Trestle Two rolled his eyes and made a gesture like he was performing a hand job.
Nick finished adjusting his gear on his chest. Normally he would have laughed, but his game face was on now. He looked up to his second in command. “It’s all good. Gentry did something to make himself an enemy of the state. We’re the state. Well… sort of. Close enough, anyhow.” He smiled now. “Let’s go kill that miserable fuck.”
“Yeah, let’s.”
The two men headed back to join the others loading into the van.
THIRTEEN
Court lay awake, listening to the wind whipping fine grainlike snow against the window of his tiny third-floor room. He glanced at his watch and saw it was nearly four A.M., and as near as he could tell from his view out the window, there was one hell of a storm raging outside.
He wanted to sleep; he’d dozed off and on for hours, but he couldn’t seem to shut off his mind. He often took a few days to decompress after an action, and this was no different. The good result of the Sidorenko hit notwithstanding, he found himself stressing, reliving everything that happened.
Maybe it was the kid that was getting to him. The little boy he’d run into in the hallway of the mansion. Court had done his best to scare the living shit out of him to make sure he would go back into his room and hide. He’d probably saved the boy’s life; had he been wandering the dark hallways when the shooting started he could easily imagine one of the drugged-up gun-wielding skinheads on the property spooking at the movement and shooting the boy dead.
Yes, Court acknowledged, he’d done the right thing, in the short term anyhow. But long term?
Would the boy have nightmares about his encounter with the monster who broke into his house in the dead of night and killed his uncle? Surely he would put together that a rival had sent an assassin to the house, and the assassin, while obviously talented, was no ghost. No monster.
Or was he?
Court stared out the window. What are you, Gentry?
Court was known by many names. His given name, of course, but almost no one referred to him by that anymore. His mom died when he was young, he hadn’t spoken to his dad in years, and he’d lost his brother a few years earlier.
At the CIA he had first been known as Violator, a code name he’d been given when he was admitted into AADP, the Autonomous Asset Development Program, a school of sorts in Harvey Point, North Carolina, where lost-boy renegade-types were taken in and taught how to channel their wild side into doing dirty jobs for the United States of America.
After 9/11, Court was pulled out of solo work and folded into a tip-of-the-spear unit called Golf Sierra, jokingly referred to as the Goon Squad, an anti-terror task force in the CIA’s Special Activities Division, and during those years Violator became Sierra Six, the low man in the six-member team. He spent his days on snatch-and-grab missions, rendering America’s greatest enemies to black sites for interrogation, or shooting them in the head when so ordered.
And then suddenly — extraordinarily suddenly, as a matter of fact — he was no longer Sierra Six, no longer part of the team. The Goon Squad turned on him; clearly they’d been ordered to kill him.
But Sierra Six retained enough of his training as Violator to single-handedly take down his entire team, one against five. It also marked the end of his life in the USA. He left the country a day later, running to stay ahead of the hunters on his trail.
To survive on the lam from the most powerful nation on earth, Court, Violator, Sierra Six, became the Gray Man, an assassin for hire, executing private contract killings only against those he deemed worthy of capital punishment for their crimes. In five years he had eliminated terrorists, drug lords, mafia leaders, despots, and even other assassins.
His goal, through the years living abroad and off the net, had always been to win his way back to the United States. While his one attempt at reconciliation with the CIA had ended poorly, on the banks of the Red Sea with a former friend and Special Activities Division operative declaring his intent to chase him to the ends of the earth, Court had not given up hope that somehow, someday, he would be allowed back into the USA, either into the open arms of the CIA or at least with their grudging approval.
But the years were adding up, and his relationship with Langley had not improved.
And there was something else. He’d spent the last months preparing for the Sidorenko hit, putting all of his efforts into this task to the extent that he had thought of little else. Now that it was over, something had entered the forefront of his consciousness that he could no longer avoid thinking about. His relationships with nefarious personalities like Sidorenko had created so many new enemies for him to deal with, the CIA situation had become a back-burner problem for him. His killing of Sid had been necessary, but now that it was done, it felt like time wasted.
There were so many others out there who wanted him dead. A French oil concern he’d worked against, and then worked for, now held a grudge because of the manner in which they had parted ways.
A Mexican cartel boss he’d worked for, then worked against, had recently placed a video on YouTube. In it, Constantino Madrigal, one of the most wanted men on earth, addressed the camera with his face all but obscured by a cowboy hat and a bandanna.
He said, “This message is to José, the gringo pistolero. Your amigos, the Cowboys, have some advice for you. Don’t buy any green bananas.”
Madrigal ended the video with a raspy laugh and a wave of his gold-plated AK-47.
The first appearance of Madrigal on camera in years made the international press, and Court had caught the video while living in his safe house in Moscow, prepping for the Sidorenko operation. Though the clip was cryptic to everyone else, Court got the message. He had called himself José in Mexico, and the reference to green bananas was clear.
In Moscow, Court triaged this problem well behind the Sidorenko situation. He was in Russia, after all, and Sid was a bigger fish to fry than a Mexican drug lord.
But now Sid was dead, and Court wondered how much trouble Madrigal, or the French energy company LaurentGroup, could still make for him.
All the bad guys out there on his ass were really cutting into his free time.
Court knew the only way around this problem, long term, was to stop making deals with these devils. He knew he had to get out of the industry, to stop working for handlers he could not trust and accepting patronage from those who had as much blood on their hands as the evil men he targeted.
Court knew he had to, somehow, cease his life as the Gray Man.
It seemed as if the thought had just come to him, but he realized after a moment of reflection he had been moving toward this line of thinking for some time.
What good had he done in the past five years? There were still evil multinationals, still despots in Africa, still thriving brotherhoods in Russia, still calamitous drug wars in Mexico.
Court got older, more beaten and battered and shell-shocked and defeated, but the world around him kept turning, unchanged and unimproved.
The only thing he’d managed to accomplish was stay alive, and if he kept up this lifestyle, he knew it was only a matter of time before he pissed away this tiny victory by getting his ass killed, dead in a jungle in Asia or a dirty back alley in Europe or a putrid ditch in South America or, just maybe, a soulless hotel room in the Baltic.
The end would be ignominious and sudden.
Don’t buy any green bananas, indeed.
As he lay there on the bed, he thought back to something Maurice, his principal trainer at AADP in Harvey Point, had said to him.
“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” It was a Chesterton quote, and at the time Court was a nineteen-year-old kid, an aimless and troubled young man who just happened to be incredible with a weapon in his hand. He did not understand the quote, so Maurice explained it this way: “If you are going to fight, do it for something you love. Do it for your country.”