by Lee Child
I said nothing. She hurried away. I went back to my room.
Day ten started with the arrival of the vehicles. The old guy got a seven-year-old Chevy Caprice to act as his police unmarked. It was the one with the Corvette motor in it, from the final model year before General Motors stopped making them. It looked just right. The pickup was a big thing painted faded red. It had a bull bar on the front. I saw the younger guys talking about how they would use it. My ride was a plain brown panel van. It was the most anonymous truck I had ever seen. It had no side windows and two small rear windows. I checked inside for a glove compartment. It had one.
“OK?” Eliot asked me.
I slapped its side like van people do and it boomed faintly in response.
“Perfect,” I said. “I want the revolvers to be big .44 Magnums. I want three heavy soft-nosed bullets and nine blanks. Make the blanks as loud as you can get.”
“OK,” he said. “Why soft-nose?”
“I’m worried about ricochets,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt anybody by accident. Soft-nose slugs will deform and stick to what they hit. I’m going to fire one into the radiator and two at the tires. I want you to pump the tires way high so they’ll explode when I hit them. We’ve got to make it spectacular.”
Eliot hurried away and Duffy came up to me.
“You’ll need these,” she said. She had a coat and a pair of gloves for me. “You’ll look more realistic if you’re wearing them. It’ll be cold. And the coat will hide the gun.”
I took them from her and tried on the coat. It fit pretty well. She was clearly a good judge of sizes.
“The psychology will be tricky,” she said. “You’re going to have to be flexible. The kid might be catatonic. You might need to coax some reaction out of him. But ideally he’ll be awake and talking. In which case I think you need to show a little reluctance about getting yourself more and more involved. Ideally you need to let him talk you into driving him all the way home. But at the same time you need to be dominant. You need to keep events moving along so he doesn’t have time to dwell on exactly what he’s seeing.”
“OK,” I said. “In which case I’m going to change my ammunition requisition. I’m going to make the second bullet in the second gun a real one. I’ll tell him to get down on the floor and then I’ll blow out the window behind him. He’ll think it was the college cops shooting at us. Then I’ll tell him to get up again. It’ll increase his sense of danger and it’ll get him used to doing what I tell him and it’ll make him a little happier to watch the college cops get it in the neck. Because I don’t want him fighting me, trying to stop me. I might wreck the van and kill both of us.”
“In fact you need to bond with him,” she said. “He needs to speak well of you, later. Because I agree, getting hired on up there would hit the jackpot. It would give you access. So try to impress the kid. But keep it very subtle. You don’t need him to like you. You just need to make him think you’re a tough guy who knows what he’s doing.”
I went to find Eliot and then the two guys playing the college cops came to find me. We arranged that they would fire blanks at me first, then I would fire one blank at them, then I would shoot out the van’s rear window, and then I would fire another blank, and finally I would fire my last three blanks in a spaced group. On the final shot they would blow out their own windshield with a real bullet from one of their own guns and then they would go sliding off the road like they had lost a tire or been hit.
“Don’t get confused which load is which,” one of them said.
“You either,” I said back.
We had more pizza for lunch and then went out to cruise the target area. We parked a mile short and went over a couple of maps. Then we risked three separate passes in two cars right past the college gate. I would have preferred more time to study but we were worried about being conspicuous. We drove back to the motel in silence and regrouped in Eliot’s room.
“Looks OK,” I said. “Which way will they turn?”
“Maine is north of here,” Duffy said. “We can assume he lives somewhere near Portland.”
I nodded. “But I think they’ll go south. Look at the maps. You get to the highway faster that way. And standard security doctrine is to get on wide busy roads as soon as possible.”
“It’s a gamble.”
“They’ll go south,” I said.
“Anything else?” Eliot asked.
“I’d be nuts to stick with the van,” I said. “Old man Beck will figure if I was doing this for real I’d ditch it and steal a car.”
“Where?” Duffy asked.
“The map shows a mall next to the highway.”
“OK, we’ll stash one there.”
“Spare keys under the bumper?” Eliot asked.
Duffy shook her head. “Too phony. We need this whole thing to be absolutely convincing. He’ll have to steal it for real.”
“I don’t know how,” I said. “I’ve never stolen a car.”
The room went quiet.
“All I know is what I learned in the army,” I said. “Military vehicles are never locked. And they don’t have ignition keys. They start off a button.”
“OK,” Eliot said. “No problem is insuperable. We’ll leave it unlocked. But you’ll act like it is locked. You’ll pretend to jimmy the door. We’ll leave a load of wire and a bunch of coat hangers nearby. Maybe you could ask the kid to find something for you. Make him feel involved. It’ll help the illusion. Then you screw around with it and, hey, the door pops open. We’ll loosen the shroud on the steering column. We’ll strip the right wires and only the right wires. You find them and touch them together and you’re an instant bad guy.”
“Brilliant,” Duffy said.
Eliot smiled. “I do my best.”
“Let’s take a break,” Duffy said. “Start again after dinner.”
The final pieces fell into place after dinner. Two of the guys got back with the last of the equipment. They had a matched pair of Colt Anacondas for me. They were big brutal weapons. They looked expensive. I didn’t ask where they got them from. They came with a box of real .44 Magnums and a box of .44 blanks. The blanks came from a hardware store. They were designed for a heavy-duty nail gun. The sort of thing that punches nails straight into concrete. I opened each Anaconda cylinder and scratched an X against one of the chambers with the tip of a nail scissor. A Colt revolver’s cylinder steps around clockwise, which is different from a Smith & Wesson, which rotates counterclockwise. The X would represent the first chamber to be fired. I would line it up at the ten o’clock position where I could see it and it would step around and fall under the hammer with the first pull of the trigger.
Duffy brought me a pair of shoes. They were my size. The right one had a cavity carved into the heel. She gave me a wireless e-mail device that fit snugly into the space.
“That’s why I’m glad you’ve got big feet,” she said. “Made it easier to fit.”
“Is it reliable?”
“It better be. It’s new government issue. All departments are doing their concealed communications with it now.”
“Great,” I said. In my career more foul-ups had been caused by faulty technology than any other single cause.
“It’s the best we can do,” she said. “They’d find anything else. They’re bound to search you. And the theory is if they’re scanning for radio transmissions all they’ll hear is a brief burst of modem screech. They’ll probably think it’s static.”
They had three blood effects from a New York theatrical costumier. They were big and bulky. Each was a foot-wide square of Kevlar that was to be taped to the victim’s chest. They had rubber gore reservoirs and radio receivers and firing charges and batteries.
“Wear loose shirts, guys,” Eliot said.
The radio triggers were separate buttons I would have to tape to my right forearm. They were wired to batteries I would have to carry in my inside pocket. The buttons were big enough to feel through my coat and my jacket and
my shirt, and I figured I would look OK supporting the Colt’s weight with my left hand. We rehearsed the sequence. First, the pickup driver. That button would be nearest my wrist. I would trigger it with my index finger. Second, the pickup passenger. That button would be in the middle. Middle finger. Third, the old guy playing the cop. That button would be nearest my elbow, ring finger.
“You’ll have to lose them afterward,” Eliot said. “They’ll search you for sure at Beck’s house. You’ll have to stop at a men’s room or something and get rid of them.”
We rehearsed endlessly in the motel lot. We laid out the road in miniature. By midnight we were as solid as we were ever going to get. We figured we would need all of eight seconds, beginning to end.
“You have the critical decision,” Duffy said to me. “It’s your call. If there’s anything wrong when the Toyota is coming at you, anything at all, then you abort and you watch it go on by. We’ll clean it up somehow. But you’ll be firing three live rounds in a public place and I don’t want any stray pedestrians getting hit, or cyclists, or joggers. You’ll have less than a second to decide.”
“Understood,” I said, although I really didn’t see any easy way of cleaning it up if it had already gotten that far. Then Eliot took a last couple of phone calls and confirmed they had a college security cruiser on loan and were putting a plausible old Nissan Maxima behind the mall’s flagship department store. The Maxima had been impounded from a small-time marijuana grower in New York State. They still had tough drug laws down there. They were putting phony Massachusetts plates on it and filling it with the kind of junk a department store sales lady might be expected to haul around with her.
“Bed now,” Duffy called. “Big day tomorrow.”
That was the end of day ten.
Duffy brought doughnuts and coffee to my room for breakfast on day eleven, early. Her and me, alone. We went through the whole thing, one last time. She showed me photographs of the agent she had inserted fifty-nine days ago. She was a blonde thirty-year-old who had gotten a clerk’s job with Bizarre Bazaar using the name Teresa Daniel. Teresa Daniel was petite and looked resourceful. I looked hard at the pictures and memorized her features, but it was another woman’s face I was seeing in my mind.
“I’m assuming she’s still alive,” Duffy said. “I have to.”
I said nothing.
“Try hard to get hired,” she said. “We checked your recent history, the same way Beck might. You come out pretty vague. Plenty missing that would worry me, but I don’t think it would worry him.”
I gave the photographs back to her.
“I’m a shoo-in,” I said. “The illusion reinforces itself. He’s left shorthanded and he’s under attack, all at the same time. But I’m not going to try too hard. In fact I’m going to come across a little reluctant. I think anything else would seem phony.”
“OK,” she said. “You’ve got seven objectives, of which numbers one, two, and three are, take a lot of care. We can assume these are extremely dangerous people.”
I nodded. “We can do more than assume it. If Quinn’s involved, we can absolutely guarantee it.”
“So act accordingly,” she said. “Gloves off, from the start.”
“Yes,” I said. I put my arm across my chest and started massaging my left shoulder with my right hand. Then I stopped myself, surprised. An army psychiatrist once told me that type of unconscious gesture represents feelings of vulnerability. It’s defensive. It’s about covering up and hiding. It’s the first step toward curling yourself into a ball on the floor. Duffy must have read the same books, because she picked up on it and looked straight at me.
“You’re scared of Quinn, aren’t you?” she said.
“I’m not scared of anybody,” I said. “But certainly I preferred it when he was dead.”
“We can cancel,” she said.
I shook my head. “I’d like the chance to find him, believe me.”
“What went wrong with the arrest?”
I shook my head again.
“I won’t talk about that,” I said.
She was quiet for a beat. But she didn’t push it. Just looked away and paused and looked back and started up with the briefing again. Quiet voice, efficient diction.
“Objective number four is find my agent,” she said. “And bring her back to me.”
I nodded.
“Five, bring me solid evidence I can use to nail Beck.”
“OK,” I said.
She paused again. Just a beat. “Six, find Quinn and do whatever you need to do with him. And then seven, get the hell out of there.”
I nodded. Said nothing.
“We won’t tail you,” she said. “The kid might spot us. He’ll be pretty paranoid by then. And we won’t put a homing device on the Nissan, because they’d probably find it later. You’ll have to e-mail us your location, soon as you know it.”
“OK,” I said.
“Weaknesses?” she asked.
I forced my mind away from Quinn.
“Three weaknesses that I can see,” I said. “Two minor and one major. First minor one is that I’m going to blow the back window out of the van but the kid will have about ten minutes to realize the broken glass is in the wrong place and there isn’t a corresponding hole in the windshield.”
“So don’t do it.”
“I think I really need to. I think we need to keep the panic level high.”
“OK, we’ll put a bunch of boxes back there. You should have boxes anyway, if you’re a delivery man. They might obscure his view. If they don’t, just hope he doesn’t put two and two together inside ten minutes.”
I nodded. “And second, old man Beck is going to call the cops down here, sometime, somehow. Maybe the newspapers, too. He’s going to be looking for corroborating information.”
“We’ll give the cops a script to follow. And they’ll give the press something. They’ll play ball for as long as they need to. What’s the major weakness?”
“The bodyguards,” I said. “How long can you hold them? You can’t let them get near a phone, or they’ll call Beck. So you can’t formally arrest them. You can’t put them in the system. You’ll have to hold them incommunicado, completely illegally. How long can you keep that going?”
She shrugged. “Four or five days, tops. We can’t protect you any longer than that. So be real fast.”
“I plan to be,” I said. “How long will the battery last on my e-mail thing?”
“About five days,” she said. “You’ll be out by then. We can’t give you a charger. It would be too suspicious. But you can use a cell phone charger, if you can find one.”
“OK,” I said.
She just looked at me. There was nothing more to say. Then she moved close and kissed me on the cheek. It was sudden. Her lips were soft. They left a dusting of doughnut sugar on my skin.
“Good luck,” she said. “I don’t think we’ve missed anything.”
But we had missed a lot of things. They were glaring errors in our thinking and they all came back to haunt me.
CHAPTER 3
Duke the bodyguard came back to my room five minutes before seven in the evening, which was way too early for dinner. I heard his footsteps outside and a quiet click as the lock turned. I was sitting on the bed. The e-mail device was back in my shoe and my shoe was back on my foot.
“Get a nap, asshole?” he asked.
“Why am I locked up?” I asked back.
“Because you’re a cop-killer,” he said.
I looked away. Maybe he had been a cop himself, before he went private. Lots of ex-cops wind up in the security business, as consultants or private eyes or bodyguards. Certainly he had some kind of an agenda, which could be a problem for me. But it meant he was buying Richard Beck’s story without question, which was the upside. He looked at me for a second with nothing much in his face. Then he led me out of the room and down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor and through dark passageways toward the side of the
house that faced north. I could smell salt air and damp carpet. There were rugs everywhere. Some places they were laid two-deep on the floor. They glowed with muted colors. He stopped in front of a door and pushed it open and stepped back so I was channeled into a room. It was large and square and paneled with dark oak. Rugs all over the floor. There were small windows in deep recesses. Darkness and rock and gray ocean outside. There was an oak table. My two Colt Anacondas were lying on it, unloaded. Their cylinders were open. There was a man at the head of the table. He was sitting in an oak chair with arms and a tall back. He was the guy from Susan Duffy’s surveillance photographs.
In the flesh he was mostly unremarkable. Not big, not small. Maybe six feet, maybe two hundred pounds. Gray hair, not thin, not thick, not short, not long. He was about fifty. He was wearing a gray suit made out of expensive cloth cut without any attempt at style. His shirt was white and his tie was no color at all, like gasoline. His hands and face were pale, like his natural habitat was underground parking garages at night, hawking samples of something from his Cadillac’s trunk.
“Sit down,” he said. His voice was quiet and strained, like it was all high up in his throat. I sat opposite him at the far end of the table.
“I’m Zachary Beck,” he said.
“Jack Reacher,” I said.
Duke closed the door gently and leaned his bulk against it from the inside. The room went quiet. I could hear the ocean. It wasn’t a rhythmic wave sound like you hear at the beach. It was a continuous random crashing and sucking of surf on the rocks. I could hear pools draining and gravel rattling and breakers coming in like explosions. I tried to count them. People say every seventh wave is a big one.
“So,” Beck said. He had a drink on the table in front of him. Some kind of amber liquid in a short heavy glass. Oily, like scotch or bourbon. He nodded to Duke. Duke picked up a second glass. It had been waiting there for me on a side table. It had the same oily amber liquid in it. He carried it awkwardly with his finger and thumb right down at the base. He walked across the room and bent a little to place it carefully in front of me. I smiled. I knew what it was for.