by Lee Child
“I was standing right next to him,” she said.
“You aren’t standing right next to him now,” I said. “That’s the bottom line.”
Villanueva let go of her and stepped over and bent down and picked up our handguns from where Harley had kicked them. I took the second loaded Persuader out of the crate and unwrapped it again and clicked the safety on.
“I really like these,” I said.
“They seem to work,” Villanueva said.
I held both shotguns in one hand and put my Beretta in my pocket.
“Get the car, Terry,” I said. “Somebody’s probably calling the cops right now.”
He left by the front door and I looked at the sky through the window. There was plenty of cloud, but there was still plenty of daylight, too.
“What now?” Duffy said.
“Now we go somewhere and wait,” I said.
I waited more than an hour, sitting at my desk, looking at my telephone, expecting Kohl to call me. She had timed the drive out to MacLean at thirty-five minutes. Starting from the Georgetown University campus might have added five or ten, depending on traffic. Assessing the situation at Quinn’s house could have added another ten. Taking him down should have taken less than one. Cuffing him and putting him in the car should have taken another three. Fifty-nine minutes, beginning to end. But a whole hour passed and she didn’t call.
I started to worry after seventy minutes. Started to worry badly after eighty. Dead on ninety minutes I scared up a pool car and hit the road myself.
Terry Villanueva parked the Taurus on the patch of broken blacktop outside the office door and left the engine running.
“Let’s call Eliot,” I said. “Find out where he went. We’ll go wait with him.”
“What are we waiting for?” Duffy said.
“Dark,” I said.
She went out to the idling car and got her bag. Brought it back. Dug out her phone and hit the number. I timed it out in my head. One ring. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
“No answer,” Duffy said.
Then her face brightened. Then it fell again.
“Gone to voice mail,” she said. “Something’s wrong.”
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Where to?”
I looked at my watch. Looked out the window at the sky. Too early.
“The coast road,” I said.
We left the warehouse with the lights off and the doors locked. There was too much good stuff in it to leave it open and accessible. Villanueva drove. Duffy sat next to him in the front. I sat in the back with the Persuaders on the seat beside me. We threaded our way out of the harbor area. Past the lot where Beck parked his blue trucks. Onto the highway, past the airport, and south, away from the city.
We came off the highway and struck out east on the familiar coast road. There was no other traffic. The sky was low and gray and the wind off the sea was strong enough to set up a howling around the Taurus’s windshield pillars. There were drops of water in the air. Maybe they were raindrops. Maybe it was sea spray, lashed miles inland by the gale. It was still way too light. Too early.
“Try Eliot again,” I said.
Duffy took her phone out. Speed-dialed the number. Put the phone to her ear. I heard six faint rings and the whisper of the voice mail announcement. She shook her head. Clicked the phone off again.
“OK,” I said.
She twisted around in her seat.
“You sure they’re all out at the house?” she said.
“Did you notice Harley’s suit?” I said.
“Black,” she said. “Cheap.”
“It was as close as he could get to a tux. It was his idea of evening wear. And Emily Smith had a black cocktail dress ready in her office. She was going to change. She already had her smart shoes on. I think there’s going to be a banquet.”
“Keast and Maden,” Villanueva said. “The caterers.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Banquet food. Eighteen people at fifty-five dollars a head. Tonight. And Emily Smith made a note on the order. Lamb, not pork. Who eats lamb and not pork?”
“People who keep kosher.”
“And Arabs,” I said. “Libyans, maybe.”
“Their suppliers.”
“Exactly,” I said again. “I think they’re about to cement their commercial relationship. I think all the Russian stuff in the crates was some kind of a token shipment. It was a gesture. Same with the Persuaders. They’ve demonstrated to each other that both sides can deliver. Now they’re going to break bread together and go into business for real.”
“At the house?”
I nodded. “It’s an impressive location. Isolated, very dramatic. And it’s got a big dining table.”
He turned the windshield wipers on. The glass streaked and smeared. It was sea spray, whipping horizontally off the Atlantic. Full of salt.
“Something else,” I said.
“What?”
“I think Teresa Daniel is part of the deal,” I said.
“What?”
“I think they’re selling her along with the shotguns. A cute blond American girl. I think she’s the ten-thousand-dollar bonus item.”
Nobody spoke.
“Did you notice what Harley said about her? Mint condition.”
Nobody spoke.
“I think they’ve kept her fed and alive and untouched.” I thought: Paulie wouldn’t have bothered with Elizabeth Beck if Teresa had been available to him. With all due respect to Elizabeth.
Nobody spoke.
“They’re probably cleaning her up right now,” I said.
Nobody spoke.
“I think she’s headed for Tripoli,” I said. “Part of the deal. Like a sweetener.”
Villanueva accelerated hard. The wind howled louder around the windshield pillars and the door mirrors. Two minutes later we reached the spot where we had ambushed the bodyguards and he slowed again. We were five miles from the house. Theoretically we were already visible from the upper floor windows. We came to a stop in the center of the road and we all craned forward and stared into the east.
I used an olive-green Chevrolet and made it out to MacLean in twenty-nine minutes. Stopped in the center of the road two hundred yards shy of Quinn’s residence. It was in an established subdivision. The whole place was quiet and green and watered and was baking lazily in the sun. The houses were on acre lots and were half-hidden behind thick evergreen foundation plantings. Their driveways were jet black. I could hear birds singing and a far-off sprinkler turning slowly and hissing against a soaked sidewalk through sixty degrees of its rotation. I could see fat dragonflies in the air.
I took my foot off the brake and crawled forward a hundred yards. Quinn’s house was sided with dark cedar boards. It had a stone walk and knee-high stone walls boxing in earth beds full of low spruces and rhododendrons. It had small windows and the way the eaves of the roof met the tops of the walls made it feel like the house was crouched down with its back to me.
Frasconi’s car was parked in the driveway. It was an olive-green Chevrolet identical to my own. It was empty. Its front bumper was tight against Quinn’s garage door. The garage was a long low triple. It was closed up. There was no sound anywhere, except the birds and the sprinkler and the hum of insects.
I parked behind Frasconi’s car. My tires sounded wet on the hot blacktop. I slid out and eased my Beretta out of its holster. Clicked the safety to fire and started up the stone walk. The front door was locked. The house was silent. I peered in through a hallway window. Saw nothing, except the kind of solid neutral furniture that goes into an expensive rental.
I walked around to the rear. There was a flagstone patio with a barbecue grill on it. A square teak table going gray in the weather and four chairs. An off-white canvas sun umbrella on a pole. A lawn, and plenty of low-maintenance evergreen bushes. A cedar fence stained the same dark color as the house siding closed off the neighbors’ view.
I tried the kitchen door. It was locked. I
looked in the window. Saw nothing. I moved around the rear perimeter. Came to the next window and saw nothing. Moved to the next window and saw Frasconi lying on his back.
He was in the middle of the living room floor. There was a sofa and two armchairs all covered in durable mud-colored fabric. The floor was done in wall-to-wall carpet and it matched the olive of his uniform. He had been shot once through the forehead. Nine millimeter. Fatal. Even through the window I could see the single crusted hole and the dull ivory color of his skull under his skin. There was a lake of blood under his head. It had soaked into the carpet and was already drying and turning dark.
I didn’t want to go in on the first floor. If Quinn was still in there he would be waiting upstairs where he had the tactical advantage. So I dragged the patio table over to the back of the garage and used it to climb onto the roof. Used the roof to get me next to an upstairs window. Used my elbow to get me through the glass. Then I went feetfirst into a guest bedroom. It smelled musty and unused. I walked through it and came out in an upstairs hallway. Stood still and listened. Heard nothing. The house sounded completely empty. There was a deadness. A total absence of sound. No human vibrations.
But I could smell blood.
I crossed the upstairs hallway and found Dominique Kohl in the master bedroom. She was on her back on the bed. She was completely naked. Her clothes had been torn off. She had been hit in the face enough times to make her groggy and then she had been butchered. Her breasts had been removed with a large knife. I could see the knife. It had been thrust upward through the soft flesh under her chin and through the roof of her mouth and into her brain.
By that point in my life I had seen a lot of things. I had once woken up after a terrorist attack with part of another man’s jawbone buried in my gut. I had had to wipe his flesh out of my eyes before I could see well enough to crawl away. I had crawled twenty yards through severed legs and arms and butted my knees against severed heads with my hands pressed hard into my abdomen to stop my own intestines falling out. I had seen homicides and accidents and men machine-gunned in feuds and people reduced to pink paste in explosions and blackened twisted lumps in fires. But I had never seen anything as bad as Dominique Kohl’s butchered body. I threw up on the floor and then for the first time in more than twenty years I cried.
“So what now?” Villanueva said, ten years later.
“I’m going in alone,” I said.
“I’m coming with you.”
“Don’t argue,” I said. “Just get me a little closer. And drive real slow.”
It was a gray car on a gray day and slow-moving objects are less perceptible than fast-moving objects. He took his foot off the brake and touched the gas and got it rolling at about ten miles an hour. I checked the Beretta and its spare magazines. Forty-five rounds, less two fired into Duke’s ceiling. I checked the Persuaders. Fourteen rounds, less one fired through Harley’s gut. Total of fifty-six rounds, against less than eighteen people. I didn’t know who was on the guest list, but Emily Smith and Harley himself were going to be no-shows for sure.
“Stupid to do it alone,” Villanueva said.
“Stupid to do it together,” I said back. “The approach is going to be suicidal.”
He didn’t answer.
“Better that you guys stand by out here,” I said.
He made no reply to that. He wanted my back and he wanted Teresa but he was smart enough to see that walking toward a fortified and isolated house in the last of the daylight was going to be no kind of fun. He just kept the car rolling slowly. Then he took his foot off the gas and put the transmission in neutral and let it coast to a stop. He didn’t want to risk the flare of brake lights in the mist. We were maybe a quarter-mile short of the house.
“You guys wait here,” I said. “For the duration.”
Villanueva looked away.
“Give me one hour,” I said.
I waited until they both nodded.
“Then call ATF,” I said. “After an hour, if I’m not back.”
“Maybe we should do that now,” Duffy said.
“No,” I said. “I want the hour first.”
“ATF will get Quinn,” she said. “It’s not like they’re going to let him walk.”
I thought back to what I had seen and just shook my head.
I broke every regulation and ignored every procedure in the book. I walked away from a crime scene and failed to report it. I obstructed justice left and right. I left Kohl in the bedroom and Frasconi in the living room. Left their car on the driveway. Just drove myself back to the office and took a silenced Ruger Standard .22 from the company armory and went to find Kohl’s boxed-up files. My gut told me Quinn would make one stop before he headed for the Bahamas. He would have an emergency stash somewhere. Maybe phony ID, maybe a wad of cash, maybe a packed bag, maybe all three. He wouldn’t hide the stash on-post. Nor in his rented house. He was too professional for that. Too cautious. He would want it safe and far away. I was gambling it would be in the place he had inherited in northern California. From his parents, the railroad worker and the stay-at-home mom. So I needed that address.
Kohl’s handwriting was neat. The two cartons were filled with her notes. They were comprehensive. They were meticulous. They broke my heart. I found the California address in an eight-page bio she had prepared. It was a five-digit house number on a road that came under the Eureka post office. Probably a lonely place, far out of town. I went to my company clerk’s desk and signed a stack of travel warrants for myself. Put my service Beretta and the silenced Ruger in a canvas bag and drove to the airport. They gave me papers to sign before they let me carry loaded firearms inside the cabin. I wasn’t about to check them. I figured there was a good chance Quinn might take the same flight. I figured if I saw him at the gate or on the plane I would waste him right there and then.
But I didn’t see him. I got on a plane for Sacramento and walked the aisle after takeoff and scanned every face and he wasn’t there. So I sat tight for the duration of the flight. Just stared into space. The stewardesses stayed well away from me.
I rented a car at the Sacramento airport. Drove it north on I-5 and then northwest on Route 299. It was a designated scenic road. It wound through the mountains. I looked at nothing except the yellow line ahead of me. I had picked up three hours because of flying across three time zones but even so it was gathering dark when I hit the Eureka limit. I found Quinn’s road. It was a meandering strip that ran north-south high in the hills above U.S. 101. The highway was laid out far below me. I could see headlights streaming north. Taillights heading south. I guessed there was a rail line down there somewhere. Maybe a station or a depot nearby, convenient for Quinn’s old man back when he was working.
I found the house. Drove past it without slowing. It was a rough one-story cabin. It used an old milk churn instead of a mailbox post. The front yard had gone to seed a decade ago. I K-turned five hundred yards south of it and drove two hundred yards back toward it with my lights off. Parked behind an abandoned diner with a caved-in roof. Got out and climbed a hundred feet into the hills. Walked north three hundred yards and came on his place from the rear.
In the dusk I could see a narrow back porch and a scuffed area next to it where cars could be parked. Clearly it was the sort of place where you use the back door, not the front. There were no lights on inside. I could see dusty sun-faded drapes half-closed in the windows. The whole place looked empty and unused. I could see a couple of miles north and south and there were no cars on the road.
I came down the hill slowly on foot. Circled the house. Listened at every window. There was nobody inside. I figured Quinn would park in back and come in through the rear, so I broke in through the front. The door was thin and old and I just pushed hard on it until the inner jamb started to give and then I smacked it once above the lock with the heel of my hand. Wood splintered and the door swung open and I stepped inside and closed it again and wedged it shut with a chair. It would look OK from the outsid
e.
It was musty inside and easily ten degrees colder than outside. It was dark and dim. I could hear a refrigerator running in the kitchen, so I knew there was electricity. The walls were covered in ancient wallpaper. It was faded and yellow. There were only four rooms. There was an eat-in kitchen, and a living room. There were two bedrooms. One was small and the other was smaller. I figured the smaller one had been Quinn’s, as a kid. There was a lone bathroom between the bedrooms. White fixtures, stained with rust.
Four rooms plus a bath is an easier search than most. I found what I was looking for almost immediately. I lifted a rag rug off of the living room floor and found a square hatch let into the boards. If it had been in the hallway I would have figured it for an inspection cover above the crawl space. But it was in the living room. I took a fork from the kitchen and levered it open. Under it was a shallow wooden tray built between the floor joists. On the tray was a shoe box wrapped in milky plastic sheeting. Inside the shoe box were three thousand dollars and two keys. I figured the keys were for safety-deposit boxes or left-luggage lockers. I took the cash and left the keys where they were. Then I put the hatch lid back and replaced the rug and chose a chair and sat down to wait with my Beretta in my pocket and the Ruger laid across my lap.
“Take care,” Duffy said.
I nodded. “Sure.”
Villanueva said nothing. I slid out of the Taurus with the Beretta in my pocket and the Persuaders held one in each hand. Crossed straight to the shoulder of the road and got as far down on the rocks as I could and started picking my way east. There was still daylight behind the clouds but I was dressed in black and I was carrying black guns and I wasn’t exactly on the road itself and I thought I might have a chance. The wind was blowing hard toward me and there was water in the air. I could see the ocean ahead. It was raging. The tide was on the way out. I could hear the distant waves pounding and the long suck of the undertow ripping through sand and gravel.