by Lee Child
phone to Nice. Her thumbs were quicker. And smaller. I said, ‘Tell him to come alone.’
I wasn’t sure how long Bennett would have stuck around the giant four-way in the west of London, but probably he had twigged pretty early that things were not going to plan, so he might have already folded his tent and started for home. In which case he could be in Chigwell as fast as twenty minutes. Or as slow as forty, if in fact he had hung around until the bitter end. There was no way of knowing.
There was only one practical way to the bowling club, for a pedestrian, which was the yard-wide footpath. No doubt there were ancient easements and rights of way across neighbouring lots, for lawnmowers and heavy rollers and whatever else it took to keep grass that smooth, and if SWAT teams came they would use helicopters and land on the green itself, but if Bennett came alone he would walk.
Charlie White was still watching us. Still unsure. I spent most of the time looking out the windows, but without the night vision and the magnification there wasn’t much to see. Just dark space, vague trees, and the distant glow of Little Joey’s street, a quarter of a mile away. No detail. I could barely make out his house, big as it was. Nice sat on a lumpy canvas bag, with both hands in her jacket pockets, one of them no doubt curled around the butt of her Glock, and the other maybe curled around her pill bottle. I wanted to say I guess this ain’t the night to quit Zoloft, but I didn’t, because I figured she would prefer me to take it seriously. And maybe she wasn’t thinking about pills at all. In which case I certainly didn’t want to remind her. Maybe she was just keeping her hands warm. The air had gone cold. It had been a pleasant day, but the temperature had dropped after sunset.
After fifteen minutes I went out, and closed the smashed door behind me, and hiked across the grit to the clearing’s furthest corner, which gave me a sideways view of the line between the mouth of the alley and the bowling club HQ. Which was the best I could do. I didn’t want to be in the alley itself. I didn’t want to be on the street. I wanted an escape route, if necessary, and our best bet was through the gardens and over the lawns that surrounded us, not along the public highways and byways, which were full of dangers and perils.
And I wanted to be at least a little proactive, too. If Nice had to start shooting, she’d be firing out the front of the hut, so it made sense for me to be firing at ninety degrees. Basic triangulation. Lots of good reasons. Not that I could see very well. Clearly the bowling club had voted down any kind of exterior illumination. Some of the houses backing on to the space had lit-up rooms, and there was the usual kind of urban glow in the sky, the city itself reflected back off low night-time clouds, all averaged out to smoky yellow, but apart from those two faint sources I was looking at nothing but pitch dark. The back part of my brain told me Bennett was a man of average size, and his centre mass would be thirty-seven inches behind his muzzle flash.
I waited.
I was out in the cold seven more minutes, which when added to the original fifteen made twenty-two, which told me Bennett had indeed quit early and holed up somewhere central to wait on events. I heard his footsteps all the way at the far end of the path, a soft, whispering sound, amplified but also modified by the parallel board fences. Then as he got closer I heard the muted crunch of his soles on the thin scattering of grit, and at one point I heard a brief rat-a-tat scuffle, as if he had swayed on the uneven ground and something in his hand had brushed against the boards. Something leather, I thought, given the sound.
He stepped into the clearing, and stopped. I could see his face, just vaguely, a pale gleam, but I couldn’t see anything else. I couldn’t see his hands.
I waited.
Then he spoke, in his normal sing-song voice, as if we were in a room together and I was six feet away. He said, ‘Reacher? I’m guessing you’re ninety degrees to my left or my right. I have a flashlight with me. I’m not going to shine it on you. I’m going to shine it on myself, and then I’m going to shine it back down the footpath so you can see I came alone.’
I said nothing.
I saw a flashlight beam click on, dancing on the ground, and then it reversed itself in his hand and he played it all over himself, fast, like it was foam and he was on fire. He was in his regular clothes. The thing in his hand was a briefcase. He ended up with the beam high over his head, shining straight down, like a shower rose.
I said, ‘OK, I believe you.’
He glanced my way, inside his cone of light, and then he swung the beam down and picked out his way to the door. I followed him in, and he balanced the flashlight upright on the floor, so the bounce off the ceiling lit us all up. He took a long hard look at Charlie White, and then he turned back to me.
I asked him, ‘What happened to the binoculars?’
He said, ‘I had them removed.’
‘Why?’
‘They weren’t just binoculars. Remember? They were video feeds. Think back through history. Who gets in the least trouble? The guy on the tape, or the guy not on the tape, because there was no tape in the first place?’
‘You were looking out for us?’
‘We’re here to help each other.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I was expecting some action tonight.’
‘You got my information?’
He paused a second, and said, ‘I’ve got information.’
‘But not mine?’
‘I think it’s yours in a way. I think you should own it. A lot of the ideas were yours.’
‘What ideas?’
‘The wrong ideas,’ he said.
He squatted down and popped his briefcase lid, and I saw a photograph inside, black and white, which he picked up and lifted into the light. He offered it to me and Nice equally, like a ceremony, so she took its left edge and I took its right edge, and we held it between us. It was not a regular printed photograph. It had come out of a computer. The paper was thin, and the surface was dull. An e-mailed attachment, maybe, printed out on an office machine.
The picture showed a dead man in what looked like a hospital bed. In what looked like a foreign hospital. The finish on the wall looked different. Somewhere hot, maybe. The kind of place where a hospital could have yellow clay tiles on the floor. The bed was narrow, and made of iron pipe painted white. The sheet was tight and straight, and the blanket was pale and unmarked. High standards from the nursing staff, maybe. Or mugging for the camera. Because the picture was clearly part of an official documentary record. Someone had stood at the foot of the bed and taken a picture for a file. The angle and the framing said so. Like a crime scene photograph. There was a date and a time stamped in. Depending on exactly where in the world it was, it was either very recent, or extremely recent.
The man in the bed had not died easy. That was clear. He had what looked like a bullet wound in his forehead. The skin was all torn up. Not an entry wound. Not an exit wound, either. It was a furrow. Like a glancing blow, that shreds flesh but only cracks bone, instead of piercing it. Maybe an unlucky ricochet.
It was not a new wound. Far from it. I could practically smell it through the paper. I had seen wounds like that before. It was between twelve and twenty days old. That was my guess. And it hadn’t healed. Hadn’t even begun. It looked like it had gone septic early, and gotten messy, and no doubt the infection had caused a raging fever, and it looked like the guy had fallen for it hard, racked and sweating, tossing and shivering, losing weight, getting pale, becoming nothing more than glittering skin wrapped tight over jutting cheekbones, and then finally getting his picture taken by a bored government clerk. Rest in peace, wherever. It was impossible to say what the guy had looked like three weeks before, other than he was probably white, and his skull was a normal size.
I said, ‘So?’
Bennett said, ‘That’s one of the retired snipers we keep an eye on.’
‘And?’
‘He got hired all the way to Venezuela. But things went wrong over there. You know how it is. Everyone betrays everyone else. Our boy got in
a gunfight with the police, and he got away, but not before getting hit in the head. Which he didn’t get treated, because now he was on the run. He holed up in a chicken house somewhere, and tried to gut it out. He ate raw eggs and drank from a hosepipe at night. But the infection was bad. A woman found him delirious, and took him to the hospital in the back of her pick-up truck. By that point his blood work looked like toxic waste. He died a day later. He had no name and no ID. But he looked foreign to them, so they put his fingerprints on the Interpol system.’
‘And?’
‘That’s William Carson.’
FORTY-NINE
BENNETT SAID, ‘KOTT is the only one not accounted for now. Which raises two possibilities. Which throws them into a panic, obviously. Because now they have to choose. Either you’re wrong, and the same guy could make both shots, or they’re wrong, and there are more snipers in the world than they know about.’
I said, ‘Which way are they leaning?’
‘I’m sure they’d like to blame you, but they’re supposed to be rational. The truth is they just don’t know.’
‘Not even the psychological subcommittee?’
‘Not even.’
‘It’s option one,’ I said. ‘Kott is on his own.’
‘What tells you that?’
‘A toothless hillbilly in Arkansas.’
‘Are you admitting you were wrong?’
‘I’m admitting I was misled.’
‘By what?’
‘Doesn’t matter yet. Doesn’t change what we have to do next.’
‘Which is what?’
‘We have to get Little Joey out of his house.’
‘How?’
‘We’re going to negotiate with him. Face to face, because of the size of the deal.’
‘Which is what?’
‘We’re going to sell Charlie to him.’
‘Like a ransom?’
I shook my head. ‘Like a purchase price. All anyone knows so far is that Charlie was snatched up by persons unknown, so now we can sell him on, under the table, and Joey can beat whatever kind of information he wants right out of him, and no one will ever be the wiser. Done deal, right there. Because now Joey’s got the account numbers and the passwords and he knows where the bodies are buried. He’s the new boss, automatically.’
‘Will he go for that?’
‘Are you kidding?’
‘I mean, will he understand the logic?’
‘It’s a DNA thing. Like rats. He’ll come running. Which is what we want.’
‘Why were you not more surprised by Carson?’
‘Just a feeling.’
‘About what?’
‘Joey doubled his guard. He didn’t triple it. Yet he likes to put on a show. There were only two people in the house. Joey and Kott.’
‘Why not Joey and Carson?’
‘It was Kott’s bullet in Paris. Chemistry says so. Trust me. This is all about John Kott.’
‘No, this is all about the G8.’
‘The G8 is safe. Trust me on that, too.’
‘It can’t be safe until we get him. He’s the last one.’
‘The G8 was never the target,’ I said.
‘So what is?’
‘I need my information about the glass.’
‘You’ll get it. What’s the target?’
‘Something that doesn’t change what we have to do next.’
‘We’re not doing anything next. They’re still talking.’
‘Who’s talking?’
‘The committees.’
‘John Kott is in Little Joey’s house. That’s all they need to know. Tell them that from me.’
‘They’ll say your credibility is damaged.’
‘Then I’ll do what my mother told me, whenever I got mad. I’ll count to three.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Can you count to three?’
‘Of course I can.’
‘Show me.’
‘One, two, three.’
I said, ‘Do it like time ticking away.’
He said, ‘One second, two second, three second.’
‘Is that how they say it in Wales?’
‘That’s how they say it everywhere.’
‘No, it isn’t. We say one thousand, two thousand.’
‘It’s supposed to sound like a ticking clock. Which it does. Second, second, second. Like something with a pendulum, in your grandma’s front parlour.’
‘That’s pretty good.’
‘What was your point?’
I said, ‘John Kott is in Little Joey’s house.’
Bennett paused a beat, and then he looked over towards the corner of the hut, and he said, ‘We should confirm these wild rumours with Mr White.’
Old Charlie backed away a little when he heard those words. No doubt the Romford Boys asked questions from time to time, of reluctant sources, and no doubt they used methods that ran the whole gamut from brutal to fatal. And apparently he didn’t expect a government agent to be lenient in comparison.
Bennett stepped over and considered the guy for a long moment. Then he took a switchblade from his pocket. A flick knife, in Britain. He thumbed the button and the blade popped out, with a solid thunk. An antique, probably. They had been illegal for so long it had gotten hard to find a good one. He balanced the handle on his thumb, with his four fingers spread along the upper edge, and he moved the blade close to Charlie’s cheek, like he was a barber about to start a shave with a straight razor.
Charlie eased backward, until his head was jammed hard against the wood of the wall.
Casey Nice said, ‘Are we on the record here?’
Bennett said, ‘Don’t worry.’
He used the blade to pick at the edge of the duct tape I had wrapped around Charlie’s mouth. He got some of it lifted and used a fingernail to pouch it out. He made a quarter-inch cut, and then started over, lifting, picking, cutting, a quarter-inch at a time, until the whole two-inch width was severed. He used the blade again, to lift a tab, which he grasped finger-andthumb with his left hand, and then he peeled the tape away from Charlie’s lips, neither fast nor slow, like a nurse changing a dressing. Charlie coughed and ducked his mouth to his shoulder, to wipe it.
Bennett asked him, ‘Who is staying with Joey?’
Charlie said, ‘I don’t know.’
Bennett still had the switchblade open. Charlie’s hands were still taped behind his back. He was wedged as tight in the corner as he could get. No further movement was feasible.
Bennett said, ‘You sell guns to hoodlums everywhere in this country. You peddle heroin and cocaine. You lend a man with mouths to feed fifty pounds, but he pays you back a hundred, or you break his legs. You bring teenage girls from Latvia and Estonia and you turn them out, and when they’re all used up, they go to Joey’s. So on a scale of one to ten, how likely is it that anyone in the whole wide world will give a shit about what I do to you next?’
Charlie didn’t speak.
Bennett said, ‘I need an answer, Mr White. Just so we understand each other. On a scale of one to ten. Where ten is very likely and one is not very likely. Pick a number.’
Charlie didn’t speak.
‘I get it,’ Bennett said. ‘You can’t find the right answer. Because it’s a trick question. The numbers don’t go low enough. No one in the whole wide world is going to give a shit. Not one single person. And they won’t even know anyway. Tomorrow you’ll be in Syria or Egypt or Guantanamo Bay, even. We do things differently now. Your organization is harbouring a rifleman planning to shoot the British prime minister and the American president. You’re the new Osama bin Laden. Or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, at the very least.’
Charlie White said, ‘That’s bullshit.’
‘Which part?’
‘All of it. I wouldn’t have the prime minister shot.’
‘Why not?’
‘I voted for him.’
‘Who is staying with Joey?’
‘I don’t k
now who it is.’