Babbitt finished the last swig of his scotch, stepped back to his little bar, and made himself a third drink.

Returning to the window, he thought about Asia again.

“Asia. Yes,” Babbitt said. He felt confident he was in Gentry’s brain now. He knew where he’d go.

Immediately Babbitt pulled out his phone and began thumbing through contacts, looking for the number of his Hong Kong–based agent. It would be mid-morning there—he could reach his man and get him started on building an infrastructure for the hunt to come.

Absently, while he scrolled through his phone, he lifted his rocks glass to down a swig of Macallan. Just as he brought it up to chest height the glass cracked, broke apart, and fell from his hand, dousing his shirt and trousers with the tepid scotch.

Babbitt looked down at the mess, an expression of mild surprise on his face. He took a half step back, concerned he’d cut his hand on the lead crystal.

Then he saw the blood, and it wasn’t on his hand.

A hole in the middle of his white shirt, just to the left of center, from which redness grew, expanding.

Leland Babbitt dropped his phone on the floor, brought both hands to his wound, realizing only now that he’d been shot. He was in the industry, so he recognized within another second that the shooter must have employed a suppressed weapon. He looked up to his sliding glass door, just five feet in front of him, and he saw the hole in the glass at chest height, and he looked beyond the glass and saw movement in his garden on the far edge of the patio. A dark silhouette appeared from his rosebushes, turned, and began running towards his back fence.

“Gentry?” It came out in a hoarse whisper, and then Leland Babbitt dropped dead in a heap on the floor.

Leland Babbitt was the first person, but certainly not the last person, to believe with absolute conviction that he had been assassinated by the Gray Man.

—

Court was on the move before Babbitt’s face slammed down on the living room tile. He’d heard no gunshot, but the screaming bullet had zinged through the night air from behind him on his right, crackling by at high speed thirty or forty feet off his right shoulder, and then snapping through the window glass.

Gentry gave up stealth for speed in his race to leave the scene, because he needed to get the hell out of here as fast as possible. He had a litany of immediate concerns, and none of them would go away as long as he remained hiding in the garden bed.