The Gray Man (36 page)
Eighteen minutes after Gentry walked into the bathroom, a different man walked out.
The hair and clothing had changed, of course, but also his gait was longer, his posture more erect. Court fought against his desire to limp off his right leg. The suited gentleman descended the stairs back to the parking garage and deposited his bags, retrieved one of the Glock pistols, then returned to the street, just a well-dressed Parisian strolling alone on his way home from a nice restaurant, his umbrella swinging along beside him as he moved with the pedestrians in the November mist. He climbed into a cab on the Rue Saint-Lazare at eleven thirty and instructed the driver in halting French to take him to the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood of the Left Bank.
Song Park Kim had spotted the Kazakhs by the Notre Dame Cathedral. He had no doubt they were hunters after the same target as he. From his sharp eye they could not hide, and the Korean had no doubt the Gray Man would ID them just as easily. He also passed three or four static surveillance operatives; his training picked them out in the Saturday-evening crowds, but he determined them to be adequately skilled, nonetheless.
Kim knew his target. If the Gray Man were to make a stop-off in Paris at all, he should have arrived by now. His already supersharp senses prickled a bit more as he listened to each dead-end report from the Tech over his earpiece, and the Korean walked from boulevard to boulevard, appearing nonchalant but remaining carefully equidistant to the known associate locations.
Kim walked in complete silence on an empty street. A single Irish pub lit the cobblestones ahead of him; otherwise it was dark, and the Korean used the night as his confederate, moving quickly and comfortably like a nocturnal hunter. At the corner of Boulevard Saint-Michel and Rue du Sommerard he ducked down an alley, found a fire escape he’d spotted earlier in his full day of wandering the city, and leapt high to grab hold. The rucksack on his back swung, the HK machine pistol and the extra magazines causing the olive green bag to hang down as the Korean assassin pulled himself up the rungs. He climbed onto the metal staircase without a sound and scaled up to the sixth floor. Another heave with his strong arms, and he was over the top and on the roof. From here he could see the Eiffel Tower more than a mile away in front of him, the Seine was on his right, and the Latin Quarter all around him, stretching off to his left. The rooftops continued along the Boulevard Saint-Michel, touched one another, and made a path high above the streets below.
This would be Kim’s starting point for the evening. If Gentry ventured anywhere on the Left Bank, Kim could move quickly and quietly over this row of buildings or others like it. If the Gray Man showed on the Right Bank, Kim could be there within minutes by dropping down and running across any one of the bridges a few blocks to the north that spanned the cold, swift river, its surface shimmering as it flowed through the City of Lights.
Court Gentry climbed out of his taxi at an Internet café on the Boulevard Saint Germaine. He ordered an hour’s Web time and a double espresso from the bar, paid, and then politely nudged his way through the throngs of students towards an open computer at the back. His glasses low on his nose, his cup and saucer in his hands, his fancy umbrella hooked over his arm.
Once online, he opened a search engine and typed in “LaurentGroup properties in France.” He clicked on a Web site that showed off the real estate holdings of the huge firm: ports, offices, truck farms, and a Web page for corporate retreats. Here he found Château Laurent, a family property used by the corporation northeast of the tiny village of Maisons in Lower Normandy. Once he had the name, he searched the Web for more information about the property, found a site showing private châteaus of Europe, looked over the glamour shots of the squat seventeenth-century manor house. He committed many of the facts to memory, ignored others that didn’t seem so important, like the fact that Mitterrand had shot rabbits on the grounds or that some of Rom mel’s senior officers had billeted their wives there when in town to make final preparations to the Atlantic Wall.
He wrote the address down with a pen borrowed from a dark-skinned boy sitting next to him, then he surfed to LaurentGroup’s corporate Web site. It took him a few minutes to find the address in its corporate holdings—the château was listed just as a satellite office and not a company retreat—but from here Court found the listed phone number to the building. He wrote this on his forearm while the young kid who loaned him the pen laughed and offered him a sheet of paper, which Gentry declined.
Next the American took a few minutes to look at a satellite map of the area around the castle. The layout of the forest, streams running nearby, the orchards behind the 300-year-old stone building, and the graveled country roads outside the encircling wall.
He took one more look at the shots of the structure. A large turret was the high point of the building. Court knew a marksman would lurk there. He also knew there were 200 yards of open ground between Château Laurent and the apple orchard in the back. There was a shorter distance in front of the building, but a higher stone wall and better lighting. He imagined there would be patrolling men with dogs, watchers in the village, and maybe even a helicopter in the air.
Lloyd clearly had the resources at his disposal to protect a mansion from one lousy, limping attacker.
The fortification was not impenetrable; few places were impenetrable to Gentry. But if he left Paris right this very minute, he would not get to Bayeux before two in the morning. He had until eight to rescue the Fitzroys before Lloyd’s deadline, but this was false comfort. He knew if he was to have any chance for success, he’d have to make his move in the dead of night when the guard force would be groggy, and reaction times would suffer.
So, even though there were surely ways to breach Château Laurent, Court knew it would be tough to breach without laying up for hours and hours to get a feel for the security measures.
He would not have hours and hours. A couple hours’ watch at most before daylight.
And again, that was only if he left Paris right now, and that was not his plan.
At one a.m., Gentry sat in the Café le Luxembourg and drank his second double espresso of the evening among the young and the beautiful on the Rue Souf flot. A small ham sandwich sat untouched on a plate in front of him. The coffee was bitter, but he knew the caffeine would help him through the next few hours. That and good hydration, so he chugged his second five-euro bottle of mineral water while he pretended to read a day-old copy of
Le Monde
. His eyes darted around, but they kept returning to a building across the street, number 23.
Le Monde
. His eyes darted around, but they kept returning to a building across the street, number 23.
Really, Court just wanted to get up and go, get out of town without pursuing his objective in Paris. He knew he would be taking a tremendous risk to pay a visit to the man in the apartment building across the little street, but he needed help, not just for himself but also a way to get the Fitzroys clear. The man across the street was named Van Zan, he was Dutch, a former CIA contracted ferryman and an awesome pilot of small prop planes. Court had planned to pay him a surprise visit, wave some cash under his nose, grossly underplay the danger in making a five a.m. trip up to Bayeux to pick up a family of four and Court himself, and then fly them low over the channel to the UK. Van Zan was a known associate, so Lloyd would have had his phone tapped within minutes of beginning this operation and would have planted surveillance outside his door. Court knew he couldn’t call Van Zan, but he figured he could duck past a watcher or two and drop in for a personal visit.
Yeah, it was a good plan, Court told himself as he gulped bitter espresso and pointed his unfocused eyes at the newspaper in front of his face.
But slowly he realized it wasn’t going to happen.
Sure, Court knew he could slip a couple of surveillance goons and make it in to see Van Zan.
A couple, yes.
But not a half dozen.
While sipping his espresso, he’d compromised five definite watchers, and there was another person in the crowd who did not belong.
Shit,
thought Court. Not only did he now know there was no way he could get into Van Zan’s place to make him an offer, but he was beginning to feel extremely hemmed in and vulnerable, surrounded by a half dozen eagle eyes.
thought Court. Not only did he now know there was no way he could get into Van Zan’s place to make him an offer, but he was beginning to feel extremely hemmed in and vulnerable, surrounded by a half dozen eagle eyes.
There were two, a young couple hanging out in the Quality Burger across the street. They checked out each white male passerby, then jacked their heads back towards the doorway to the alcove to Van Zan’s place. Then there was the man alone in his parked car. He was Middle Eastern, strummed his fingers on the dash like he was listening to music, watched the crowd as they passed. Number four stood at the bus stop in front of the Luxembourg Gardens, like he was waiting for a bus, but he never even glanced at the front of any of the buses that pulled up to see where they were going.
Five stood on a second-floor balcony, held a camera with a lens the size of a baguette, and pretended to take photos of the vibrant intersection, but Court wasn’t buying it for a second. His “shots” were up and down the pavement below him and across the street at the alcove. Nothing of the well-lit Panthéon up the road to his left. Nothing of the typically French produce stands and the beautiful iron fencing around the Luxembourg Gardens.
And number six was a woman, alone, in the café just a few tables ahead of Gentry. He’d made sure to get a table towards the back but near the window that ran along the side of the eatery. From here he could keep an eye on everyone in the room with him while covering his face with the paper, and yet still look to his right to Van Zan’s place and those around it. She had done the same thing, sitting just ahead.
Number six was slick. She spent 80 percent of her time looking down to her big, foamy mocha, not bouncing every glance out the window. But her mistake was her dress and her attitude. She was French—he could tell by clothes and countenance—but she was alone and did not seem to know anyone in the café. A pretty French girl in her twenties who spent Saturday night alone, away from friends but still out in the crowd, in a café unfamiliar to her, in a part of town she did not know.
No, Court determined, she was a pavement artist, a watcher, a follower, paid to sit there and keep her big doughy eyes peeled.
After eating his little sandwich and finishing his coffee, after giving up on his great plan to set up a foolproof escape route after saving the Fitzroys, he decided he needed to get away, get out of town, get up to Bayeux and work something out. His spirits had ebbed to their lowest point since yesterday morning—he was even more dejected than he’d been when sitting in the moldy pit in Laszlo’s laboratory—but Gentry knew the absolute worst thing he could do right now was sit and sulk. He dropped a wad of euro notes on his table and slipped down a back hall to the bathroom. After relieving himself, he continued down the hall, ducked into the kitchen like he belonged, walked straight to a back door and then through it onto the Rue Monsieur le Prince.
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