by Lee Child
I came around a shallow curve and saw that the wall lights were on. They blazed blue-white against the dim sky. The contrast between the electric light and the late-afternoon darkness beyond it would mean they would see me less and less well the closer I got. So I climbed back onto the roadway and started to jog. I got as close as I dared and then slipped back down the rocks and hugged the shore. The ocean was right at my feet. I could smell salt and seaweed. The rocks were slippery. Waves pounded and spray burst up at me and the water swirled angrily.
I stood still. Took a breath. Realized I couldn’t swim around the wall. Not this time. It would be madness. The sea was way too rough. I would have no chance. No chance at all. I would be tossed around like a cork and smashed against the rocks and battered to death. Unless the undertow got me first and pulled me out and swallowed me into the depths and drowned me.
Can’t go around it, can’t go over it. Got to go through it.
I climbed up the rocks again and stepped into the bar of light as far from the gate as I could get. I was all the way over where the foundations canted down toward the water. Then I kept very close to the wall and walked along its length. I was bathed in light. But nobody east of the wall could see me because it was between me and the house and it was taller than me. And anybody west of me was a friend. All I had to worry about was tripping the sensors buried in the ground. I stepped as lightly as I could and hoped they hadn’t buried any this close in.
And I guess they hadn’t, because I made it to the gatehouse OK. I risked a glance inside through the gap in the drapes in the front window and saw the brightly-lit living room and Paulie’s replacement busy relaxing on the collapsed sofa. He was a guy I hadn’t seen before. He was about Duke’s age and size. Maybe approaching forty, maybe a little slighter than me. I spent some time figuring his exact height. That was going to be important. He was possibly two inches shorter than me. He was dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt and a denim jacket. Clearly he wasn’t going to the ball. He was Cinderella, tasked to watch the gate while the others partied. I hoped he was the only one. I hoped they were working a skeleton crew. But I wasn’t about to bet on it. Any kind of minimal caution would put a second guy on the front door of the house, and maybe a third up there in Duke’s window. Because they knew Paulie hadn’t gotten the job done. They knew I was still out there somewhere.
I couldn’t afford the noise involved in shooting the new guy. The waves were loud and the wind was howling but neither sound would mask the Beretta. And nothing on earth would mask a Persuader firing a Brenneke Magnum. So I retreated a couple of yards and put the Persuaders down on the ground and took my coat and my jacket off. Then I took my shirt off and wrapped it tight around my left fist. Put my bare back against the wall and sidestepped my way to the edge of the window. Used the nails on my right hand to tap softly on the bottom corner of the glass, where it was draped, on and off, faint little paradiddles like a mouse makes when he runs across above a ceiling. I did it four times and was about to try a fifth when I saw in the corner of my eye the light in the window suddenly go dim. That meant the new guy had gotten off his sofa and pressed his face up against the glass to try to see what kind of little creature was out there bothering him. So I concentrated on getting the height exactly right and spun one-eighty and threw a huge roundhouse left with my padded fist and bust the window first and the new guy’s nose a millisecond later. He went down in a heap below the inside sill and I reached in through the hole I had made and unlatched the casement and swung it open and climbed inside. The guy was sitting on his butt on the floor. He was bleeding from his nose and the glass cuts in his face. He was groggy. There was a handgun on the sofa. He was eight feet away from it. He was twelve feet from the phones. He shook his head to clear it and looked up at me.
“You’re Reacher,” he said. There was blood in his mouth.
“Correct,” I said back.
“You’ve got no chance,” he said.
“You think?”
He nodded. “We’ve got shoot-to-kill orders.”
“On me?”
He nodded again.
“Who has?”
“Everybody.”
“Xavier’s orders?”
He nodded again. Put the back of his hand up under his nose.
“People going to obey those orders?” I asked.
“For sure.”
“Are you?”
“I guess not.”
“Promise?”
“I guess so.”
“OK,” I said.
I paused for a moment and thought about asking him some more questions. He might be reluctant. But I figured I could slap him around some and get all the answers he had to give. But in the end I figured those answers didn’t matter very much. Made no practical difference to me if there were ten or twelve or fifteen hostiles in the house, or what they were armed with. Shoot to kill. Them or me. So I just stepped away and was trying to decide what to do with the guy when he made my mind up for me by reneging on his promise. He came up off the floor and made a dive for the handgun on the sofa. I caught him with a wild left in the throat. It was a solid punch, and a lucky one. But not for him. It crushed his larynx. He went down on the floor again and suffocated. It was reasonably quick. About a minute and a half. There was nothing I could do for him. I’m not a doctor.
I stood completely still for a minute. Then I put my shirt back on and climbed back out of the window and retrieved the shotguns and my jacket and my coat and climbed back in and crossed the room and looked out of the back window at the house.
“Shit,” I said, and looked away.
The Cadillac was parked on the carriage circle. Eliot hadn’t gotten away. Nor had Elizabeth, or Richard, or the cook. That put three noncombatants into the mix. And the presence of noncombatants makes any assault a hundred times harder. And this one was hard enough to begin with.
I looked again. Next to the Cadillac was a black Lincoln Town Car. Next to the Town Car were two dark blue Suburbans. There was no catering truck. Maybe it was around the side, next to the kitchen door. Maybe it was coming later. Or maybe it wasn’t coming at all. Maybe there was no banquet. Maybe I had screwed up completely and misinterpreted the whole situation.
I stared through the harsh lights on the wall into the gloom around the house. I couldn’t see a guard on the front door. But then, it was cold and wet and anybody with any sense would be inside the hallway looking out through the glass. I couldn’t see anybody in Duke’s window, either. But it was standing open, exactly the way I had left it. Presumably the NSV was still hanging there on its chain.
I looked at the vehicles again. The Town Car could have brought four people in. The Suburbans could have brought seven each. Eighteen people, maximum. Maybe fifteen or sixteen principals and two or three guards. Alternatively, maybe only three drivers came. Maybe I was completely wrong.
Only one way to find out.
And this was the hardest part. I had to get through the lights. I debated finding the switch and turning them off. But that would be an instant early warning to the people in the house. Five seconds after they went off they would be on the phone asking the gate guard what had happened. And the gate guard couldn’t answer, because the gate guard was dead. Whereupon I would have fifteen or more people swarming straight at me in the gloom. Easy enough to avoid most of them. But the trick would be to know who to avoid, and who to grab. Because I was pretty sure if I let Quinn get behind me tonight I would never see him again.
So I had to do it with the lights blazing. Two possibilities. One was to run straight toward the house. That would minimize the time I spent actually illuminated. But it would involve rapid motion, and rapid motion catches the eye. The other possibility would be to traverse the wall all the way to the ocean. Sixty yards, slowly. It would be agony. But it was probably the better option.
Because the lights were mounted on the wall, trained away from it. There would be a dark tunnel between the wall itself and the rear edg
e of the beams. It would be a slim triangle. I could crawl along it, right down at the base of the structure. Slowly. Through the NSV’s field of fire.
I eased the rear door open. There were no lights on the gatehouse itself. They started twenty feet to my right, where the gatehouse wall became the perimeter wall. I stepped halfway out and crouched down. Turned ninety degrees right and looked for my tunnel. It was there. It was less than three feet deep at ground level. It narrowed to nothing at head height. And it wasn’t very dark. There was scatter coming back off the ground and there were occasional misaligned beams and there was glow coming out of the rear of the lamps themselves. My tunnel was maybe halfway between pitch dark and brilliantly lit.
I shuffled forward on my knees and reached back and closed the door behind me. Put a Persuader in each hand and dropped to my stomach and pressed my right shoulder hard against the base of the wall. Then I waited. Just long enough for anybody who thought they’d seen the door move to lose interest. Then I started crawling. Slowly.
I got maybe ten feet. Then I stopped again. Fast. I heard a vehicle out on the road. Not a sedan. Something bigger than that. Maybe another Suburban. I reversed direction. Dug my toes in and crawled backward to the doorway. Knelt up and opened the door and slid inside the gatehouse and stood up. Put the Persuaders on a chair and took the Beretta out of my pocket. I could hear a big-inch V-8 idling on the other side of the gate.
Decisions. Whoever was out there was expecting the gate guard’s services. And a buck got ten whoever was out there would know I wasn’t the real gate guard. So I figured I would have to give up on the crawling. I figured I would have to go noisy. Shoot them, take their vehicle, make it down to the house real fast before the NSV gunner could draw a bead. Then take my chances in the ensuing chaos.
I stepped to the back door again. Clicked the Beretta’s safety off and took a breath. I had the initial advantage. I already knew exactly what I was going to do. Everybody else would have to react first. And that would take them a second too long.
Then I remembered the camera on the gatepost. The video monitor. I could see exactly what I was faced with. I could count heads. Forewarned is forearmed. I stepped across to check. The picture was gray and milky. It showed a white panel van. Writing on the side. Keast & Maden Catering. I breathed out. No reason why they should know the gate man. I put the Beretta back in my pocket. Stripped off my coat and jacket. Pulled the denim thing off the gate man’s body and slipped it on. It was tight, and there was blood on it. But it was reasonably convincing. I stepped out the door. Kept my back to the house and tried to make myself look two inches shorter. Walked to the gate. Butted the latch upward with my fist, the same way Paulie used to. Hauled it open. The white truck drove up level with me. The passenger buzzed his window down. He was wearing a tux. The guy at the wheel was in a tux. More noncombatants.
“Where to?” the passenger asked.
“Around the house to the right,” I said. “Kitchen door’s all the way at the back.”
The window went back up. The truck drove past me. I waved. Closed the gate again. Stepped back into the lodge and watched the truck from the window. It headed straight for the house and then swung right at the carriage circle. Its headlight beams washed over the Cadillac and the Town Car and the two Suburbans and I caught a flare from its brake lights and then it disappeared from view.
I waited two minutes. Willed it to get darker. Then I changed back into my own coat and jacket and retrieved the Persuaders from the chair. Eased the door open and crawled out and closed it behind me and dropped to my stomach. Pressed my shoulder to the base of the wall and started the slow crawl all over again. I kept my face turned away from the house. There was grit underneath me and I could feel small stones sharp against my elbows and my knees. But mostly I could feel a tingle in my back. It was facing a weapon that could fire twelve half-inch bullets every second. There was probably some tough guy right behind it with his hands resting lightly on the handles. I was hoping he would miss with the first burst. I figured he probably would. I figured he would fire the first burst way low or way high. Whereupon I would be up and running zigzags into the darkness before he lined up for a better try.
I inched forward. Ten yards. Fifteen. Twenty. I kept it really slow. Kept my face turned to the wall. Hoped I looked like a vague indistinct shadow in the penumbra. It was completely counterintuitive. I was fighting a powerful desire to jump up and run. My heart was pounding. I was sweating, even though it was cold. The wind was battering me. It was coming off the sea and hitting the wall and streaming down it like a tide and trying to roll me out to where the lights were brightest.
I kept going. Made it about halfway. About thirty yards covered, about thirty yards to go. My elbows were sore. I was keeping the Persuaders up off the ground and my arms were taking the toll. I stopped to rest. Just pressed myself into the dirt. Tried to look like a rock. I turned my head and risked a glance toward the house. It was quiet. I glanced ahead. Glanced behind. The point of no return. I crawled on. Had to force myself to keep the speed slow. The farther I got, the worse my back tingled. I was breathing hard. Getting close to panic. Adrenaline was boiling through me, screaming run, run. I gasped and panted and forced my arms and legs to stay coordinated. To stay slow. Then I got within ten yards of the end and started to believe I could make it. I stopped. Took a breath. And another. Started again. Then the ground tilted down and I followed it headfirst. I reached the water. Felt wet slime underneath me. Small rough waves came at me and spray hit me. I turned a ninety-degree left and paused. I was way on the edge of anybody’s field of view, but I had to get through thirty feet of bright light. I gave up on keeping it slow. I ducked my head and half-stood and just ran for it.
I spent maybe four seconds lit up brighter than I had ever been before. It felt like four lifetimes. I was blinded. Then I crashed back into darkness and crouched down and listened. Heard nothing except the wild sea. Saw nothing except purple spots in my eyes. I stumbled on another ten paces over the rocks and then stood still. Looked back. I was in. I smiled in the dark. Quinn, I’m coming to get you now.
CHAPTER 15
Ten years ago I waited eighteen hours for him. I never doubted he was coming. I just sat in his armchair with the Ruger on my lap and waited. I didn’t sleep. I barely even blinked. Just sat. All through the night. Through the dawn. All through the next morning. Midday came and went. I just sat and waited for him.
He came at two o’clock in the afternoon. I heard a car slowing on the road and stood up and kept well back from the window and watched as he turned in. He was in a rental, similar to mine. It was a red Pontiac. I saw him clearly through the windshield. He was neat and clean. His hair was combed. He was wearing a blue shirt with the collar open. He was smiling. The car swept past the side of the house and I heard it crunch to a stop on the dirt outside the kitchen. I stepped through to the hallway. Pressed myself against the wall next to the kitchen door.
I heard his key in the lock. Heard the door swing open. The hinges squealed in protest. He left it open. I heard his car idling outside. He hadn’t switched it off. He wasn’t planning on staying long. I heard his feet on the kitchen linoleum. A fast, light, confident tread. A man who thought he was playing and winning. He came through the door. I hit him in the side of the head with my elbow.
He went down on the floor on his back and I spanned my hand and pinned him by the throat. Laid the Ruger aside and patted him down. He was unarmed. I let go of his neck and his head came up and I smashed it back down with the heel of my hand under his chin. The back of his head hit the floor and his eyes rolled up in his head. I walked through the kitchen and closed the door. Stepped back and dragged him into the living room by the wrists. Dropped him on the floor and slapped him twice. Aimed the Ruger at the center of his face and waited for his eyes to open.
They opened and focused first on the gun and then on me. I was in uniform and all covered in badges of rank and unit designations so it didn’
t take him long to work out who I was and why I was there.
“Wait,” he said.
“For what?”
“You’re making a mistake.”
“Am I?”
“You’ve got it wrong.”
“Have I?”
He nodded. “They were on the take.”
“Who were?”
“Frasconi and Kohl.”
“Were they?”
He nodded again. “And then he tried to cheat her.”
“How?”
“Can I sit up?”
I shook my head. Kept the gun where it was.
“No,” I said.
“I was running a sting,” he said. “I was working with the State Department. Against hostile embassies. I was trawling.”
“What about Gorowski’s kid?”
He shook his head, impatiently. “Nothing happened with the damn kid, you idiot. Gorowski had a script to follow, that’s all. It was a setup. In case the hostiles checked on him. We play these things deep. There has to be a chain to follow, in case anyone is suspicious. We were doing proper dead drops and everything. In case we were being watched.”
“What about Frasconi and Kohl?”
“They were good. They picked up on me real early. Assumed I wasn’t legit. Which pleased me. Meant I was playing my part just right. Then they went bad. They came to me and said they’d slow the investigation if I paid them. They said they’d give me time to leave the country. They thought I wanted to do that. So I figured, hey, why not play along? Because who knows in advance what bad guys a trawl will find? And the more the merrier, right? So I played them out.”
I said nothing.
“The investigation was slow, wasn’t it?” he said. “You must have noticed that. Weeks and weeks. It was real slow.”
Slow as molasses.
“Then yesterday happened,” he said. “I got the Syrians and the Lebanese and the Iranians in the bag. Then the Iraqis, who were the big fish. So I figured it was time to put your guys in the bag too. They came over for their final payoff. It was a lot of money. But Frasconi wanted it all. He hit me over the head. I came around and found he had sliced Kohl up. He was a crazy man, believe me. I got to a gun in a drawer and shot him.”