Kincaid took yet another hit of his second beer. “Four days from now, two targets will be dead, and I’ll be after the third on the list.”
“You aren’t lacking in confidence, are you?” Scardino noted.
“A lifetime of success will do that to you.”
“Success?We just pulled your ass out of a prison in Cuba.”
“Yeah, it sucked to be there, but by the time I left, I ran that place.”
Scardino hid a smile behind his beer bottle. “I’m sure you did.”
Now the assassin said, “There’s something else I want from you.”
“What’s that?”
“You just said you have the ability to obtain classified intel from the CIA.”
“I did.”
“I want you to find someone for me.”
Confused, the Gauntlet man said, “Who?”
“The Gray Man.”
With a chuckle, Scardino said, “You’re kidding, right? That guy’s not real.”
“He’s real to me. He’s the one who put me in that fucking prison. I’ll work for you, I’ll kill for you, but you find out what you can about him.”
Scardino said nothing.
“Deal?”
Now Big Mike looked up to the screen on the bulkhead showing the location of the aircraft. They were heading northeast, towards Miami. He said, “We’re going to overfly Havana in about twenty-five minutes. Want me to drop you off there?”
“I do not,” Lancer said. “Look, I will work for you regardless. But if you really have a lot of targets, you will want me to do them quickly. The longer this takes, the sooner the targets will recognize a pattern, the sooner the targets will realize they might be next. They will go to ground. I know that, andIknow thatyouknow that. I will be more motivated to work more quickly if you and I agree on these terms. My terms are my freedom, which you have already secured. Payment, which you promise me for each successful operation. And information. Get me what the U.S. government has on the Gray Man. I get all that…I’ll be the best worker bee you’ve everseen. Your enemies list will be full of stacked bodies, flies crawling across their eyeballs, that kind of shit.”
“What if there’s nothing about the Gray Man?”
“There’snotnothing about the Gray Man. He used to be CIA. There are files on him.”
Scardino looked out the window a moment. “Sure, Lancer. I’ll put in a request. I don’t know what the IC has on this phantom everybody talks about, but if there’s anything out there, you can see it.”
Scott Kincaid, code-named Lancer, wiped a thin sheen of perspiration from his shaved head, looked out the portal, down at the island he had no desire to ever see again, and smiled, thinking about a future that seemed so much brighter now than it had just a couple of hours earlier.
Twenty-Two
The middle-aged man from Northern Ireland stepped out of the cab, looked up at the building in front of him, and read the sign.
Kearney and Sons Funeral Home
At the front door he took off his hat and paused.
This was Boston, South Dorchester, and Campbell Coyle had been in America for less than three hours. The jet lag would hit him later, but he’d fight it, and he’d be fine.
He’d been to Boston before, working, but never had he been to this place, with his hat in hand, asking for a favor from a man he did not know.
He didn’t like the feeling of others being involved in his business; he had been comfortable in hiding, using a fake name, living a fake life.
