The Gray Man (20 page)
Still, Kim knew he was an instrument of South Korea’s domestic and foreign policy, his counsel had not been sought, and those whose judgment was valued had decided he should come here to Paris, settle in, wait for a call giving him the Gray Man’s whereabouts, and then pour hot bullets into the poor bastard’s back.
Graubünden is an eastern canton of Switzerland, tucked into a little niche near where the southwestern Austrian border concaves. It is known as the canton of a hundred and fifty valleys, and one of these valleys runs east to west in an area called the Lower Engadine. There the tiny village of Guarda rests atop the sharp ledge of a steep hill high above the valley floor, just miles from both the Austrian and Italian borders. There is only one sheer, winding road up to the little village, and it connects the one-room, whistle-stop train station below to the half-timbered houses above, a laborious forty-minute hike.
There are almost no cars in the village, and farm animals greatly outnumber the human residents. Narrow cobblestone roads wind steeply up and between the white buildings, alongside water troughs and fenced gardens. The town ends abruptly, and the steep hill resumes, a meadow that rises to a thick pine forest that itself gives way to rocky cliffs that loom above the town that surveys the valley floor below and all who pass or approach.
The villagers understand German but among themselves speak Romansch, a language spoken by barely 1 percent of the seven and a half million Swiss, and virtually no one else on earth.
At four a.m., a few snow flurries swirled around the little road that led from the valley floor up to Guarda. A lone man, dressed in thick jeans, a heavy coat, and a black knit cap limped up the steep, winding switchback. A small backpack hung off his shoulders.
Ten hours earlier, minutes after speaking with Don Fitzroy from a pink cell phone he’d snatched from the open purse of a staggeringly drunk female university student meandering alone on the sidewalk, Gentry found an outdoor clothing store in Budapest and purchased a full wardrobe, new from the bottom of his leather boots to the top of his black knit cap. Within an hour of leaving Szabo’s building, he was boarding a bus at Népliget Bus Terminal for the Hungarian border town of Hegyeshalom.
He climbed out of the bus a half mile from the border, walked north out of the village into a field, and turned left.
There was no moon; he had a tactical flashlight in his pack but did not use it. Instead, he stumbled to the west, walked a mile on his cut feet, could feel the sting and the warm blood squish in his socks and between his cold toes.
Finally, just before eight in the evening, he crossed a field full of modern windmills and found himself in the Austrian border town of Nickelsdorf.
He had made it into the European Union.
It was another mile walk—a limp, really, with the gunshot wound to the thigh and the injured feet and knees—before he found the road. He walked west with his thumb out for a few minutes. A trucker pulled over, but he was heading north and could not help. A second driver and then a third were also heading in the wrong direction.
At a quarter past nine, he was picked up by a Swiss businessman heading all the way to Zurich. Court told him his name was Jim. The businessman wanted to practice his English, and Court obliged. They talked about their lives and families on the trip across Austria. Court’s story was 100 percent bullshit, but he was a pro. He sold the tale of the messy divorce back in Virginia, the lifelong desire to visit Europe, the mugging in Budapest that cost him his belongings, and his good fortune to still have his wallet and cash and passport and a friend in eastern Switzerland who could put him up until he caught his plane back home the following week.
As they drove through the night and talked, Court kept part of his focus on the side mirror, nonchalantly making sure he’d not been followed. He also, between the BS stories of places he’d never been and people he’d created out of whole cloth, kept in mind his task at hand. He tried to get his head around the events still to come in the next thirty hours.
It was a Friday night, traffic on the A1 was heavy, but the businessman’s Audi was sleek and fast. They skirted to the north of Salzburg. Court offered to drive, and the Swiss businessman caught a couple of hours of sleep.
The Audi turned onto the Engadiner-Bundesstrasse and crossed the northeastern border of Switzerland at three a.m. There was no customs control at the Swiss border, though Switzerland was not officially a member of the EU. The Swiss driver pulled into an all-night rest stop, insisting Jim simply must try Swiss beer and give his honest opinion. Court did so, gushed over the body and color and texture, threw in a few other accolades he’d once overheard in a Munich biergarten in reference to German brews, and this convinced the now-smitten businessman to take Jim directly to his destination instead of dropping him off once their paths diverged.
They took the 180 south and then the 27 west through a valley, though in the overcast night they could see nothing on either side of their headlights. Finally in the burg of Lavin, Gentry picked a half-timbered house just off the main road and claimed it as his destination. Actually, by climbing out of the warm Audi here, Court was left with a two-mile walk in the snow, but, he decided, should there be trouble waiting at his real objective, there was no reason for this nice fellow to suffer for his good deed.
“Thanks for the lift.
Auf Wiedersehen
.” Court climbed out of the car and shook the gentleman’s hand through the window. He stood in the road as he waved good night.
Auf Wiedersehen
.” Court climbed out of the car and shook the gentleman’s hand through the window. He stood in the road as he waved good night.
As the taillights of the Audi rounded a corner in the distance, the Gray Man turned in the opposite direction and began walking westward through a gentle snowfall.
He trudged along purposefully, but he was bone tired. The adrenaline that, along with his discipline, had moved him forward without pause for the past twenty hours had now given out, and all that remained was the discipline. He needed rest and hoped to find a few hours of it up the steep road in Guarda.
By four ten, the snowfall had picked up. Court was up the hill and in the village now. He saw not a single soul, though there were still some lights on in the little hotel. The lights of the homes of the villagers were all extinguished, the shepherds and the blacksmiths and the innkeepers and the pensioners were sound asleep for a few hours more. He continued on, still climbing higher through the village, past ancient stone water troughs for the sheep flocks that moved through the hamlet’s pedestrian-only streets, past the tiny gardens surrounded by tiny fences in front of the tiny homes, until he broke out the other end of town and climbed higher up the steep hill along a dirt path. The evening’s snow settled on earlier accumulation, and it nearly blanketed the hillside, though even in the moonless night Gentry could see patches of darkness, bare spots on the prominence that had yet to accept the cover of the white powder.
After climbing through the white meadows for three hundred yards above Guarda, Gentry clicked on his small tactical flashlight. Behind him was sheer pas tureland, but he was now entering a pine forest, and the snow swirling though the trees and the black night made the road invisible ahead of him. The light helped. He pressed forward another hundred yards and found his destination in the woods, a tiny shack.
It stood thirty yards from the road, which continued on and up through disused private property. There was no reason anyone else would pass by, and no reason, if someone did, that they would look hard to their right through the forest and notice the simple structure. A huge, rusty padlock hung uninvitingly on the front door, the three windows around the one-room shack were boarded from the inside, and the surrounding pines grew unfettered nearly to the edges of the building.
Gentry walked through the trees and circled the building with his tac light. At the back of the cabin stood a utility shed, also heavily padlocked, and he checked this and found it secure. Continuing around the structure, he scanned the walls, the wooden slats on the roof, and finally the front door. He took off his gloves, ran his fingers around the door’s edges slowly and, in the top right corner he found it. A wooden toothpick jabbed flush with the frame. Had the door been opened, this telltale would have dropped to the ground and given the Gray Man the tipoff that his cabin had been compromised by visitors.
Satisfying himself that the location was secure, Court next turned his back to the front door, took thirty measured steps away into the pines, pushing through the needled branches. At thirty paces, he shifted five yards to his right and knelt down.
The key was buried in a metal coffee tin, just six inches or so below the pine mulch and frozen dirt. He dug it out with a flat rock. After retrieving the key, he returned to the cabin and opened the lock.
The interior air was dry and stale and every bit as cold as outside the door. There was a knee-high coal furnace in a corner, but Gentry ignored it. Instead, he lit a lantern on a card table in the center of the room, its dim glow the only warmth to be had.
A shelf on the wall held cases of military rations, meals ready to eat, and the thirty-six-year-old American tore into the first MRE he could grab as soon as he came out of the restroom with the chemical toilet. He ate hard crackers and cookies, wolfed them down as he sat alone at the card table.
He finished his meal in ninety seconds. Next he stood and pushed the squat coal furnace out of the corner and lifted the loose floorboards below it.
Placing the tactical light in his mouth, he climbed down a wooden ladder exposed with the removal of the floorboards, into a dirt-walled basement six feet high and ten feet square. When he turned from the ladder, he faced three chest-high stacks of black cases, each case the size of a very large toolbox. This took up nearly half the room in the underground cellar, and a metal workbench filled the space to his right. There was only room to climb up and down the ladder and move sufficiently to manipulate the cases. Court hefted the first container off the first stack, dropped it heavily on the table, and flicked open the latch.
Early that morning, when Court told Fitzroy he would rescue his family, he immediately decided to go to Guarda, Switzerland, to his massive weapons cache hidden in the forest. He had a half dozen other stores around the continent, but nothing like Guarda.
Guarda was the mother lode.
The heavy metal.
The first case housed a black Swiss Brügger & Thomet MP9 submachine gun. He pulled it out of its foam bed and snapped a loaded magazine into the mag well, affixed the sling to its buttstock, and lifted it over his head to push it outside the trapdoor onto the floor above him. Another case held a sub-load, a nylon and canvas rig full of loaded magazines for the weapon that would strap both to his thigh and his utility belt. He tossed this through the hole above him as well.
For the next five minutes Court went through case after case. Into a huge duffel he stuffed all manner of small arms and explosives. Into a smaller bag he placed a black tactical suit, a face mask, ballistic eyewear, a small surveillance scanner that would allow him to pick up short-distance communication, and a pair of binoculars.
Finally, just before five a.m., Gentry climbed out of the basement, following behind the two duffels he pushed out in front of him. He left the entrance to the basement cache open. He drank from a half-frozen water bottle, washed down a couple of mild painkillers for his thigh, used the chemical toilet a second time, and pulled a sleeping bag from a shelf. He rolled it out on the floor, unlocked the latch of the front door, prepared the cabin’s defenses a bit, and then climbed inside his bedding. He set the alarm on his watch to seven thirty. A couple hours’ sleep would have to be enough to get him through another long day.
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