Gone Tomorrow

by Lee Child

  of standards for the pipes and the connectors. Those standards are still in the building code, all these years later. A pipe like this has a flange lapping over the floor. I’m betting it’s fixed stronger than the spot welds. Those nineteenth-century public works guys erred on the side of caution. More so than some modern corporation wanting Homeland Security money.’

  Lee paused a beat. Then she smiled, briefly. ‘So either I get illegally busted out of a government jail cell, or the sewer pipe gets torn out of the floor. Either way I’m in the shit.’

  ‘You got it.’

  ‘Great choice.’

  ‘Your call,’ I said.

  ‘Go for it.’

  Two rooms away I heard a telephone start to ring.

  I knelt down and eased the tip of the pry bar into the position it needed to be in, which was under the bottom horizontal rail of the cell, but not so far under that it also caught the edge of the floor tray. Then I kicked it sideways a little until it was directly below one of the upside-down T-welds, where the force would be carried upward through one of the vertical bars.

  Two rooms away the telephone stopped ringing.

  I looked at Lee and said, ‘Stand on the toilet seat. Let’s give it all the help we can.’

  She climbed up and balanced. I took up all the slack in the pry bar and then leaned down hard and bounced, once, twice, three times. Two hundred and fifty pounds of moving mass, multiplied by sixty inches of leverage. Three things happened. First, the pry bar dug itself a shallow channel in the concrete under the cage, which was mechanically inefficient. Second, the whole assemblage of bars distorted out of shape a little, which was also inefficient. But third, a bright bead of metal pinged loose and skittered away.

  ‘That was a spot,’ Lee called. ‘As in spot-weld.’

  I moved the pry bar and found a similar position twelve inches to the left. Wedged the bar tight, took up the slack, and bounced. Same three results. The grind of powdered concrete, the screech of bending bars, and the ping of another metal bead torn loose.

  Two rooms away a second phone started to ring. A different tone. More urgent.

  I stood back and caught my breath. Moved the pry bar again, this time two feet to the right. Repeated the procedure, and was rewarded with another broken weld. Three down, many more to go. But now I had approximate hand-holds in the bottom rail, where the pry bar had forced shallow U-shaped bends into the metal. I put the pry bar down and squatted facing the cell and shoved my hands palms-up into the holds. Grasped hard and breathed hard and prepared to lift. When I quit watching the Olympics the weightlifters were moving more than five hundred pounds. I figured I was capable of much less than that. But I figured much less than that might do the trick.

  Two rooms away the second telephone stopped ringing.

  And a third started.

  I heaved upward.

  I got the side of the cell about a foot off the ground. The tread plate floor shrieked and bent like paper. But the welds held. The third telephone stopped ringing. I looked up at Lee and mouthed, ‘Jump.’ She got the message. She was a smart woman. She jumped high off the toilet and smashed her bare feet down together right where two welds were under pressure. I felt nothing through my hands. No impact. No shock. Because the welds broke immediately and the floor bent down into a radical V-shaped chute. Like a mouth. The opening was about a foot wide and a foot deep. Good, but not good enough. A kid might have gotten through it, but Lee wasn’t going to.

  But at least we had proved the principle. Score one for the nineteenth-century city fathers.

  Two rooms away all three phones started to ring simultaneously. Competing tones, fast and urgent.

  I caught my breath again and after that it was just a question of repeating the triple procedures over and over again, two welds at a time. The pry bar, the weightlifting, the jump. Lee wasn’t a big woman, but even so we needed to tear free a line of welds nearly six feet long before the floor would bend down enough to let her out. It was a question of simple arithmetic. The straight edge of the floor became part of a curved circumference, in a ratio of one to three against us. It took us a long time to get the job done. Close to eight minutes. But we got it done eventually. Lee came out on her back, feet first, like a limbo dancer. Her shirt got caught and rode up to reveal a smooth tan stomach. Then she wriggled free and crabbed clear and stood up and hugged me hard. And longer than she needed to. Then she broke away and I rested for a minute and wiped my hands on my pants.

  Then I repeated the whole procedure all over again, for Jacob Mark.

  Two rooms away phones rang and stopped, rang and stopped.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  We got out fast. Theresa Lee took the lead agent’s shoes. They were big on her, but not by much. Jacob Mark took the medical technician’s whole outfit. He figured that an incomplete out-of-town cop’s uniform would be conspicuous on the street, and he was probably right. The change was worth the delay. He looked much better in the chinos and the T-shirt and the basketball sneakers. They fit close to perfectly. There was a nickel-sized bloodstain on the back of the pants, but that was the only disadvantage. We left the medical guy sleeping in his underwear.

  Then we headed out. Up the stairs, across the littered floor, through the alley, to the 3rd Street sidewalk. It was crowded. It was still hot. We turned left. No real reason. Just a random choice. But a lucky one. We got about five steps away and I heard the blare of a horn behind us and the yelp of tyres and I glanced back and saw a black car jamming to a stop ten feet the other side of the firehouse. A Crown Vic, new and shiny. Two guys spilled out. I had seen them before. And I knew for sure that Theresa Lee had seen them before. Blue suits, blue ties. The FBI. They had talked to Lee in the precinct house, and they had talked to me on 35th Street. They had asked me questions about Canadian phone numbers. Now twenty feet behind us they ran for the alley and ducked in. They didn’t see us at all. But if we had turned right we would have collided head-on with them as they got out of their car. So we had been lucky. We celebrated by hustling hard, straight for Sixth Avenue. Jacob Mark got there first. He was the only one of us with decent shoes.

  We crossed Sixth Avenue and followed Bleecker for a spell and then found refuge on Cornelia Street, which was narrow and dark and relatively quiet, except for diners at sidewalk café tables. We stayed well away from them and they paid no attention to us. They were more interested in their food. I didn’t blame them. It smelled good. I was still very hungry, even after the salami and cheese. We headed up to the quiet end of the street and took inventory there. Lee and Jake had nothing. All their stuff was locked away in the firehouse basement. I had what I had reclaimed from the table in the second room, the important components of which were my cash, my ATM card, my Metrocard, and Leonid’s cell phone. The cash amounted to forty-three dollars and change. The Metrocard had four rides left on it. Leonid’s cell was almost out of battery. We agreed it was beyond certain that my ATM number and Leonid’s phone number were already flagged up in various computer systems. If we used either one, someone would know within seconds. But I wasn’t too worried. Information has to be useful to be damaging. If we escaped from West 3rd and days later withdrew cash in Oklahoma City or New Orleans or San Francisco, then that data would be significant. If we withdrew cash immediately a couple of blocks from the firehouse, then that data was useless. It told them nothing they didn’t already know. And there are so many cell antennas in New York that triangulation is difficult. A ballpark location is helpful out in the sticks. Not so much, in the city. A target area two blocks wide and two deep can contain fifty thousand people and take days to search.

  So we moved on and found an ATM in a bright blue bank lobby and I withdrew all the cash I could, which was three hundred bucks. Apparently I had a daily limit. And the machine was slow. Probably on purpose. Banks cooperate with law enforcement. They sound the alarm and then slow down the transaction. The idea is to give the cops time to show up. Maybe possible, in some places. No
t very likely, with city traffic to deal with. The machine waited and waited and waited and then it coughed up the bills. I took them and smiled at the machine. Most of them have surveillance cameras built in, connected to digital recorders.

  We moved on again and Lee spent ten of my new dollars in a deli. She bought an emergency cell phone charger. It operated off a penlight battery. She plugged it into Leonid’s phone and called Docherty, her partner. It was ten after ten, and he would be getting ready for work. He didn’t pick up the call. Lee left a message and then switched off the phone. She said cell phones had GPS chips in them. I didn’t know that. She said the chips bleeped away every fifteen seconds and could be pinned down within fifteen feet. She said GPS satellites were much more precise than antenna triangulation. She said the way to use a cell on the run was to keep it switched off except for brief moments just before leaving one location and moving on to the next. That way the GPS trackers were always one step behind.

  So we moved on again. We were all aware of cop cars on the streets. We saw plenty of them. The NYPD is a big operation. The largest police department in America. Maybe the largest in the world. We found a noisy bistro in the heart of NYU territory after skirting north of Washington Square Park and then heading east. The place was dark and packed with undergraduate students. Some of the food it sold was recognizable. I was hungry and still dehydrated. I guessed my systems had been working overtime to flush out the double dose of barbiturate. I drank whole glasses of tap water and ordered a kind of shake made of yoghurt and fruit. Plus a burger, and coffee. Jake and Lee ordered nothing. They said they were too shaken to eat. Then Lee turned to me and said, ‘You better tell us what exactly is going on.’

  I said, ‘I thought you didn’t want to know.’

  ‘We just crossed that line.’

  ‘They didn’t show ID. You were entitled to assume the detention was illegal. In which case busting out wasn’t a crime. In fact it was probably your duty.’

  She shook her head. ‘I knew who they were, ID or no ID. And it’s not the busting out that I’m worried about. It’s the shoes. That’s what’s going to screw me. I stood over the guy and stole his footwear. I was looking right at him. That’s premeditation. They’ll say I had time to reflect and react appropriately.’

  I looked at Jake, to see whether he wanted to be included, or whether he still figured that innocence was bliss. He shrugged, as if to say in for a penny, in for a pound. So I let the waitress finish up serving my order and then I told them what I knew. March of 1983, Sansom, the Korengal Valley. All the details, and all the implications.

  Lee said, ‘There are American troops in the Korengal Valley right now. I just read about it. In a magazine. I guess it never stops. I hope they’re doing better than the Russians did.’

  ‘They were Ukrainians,’ I said.

  ‘Is there a difference?’

  ‘I’m sure the Ukrainians think so. The Russians put their minorities out front, and their minorities didn’t like it.’

  Jake said, ‘I get it about World War Three. At the time, I mean. But this is a quarter-century later. The Soviet Union isn’t even a country any more. How can a country be aggrieved about something, if it doesn’t even exist today?’

  ‘Geopolitics,’ Lee said. ‘It’s about the future, not the past. Maybe we want to do similar stuff again, in Pakistan or Iran or wherever. It makes a difference if the world knows we did it before. It sets up preconceptions. You know that. You’re a cop. You like it when we can’t mention prior convictions in court?’

  Jake said, ‘So how big of a deal do you think this is?’

  ‘Huge,’ Lee said. ‘As big as can be. For us, anyway. Because overall it’s still small. Which is ironic, right? You see what I mean? If three thousand people knew, there’s not much anyone could do about it. Or three hundred, even. Or thirty. It would be out there, end of story. But right now only the three of us know. And three is a small number. Small enough to be contained. They can make three people disappear without anyone noticing.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It happens, believe me. Who’s going to pay attention? You’re not married. Me either.’ She looked at me and asked, ‘Reacher, are you married?’

  I shook my head.

  She paused a second. She said, ‘No one left behind to ask questions.’

  Jake said, ‘What about people where we work?’

  ‘Police departments do what they’re told.’

  ‘This is insane.’

  ‘This is the new world.’

  ‘Are they serious?’

  ‘It’s a cost-benefit analysis. Three innocent people versus a big geopolitical deal? What would you do?’

  ‘We have rights.’

  ‘We used to.’

  Jake said nothing in reply to that. I finished my coffee and washed it down with another glass of tap water. Lee called for the check and waited until it had arrived and I had paid it, and then she turned Leonid’s phone back on. It came to life with a merry little tune and locked on to its network and ten seconds after that its network recognized it and told it there was a text message waiting. Lee hit the appropriate button and started scrolling.

  ‘It’s from Docherty,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t dumped me yet.’

  Then she read and scrolled, read and scrolled. I counted fifteen-second intervals in my head, and imagined the GPS chip sending out a little burst of data for every one of them, saying Here we are! Here we are! I got up to ten. A hundred and fifty seconds. Two and a half minutes. It was a long message. And it was full of bad news, according to Lee’s face. Her lips compressed and her eyes narrowed. She checked back on a couple of paragraphs and then she shut the thing down again and handed it back to me. I put it in my pocket. She looked straight at me and said, ‘You were right. The dead guys under the FDR Drive were Lila Hoth’s crew. I guess the 17th called everyone in the phone book and checked out the only one that didn’t answer. They broke into their offices and found billing records made out to Lila Hoth, in care of the Four Seasons Hotel.’

  I didn’t answer.

  She said, ‘But here’s the thing. Those billing records go back three months, not three days. And the other data is in. Homeland Security has no record of two women called Hoth ever entering the country. Certainly not three days ago on British Airways. And Susan Mark never called London, either from work or from home.’

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Use the phone and move on immediately, was the rule. We took Broadway north. Taxis and police cruisers sped past us. Headlight beams washed over us. We hustled as far as Astor Place and then ducked underground and burned three of my four remaining Metrocard rides on the 6 train north. Where it all began. Another bright new R142A car. It was eleven in the evening and there were eighteen passengers in addition to ourselves. We got three spaces together on one of the eight-person benches. Lee sat in the middle. On her left Jake half turned and bent his head, ready for quiet talk. On her right I did the same thing. Jake asked, ‘So which is it? Are the Hoths phony or is the government already covering its ass by erasing data?’

  Lee said, ‘Could be either.’

  I said, ‘The Hoths are phony.’

  ‘You think or you know?’

  ‘It was too easy at Penn station.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘They sucked me in. Leonid let me see him. He was wearing a jacket that looked bright orange under the lights. It was practically the same as the safety vests I saw some railroad workers wearing. It drew my eye. I was supposed to notice it. Then he let me hit him. Because I was supposed to take the phone from him and find out about the Four Seasons. They manipulated me. There are layers upon layers here. They needed to talk to me but they didn’t want me to see everything. They didn’t want to show their whole hand. So they set up a way in for me. They lured me to the hotel and tried a sweet, easy approach. Just one guy acting incompetent at the railroad station, and then the soft soap. They even had a back-up plan, which was coming to the precinct house and mak
ing the missing persons report. Either way I would have showed up eventually.’

  ‘What do they want from you?’

  ‘Susan’s information.’

  ‘Which was what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Not journalists,’ I said. ‘I guess I was wrong about that. Lila was acting one thing, acting another thing. I don’t know what she really is.’

  ‘Is the old woman for real?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Where are they now? They bailed out of the hotel.’

  ‘They always had somewhere else. They had two tracks running. Public consumption, and private business. So I don’t know where they are now. Their alternative place, obviously. Some long-term secure location, I guess. Here in the city, probably. Maybe a town house. Because they have a crew with them. People of their own. Bad people. Those private guys were right. How bad, they just found out the hard way. With the hammers.’

  Lee said, ‘So the Hoths are covering their asses too.’

  ‘Wrong tense,’ I said. ‘They already covered them. They’re hunkered down someplace and anyone who might have known where is dead.’

  The train stopped at 23rd Street. The doors opened. No one got on. No one got off. Theresa Lee stared at the floor. Jacob Mark looked across her at me and said, ‘If Homeland Security can’t even track Lila Hoth into the country, then they also can’t tell if she went to California or not. Which means it could have been her, with Peter.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It could have been.’

  The doors closed. The train moved on.

  Theresa Lee looked up from the floor and turned to me and said, ‘What happened to those four guys was our fault, you know. With the hammers. Your fault, specifically. You told Lila you knew about them. You turned them into a loose end.’

  I said, ‘Thanks for pointing that out.’

  You tipped her over the edge.

  Your fault, specifically.

  The train rattled into the 28th Street station.

  We got out at 33rd Street. None of us wanted to hit Grand Central. Too many cops, and in Jacob Mark’s case at least, maybe too many negative associations. At street level Park Avenue was busy. Two cop cars came past in the first minute. To the west was the Empire State Building. Too many cops. We doubled back south and took a quiet cross street towards