Chapter Twenty
TWENTY
Riegel took the call at eleven thirty-eight in the morning.
“Sir, Kruger again. Gentry has been taken off the train at a little village called Marnand. Not a scheduled stop.”
“Taken off by who?”
“Municipaux. He’s cuffed and just sitting on the platform, surrounded by the police. I heard one of the cops calling for a transport wagon to be sent up from Lausanne. It should take no more than thirty minutes.”
“Did you get off the train as well?”
“No other passengers were allowed off. I’ll disembark in Lausanne and go directly to the police station, wait for him to arrive.”
Riegel stared at a map on his computer as he hung up and called Lloyd. “Tell the Venezuelans Gentry’s in Marnand, about thirty kilometers north of Lausanne. The police have him.”
The American answered back immediately. “They can’t have him! We need him!”
Riegel looked across his desk. The heads of a dozen brilliant animals, trophies of his hunts, stared back at him. He said, “I know that. Tell the Venezuelans they are weapons free. They can destroy whoever gets in their way.”
“Now we’re talking! Are they any good?”
“They are from the General Intelligence Office, Hugo Chavez’s secret police. They are the best Caracas has to offer.”
“Right. Are they any good?”
“We’ll know soon enough, won’t we?”
—
Gentry sat shivering on a wooden bench on the one platform of the small train station. His left hand had been cuffed to the bench’s iron armrest. Five municipal cops stood around him in the light snowfall; the rest had stayed on the train.
He’d gotten the idea that his description had been distributed after the morning ruckus in Guarda.
He guessed the stolen bike showing up at the train station in Ardez earned the ticket girl a questioning by the police.
She would have remembered a foreigner on the first train to Zurich that morning.
Zurich being the main transportation hub in the tiny nation, it was just a matter of alerting every cop to check every train, bus, and aircraft out of Zurich for a brown-haired male in his thirties traveling alone.
The sign on the platform said Marnand. He had no idea where this burg was on the map, but his body felt like he may have gotten a couple of hours of sleep, so he suspected he was not far from Geneva.
He had to find a way to get free from these guys and get back on the road.
In the back of his head a clock was ticking.
The lead policeman sat down next to him. His hair was white like a snow-capped mountain peak, and he smelled of fresh aftershave.
“We wait for a car from Lausanne. They take you to the station. Detectives come and talk to you about the fight in Guarda and the gun you have on train.”
“Yes, sir.” Gentry was trying on the friendly approach now, his strategy blowing around like a summer wind because he did not know what else to do.
It wouldn’t win him release, but it easily could help him get the upper hand with the police, cause them to lower their guard just enough for him to find a window of opportunity to exploit.
Still, carrying a gun in your pants in Switzerland was an outrage with nearly the gravitas of mass murder in America.
“Can I go to the bathroom?”
“No. Hold your piss.”
The younger cops around laughed.
Court sighed. It was worth a shot.
Off to his left, down the platform, a two-lane road twisted up and over a rise.
The road was wet and clean and black like liquorice, bisecting the white snowfall on the hill.
A dark green panel truck was parked high up on the hill, fifty yards from the station’s edge and a hundred yards or so from where Court sat and his police guards stood on the station’s single platform.
Exhaust vapors blew out from the muffler, rose into the air behind the vehicle.
Court looked to his right now, still trying to find a way to gain the advantage before more cops showed up.
To his right was the edge of the village proper.
Gingerbread homes were sprinkled in among more modern structures.
Plumes of woodsmoke floated into the air above the homes and dissipated in the gray sky above.
A green truck, identical to the one on his right, rolled slowly out of the village and pulled into a gas station thirty yards from where Court sat. It jolted to a stop in the parking lot, away from the pumps.
The Gray Man decided in seconds that he had just been surrounded.
“Sergeant!” he called quickly to the cop in charge.
The older man was speaking with his subordinates, but he walked over towards Court on the bench.
“Please listen carefully. We have a problem. On both sides of us are green trucks. In or near those vehicles are men who have been sent to kill me. They will not hesitate to kill you and your men to get to me.”
The policeman looked to his left and right at both of the vehicles, then back to Gentry.
“What is this shit you are saying?”
“They will be well-trained killers. You need to move us all inside the station. Hurry!”
Slowly, the policeman pulled his walkie-talkie from his belt and brought it to his mouth. His eyes did not leave Gentry’s. In German he instructed his men behind him to come over.
He switched to English. “Two green vehicles. One to the north, one to the south. This man tells me they are men here to rescue him.”
“Not rescue! Kill!”
All five looked up and down the platform at the vans. There was still no movement from either.
“It’s a trick,” said a young blond officer as he unfastened the retention restraint over the tang of his pistol.
“Who are you?” asked another man.
Court didn’t answer. Instead he said, “We need to go inside. Quickly.”
The lead policeman told his officers, “Watch him. I’ll check this out.” He turned and began walking up the platform towards the van to the south at the gas station.
“Sergeant! You really do not want to do that.” Court called out but was ignored by the silver-headed policeman in the heavy coat.
The cop descended the platform steps and onto the property of the little gas station. The green van had tinted windows. It sat at idle, steam pouring from its exhaust and drifting away in the air behind.
As the Municipaux officer approached the truck, Gentry spoke to the four remaining men.
“He’s going to die. Don’t freak out; we will all have to work together. If you try to run, they will just gun you down. If you want to live, just do what I say.”
“Shut up,” said one, and all four were looking at their sergeant as he approached the driver’s-side window. He used his walkie-talkie to tap on the tinted glass.
“Don’t forget about the other van!” Court pleaded to the uniformed men standing over him.
“Shut up,” repeated the policeman. Gentry could see their growing concern as their heads swiveled back and forth between the north and south.
The sergeant tapped harder on the glass.
As Gentry and the others watched, the silver-haired man seemed to peer closely through the heavy tint.
He must have seen something, some movement or other indicator of danger, because quickly the Swiss policeman stepped back and reached down to the pistol on his hip.
The driver’s-side window shattered with the crack of gunfire.
The cop backpedaled away quickly, and the door opened.
A man in a black jumpsuit and a ski mask slid out from behind the wheel and onto the pavement, a short-barreled machine pistol in his hand.
He fired another three-round burst into the sergeant’s stumbling body, and the Swiss officer dropped dead on his back.
All four Swiss cops around Court drew their pistols with technique hampered by panic. At thirty yards an accurate shot would be difficult, but the young men fired rounds downrange as they shouted in shock and dropped for cover.
“The other truck! The other fucking truck!” Court screamed as he himself dropped to the cement. He lay on the cold pavement next to the bench, his left arm above him in the seat, shackled to the armrest.
The cops looked behind them and saw four masked men walking down the blacktop road towards their position. They all held rifles similar to the man at the gas station, who was now joined by three confederates. All eight moved closer with confidence, like they had all the time in the world.
“Uncuff me! We’ve got to get inside!” Court yelled, but the policemen just pressed lower into the cement platform, squatted and ducked behind a wooden push-cart or lay flat in the open, and they fired inaccurate rounds at the gunmen as the men in black approached menacingly through the swirling snowfall from opposite directions.
A bald-headed young policeman shouted into the radio affixed to the epaulets of his jacket.
He crouched fifteen feet from Gentry behind a luggage cart that provided him poor shielding from the men on the hill to the north and no cover whatsoever from the men fanned out at the gas station to his south.
Court watched bursts of concrete stitch up the platform, race towards the young cop as he looked the other way and screamed into his microphone, unaware.
Each explosion of cement and dust tracked closer to him, until finally supersonic machine pistol rounds burrowed into his legs and back.
He spun onto his side and twitched on the concrete.
The death throes ceased as quickly as they began.
“Somebody give me a gun!” Gentry shouted. The three remaining policemen ignored him. They fired inaccurately and reloaded slowly with jittering hands.
Court swiveled around on the cold concrete.
He put his boots against the iron legs of the bench and kicked as hard as he could.
He desperately tried to break the large iron end piece to which he was manacled free from the rest of the twelve-foot wooden bench.
The metal handcuff bit into his left wrist as he kicked and pulled.
Soon he created a rhythm to his work. A kick with his feet, cracks of the old wood, and searing pain in his wrist and hand.