by Lee Child
“By Paulie,” he said. “He was just out of prison. He still had a taste for that kind of thing.”
I was quiet for a long moment.
“Does your father know?”
“No,” he said.
“Your mother?”
“No.”
I didn’t know what to say. Richard said nothing more. We sat there in silence. Then the cook came back and fired up the stove. She put fat in a skillet and started heating it. The smell made me sick to my stomach.
“Let’s go for a walk,” I said.
Richard followed me outside to the rocks. The air was salty and fresh and bitter cold. The light was gray. The wind was strong. It was blowing straight in our faces. Richard’s hair strung way out behind him, almost horizontal. The spray was smashing twenty feet in the air and foamy drops of water were whipping toward us like bullets.
“Every silver lining has a cloud,” I said. I had to talk loud, just to be heard over the wind and the surf. “Maybe one day Xavier and Paulie will get what’s coming to them, but your dad will go to prison in the process.”
Richard nodded. There were tears in his eyes. Maybe they were from the cold wind. Maybe they weren’t.
“He deserves to,” he said.
Very loyal, his father had said. Best buddies.
“I was gone eight days,” Richard said. “One should have been enough. Like with the other guy you mentioned.”
“Gorowski?”
“Whoever. With the two-year-old girl. You think she was raped?”
“I sincerely hope not.”
“Me too.”
“Can you drive?” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
“You might need to get out of here,” I said. “Soon. You and your mother and the cook. So you need to be ready. For if and when I tell you to go.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a guy paid to protect your father. From his so-called friends, as much as his enemies.”
“Paulie won’t let us through the gate.”
“He’ll be gone soon.”
He shook his head.
“Paulie will kill you,” he said. “You have no idea. You can’t deal with Paulie, whoever you are. Nobody can.”
“I dealt with those guys outside the college.”
He shook his head again. His hair streamed in the wind. It reminded me of the maid’s hair, under the water.
“That was phony,” he said. “My mom and I discussed it. It was a setup.”
I was quiet for a second. Did I trust him yet?
“No, it was for real,” I said. No, I didn’t trust him yet.
“It’s a small community,” he said. “They have about five cops. I never saw that guy before in my life.”
I said nothing.
“I never saw those college cops either,” he said. “And I was there nearly three full years.”
I said nothing. Mistakes, coming back to haunt me.
“So why did you quit school?” I said. “If it was a setup?”
He didn’t answer.
“And how come Duke and I were ambushed?”
He didn’t answer.
“So what was it?” I said. “A setup or for real?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You saw me shoot them all,” I said.
He said nothing. I looked away. The seventh wave came rolling in. It crested forty yards out and hit the rocks faster than a man can run. The ground shuddered and spray burst upward like a star shell.
“Did either of you discuss this with your father?” I said.
“I didn’t,” he said. “And I’m not going to. I don’t know about my mom.”
And I don’t know about you, I thought. Ambivalence works both ways. You blow hot, then you blow cold. The thought of his father in a prison cell might look pretty good to him right now. Later, it might look different. When push came to shove, this guy was capable of swinging either way.
“I saved your ass,” I said. “I don’t like it that you’re pretending I didn’t.”
“Whatever,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do anyway. This is going to be a busy weekend. You’ve got the shipment to deal with. And after that you’ll be one of them anyway.”
“So help me out,” I said.
“I won’t double-cross my dad,” he said.
Very loyal. Best buddies.
“You don’t have to,” I said.
“So how can I help you?”
“Just tell him you want me here. Tell him you shouldn’t be alone right now. He listens to you, about stuff like that.”
He didn’t reply. Just walked away from me and headed back to the kitchen. He went straight through to the hallway. I guessed he was going to eat breakfast in the dining room. I stayed in the kitchen. The cook had set my place at the deal table. I wasn’t hungry, but I forced myself to eat. Tiredness and hunger are bad enemies. I had slept, and now I was going to eat. I didn’t want to wind up weak and light-headed at the wrong moment. I had toast, and another cup of coffee. Then I got more into it and had eggs and bacon. I was on my third cup of coffee when Beck came in to find me. He was wearing Saturday clothes. Blue jeans and a red flannel shirt.
“We’re going to Portland,” he said. “To the warehouse. Right now.”
He went back out to the hallway. I guessed he would wait at the front. And I guessed Richard hadn’t talked to him. Either he hadn’t gotten a chance, or he hadn’t wanted to. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Checked my pockets to make sure the Beretta was safely stowed and the keys were there. Then I walked out and fetched the car. Drove it around to the front. Beck was waiting there for me. He had put a canvas jacket over his shirt. He looked like a regular Maine guy heading out to split logs or tap his maple trees for syrup. But he wasn’t.
Paulie was about ready with the gate so I had to slow but I didn’t have to stop. I glanced at him as I passed. I figured he would die today. Or tomorrow. Or I would. I left him behind and gunned the big car along the familiar road. After a mile I passed the spot where Villanueva had parked. Four miles after that I rounded the narrow curve where I had trapped the bodyguards. Beck didn’t speak. He had his knees apart with his hands held down between them. He was leaning forward in his seat. His head was down, but his eyes were up. He was staring straight ahead through the windshield. He was nervous.
“We never had our talk,” I said. “About the background information.”
“Later,” he said.
I passed Route One and used I-95 instead. Headed north for the city. The sky stayed gray. The wind was strong enough to push the car a little off line. I turned onto I-295 and passed by the airport. It was on my left, beyond the tongue of water. On my right was the back of the strip mall where the maid had been captured, and the back of the new business park where I figured she had died. I kept on going straight and threaded my way into the harbor area. I passed the lot where Beck parked his trucks. One minute later we arrived at his warehouse.
It was surrounded by vehicles. There were five of them parked head-in against the walls, like airplanes at a terminal. Like animals at a trough. Like suckerfish on a corpse. There were two black Lincoln Town Cars and two blue Chevy Suburbans and a gray Mercury Grand Marquis. One of the Lincolns was the car I had been in when Harley drove me out to pick up the Saab. After we put the maid into the sea. I looked for enough space to park the Cadillac.
“Just let me out here,” Beck said.
I eased to a stop. “And?”
“Head back to the house,” he said. “Take care of my family.”
I nodded. So maybe Richard had talked to him, after all. Maybe his ambivalence was swinging my way, just temporarily.
“OK,” I said. “Whatever you need. You want me to pick you up again later?”
He shook his head.
“I’m sure I’ll get a ride back,” he said.
He slid out and headed for the weathered gray door. I took my foot off the brake and looped around the warehouse and rol
led back south.
I used Route One instead of I-295 and drove straight to the new business park. Pulled in and cruised through the network of brand-new roads. There were maybe three dozen identical metal buildings. They were very plain. It wasn’t the kind of place that depends on attracting casual passersby. Foot-traffic wasn’t important. There were no retail places. No gaudy come-ons. No big billboards. Just discreet unit numbers with business names printed small next to them. There were lock-and-key people, ceramic tile merchants, a couple of print shops. There was a beauty products wholesaler. Unit 26 was an electric wheelchair distributor. And next to it was Unit 27: Xavier eXport Company. The Xs were much larger than the other letters. There was a main office address on the sign that didn’t match the business park’s location. I figured it referred to someplace in downtown Portland. So I rolled north again and recrossed the river and did some city driving.
I came in on Route One with a park on my left. Made a right onto a street full of office buildings. They were the wrong buildings. It was the wrong street. So I quartered the business district for five long minutes until I spotted a street sign with the right name on it. Then I watched the numbers and pulled up on a fireplug outside a tower that had stainless steel letters stretched across the whole of the frontage, spelling out a name: Missionary House. There was a parking garage under it. I looked at the vehicle entrance and was pretty sure Susan Duffy had walked through it eleven weeks earlier, with a camera in her hand. Then I recalled a high school history lesson, somewhere hot, somewhere Spanish, a quarter-century in the past, some old guy telling us about a Spanish Jesuit called Francisco Javier. I could even remember his dates: 1506 to 1552. Francisco Javier, Spanish missionary. Francis Xavier, Missionary House. Back in Boston at the start Eliot had accused Beck of making jokes. He had been wrong. It was Quinn with the twisted sense of humor.
I moved off the fireplug and found Route One again and headed south on it. I drove fast but it took me thirty whole minutes to reach the Kennebunk River. There were three Ford Tauruses parked outside the motel, all plain and identical apart from color, and even then there wasn’t much variation between them. They were gray, gray blue, and blue. I put the Cadillac where I had put it before, behind the propane store. Walked back through the cold and knocked on Duffy’s door. I saw the peephole black out for a second and then she opened up. We didn’t hug. I saw Eliot and Villanueva in the room behind her.
“Why can’t I find the second agent?” she said.
“Where did you look?”
“Everywhere,” she said.
She was wearing jeans and a white Oxford shirt. Different jeans, different shirt. She must have had a large supply. She was wearing boat shoes over bare feet. She looked good, but there was worry in her eyes.
“Can I come in?” I said.
She paused a second, preoccupied. Then she moved out of the way and I followed her inside. Villanueva was in the desk chair. He had it tilted backward. I hoped the legs were strong. He wasn’t a small guy. Eliot was on the end of the bed, like he had been in my room in Boston. Duffy had been sitting at the head of the bed. That was clear. The pillows were stacked vertically and the shape of her back was pressed into them.
“Where did you look?” I asked her again.
“The whole system,” she said. “The whole Justice Department, front to back, which means FBI as well as DEA. And she’s not there.”
“Conclusion?”
“She was off the books too.”
“Which begs a question,” Eliot said. “Like, what the hell is going on?”
Duffy sat down at the head of the bed again and I sat down next to her. There was no other place for me to go. She wrestled a pillow out from behind her and shoved it in behind me. It was warm from her body.
“Nothing much is going on,” I said. “Except all three of us started out two weeks ago just like the Keystone Cops.”
“How?” Eliot said.
I made a face. “I was obsessed with Quinn, you guys were obsessed with Teresa Daniel. We were all so obsessed we went right ahead and built a house of cards.”
“How?” he said again.
“My fault more than yours,” I said. “Think about it from the very beginning, eleven weeks ago.”
“Eleven weeks ago was nothing to do with you. You weren’t involved yet.”
“Tell me exactly what happened.”
He shrugged. Rehearsed it in his mind. “We got word from LA that a top boy just bought himself a first-class ticket to Portland, Maine.”
I nodded. “So you tracked him to his rendezvous with Beck. And took pictures of him doing what?”
“Checking samples,” Duffy said. “Doing a deal.”
“In a private parking garage,” I said. “And as an aside, if it was private enough to get you in trouble with the Fourth Amendment, maybe you should have wondered how Beck got himself in there.”
She said nothing.
“Then what?” I said.
“We looked at Beck,” Eliot said. “Concluded he was a major importer and a major distributor.”
“Which he most definitely is,” I said. “And you put Teresa in to nail him.”
“Off the books,” Eliot said.
“That’s a minor detail,” I said.
“So what went wrong?”
“It was a house of cards,” I said. “You made one tiny error of judgment at the outset. It invalidated everything that came after it.”
“What was it?”
“Something that I should have seen a hell of a lot earlier than I did.”
“What?”
“Just ask yourself why you can’t find a computer trail for the maid.”
“She was off the books. That’s the only explanation.”
I shook my head. “She was as legal as can be. She was all over the damn books. I found some notes she made. There’s no doubt about it.”
Duffy looked straight at me. “Reacher, what exactly is going on?”
“Beck has a mechanic,” I said. “Some kind of a technician. For what?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I never even asked myself,” I said. “I should have. I shouldn’t have needed to, actually, because I should have known before I even met the damn mechanic. But I was locked in a groove, just like you were.”
“What groove?”
“Beck knew the retail on a Colt Anaconda,” I said. “He knew how much it weighed. Duke had a Steyr SPP, which is a weird Austrian gun. Angel Doll had a PSM, which is a weird Russian gun. Paulie’s got an NSV, probably the only one inside the United States. Beck was obsessed with the fact that we attacked with Uzis, not H and Ks. He knew enough to spec out a Beretta 92FS so it looked just like a regular military M9.”
“So?”
“He’s not what we thought he was.”
“So what is he? You just agreed he’s definitely a major importer and distributor.”
“He is.”
“So?”
“You looked in the wrong computer,” I said. “The maid didn’t work for the Justice Department. She worked for Treasury.”
“Secret Service?”
I shook my head.
“ATF,” I said. “The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.”
The room went quiet.
“Beck isn’t a drug dealer,” I said. “He’s a gunrunner.”
The room stayed quiet for a very long time. Duffy looked at Eliot. Eliot looked back at her. Then they both looked at Villanueva. Villanueva looked at me. Then he looked out the window. I waited for the tactical problem to dawn on them. But it didn’t. Not right away.
“So what was the LA guy doing?” Duffy said.
“Looking at samples,” I said. “In the Cadillac’s trunk. Exactly like you thought. But they were samples of the weapons Beck was dealing. He as good as told me. He said dope dealers were driven by fashion. They like new and fancy things. They change weapons all the time, always looking for the latest thing.”
�
��He told you?”
“I wasn’t really listening,” I said. “I was tired. And it was all mixed in with stuff about sneakers and cars and coats and watches.”
“Duke went to Treasury,” she said. “After he was a cop.”
I nodded. “Beck probably met him on the job. Probably bought him off.”
“Where does Quinn fit in?”
“I figure he was running a rival operation,” I said. “He probably always was, ever since he got out of the hospital in California. He had six months to make his plans. And guns are a much better fit with a guy like Quinn than narcotics. I figure at some point he identified Beck’s operation as a takeover target. Maybe he liked the way Beck was mining the dope dealer market. Or maybe he just liked the rug side of the business. It’s great cover. So he moved in. He kidnapped Richard five years ago, to get Beck’s signature on the dotted line.”
“Beck told you the Hartford guys were his customers,” Eliot said.
“They were,” I said. “But for their guns, not for their dope. That’s why he was puzzled about the Uzis. He’d probably just gotten through selling them a whole bunch of H and Ks, and now they’re using Uzis? He couldn’t understand it. He must have thought they had switched suppliers.”
“We were pretty dumb,” Villanueva said.
“I was dumber than you,” I said. “I was amazingly dumb. There was evidence all over the place. Beck isn’t rich enough to be a dope dealer. He makes good money, for sure, but he doesn’t make millions a week. He noticed the marks I scratched on the Colt cylinders. He knew the price and the weight of a laser sight to use on the Beretta he gave me. He put a couple of mint H&Ks in a bag when he needed to take care of some business down in Connecticut. Probably pulled them right out of stock. He’s got a private collection of Thompson grease guns.”
“What’s the mechanic for?”
“He gets the guns ready for sale,” I said. “That’s my guess. He tweaks them, adjusts them, checks them out. Some of Beck’s customers wouldn’t react well to substandard merchandise.”
“Not the ones we know,” Duffy said.
“Beck talked about the M16 at dinner,” I said. “He was conversing about an assault rifle, for God’s sake. And he wanted to hear my opinion about Uzis versus H&Ks, like he was really fascinated. I thought he was just a gun nerd, you know, but it was actually professional interest. He has computer access to the Glock factory in Deutsch-Wagram in Austria.”