big money. The other teams who had been in the area had since been sent to Paris to search for the target, as had every pavement artist within 300 miles. The Libyans had been given a clear chance at the target back on the hillside in Switzerland, and they had failed, so now they were ordered to sit tight and wait, were facing a hundred-to-one odds at best they would get another crack at the Gray Man.
No one expected Gentry to make it to Bayeux now.
Riegel, Lloyd, the Tech, and Felix sat in the control room in low light, sipped coffee, and watched computer monitors displaying the rocking and bouncing images broadcast from digital video cameras held by the watchers and kill teams in Paris. The Tech was still organizing the search around the Seine. By now Riegel and Lloyd both conceded Gentry must have made it out of the water downstream and staggered off, so the net was widened and then widened again on both sides of the river.
By five thirty a.m., there was fresh news in Paris that generated a flurry of activity around the château. A watcher listening to police radio had learned about a break-in at a minor emergency clinic in the Fifth Ar rondissement. This was upstream from where the target went into the river, but the Tech had sent a watcher over to find out what he could. The owners of the clinic had arrived and announced the medicines and blood and equipment stolen were all items necessary for wound management.
Riegel stood behind the Tech. “We’ll have to split the search. Keep the Bolivians and the Sri Lankans in Paris. Tell the Botswanans to come here via the highway, see if they can spot him on the way. Send a helicopter up to pick up the Kazakhs. They are the most skilled gunners; I want them here. They can patrol the back roads around the property, checking anything that moves. And alert the Libyans in Bayeux! They need to stay there to watch the train station and the routes through town. If the Gray Man is somehow still in the fight, he’ll be here before daybreak.”