Declan Lynch, the oldest of the Lynch brothers, was never alone. He was never with his brothers, but he was never alone. He was a perpetual-motion machine run by the energy of others: here leaning over a friend’s table at a pizza joint, here drawn into an alcove with a girl’s palm to his mouth, here laughing over the hood of an older man’s Mercedes. The congregation was so natural that it was impossible to tell if Declan was the magnet attracting or the filings attracted.
It was giving the Gray Man a not inconsiderable difficulty in finding an opportunity to speak with him. He had to loiter around the Aglionby Academy campus for the better part of a day.
The waiting wasn’t entirely disagreeable. The Gray Man found himself quite charmed by the oak-shaded school. The campus possessed a shabby gravitas that was only possible with age and affluence. The dorms were emptier than they would’ve been during school term, but they were not empty. There were still the sons of CEOs traveling to third-world countries for photo ops and the sons of touring punk musicians with heavier things to bring along than seventeen-year-old accidental progeny and the sons of men who were dead and never coming to retrieve them.
These summer sons, few as they were, were not entirely noiseless.
Declan Lynch’s dorm was not quite as pretty as the other buildings, but it was still handsome with money. It was a remnant from the seventies, a Technicolor decade the Gray Man had enormous fondness for. The front door was meant to be accessible only with a key code, but someone had propped it open with a rubber door stopper. The Gray Man clucked in disapproval. A locked door wouldn’t have kept him out, of course, but it was the thought that counted.
Actually, the Gray Man wasn’t certain he believed that. It was the deed that counted.
Inside, the dorm offered the neutral-toned welcome of a decent hotel. From behind one of the closed doors, a Colombian hip-hop track raged, something seductive and violent. It wasn’t the Gray Man’s sort of music, but he could hear the appeal. He glanced at the door. The dorm rooms at Aglionby were not numbered. Instead, each door bore an attribute the administration hoped its students would walk away with. This door was labeled Mercy. It was not the one the Gray Man was looking for.
The Gray Man headed in the opposite direction, reading doors (Diligence, Generosity, Piety) until he got to Declan Lynch’s. Effervescence.
The Gray Man had been called effervescent, once, in an article. He was fairly certain it was because he had very straight teeth. Even teeth seemed to be a prerequisite for effervescence.
He wondered if Declan Lynch had good teeth.
There was no sound coming from behind the door. He tried the doorknob, softly. Locked. Good boy, he thought.
Down the hall, the music pounded like the apocalypse. The Gray Man checked his watch. The rental-car place closed in an hour, and if he despised anything, it was public transportation. This would have to be brief.
He kicked in the door.
Declan Lynch sat on one of the two beds inside. He was very handsome, with a lot of dark hair and a rather distinguished Roman nose.
He had excellent teeth.
“What’s this?” he said.
By way of answer, the Gray Man picked Declan up off his bed and slammed him against the adjacent window. The sound was curiously muffled; the loudest part of it was the boy’s breath bursting from him as his spine railed against the sill. But then he was back up and fighting. He wasn’t a shoddy boxer, and the Gray Man could tell that he expected this surprise to give him an advantage.
But the Gray Man had known before he arrived that Niall Lynch had taught his sons to box. The only thing the Gray Man’s father had taught him was how to pronounce trebuchet.
For a moment they fought. Declan was skilled, but the Gray Man was more so. He tossed the boy about his dorm room and used Declan’s shoulder to sweep awards and credit cards and car keys from the dresser. The thump of his head against a drawer was indistinguishable from the bass down the hall. Declan swung, missed. The Gray Man kicked Declan’s legs from beneath him, hurled him to the wall next to the piece of furniture, and then approached for another round, pausing only to pick up a motorcycle helmet that had rolled into the middle of the floor.
With a sudden burst of speed, Declan used the dresser to haul himself up, then pulled a handgun from a drawer.
He pointed it at the Gray Man.
“Stop,” he said simply. He flicked off the safety.
The Gray Man had not expected this.
He stopped.
Several different emotions battled for precedence on Declan’s face, but shock was not one of them. It was clear the gun was not for the possibility of an attack; it was for the eventuality of one.
The Gray Man considered what it must’ve been like to live like that, always waiting for your door to be kicked in. Not pleasant, he thought. Probably not pleasant at all.
He didn’t think Declan Lynch would balk at shooting him. There was no hesitation in his stance. His hand trembled a bit, but the Gray Man thought that was from injury, not fear.
The Gray Man considered for a moment, then he hurled the helmet. The boy fired a shot, but it was nothing but noise. The helmet crashed into his fingers, and while he was still stunned, the Gray Man stepped forward and plucked the gun from his numb hand. He took a moment to put the safety back on.
Then the Gray Man smashed the gun against Declan’s cheek. He did it a few times, just to get his point across.
Finally, he allowed Declan to sink to his knees. The boy was holding on to consciousness quite valiantly. With his shoe, the Gray Man pressed him the rest of the way to the ground, and then eased him onto his back. Declan’s eyes were focused on the ceiling fan. Blood ran out of his nose.
The Gray Man knelt and pressed the barrel of the gun to Declan’s stomach, which rose and fell calamitously as he gasped for air. Tracing the gun over the boy’s right kidney, he said conversationally, “If I shot you here, it would take you twenty minutes to die, and you’d be done no matter what the medics did for you. Where is the Greywaren?”
Declan said nothing. The Gray Man gave him some time to consider his reply. Head wounds tended to make thoughts slower.
When Declan remained quiet, he dragged the muzzle down to Declan’s thigh. He pressed hard enough that the boy gasped. “Here, you’d die in five minutes. Of course, I don’t need to shoot you for that. The point of your umbrella over there would do it just as well. You’d be gone in five minutes and wishing for it in three.”
Declan closed his eyes. One of them, anyway. The left eye was already swollen most of the way shut.
“I don’t know,” he said eventually. His voice sounded full of sleep. “I don’t know what that is.”
“Lies are for your politicians,” the Gray Man said, without vehemence. He just wanted Declan to know that he knew about his life, his internship. He wanted him to know that he’d done his research. “I know where your brothers are right now. I know where your mother lives. I know the name of your girlfriend. Are we clear?”
“I don’t know where it is.” Declan hesitated. “That’s the truth. I don’t know where it is. I just know it is.”
“Here is the plan.” The Gray Man stood up. “You’re going to find that thing for me, and when you do, you’re going to give it to me. And then I will be gone.”
“How do I find you to give it to you?”
“I don’t think you understand. I am your shadow. I’m the spit you swallow. I’m the cough that keeps you up at night.”
Declan asked, “Did you kill my father?”
“Niall Lynch.” The Gray Man tried the words out in his mouth. In his opinion, Niall Lynch was a pretty lousy father, getting himself killed and then allowing his sons to live in a place where they propped the security doors open. The world, he felt, was full of bad fathers. “He asked me that question, too.”
Declan Lynch exhaled unevenly: half a breath, and then the other half. Now, the Gray Man could see, he was finally afraid.
“Okay,” Declan said. “I’ll find it. Then you’ll leave us alone. All of you.”
The Gray Man set the pistol back in its drawer and pushed it closed. He checked his watch. He had twenty minutes to pick up his rental car. He might upgrade to a midsize. He hated compact cars nearly as much as he hated public transportation. “Yes.”
“Okay,” Declan said again.
The Gray Man withdrew from the room, shutting the door partway. It wouldn’t quite close right; he had messed up one of the hinges when he’d entered. He was sure there was an endowment somewhere that would cover the damages.
He paused, watching through the crack of the door.
There was still more to learn from Declan Lynch today.
For several minutes, nothing happened. Declan lay there bleeding and crooked. Then the fingers of his right hand crabbed across the ground to where his cell phone had fallen. He didn’t immediately dial 911, though. With agonizing slowness — his shoulder was almost certainly dislocated — he punched in another number. Immediately, a phone rang on the opposite bed. It was, the Gray Man knew already, the bed that belonged to Declan’s youngest brother, Matthew. The ringtone was an Iglu & Hartly song that the Gray Man knew but couldn’t condone. The Gray Man already knew where Matthew Lynch was: floating in a boat on the river with some local boys. Like his older brother, never content to be alone.
Declan let his youngest brother’s phone ring for longer than it needed to, his eyes closed. Finally, he pressed end and dialed another number. It still wasn’t 911. Whoever it was didn’t pick up. And whoever it was made Declan’s already strained expression even tighter. The Gray Man could hear the tinny sound of the phone ringing and ringing, then a brief voicemail that he couldn’t catch.
Declan Lynch closed his eyes and breathed, “Ronan, where the hell are you?”