Mark Greaney: On target

Thirty minutes after slinging a leg over the balcony on the twelfth floor, Gentry was dressed in fresh clothing and entering a tiny guesthouse a quarter mile from the Nevsky Palace. Court remembered the place from his last trip here. This was the nondescript hotel he'd stayed in back in 2003 with Zack Hightower, team leader of the Goon Squad, while they waited to take down the cargo ship full of Saddam's guns. Then, as now, it was pretty much a dump, but it was quiet and secluded and at the end of a narrow cul-de-sac that gave a good view of all who came and went.

He paid an elderly lady in euros for one night. She asked for a passport, but he shrugged his shoulders and fanned two more twenty euro notes. She shrugged herself, and took the money. He asked for the second-floor room that faced the street, and she took him up one narrow flight of stairs, past the community toilet, and down a shoulder-wide second-floor hallway that creaked with each step. She opened the door with the key and then turned and shuffled back to the staircase without a glance.

Court much preferred spending the night here, as opposed to being held captive in his suite at the Nevsky Palace, surrounded by skinhead goons. He just wanted to crash, lie in bed, and think about his options as far as making a run for it or working with Sidorenko to get into the Sudan, maybe even return to his suite in time to thumb through some of the documentation left there to help him make up his mind.

Court entered his darkened room and flipped the light switch. Nothing happened. Shit hole. He breathed a slight sigh of frustration and felt his way forward, using the dim illumination from the streetlights outside the vinyl curtains. He stepped around the tiny twin bed and drew open the curtains and turned around to survey his room.

Five men faced him in the low light. Still as statues, they were positioned against the walls, but all were within a couple of steps of the Gray Man.

Court's fight-or-flight response kicked on in a single heartbeat, and he attacked. He ducked low and charged the man on his far right, slammed into him as the big man's arms came down hard on the back of Court's head. They crashed into the wall together. Gentry raised his left leg to deliver a groin kick to whoever would surely be attacking from behind. He connected with inner thigh, not a debilitating blow, and while he brought his right palm up hard for an open-hand uppercut on the man embracing him, he felt an airborne body hit him hard from the right. Court's palm connected with the first man's face just as he spun away, crashed onto the bed on his back, and felt two more men grab his legs and pin them.

With his one free arm he delivered a vicious punch to the solar plexus of a man moving towards him. He felt a Kevlar vest under his dark clothing and knew he'd done no damage.

As he struggled and fought, he recognized plainly that the men attacking him were competent. No, they were damn good. They were fast, strong, and well-trained. More important, they worked together and didn't shout or scream or freak out as they fought him. He managed a solid elbow to the side of a smaller man's head, sending him hard against the headboard of the bed and then off the side onto the wooden floor. But the others filled in the gap left by their wounded comrade in an instant, their body weight pinning his appendages to the bed as he wrestled desperately to get free.

Looking to his left, he saw one of the men had retrieved something from somewhere in the darkness and approached now with careful confidence. Court saw the sharp glint of thin metal, a stubby piece of clear plastic. Even in the negligible light he recognized the outline of the syringe. The needle approached, and whatever noxious goo it had been filled with was on its way to his bloodstream unless he could stop the man trying to punch it against his skin.

Instantly Gentry decided these were CIA Special Activities Division Paramilitary Operations officers, an entire field team, and he knew he was in deep shit. There was a termination order on him. He'd ducked them for years, but they had found him now.

Bound to happen sooner or later.

Court relaxed his left arm for an instant, gave the man holding it down a moment's respite from the struggle. The ruse worked, and Gentry shot his arm down, under the man's grip and to his side. From here it was free, and he jetted out a fierce jab to the needle man's face. The needle man's head snapped back, and he dropped the syringe as he folded back on his legs and grabbed his nose, but the operator pinning his left leg down reached out and grabbed the instrument off the floor, buried its business end into Court's thigh, and pressed the plunger as Gentry tried and failed to kick free.

"Son of a bitch!" Court shouted, not knowing what he'd been injected with but recognizing that, no matter what he did now, he had just lost the battle.

He stopped moving immediately. There was no point. He was as good as dead.

A sixth man entered the room-slowly, but with an unmistakable swagger in his step. Court tried to focus on him, but already he could feel a drug taking hold of his central nervous system. Whatever they'd given him was powerful; he'd worked with poisons and incapacitating anesthetics enough to know that he'd been dosed with a hard and potent sedative. His muscles relaxed; he felt as if his body were melting into the mattress.

The new man in the room leaned over him as the others climbed off. Two of the original five were down; the other three calmly tended to their associates' injuries, while the new visitor to the dark room just looked down on Court with curiosity. Gentry tried to focus on the man, to fight against the growing fuzz from the drugs in his blood. For a moment he thought the face looked familiar, but a wave of dizziness wiggled the image out of his mind.

The man above him spoke. "Hiya, Court."

Through the haze Gentry knew the voice somehow. The man grabbed Court's cheeks and pinched them until his mouth opened. Saliva oozed out past his protruding tongue and down his chin.

"Twenty seconds and he's out," said the man above him to the men standing around. Then he turned his attention back to Gentry. "Predictable. I knew you'd sneak out of the hotel and come here. Haven't you picked up any new travel tips in the past eight years?" He smiled. "Unlucky for you I just happened to remember this shit hole."

He turned back to his colleagues. "Sierra Six never was the luckiest dude around. We used to say that if it were raining pussy, Court Gentry would get hit with a dick."

Sierra Six?

As Court felt himself falling into blackness, his numb mouth moved, and he whispered a single word before the lights went out completely. "Zack?"

"You remember me, don't you, Gentry?"

Gentry hadn't even remembered that his name was Gentry. His eyes were well open when he became aware, and he wondered if he'd been conscious for a while or if he'd just now come to. He was not dead, of that he was certain, though the rest was unclear. He then felt the cold, looked down at his bare chest and underwear, found himself sitting on a chair. Four walls surrounded him, and his wrists were bound behind his back. He saw four men standing around him, over him, and felt their malevolence, but their faces were difficult to focus on, drugs coursing through him still. In his training at the CIA's secret Autonomous Asset Development Program in Harvey Point, North Carolina, he had been injected with, had ingested, or had been aspirated with somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five mood-altering substances to test and improve his dexterity, agility, and cognitive ability while under the influence. He'd once even successfully climbed a three-story rope ladder and picked a lock while completely numbed by Versed, though he had no recollection of performing the drill twenty minutes later. He'd learned much about opiates and other anesthetics in his training, but now all he could say for sure was that he was seriously fucked up.