by Child, Lee
‘There,’ he said.
He pointed to a narrow building across the street, about ten yards farther on. At the front it was propped up with steeply angled baulks of wood. As if it was in danger of falling down. The wood supports were shrouded in a tough black net. Maybe a local regulation. Maybe the city worried about stressed chips of brick randomly flinging themselves outward from the faulty wall, to the detriment of passers-by, or those lingering beneath. Whatever the reason, the result in practical terms could be used as an improvised semi-hideaway, because a person could squeeze in behind the net, and then just stand there, semi-obscured from view.
Maybe sixty per cent obscured. It was a thick net.
Maybe forty per cent. It was a sunny morning.
Better than nothing.
Abby relayed the information.
‘Five minutes,’ Vantresca said again. ‘Maybe ten.’
‘What kind of car?’ Reacher asked him. ‘We don’t want to squeeze out again for the wrong people.’
‘It’s an ’05 S-type R in anthracite over charcoal.’
‘Remember what I said about armour people?’
‘We glamorize the machine.’
‘I didn’t understand what any of those words meant.’
‘It’s a moderately old Jaguar,’ Vantresca said. ‘The hardcore sports version of the first refresh of the retro model they designed at the end of the nineties. With the upgraded cam followers and the bored-out motor. And the supercharger, obviously.’
‘Not helping,’ Reacher said.
Vantresca said, ‘It’s a black sedan.’
He clicked off. Abby put her phone away. They started across the street, on a shallow diagonal, heading for the propped-up building.
A car came around the corner.
Fast.
A black sedan.
Too soon. Five seconds, not five minutes.
And not an old Jaguar.
A new Chrysler. With a low roof, and a high waistline, and shallow windows. Like slots. Like the vision ports in the side of an armoured vehicle.
THIRTY-FOUR
The black Chrysler came on towards them, then slowed a step, then picked up again. Like a stumble. Like the automotive equivalent of a double take. As if the car itself couldn’t believe what it was seeing. A small slender woman and a big ugly man. Suddenly right there on the street. Front and centre in the windshield. Large as life. Be on the lookout.
The car jammed to a stop and the front doors opened. Both of them. Twenty feet away. Two guys. Two guns. The guns were Glock 17s. The guys were right-handed. Smaller than Gezim Hoxha, but bigger than the average. Not scrappy little Adriatic guys. That was for sure. Both wore black pants and black T-shirts and black neckties. And sunglasses. Neither one had shaved. No doubt they had been dragged out of bed and sent on patrol immediately Hoxha’s car had been found.
They took a step forward. Reacher glanced left, glanced right. No cover taller than a hydrant or wider than a light pole. He put his hand in his pocket. The H&K, that he knew for sure worked. That he also knew for sure he didn’t want to use. A gunshot on a city street at night would get a reaction. Ten times worse, in the innocent morning sunshine. There would be more officers on the day watch than the night watch. They would all deploy. There would be dozens of cars, lights flashing, sirens going. There would be news helicopters and cell phone video. There would be paperwork. There would be hundreds of hours in a room with a cop and a table screwed to the floor. Abby’s phone log would implicate Barton and Hogan and Vantresca. The mess would spread far and wide. Could take weeks to resolve. Which Reacher didn’t want, and the Shevicks didn’t have.
The guys with the Glocks took another step. They were coming in from wide, around their thrown-open doors, guns first, shuffling steps, rigid two-handed grips, concentrated squints over their front sights.
Another step. And another. Then the guy on Reacher’s right, who had been the driver, kept on coming, but the other guy stopped. The passenger. A wheel play. Like sheepdogs. They wanted to get one of them around and behind, to press Reacher and Abby towards the other one, towards the far sidewalk, towards the three-storey wall, where they would finally run out of room. An obvious, instinctive tactic.
Which depended on Reacher and Abby first staying where they were, and then rotating meekly in place, and then stumbling backward.
Not going to happen.
‘Abby, take a step back,’ Reacher said. ‘With me.’
He stepped back. She stepped back. The driver’s geometry was distorted. His envelope was enlarged. Now he had further to go.
‘Again,’ Reacher said.
He stepped back. She stepped back.
‘Stand still,’ the driver said. ‘Or I’ll shoot.’
Reacher thought, will you? It was one of life’s great questions. The guy had all the same structural inhibitions as Reacher himself. The dozens of squad cars, with their lights flashing and their sirens going. The news helicopters and the cell phone video. The paperwork. The hours in the room with the cop. Which would produce an uncertain outcome for the guy. Inevitable. Could go either way. There were no guarantees. Don’t frighten the voters. There was a new police commissioner on the way. Plus the guy had professional obligations to consider. There were questions to be answered. They thought Reacher was an outside agitator. We want to know who you are. There would be bonus points for his capture still able to talk. There would be punishments for his delivery dead or comatose or mortally wounded. Because the dead and the comatose couldn’t talk, and the mortally wounded didn’t last long enough to talk, when they brought out the spoons, and the electric saws, and the smoothing irons, and the cordless power tools, or whatever other grotesque procedures were favoured east of Center. So would the guy shoot? Unlikely, Reacher thought. Probably not. But always possible. Was he prepared to bet his life on it? Probably yes. He had before. He had gambled and won. Ten thousand generations later his instincts were still working. He had walked away, and lived to tell the tale. In any case he was fundamentally indifferent. No one lived for ever.
But was he prepared to bet Abby’s life on it?
The driver said, ‘Show me your hands.’
Which would be game over. The point of no return, right there. Which was getting close anyway. The geometry had gone bad. The driver and the passenger had gotten about sixty degrees apart. They were well positioned for enfilade fire. The likely sequence of events was easy to predict. Reacher would shoot through his pocket and hit the driver. One down. No problem. But then the sixty-degree turn towards the passenger would be slow and clumsy, because his hand would be still all snagged up inside his pocket, which would give the passenger time to fire, maybe two or three rounds, which would either hit Abby, or Reacher himself, or both, or miss altogether. Almost certainly the lattermost, he thought, in the real world. The guy was already jumpy. By then he would be startled and panicked. Most handgun rounds missed their target under the best of circumstances.
But would he bet Abby’s life on that?
‘Show me your hands,’ the driver said again.
Abby said, ‘Reacher?’
Ten thousand generations said stay alive and see what the next minute brings.
Reacher took his hands out of his pockets.
‘Take your jacket off,’ the driver said. ‘I can see the weight from here.’
Reacher took his jacket off. He dropped it on the blacktop. The guns in the pockets bumped and clanked. The Ukrainian H&Ks, the Albanian Glocks. His entire arsenal.
Almost.
The driver said, ‘Now get in the car.’
The passenger backed up to the Chrysler. Reacher thought he was going to open the rear door for them, like a guy outside a fancy hotel. But he didn’t. He opened the trunk instead.
‘Good enough for Gezim Hoxha,’ the driver said.
Abby said, ‘Reacher?’
‘We’ll be OK,’ he said.
‘How?’
He didn’t answer. He got in firs
t, crossways, on his side in a U shape, and then Abby got in the space he was leaving in front of him, curled on her side in a foetal position, like they were spooning in bed. Except they weren’t. The passenger closed the lid with a cheap metal clang. The world went dark. No luminous handle. Removed.
At that moment Dino was on the phone to Jetmir. A summons, to a meeting in Dino’s office, right then, immediately. Clearly there was something on Dino’s mind. Jetmir got there inside three minutes and sat down in front of the desk. Dino was looking at his phone. At the long sequence of texts about Gezim Hoxha, found half dead in the trunk of his car, next to an old housing development.
‘Hoxha and I go back a long way,’ Dino said. ‘I knew him when he was a cop in Tirana. He busted me once. He was the meanest bastard in Albania. I liked him. He was a solid guy. Why I gave him a job here.’
‘He’s a good man,’ Jetmir said.
‘He can’t talk,’ Dino said. ‘He may never. He has a serious injury to his throat.’
‘We must hope for the best.’
‘Who did this?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘Where did it happen?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘When exactly did it happen?’
‘He was found at dawn,’ Jetmir said. ‘Obviously the attack was prior to that, by an hour or two, possibly.’
‘Here’s what I don’t understand,’ Dino said. ‘Gezim Hoxha is a man with valuable experience, having been a policeman in Tirana, and therefore he’s a man of great substance in our organization, and I gave him his job myself, and he has been with us a very long time, and he has served us well, and therefore all in all he’s considered a very senior figure here. Am I right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then why was he running errands in the middle of the night?’
Jetmir didn’t answer.
Dino said, ‘Did I ask him to do something? Have I forgotten?’
‘No,’ Jetmir said. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Did you ask him to do something?’
Look for lights behind drapes. Knock on doors and ask questions if necessary.
‘No,’ Jetmir said.
‘I don’t understand it,’ Dino said. ‘I don’t run around in the middle of the night. I have people for that. Hoxha should have been tucked up in bed. Why wasn’t he?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Who else was running around in the middle of the night?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You should know. You’re my chief of staff.’
‘I could ask around.’
‘I already did,’ Dino said. His tone changed. ‘Turns out a lot of guys were running around in the middle of the night. Clearly connected to something serious enough to leave a mean old bastard like Hoxha with a stoved-in throat. Given the stakes involved and the numbers involved, that sounds like a big deal to me. Sounds like something I should have been involved with. At the discussion stages at least. Sounds like something that should have gotten my personal approval. That’s the way we do business here.’
Jetmir didn’t reply.
Dino was quiet a long time.
Then finally he said, ‘Also I hear Gregory came by this morning. He paid us another state visit. Naturally I’m wondering why I wasn’t informed.’
Jetmir didn’t speak. Instead the inevitable remaining paragraphs of the conversation played out inside his head, fast, abbreviated, like speed chess. Back and forth. Dino would chip away relentlessly, remorselessly, until the betrayal was fully revealed, in all its damning detail. Perhaps he already knew. I could ask around. I already did. He knew some, at least. Jetmir went cold. Suddenly he thought perhaps it was already too late. Then he recovered and thought perhaps it was not. He simply didn’t know. In which case, better safe than sorry. An ancient instinct. Ten thousand generations of his own slipped his hand under his coat, one, and came back with his gun, two, and shot Dino in the face, three. From a yard away, across the desk. Dino’s head kicked back an inch and blood and brain slop and bone fragments slapped the wall behind him. The nine-mil round was loud in the small wood room. Colossally loud. Like a bomb. After it there was hissing silence for a long second, and then people burst in. All kinds of people. Made men from nearby offices, guys from the inner council, lumber yard workers covered in dust, doormen, bagmen, legbreakers, all of them shouting and running and pulling guns, like in a movie, when the president goes down. Confusion, madness, mayhem, panic.
At that moment the black Chrysler pulled in at the lumber yard gate, with Reacher and Abby in the trunk.
THIRTY-FIVE
The driver paused with his foot on the brake. The gate was open but there was no one watching it. Which was unusual. But the guy was keen to get in and display his prize, so he didn’t think too much about it. He just drove in and swooped around and reversed towards the roll-up door. The passenger climbed out and smacked a green mushroom button with his palm. The door moved up slowly, with the rattle of chains and the clatter of metal slats. The driver backed in under it. He shut down the motor and got out and joined the passenger at the rear of the car. They pulled their guns and stood well back.
The driver blipped the button on the key fob.
The trunk lid raised up, slow, damped, majestic.
They waited.
Nothing.
The smell of pine, but no whine of saws. The low corrugated shed was quiet. There was no one in it. Then from somewhere deep in the back they heard voices, dulled by walls and doors, but nevertheless loud and panicked and confused. And footsteps too, urgent, agitated, but going nowhere. Just milling around in place. As if something weird was going down in one of the inner offices.
They listened.
Maybe Dino’s office itself.
About the first eight guys into the room saw the exact same thing. Dino, behind his desk, collapsed in his chair, slack and puddled, with his head blown apart. And Jetmir, in a chair in front of the desk, with a Glock in his hand. Literally a smoking gun. They could see the haze and smell the burned powder. Three of the first eight were inner council guys, who had at least a partial clue as to what might have happened. The other five were low level men. They had no idea. They were locked in a mental loop that made no sense at all. Did not compute. Jetmir was the second most important man in the world. His word was law. He was unimpeachable. He was obeyed and admired and revered. Stories were told. He was top of the heap. He was a legend. But he had killed Dino. And Dino was the boss. The first most important man in the world. All a guy’s loyalty and fealty was owed to him alone. Such was their code. Like a blood oath. Like a medieval kingdom. A matter of absolute duty.
One of the five with no idea was a legbreaker from a town called Pogradec, on the shores of Lake Ohrid, whose sister had once been molested by a party official. Dino had restored the family’s honour. The legbreaker was a simple man. He was as faithful as a dog. He loved Dino like a father. He loved that he loved him. He loved the structure, and the hierarchy, and the rules, and the codes, and the iron certainty they gave his life. He loved it all, and he lived by it all. He pulled out his gun and shot Jetmir in the chest, three times, deafening in the crowded space, and then instantly he himself was shot down by two other guys simultaneously, one of them a bagman who seemed to be acting on pure autopilot alone, defending the new boss, even though the new boss had just shot the old boss, and the other shooter a member of the inner council, who had some inkling of what it was all about, and some hope of salvaging something from the wreckage. But a vain hope, because his second round was a through-and-through which killed a bagman standing behind the legbreaker, and the doorman crowding in behind the bagman fired back in a panic, pure reflex, and he hit the inner council guy in the head, so a second inner council guy shot the doorman in retaliation, and a foreman from the yard who had a beef with the council fired back at him, and missed, but hit the third council guy with a ricochet, pure accident, high on the arm, who howled and blasted back, multiple r
ounds, the muzzle of his Glock dancing and jerking uncontrolled, the rounds going everywhere, into the mass of more men crowding in, falling, slipping, sliding on the blood-slick floor, going down, until the councilman’s Glock clicked on empty, and a hissing, roaring version of silence came back, thrumming and buzzing in the air, but not complete, because right then and far away some other loud sound started up to pierce it.
The new sound was more gunshots. Just two rounds. Deliberate. Carefully spaced. A nine-millimetre handgun. Muffled by distance. Maybe all the way over at the front of the shed. Maybe near the roll-up door.
The driver and the passenger stood well back from the Chrysler’s trunk, with their guns still aimed right at it, in the same solid two-handed feet-apart stances they had used before, but with their necks twisted around, comically, almost as far as they would go. They were peering behind their left shoulders, at the far back corner of the shed, way in the distance, where a corridor led away to the administrative quarters. Where the commotion was.
Then the shooting started back there. Far away, muffled, thumping, contained. First came three solo rounds, a fast triple, thud thud thud, and then a hail of more all at once, and more, and more, and then finally the repeated thumping of a handgun being fired unaimed and in anger, until it ran out.
Then there was a second of silence.
The driver and the passenger turned back to the Chrysler.
Still nothing. The trunk lid, raised. No sign of the occupants.
They turned back to the corner.
Another second of silence.
Back to the Chrysler. Still nothing. No raised heads, no glances out. No signs of life at all. The driver and the passenger glanced at each other. Suddenly worried. Maybe there was exhaust gas in the trunk. Maybe there was a leak. A cracked pipe. Maybe the man and the woman had suffocated.