had them pegged as Slavic, wearing suits, and their car was a limousine of some make.
These would be Sid’s boys, here to pick him up and take him for a ride, and this made Court furious. He’d planned on getting off here in Gdansk, losing himself for a few days on the Polish coast, and then contacting Sid via the Ural Mountain Tours Web site when he was good and ready. Sir Donald, his ex-handler, never made him work face-to-face, but these goons, sent by his soon-to-be ex-handler, had no doubt come here on a babysitting mission to make sure Gentry came along peacefully to kneel before the throne of his liege.
“Fuck this shit,” Court said it aloud at twenty-five yards. The men were up off the hood of the limo; cigarettes were thrown on the ground and crushed out. Court could see the glint of thin gold chains around their necks. Russian mob boys. Who else? The men stepped up to the edge of the dock, coming to the water’s edge to prevent him from running away when the ferry landed.
As if.
Court looked up and down the landing to see if there was any place to run to.
Nope. Shit.
Gentry stepped off the swaying launch and up onto the floating wharf. He stood in front of the four goons. No words were exchanged. The only communication between them was through the looks of five men filled with testosterone, all of them on the job, none of them here particularly willingly. Court’s old CIA Special Activities Division team leader, a foul-mouthed ex-SEAL named Zack Hightower, referred to it as “eye fucking,” a crude but accurate description of men simultaneously sizing up one another and projecting their own power and prowess through their cold stares.
Slowly Court opened his peacoat to reveal the butt of the .380 Makarov on his hip. One of the younger Russians stepped forward and yanked the gun free of its holster, sneering at Gentry during his backwards draw stroke as if he had discovered the weapon himself. He then patted Court down front to back, pulled a knife from the foreigner’s pocket, and slipped it into his own. He looked through the canvas bag on Gentry’s shoulder, yanked out the satellite phone and pocketed it, but he did not find anything else of interest. Satisfied he’d disarmed the Gray Man, the Russian stepped back, and with an impatient gesture, he beckoned the American forward to the car.
Court unslung his bag from his shoulder, then tossed it underhanded to one of the men to carry. The bag hit the thick man on the chest, and he let it fall to the ground in front of him; his “eye fuck” stare neither wavered nor diminished.
Court could not help it. He cracked a smile, stepped forward, and scooped it up with a chuckle, then walked to the black limo and opened the back door of the car and climbed in.
An hour later he was airborne. A Hawker 400 light corporate aircraft had been waiting for his entourage at Lech Walesa International Airport. No passports or customs inspections were performed that Court could see; certainly no one asked him any questions or solicited from him any documentation. The Hawker shot upwards through the wet clouds and into a clear mid-morning Polish sky. With him in the seven-seated cabin were the four men who’d picked him up at the dock. They showed him where the food and the booze were stored on the plane, and in broken English they said the flight would only be two hours. They did not tell him where they were headed, but they did not need to.
Court knew. He was being taken to the boss, and the boss lived in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Gentry leaned back and relaxed, sipped bottled water, and listened to Sidorenko’s henchmen chat. Court’s Russian comprehension had been fair at its peak, a dozen years earlier, but it was extremely rusty at the moment. By concentrating on the chitchat of the men around him with his eyes closed for over an hour, he felt like he was retuning his brain to the nearly impenetrable language.
He was reasonably sure that Sid and his men would have no idea that he spoke a word of Russian, and he thought he might be able to use their ignorance to his advantage in the hours to come.
The Hawker dipped a wing and descended, landing just after noon. Court’s assumption that he’d be heading to Saint Petersburg to meet with