Gone Tomorrow jr-13

by Lee Child

  ‘Old, young, black, white?’

  ‘White,’ Docherty said. ‘Not old. In suits. Nothing to go on, except they had phony business cards in their pockets, with some corporate name that isn’t registered anywhere in New York State, and a phone number that is permanently disconnected because it belongs to a movie company.’

  FORTY-ONE

  Docherty’s desk phone rang and he picked it up and started listening again. A friend in the 17th, presumably, with more details to share. I looked at Lee and said, ‘Now you’re going to have to reopen the file.’

  She asked, ‘Why?’

  ‘Because those guys were the local crew that Lila Hoth hired.’

  She looked at me and said, ‘What are you? Telepathic?’

  ‘I met with them twice.’

  ‘You met some crew twice. Nothing says these are the same guys.’

  ‘They gave me one of those phony business cards.’

  ‘All those crews use phony business cards.’

  ‘With the same kind of phone number? Movies and TV are the only places to get those numbers.’

  ‘They were ex-cops. Doesn’t that matter to you?’

  ‘I care about cops, not ex-cops.’

  ‘They said Lila Hoth’s name.’

  ‘No, some crew said her name. Doesn’t mean these dead guys did.’

  ‘You think this is a coincidence?’

  ‘They could be anybody’s crew.’

  ‘Like who else’s?’

  ‘Anybody in the whole wide world. This is New York. New York is full of private guys. They roam in packs. They all look the same and they all do the same stuff.’

  ‘They said John Sansom’s name, too.’

  ‘No, some crew said his name.’

  ‘In fact they were the first place I heard his name.’

  ‘Then maybe they were his crew, not Lila’s. Would he have been worried enough to have his own people up here?’

  ‘He had his chief of staff on the train. That’s who the fifth passenger was.’

  ‘There you go, then.’

  ‘You’re not going to do anything?’

  ‘I’ll inform the 17th, for background.’

  ‘You’re not going to reopen your file?’

  ‘Not until I hear about a crime my side of Park Avenue.’

  I said, ‘I’m going to the Four Seasons.’

  It was late and I was pretty far west and I didn’t find a cab until I hit Sixth Avenue. After that it was a fast trip to the hotel. The lobby was quiet. I walked in like I had a right to be there and rode the elevator to Lila Roth’s floor. Walked the silent corridor and paused outside her suite.

  Her door was open an inch.

  The tongue of the security deadbolt was out and the spring closer had trapped it against the jamb. I paused another second and knocked.

  No response.

  I pushed the door and felt the mechanism push back. I held it open forty-five degrees against my spread fingers and listened.

  No sound inside.

  I opened the door all the way and stepped in. Ahead of me the living room was dim. The lights were off but the drapes were open and there was enough of a glow from the city outside to show me that the room was empty. Empty, as in no people in it. Also empty as in checked-out-of and abandoned. No shopping bags in the corners, no personal items stowed either carefully or carelessly, no coats over chairs, no shoes on the floor. No signs of life at all.

  The bedrooms were the same. The beds were still made, but they had suitcase-sized dents and rucks on them. The closets were empty. The bathrooms were strewn with used towels. The shower stalls were dry. I caught a faint trace of Lila Roth’s perfume in the air, but that was all.

  I walked through all three rooms one more time and then stepped back to the corridor. The door closed behind me. I heard the spring inside the hinge doing its work and I heard the deadbolt tongue settle against the jamb, metal on wood.

  I walked away to the elevator and hit the down button and the door slid back immediately. The car had waited for me. A night-time protocol. No unnecessary elevator movement. No unnecessary noise. I rode back to the lobby and walked to the desk. There was a whole night staff on duty. Not as many people as during the day, but way too many for the fifty dollar trick to have worked. The Four Seasons wasn’t that kind of a place. A guy looked up from a screen and asked how he could help me. I asked him when exactly the Hoths had checked out.

  ‘The who, sir?’ he asked back. He spoke in a quiet, measured, night-time voice, like he was worried about waking the guests stacked high above him.

  ‘Lila Roth and Svetlana Hoth,’ I said.

  The guy got a look on his face like he didn’t know what I was talking about and refocused on his screen and hit a couple of keys on his keyboard. He scrolled up and down and hit a couple of keys and said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t find a record of any guests under that name.’

  I told him the suite number. He hit a couple more keys and his mouth turned down in puzzled surprise and he said, ‘That suite hasn’t been used at all this week. It’s very expensive and quite hard to rent.

  I double-checked the number in my head and I said, ‘I was in it last night. It was being used then. And I met the occupants again today, in the tea room. There’s a signature on a check.’

  The guy tried again. He called up tea room checks that had been charged to guest accounts. He half turned his screen so that I could see it too, in the sharing gesture that clerks use when they want to convince you of something. We had had tea for two plus a cup of coffee. There was no record of any such charge.

  Then I heard small sounds behind me. The scuff of soles on carpet, the rattle of drawn breath, the sigh of fabric moving through the air. And the clink of metal. I turned around and found myself facing a perfect semicircle of seven men. Four of them were uniformed NYPD patrolmen. Three of them were the federal agents I had met before.

  The cops had shotguns.

  The feds had something else.

  FORTY-TWO

  Seven men. Seven weapons. The police shotguns were Franchi SPAS 12s. From Italy. Probably not standard NYPD issue. The SPAS 12 is a futuristic, fearsome-looking gun, a semi-automatic 12-gauge smooth-bore weapon with a pistol grip and a folding stock. Advantages, many. Drawbacks, two. Cost was the first, but clearly some specialist division inside the police department had been happy to sign off on the purchase. Semi-automatic operation was the second drawback. It was held to be theoretically unreliable in a powerful shotgun. People who have to shoot or die worry about it. Mechanical failure happens. But I wasn’t about to bet on four mechanical failures happening all at once, for the same reason I don’t buy lottery tickets. Optimism is good. Blind faith is not.

  Two of the feds had Glock 17s in their hands. Nine-millimetre automatic pistols from Austria, square, boxy, reliable, well proved through more than twenty years of useful service. I had retained a mild personal preference for the Beretta M9, like the Franchi also from Italy, but a million times out of a million and one the Glock would get the job done just as well as the Beretta.

  Right then the job was to keep me standing still, ready for the main attraction.

  The fed leader was in the exact centre of the semicircle. Three men on his left, three on his right. He was holding a weapon I had seen before only on television. I remembered it well. A cable channel, in a motel room in Florence, Texas. Not the Military Channel. The National Geographic Channel. A programme about Africa. Not civil wars and mayhem and disease and starvation. A wildlife documentary. Gorillas, not guerillas. A bunch of zoological researchers was tracking an adult male silverback. They wanted to put a radio tag in its ear. The creature weighed close to five hundred pounds. A quarter of a ton. They put it down with a dart gun loaded with primate tranquillizer.

  That was what the fed leader was pointing at me.

  A dart gun.

  The National Geographic people had taken great pains to reassure their viewers that the procedure was huma
ne. They had shown detailed diagrams and computer simulations. The dart was a tiny feathered cone, with a surgical steel shaft. The tip of the shaft was a sterile ceramic honeycomb laced with anaesthetic. The dart fired at high velocity and the shaft buried itself a half-inch into the gorilla. And stopped. The tip wanted to keep on going. Momentum. Newton’s Law of Motion. The shock and the inertia exploded the ceramic matrix and the potion contained in the honeycomb flung itself onward, not quite droplets, not quite an aerosol. Like a heavy mist spreading under the skin, flooding tissue the way a paper towel soaks up a spilled drop of coffee. The gun itself was a one-shot deal. It had to be loaded with a single dart, and a single tiny bottle of compressed gas to power it. Nitrogen, as I recalled. Reloading was laborious. It was better to hit first time.

  The researchers had hit first time in the documentary film. The gorilla had been groggy after eight seconds, and in a coma after twenty. Then it had woken up in perfect health ten hours later.

  But it had weighed twice what I weigh.

  Behind me was the hotel’s reception counter. I could feel it against my back. It had a ledge about fourteen inches wide set probably forty-two inches off the floor. Bar height. Convenient for a customer to spread his papers on. Convenient to sign things on. Behind that was a drop to a regular desk-height counter for the clerks. It was maybe thirty inches deep. Or more. I wasn’t sure. But the total obstacle was a high and wide hurdle impossible to clear from a standing start. Especially when facing the wrong way. And pointless, anyway. Clearing the counter would not put me in another room. I would still be right there, just behind the counter rather than in front of it. No net gain, and maybe a big net loss if I landed awkwardly on a rolling chair or got tangled up in a telephone wire.

  I turned my head and glanced behind me. No one there. The desk people had filed out, left and right. They had been coached, maybe even rehearsed. The seven men in front of me had a clear line of fire.

  No way forward, no way back.

  I stood still.

  The fed leader was sighting down the barrel of his dart gun and aiming directly at my left thigh. My left thigh made a moderately large target. No fat under the skin. Just hard flesh, full of capillaries and other aids to rapid and efficient blood circulation. Completely unprotected, except for my new blue pants, which were made of thin summer-weight cotton.

  Don’t come dressed like that, or you won’t get in. I tensed up, as it muscle tone would make the damn thing bounce off. Then I relaxed again. Muscle tone hadn’t helped the gorilla, and it wouldn’t help me. Way behind the seven men I could see a paramedic crew in a gloomy corner. Fire department uniforms. Three men, one woman. They were standing and waiting. They had a wheeled gurney ready.

  When all else fails, start talking.

  I said, ‘If you guys have more questions, I’m quite happy to sit down for a conversation. We could get some coffee, keep things civilized. Decaf, if you prefer. Since it’s late. They’ll make fresh, I’m sure. This is the Four Seasons, after all.’

  The fed leader didn’t answer. He shot me instead. With the dart gun, from about eight feet, straight into the meat of my thigh. I heard a blast of compressed gas and felt pain in my leg. Not a sting. A dull, thumping blow, like a knife wound. Then a split second of nothing, like disbelief. Then a sharp, angry reaction. I thought if I was a gorilla I would want to tell the damn researchers to stay home and leave my ears alone.

  The fed leader lowered the gun.

  Nothing happened for a second. Then I felt my heart accelerate and my blood pressure spike and fall. I heard rushing in my temples, like Chinese food twenty years ago. I looked down. The dart’s feathered butt was tight against my pants. I pulled it out. The shaft was smeared with blood. But the tip was gone. The ceramic material had fragmented to powder and the liquid it had held in suspension was already inside me, doing its work. A fat dot of blood welled out of the wound and soaked into the cotton fabric of my pants, following the warp and the weft like a map of an epidemic spreading through city streets. My heart was beating hard. I could feel blood rushing around inside me. I wanted to stop it. No practical way to do that. I leaned back against the counter. Just temporary, I figured. For relief. The seven men in front of me seemed to slide suddenly sideways. Like a wheel play in baseball. I wasn’t sure if they had moved or if I had moved my head. Or perhaps the room had moved. Certainly there was a whole lot of fast rotation going on. Some kind of a spinning sensation. The edge of the counter hit me under the shoulder blades. Either it was rising up or I was sliding down. I put my hands back and flat on its surface. I tried to steady it. Or myself. No luck. The edge hit me in the back of the head. My internal clock wasn’t working right. I was trying to count seconds. I wanted to get to nine. I wanted to outlast the silverback. Some last vestige of pride. I wasn’t sure if I was succeeding.

  My ass hit the ground. My vision went. It didn’t go dim or dark. It brightened instead. It got full of mad whirling silver shapes, flashing horizontally right to left. Like a fairground ride running a thousand times too fast. Then I started a sequence of crazy dreams, urgent and breathless and vivid. Full of action and colour. Afterwards I realized that the start of the dreams marked the point where I officially lost consciousness, lying there on the Four Seasons’ lobby floor.

  FORTY-THREE

  I don’t know when exactly I woke up. The clock in my head still wasn’t running right. But I surfaced eventually. I was on a cot. My wrists and my ankles were fastened to the rails with plastic handcuffs. I was still fully dressed. Apart from my shoes. Those were gone. In my fuddled state I heard my dead brother’s voice in my head. A line he liked to use as a kid: Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in his shoes. Then when you start criticizing him, you’re a mile away and he’s got to run after you in his socks. I moved my toes. Then I moved my hips. I could feel that my pockets were empty. They had taken my stuff. Maybe they had listed it all on a form and bagged ii up.

  I ducked my head to my shoulder and scraped my chin across my shirt. Stubble, a little more than I remembered. Maybe eight hours’ worth. The gorilla on the National Geographic Channel had slept for ten. Score one for Reacher, except they had probably used a lighter close on mc. At least I hoped they had. That huge primate had crashed down like a tree.

  I raised my head again and looked around. I was inside a cell, and the cell was inside a room. No window. Bright electric light. New construction inside old construction. A row of three simple cages made of bright new spot-welded steel, sitting in a line inside a big old room made of brick. The cells were each about eight feet square and eight feet tall. They were roofed with bars, the same as their sides. They were floored with steel tread plate.

  The tread plate was folded up at the edges, to make a shallow inch-deep tray. To contain spilled liquids, I guessed. All kinds of liquids can get spilled in cells. The tray was spot-welded inside a horizontal rail that ran around the bottom of all the vertical bars. There were no bolts through the floors. The cells were not fixed down. They were just sitting there, three freestanding structures parked in a big old room.

  The big old room itself had a high, barrelled ceiling. The brick was all painted fresh white, but it looked soft and worn. There are guys who can look at the dimensions of bricks and the bricklaying patterns they make and tell you exactly where the building is and exactly when it was constructed. I am not one of them. But even so the place looked like the East Coast to me. Nineteenth century, built by hand. Immigrant labour, working fast and dirty. I was probably still in New York. And I was probably underground. The place felt like a basement. Not damp, not cool, but somehow stabilized in terms of temperature and humidity by virtue of being buried.

  I was in the centre cage of the three. I had the cot I was strapped to, and a toilet. That was all. Nothing else. The toilet was enclosed by a three-sided U-shaped privacy screen about three feet high. The toilet tank had a dished top that made a sink. I could see a faucet. Just one. Cold water only. The other two
cages looked the same. Cots, toilets, nothing else. Leading away from each of the cells were recent excavations in the outer room’s floor. Narrow trenches, three of them, exactly parallel, dug up and refilled and smoothed over with new concrete. Sewer lines to the toilets, I guessed, and water lines to the faucets.

  The other two cages were empty. I was all alone.

  In the far corner of the outer room where the walls met the ceiling there was a surveillance camera. A beady glass eye. A wide-angle lens, presumably, to see the whole room at once. To see into all three cells. I guessed there would be microphones, too. Many more than one, probably, some of them close by. Electronic eavesdropping is hard. Clarity is important. Room echo can ruin everything.

  My left leg hurt a little. A puncture wound and a bruise, right where the dart had hit. The blood on my pants had dried. There wasn’t much of it. I tested the strength of the cuffs around my wrists and my ankles. Unbreakable. I bucked and jerked against them for half a minute. Not trying to get free. Just checking whether I would pass out again from the effort, and aiming to attract attention from whoever was watching through the surveillance camera and listening through the microphones.

  I didn’t pass out again. My head ached a little as it cleared, and the exertion didn’t make my leg throb any less. But apart from those minor symptoms I felt pretty good. The attention I attracted was delayed well over a minute and took the form of a guy I had never seen before walking in with a hypodermic syringe. Some kind of a medical technician. He had a wet cotton ball in his other hand, ready to swab my elbow. He stopped outside my cage and looked in at me through the bars.

  I asked him, ‘Is that a lethal dose?’

  The guy said, ‘No.’

  ‘Are you authorized to give a lethal dose?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you better back off. Because however many times you shoot me up, I’m always going to wake up later. And one of those times, I’m going to come and get you. Either I’ll make you eat that thing, or I’ll stick it up your ass and inject you from the inside.’