Slowly, when it all was over, the Frenchwoman slid down the bumper of the car to the ground. She laid the rifle in front of her, and her empty hands shook as she covered her face and cried.
Court fought hyperventilation as he cleared the four bodies from the road. He heard a helicopter above in the lightening morning. With the hedgerows on both sides and the high wall surrounding Château Laurent, the chopper would have to fly directly above to spot his position, but Gentry knew every second he stayed exposed on the dusty road was a gamble.
Quickly he checked the trunk of the car for any equipment he could put to use. Immediately he found four sets of level 3A body armor. All but worthless against a rifle-caliber bullet, but damn effective stopping pistol fire. Quickly he pushed his head through a vest and Velcroed the side panels tightly around his waist. Also in the back were hard-shell tactical knee and elbow pads. He put these on as well, figured a scuffed elbow would be the absolute least of his many worries in the next few minutes, but there was no sense leaving an ounce of protective gear behind.
Then he sat down in the driver’s seat of the little Citroën, shoved it in gear to drive into the thick hedgerow in an attempt to conceal it from the air. Looking down, he realized he’d popped some if not all of the sutures Justine had used to tie his stomach back together. His knife wound bled and wet his bandages and his shirt under the bulletproof vest. Blood trickled out of his stomach, down his pants, and onto the car seat. “Shit,” he said aloud. Once again he was operating on borrowed time.
After hiding the bodies and the car and tossing the AKs into the bushes, he went to Justine, who was still kneeling by the car. She wiped tears and strands of tousled hair from her eyes. Slowly she rose to her feet.
She looked towards the bodies poorly concealed in the bushes. Discarded. Arms and legs splayed unnaturally. “They were bad men, yes?”
“Very bad. I had to do it, and now I have to go over that wall and do it some more.”
Justine did not respond.
Court began opening the aluminum cases, cinching a utility belt tightly around his waist, hooking the drop-leg pistol holster on his right thigh and the sub-load magazine carrier on his left. “I’m out of time. I have to go.” He slung the M4 assault rifle over his neck and left arm and fastened the small HK MP5 submachine gun, muzzle down, to the vest on the chest rig he’d taken from the blue Citroën. He slid the Glock 19 pistol into the thigh holster and Velcroed the two fragmentation grenades into place on the vest. From the front seat of the car he took the satellite phone and jammed it into his hip pocket.
In just under three minutes he was ready. He turned back to Justine, who stood silently behind him, still looking at the exposed legs of the four shattered corpses. “I’ll need to use the hood of the car to climb over the fence. Once I clear the top, I want you to back up, turn around, drive back up the coast. Go west, not east. Park this car at the next train station you see, get on the first morning train to Paris, and go home. Thank you again for everything you’ve done for me.”
Justine’s eyes were distant. Gentry knew killing the four men in hand-to-hand combat right in front of her had shaken her badly. It would upset anyone, he thought, at least any normal person who did not live his life.
“Are you going to be okay?” he asked gently.
“Are you a bad man, Jim?” she asked, her pupils still wide from the fight.
He put his hand on her arm, held it gently if uncomfortably. “I don’t think so. I’ve been taught some bad things. I do some… some bad things. But only to bad people.”
“Yes,” she said. She seemed to clear a little. “Yes.” She looked up at him. “I wish you luck.”
“Maybe, when I’m done with this, we can talk—”
“No,” she interrupted. Looked away. “No. It’s better I try to forget.”
“I understand.”
She hugged him briefly, but to Gentry she felt distracted, as if she took him as some sort of animal now after his brutal display of violence. She clearly just wanted to get away from him and all this madness. Without another word, she climbed into the driver’s seat of the car, and he got up onto the hood. The painkillers she’d given him while he slept provided some relief. Even so, climbing the wall was pure agony for a man with such a savage wound in his abdomen, to say nothing of his wrist, leg, and rib cage.
Gentry slid over the top of the stone wall, hung his feet down, dropped into soft grass, and heard the little four-door back away and turn around in the road. Court looked down at his watch. It was seven forty a.m.
The heavy fog totally obscured the château. All he could see was the beginning of an apple orchard in front of him. Bright red fruit lay on the ground under row after row of small trees with narrow trunks.
Court checked his gear one last time, took a deep breath to control his aches and pains, and began running through the orchard and into the deep gray mist.
THIRTY-THREE
“Shut it down,” Riegel said.
The two Frenchmen who’d been staring at the bank of monitors in the library for twelve hours straight did as they were told. They began flipping switches from left to right, turning off the images from the infrared cameras around the property.
Lloyd appeared behind them all in the library’s doorway and asked, “What are you doing?”
Riegel answered, “Infrared cameras are for the night, Lloyd. It is no longer night.”
“You said he’d come at night.”
“I did, yes.”
“But he’s still coming, right?”
“It does not appear so,” answered Riegel the hunter, his voice tinged with both confusion and dejection.
“We’ve got fifteen minutes to get a body for Felix. What the fuck are we going to do?”
Riegel turned to the younger American. “We have a helicopter overhead and over one hundred men and women looking for him. We have thirty guns right here at the château, waiting on him. We’ve shot him. We’ve stabbed him. We’ve sent him down a mountain, off a bridge. We’ve killed his friends, we’ve bled him dry. What else can we do?”
Just then the Tech’s voice chirped over the walkie-talkie feature of both men’s phones. “We have a couple of problems.”
“What is it?” asked Riegel.
“The Bolivians have left the contest. They just called from Paris to tell us they quit.”
“Good riddance,” snapped Lloyd.
“And the Kazakhs are not checking in.”
Riegel lifted his phone from his belt. “They never check in.”
“The Saudis’ chopper can’t find them on the road.”
Lloyd spoke into his phone now. “We would have heard gunshots if they were in battle with the Gray Man. Don’t worry about it. The bastards probably ran off like the Bolivians.”
Lloyd and Riegel walked back up the two flights of stairs to the third floor. Both men were dead tired, but neither would allow the other to see any sign of weakness. Instead they argued over what could have been done differently and what last-minute actions could still be taken.
They entered the control room and immediately noticed Felix standing by the window, his mobile to his ear. After a few seconds, the thin black man in the suit disconnected his call and turned to face the room. He had not spoken a word in hours. “Gentlemen, I am sorry to say your time is up.”
Lloyd stormed up to him, wild-eyed. “No! We’ve got ten minutes. You’ve got to give us a little more time. You saw him fall into the water. We’ve fucking killed him. We just need time to find whatever ditch he crawled into to die. Tell Abubaker you saw him fall—”