Blue Moon

by Child, Lee

  It turned out fast. Reacher eased the hatch open, and inside the first inch of travel both hinges let out a piercing squeal. So he flung it open the rest of the way and the glow of Abby’s phone showed him the rough lumber back of a piece of heavy wooden furniture. He shoved it hard and it fell forward and toppled over and crashed down. Completely unstable. A bookcase for sure. He scrambled out over it, into the room.

  Gregory had been sitting at his desk, in his green leather chair, running important things through his mind. Then he heard the hinges squeal behind him, and he spun his chair halfway around, just in time for the bookcase to fall on him. It was made of Baltic oak, all solid, no veneer. It was loaded with books and trophies and photos in frames. First the front edge of a shelf broke his shoulder, and then an imperceptible millisecond later the next shelf up cracked his skull, and then the full bulk of the thing crushed him down, tipping his chair, driving the side of his head against the edge of the desk top, but driving the rest of him onward to the floor, so that his neck bent grotesquely and snapped like a twig, killing him instantly. Reacher’s extra weight as he clambered out over the felled furniture did him no further damage at all.

  Reacher saw the back of the bookcase ahead of him, tilted up like a ramp. It had fallen against a desk. He scrambled over it and saw a double door, standing open, and an outer office beyond it, with a guy rising up out of a chair behind a desk, all kinds of shock and surprise on his face. This was Danilo, Reacher assumed. There was a door from the outer office to the corridor beyond. It was open too. Coming through it were the sounds of scraping chairs and feet hitting linoleum floors. The loud screech and the loud crash had gotten folks’ attention.

  Reacher had a Glock in his right hand and a Glock in his left. With his right he was covering Danilo. With his left he was covering the door. Hogan arrived behind him. Then Abby.

  She said, ‘Gregory is dead under the bookcase.’

  Reacher said, ‘How?’

  ‘It fell on him. He was at his desk. The bookcase was behind him. I think it broke his neck.’

  ‘I pushed it on him.’

  ‘I guess technically.’

  Reacher paused a beat.

  ‘He was a lucky man,’ he said.

  Then he nodded at Danilo and said to Hogan, ‘Place this guy under arrest. Keep him safe and unharmed. He and I need to have an important discussion.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘It’s what we say in the army when we’re going to beat someone to death.’

  ‘Got it.’

  Then time unspooled in a way that afterwards Reacher thought was partly inevitable, even preordained, partly driven by culture, and partly dictated by peer pressure, by blind obedience, by hopeless lack of alternatives. Hard to comprehend. But it helped him understand the pile of bodies in the doorway in back of the lumber yard. They kept on coming. First a solid guy, taking in the scene, going for his gun. Reacher let him get it out. Allowed him to make his intent crystal clear. Then he shot him centre mass. A single round. Then a second guy barrelled in, pumped up with some kind of ludicrous I-can-do-better bravado. But he couldn’t. Reacher dropped him and he fell right on top of the first guy. Which is how the pile started. It deterred no one. They kept on adding to it. One after the other. We’ll have all the same people ahead of us. Except in reverse order. Hogan was absolutely right. First came the senior figures from the offices, then the smart muscle from inside the building, then finally the dumb muscle from out on the street corners, all of them driven, all of them relentless, all of them doomed. At first Reacher thought of their sacrifice in medieval terms, but then he revised his estimate backward, all the way to the dawn of time, a hundred thousand generations, to the pure insane grip of the tribe, and the absolute terror of being without it.

  It had kept them alive then. But not now. Eventually there were no more footsteps. Reacher gave it another minute. Just to be sure. The sound of his endless firing died away to angry, hissing silence.

  Then he turned to face Danilo.

  FORTY-SIX

  Danilo was a small man by Reacher’s standards, maybe five-ten, and wiry rather than heavy. Hogan had stripped him of his suit coat and emptied his shoulder holster. As a result he looked naked and vulnerable. Already defeated. Hogan had him standing next to the desk inside the inner office. The desk was a massive thing made of toffee-coloured wood. The fallen bookcase was propped on it. It was huge. It must have weighed a ton. Books and ornaments had spilled out all over the place. From his new angle Reacher could see Gregory on the floor. He was folded into a Z shape. Kind of compressed. Otherwise a healthy individual. Tall, hard, and solid. But dead. Pity.

  Reacher hooked his left forefinger under the knot of Danilo’s tie and manoeuvred him out into clear space. He turned him around and squared him up. Shoulders back, chin out.

  He stood back.

  He said, ‘Tell me about your porn sites on the internet.’

  ‘Our what?’ Danilo said.

  Reacher slapped him. Open handed, but a colossal blow all the same. It knocked Danilo right off his feet. He did half of a sideways somersault and landed crumpled where the wall met the floor.

  ‘Get up,’ Reacher said.

  Danilo got up, slow and shaky, hands and knees first, palming his way up the wall.

  ‘Try again,’ Reacher said.

  ‘They’re a sideline,’ Danilo said.

  ‘Where are they?’

  Danilo hesitated.

  Reacher hit him again. The other side. Open handed. Even harder than before. Danilo went down again, cartwheeling sideways, banging his head on the other wall.

  ‘Get up,’ Reacher said again.

  Danilo got up again. Slow and shaky, hands and knees, hauling himself up the wall.

  ‘Where are they?’ Reacher asked again.

  ‘Nowhere,’ Danilo said. ‘Everywhere. It’s the internet. There are bits and pieces on servers all over the planet.’

  ‘Controlled from where?’

  Danilo watched Reacher’s right hand. He had figured out the sequence. Not difficult. Right, left, right. He didn’t want to answer, but he was going to.

  He said the word. Not a hive or a burrow, but a nest, way up high. Then he clamped his lips. Now he was between a rock and a hard place. He couldn’t reveal the location. It was their biggest and best-kept secret. Instead he continued to stare at Reacher’s right hand.

  Reacher said, ‘We already know where it is. You got nothing left to trade.’

  Danilo didn’t answer. Then a cell phone rang. Distant and muffled. From the far doorway. In a pocket, somewhere in the pile of corpses. It pealed six times, and stopped. Then another rang. Equally distant, equally muffled. Then two more.

  The sound of the mothership not answering.

  Danilo said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘For what?’ Reacher said.

  ‘Things I did.’

  ‘But you did them. Can’t change that.’

  Danilo didn’t answer.

  Abby said, ‘Yes.’

  Hogan said, ‘Yes.’

  Reacher shot Danilo in the forehead with the H&K P7 Hogan had taken from him. German police issue. Identical to all the others. Maybe even sequential serial numbers. A bulk order, from some bent German copper. Danilo went down, with what was left of his head in his own office, and the rest of him in Gregory’s. Reacher looked left and right. We’ll be taking them out from the top to the bottom. Much more efficient. Job done. They were laid out like a corporate chart. Gregory, Danilo, the heap of senior deputies. Cell phones ringing everywhere.

  They left the same way they arrived, through the emergency exit corridor. They walked through the vacant store. Twist, pull, go, back to the street. The guys from the corners were still where they had fallen. No one would dream of calling the cops about dead bodies near a black Town Car on a back street on the west side of the city. Such a thing was obviously someone else’s private business.

  ‘Where next?’ Abby asked.

&nbs
p; ‘You OK?’ Reacher asked back.

  ‘Doing well. Where next?’

  Reacher glanced at the downtown skyline. Six towers. Three office buildings, three hotels.

  He said, ‘I should go say goodbye to the Shevicks. I might not get another chance.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The lumber yard won’t burn for ever. Sooner or later the cops will be back west of Center. No more grand a week. They’ll be mad at somebody. Questions will be asked. Always better not to be around for a thing like that.’

  ‘You’re going to leave?’

  ‘Come with me.’

  She didn’t answer.

  He said, ‘Call Vantresca and tell him to meet us.’

  They left the Lincoln where it was. Insurance, of sorts. Like a road sign. Not Don’t Walk, but Don’t Ask. The sun was out. No clouds in the sky. Middle of the afternoon. They strolled back the way they had driven. They rode up to the Shevicks’ room. Maria looked at them through the peephole, and let them in. Barton and Vantresca were already there.

  Vantresca pointed out the window. At the left-hand of two office towers west of Center. It was a plain rectangular structure about twenty storeys tall, faced with glass that reflected the sky. Above the top floor’s windows was a bland and anodyne name. Could have been an insurance company. Could have been a laxative medicine.

  ‘You sure?’ Reacher asked.

  ‘The only new lease in the right time frame. The top three floors. A corporation no one ever heard of. All kinds of weird shit going up in the elevator.’

  ‘Good work.’

  ‘Thank Barton. He knows a saxophone player with a day job in the department of buildings.’

  Apparently Vantresca had called room service on arrival, because a waiter showed up with a cart full of things to eat and drink. Finger sandwiches, cupcakes, a plate of cookies still warm from the microwave oven. Plus water, and soda, and iced tea, and hot tea, and best of all hot coffee, in a tall chromium flask that flashed in the sun. They ate and drank together. Vantresca said he had already sent a biohazard clean-up crew to the Shevicks’ house, and a drywall guy, and a painter. He said they could go home in the morning. If they wanted. They said they did, very much. They said thank you for fixing the holes.

  Then they looked at Reacher, a question in their eyes.

  ‘Close of business today,’ he said. ‘Watch out for a wire transfer.’

  Aaron hesitated a second, politely, and asked, ‘How big?’

  ‘I’m pretty much a round-figures type of guy. If it’s too much, give the rest away. To people in the same situation. Maybe some to those lawyers. Julian Harvey Wood, Gino Vettoretto, and Isaac Mehay-Byford. They’re doing good work, for guys with so many names.’

  Then he got out the envelope from the pawn shop. The wedding bands, the small solitaires, the watch with the broken crystal. He gave it to Maria. He said, ‘They went out of business.’

  Then they left, Reacher, Abby, Barton, Hogan, Vantresca, riding down in the elevator together, stepping out to the street.

  Half a block short of the office tower’s street-level lobby was a single-wide coffee shop with tables in back. They went in and crowded knee to knee, five people at a four-top. Vantresca and Barton ran through what they knew. The building had been completed three years previously. It had twenty floors. It had a total of forty suites. So far it was a commercial failure. The local economy was uncertain. The unknown corporation had gotten a great deal on eighteen, nineteen and twenty. The only other tenants were a dentist, down on three, and a commercial real estate broker, on two. The rest was empty.

  Reacher asked Hogan, ‘What would the Marine Corps do?’

  ‘Most likely evacuate the broker and the dentist and then set the building on fire. Either the high-floor targets would make it down the emergency stairs, or they would get burned up where they were. Either way a win-win, for not much effort.’

  Reacher asked Vantresca, ‘What would the armoured divisions do?’

  ‘Standard urban doctrine is shoot out the ground-floor walls, so the building falls directly in on itself. You need to keep the streets clear of rubble if you can. Anything still moving a minute later, you hit it with the machine gun.’

  ‘OK,’ Reacher said.

  Vantresca asked, ‘What would the MPs do?’

  ‘No doubt something subtle and ingenious. Given our comparative lack of resources.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Reacher thought hard for a minute, and then he told them.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Five minutes later Barton left the coffee shop for an imaginary dental appointment. Reacher and the others stayed where they were. It was a convenient base. Close by. No doubt the counterman was a west side informant, but there was no one left to inform. Reacher saw him make a couple of calls. Apparently they weren’t answered. The guy stared at his phone, puzzled.

  Then Hogan and Vantresca left for an imaginary discussion about commercial real estate. Reacher and Abby stayed at the table. Theirs were the only faces on Ukrainian phones. They figured they better not start the party too early.

  The counterman tried a third call.

  It wasn’t answered.

  Abby said, ‘I guess this means we can go back to my place tonight.’

  ‘No reason why not,’ Reacher said.

  ‘Unless you leave before tonight.’

  ‘Depends what happens. All five of us might be running.’

  ‘Suppose we aren’t.’

  ‘Then we’ll go back to your place tonight.’

  ‘For how long?’

  He said, ‘What would be your answer to that question?’

  She said, ‘I guess not for ever.’

  ‘That’s my answer too. Except my for ever horizon is closer than most. Full disclosure.’

  ‘How close?’

  He looked out the window, at the street, at the brick, at the afternoon shadows. He said, ‘I already feel like I’ve been here for ever.’

  ‘So you’ll leave anyway.’

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘What’s wrong with sticking around?’

  ‘What’s wrong with not?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m not complaining. I just want to know.’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘How long we’ve got. So I can make the most of it.’

  ‘You don’t want to come with me?’

  ‘Seems to me I have a choice of two things. Either a good memory with a beginning and an end, or a long slow fizzle, where I get tired of motels and hitchhiking and walking. I choose the memory. Of a successful experiment. Much rarer than you think. We did good, Reacher.’

  ‘We’re not at the end yet. Don’t count your chickens.’

  ‘You worried?’

  ‘Professionally concerned.’

  ‘Maria told me what you said to her. One day you’re going to lose. Just not today.’

  ‘I was trying to cheer her up. That was all. She was really feeling it. I would have said anything.’

  ‘I think you meant it.’

  ‘It’s something they teach you in the army. The only thing under your direct control is how hard you work. In other words, if you really, really buckle down today, and you get the intelligence, the planning, and the execution each a hundred per cent exactly correct, then you are bound to prevail.’

  ‘Sounds empowering.’

  ‘It’s the army. What they really mean is, if you fail today, it’s completely your own fault.’

  ‘We’ve done OK so far.’

  ‘But now the game has changed. Now we’re fighting Moscow. Not just a bunch of pimps and thieves.’

  ‘Same actual people.’

  ‘But a better system, guaranteed. Better planning. The pick of the litter. Fewer weaknesses. Fewer mistakes.’

  ‘Sounds bad.’

  ‘I’m guessing about fifty-fifty. Win or lose. Which is OK. I like the simplicity.’

  ‘How do we do it?’

  ‘Intelligence, pl
anning, execution. First we think like them. Which isn’t difficult. We studied them endlessly. Vantresca could tell you. They’re smart people, organized, bureaucratic, cautious, careful, scientific, and painfully rational.’

  ‘So how can we win?’

  ‘We can exploit the rational part of their natures,’ Reacher said. ‘We can do something a rational person would never even consider. Something completely unhinged.’

  Then the first intelligence report came back. Barton stepped in, and nodded a greeting, and headed to the counter. He got coffee, and walked over to the table. He sat down, but before he could say anything the second report arrived. Hogan and Vantresca, stepping in together. They came straight to the table. They jostled for space and squeezed themselves in. Five people at a four-top.

  Barton said, ‘The front wall of the lobby is all glass. You go in a revolving door. The back wall of the lobby is the front face of the building’s core. There are five openings in it. A fire stair door, three elevators, and another fire stair door. Between you and them are security turnstiles and a security desk. Behind the security desk is what looks to me like a regular civilian rent-a-cop.’

  ‘Is that all?’ Reacher said.

  ‘I guess it’s all that the building provides,’ Barton said. ‘But there are also four men in suits and ties. I guess provided by someone else. Two of them were waiting just inside the revolving door. They asked my business. I said the dentist. They stepped aside and waved me forward, towards the security desk. Where the rent-a-cop asked my business all over again.’

  Reacher looked at Hogan and Vantresca.

  ‘Same for you?’ he asked.

  ‘Exactly the same,’ Vantresca said. ‘It’s a pretty good upstream screen. Then it gets even better. The other two guys are on the other side of the security turnstiles. By the elevators. Which have been upgraded, with a new control panel. Like you see in really tall buildings with thousands of people. You punch in the floor you want, and the screen tells you which car to go wait for. Then the car takes you where you said. There are no buttons inside. It’s a very efficient system. But totally unnecessary for a building that small. Obviously there for a reason. Which is, the two guys won’t let you punch in your floor yourself. They have to do it for you. They ask where you’re going, you tell them, they press the buttons, they show you where to wait. Then you get in the elevator car, and you get out again when the doors open. No other option.’