by Lee Child
She said, ‘I’m a traditional kind of girl.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You would have to kiss me first.’
‘I could do that,’ I said. And I did. Slowly and gently and a little tentatively at first, in a way that felt exploratory, and in a way that gave me time to savour the new month, the new taste, the new teeth, the new tongue. It was all good. Then we passed some kind of a threshold and got into it harder. A short minute later we were completely out of control.
Afterwards she showered, and then I showered. She dressed, and I dressed. She kissed me one more time, and told me to call her if I needed her, and wished me luck, and walked out through the door. She left the black bag on the floor near the bathroom.
SEVENTY- ONE
I hefted the bag over to the bed. About eight pounds, I figured. It hit the rucked sheet and made a satisfying metallic sound. I unzipped it and parted the flaps like a mouth and looked inside.
First thing I saw was a file folder.
It was legal sized, and khaki in colour, and made of thick paper or thin card, depending on your point of view. It held twenty-one printed-out sheets. Immigration records, for twenty-one separate people. Two women, nineteen men. Citizens of Turkmenistan. They had entered the United States from Tajikistan three months ago. Linked itineraries. There were digital photographs and digital fingerprints, from the immigration booths at JFK. The photographs had a slight fish-eye distortion. They were in colour. I recognized Lila and Svetlana easily. And Leonid and his buddy. I didn’t know the other seventeen. Four of them already had exit notations. They were the four that had left. I dropped their sheets in the trash and laid out the unknown thirteen on the bed for a better look.
All thirteen faces looked bored and tired. Local flights, connections, a long transatlantic flight, jet lag, a long wait in JFK’s immigration hall. Sullen glances at the camera, faces held level, eyes swivelling up towards the lens. Which told me all thirteen were somewhat short in stature. I cross-checked with Leonid’s sheet. His gaze was just as bored and tired as the others, but it was level. He was the tallest of the party. I checked Svetlana Hoth’s sheet. She was the shortest. The others were all somewhere in between, small wiry Middle Eastern men worn down to bone and muscle and sinew by climate and diet and culture. I looked hard at them, one through thirteen, over and over again, until I had their expressions fixed firmly in my mind.
Then I turned back to the bag.
At the minimum I was hoping for a decent handgun. At best I was hoping for a short sub-machine gun. My point to Springfield about the baggy jacket was to make him see that I would have room to carry something under it, slung high on my chest on a shortened strap and then concealed by the excess fabric zipped over it. I had hoped he would get the message.
He had. He had gotten the message. He had come through in fine style.
Better than the minimum.
Better even than the best case.
He had given me a silenced short sub-machine gun. A Heckler & Koch MP5SD. The suppressed version of the classic MP5. No butt or stock. just a pistol grip, a trigger, a housing for a curved 30-round magazine, and then a six-inch barrel radically fattened by a double-layered silencer casing. Nine-millimetre, fast, accurate, and quiet. A fine weapon. It was fitted with a black nylon strap. The strap had already been tightened up and reduced in length to its practical minimum. As if Springfield was saying: I heard you, pal.
I laid the gun on the bed.
He had supplied ammunition, too. It was right there in the bag. A single curved magazine. Thirty rounds. Short and fat, shiny brass cases winking in the light, polished lead noses nearly as bright. None-millimetre Parabellums. From the Latin motto Si vis pacem para bellum. If you wish for peace, prepare for war. A wise saying. But thirty rounds was not a lot. Not against fifteen people. But New York City is not easy. Not for me, not for Springfield.
I lined up the magazine next to the gun.
Checked the bag again, in case there was more.
There wasn’t.
But there was a bonus of a kind.
A knife.
A Benchmade 3300. A black machined handle. An auto-opening mechanism. Illegal in all fifty states unless you were active-service military or law enforcement, which I wasn’t. I thumbed the release and the blade snicked out, fast and hard. A double-edged dagger with a spear point. Four inches long. I am no kind of a knife fetishist. I don’t have favourites. I don’t really like any of them. But if you asked me to rely on one for combat, I would pick something close to what Springfield had supplied. The automatic mechanism, the point, the two-edged blade. Ambidextrous, good for stabbing, good for slashing either coming or going.
I closed it up and put it on the bed next to the H&K.
There were two final items in the bag. A single leather glove, black, sized and shaped for a large man’s left hand. And a roll of black duct tape. I put them on the bed, in line with the gun and the magazine and the knife.
Thirty minutes later I was all dressed up and locked and loaded and riding south on the R train.
SEVENTY-TWO
The R train uses older cars with some front- and rear-facing seats. But I was on a side bench, all alone. It was two o’clock in the morning. There were three other passengers. I had my elbows on my knees and I was staring at myself in the glass opposite.
I was counting bullet points.
Inappropriate clothing, check. The windbreaker was zipped to my chin and looked way too hot and way too big on me. Under it the MP5’s strap was looped around my neck and the gun itself was resting diagonally grip-high and barrel-low across my body and it didn’t show at all.
A robotic walk: not immediately applicable with a seated suspect on public transportation.
Points three through six: irritability, sweating, tics, and nervous behaviour. I was sweating, for sure, maybe a little more than the temperature and the jacket called for. I was feeling irritable, too, maybe even a little more than usual. But I looked at myself hard ill the glass and saw no tics. My eyes were steady and my face was composed. I saw no nervous behaviour, either.
But behaviour is about external display. I was a little nervous inside. That was for damn sure.
Point seven: breathing. I wasn’t panting. But I was prepared to accept that I was breathing a little harder and steadier than normal. Most of the time I am not aware of breathing at all. It just happens, automatically. An involuntary reflex, deep in the brain. But now I could feel a relentless in-through-the-nose, out-through-the-mouth rhythm. In, out, in, out. Like a machine. Like a man using equipment, underwater. I couldn’t slow it down. I wasn’t feeling much oxygen in the air. It was going in and coming out like an inert gas. Like argon or xenon. It wasn’t doing me any good at all.
Point eight: a rigid forward stare. Check, but I excused myself because I was using it to assess all the other points. Or because it was a symbol of pure focus. Or concentration. Normally I would be gazing around, and not rigidly.
Point nine: mumbled prayers. Not happening. I was still and silent. My mouth was closed and not moving at all. In fact my mouth was closed so hard my back teeth were hurting and the muscles in the corners of my jaw were standing out like golf balls.
Point ten: a large bag. Not present.
Point eleven: hands in the bag. Not relevant.
Point twelve: a fresh shave. Hadn’t happened. I hadn’t shaved for days.
So, six for twelve. I might or might not be a suicide bomber.
And I might or might not be a suicide. I stared at my reflection and thought back to my first sight of Susan Mark: a woman heading for the end of her life, as surely and certainly as the train was heading for the end of the line.
I took my elbows off my knees and sat back. I looked at my fellow passengers. Two men, one woman. Nothing special about any of them. The train rocked on south, with all its sounds. The rushing air, the clatter of expansion joints tinder the wheels, the scrape of the current collector, the whine of
the motors, the squeals as the cars lurched one after the other through the long gentle curves. I looked back at myself in the dark window opposite and smiled.
Me against them.
Not the first time.
And not the last.
* * *
I got out at 34th Street and stayed in the station. Just sat in the heat on a wooden bench and walked myself through my theories one more time. I replayed Lila Hoth’s history lesson from the days of the British Empire: when contemplating an offensive, the very first thing you must plan is your inevitable retreat. Had her superiors back home followed that excellent advice? I was betting not. For two reasons. First, fanaticism. Ideological organizations can’t afford rational considerations. Start thinking rationally, and the whole thing falls apart. And ideological organizations like to force their foot soldiers into no-way-out operations. To encourage persistence. The same way explosive belts are sewn together behind, not zippered or snapped.
And second, a plan for retreat carried with it the seeds of its own destruction. Inevitably. A third or a fourth or a fifth bolt-hole bought or rented three months ago would show up in the city records. Just-in-case reservations at hotels would show up, too. Same-day reservations would show up. Six hundred agents were combing the streets. I guessed they would find nothing at all, because the planners back in the hills would have anticipated their moves. They would have known that all trails would be exhausted as soon as the scent was caught. They would have known that by definition the only safe destination is an unplanned destination.
So now the Hoths were out in the cold. With their whole crew. Two women, thirteen men. They had quit their place on 58th Street and they were scuffling, and improvising, and crawling below the radar.
Which was exactly where I lived. They were in my world. It takes one to find one.
I came up from under the ground into Herald Square, which is where Sixth Avenue and Broadway and 34th Street all meet.
* * *
By day it’s a zoo. Macy’s is there. At night it’s not deserted, but it’s quiet. I walked south on Sixth and west on 33rd and came up along the flank of the faded old pile where I had bought my only uninterrupted night of the week. The MP5 was hard and heavy against my chest The Hoths had only two choices: sleep on the street, or pay off a night porter. Manhattan has hundreds of hotels, but they break down quite easily into separate categories. Most of them are mid-market or better, where staffs are large and scams don’t work. Most of the down-market dumps are small. And the Hoths had fifteen people to accommodate. Five rooms, minimum. To find five empty unobtrusive rooms called for a big place. With a bent night porter working alone. I know New York reasonably well. I can make sense of the city, especially from the kind of angles most normal people don’t consider. And I can count the number of big old Manhattan hotels with bent night porters working alone on my thumbs. One was way west on 23rd Street. Far from the action, which was an advantage, but also a disadvantage. More of a disadvantage than an advantage, overall.
Second choice, I figured.
I was standing right next to the only other option.
The clock in my head was ticking past two thirty in the morning. I stood in the shadows and waited. I wanted to be neither early nor late. I wanted to time it right. Left and right I could see traffic heading up on Sixth and down on Seventh. Taxis, trucks, some civilians, some cop cars, some dark sedans. The cross street itself was quiet.
At a quarter to three I pushed off the wall and turned the corner and walked to the hotel door.
SEVENTY-THREE
The same night porter was on duty. Alone. He was slumped on a chair behind the desk, staring morosely into space. There were fogged old mirrors in the lobby. My jacket was puffed out in front of me. I felt I could see the shape of the MP5’s pistol grip and the curve of its magazine and the tip of its muzzle. But I knew what I was looking at. I assumed the night porter didn’t.
I walked up to him and said, ‘Remember me?’
He didn’t say yes. Didn’t say no. Just gave a kind of all-purpose shrug that I took to be an invitation to open negotiations.
‘I don’t need a room,’ I said.
‘So what do you need?’
I took five twenties out of my pocket. A hundred bucks. Most of what I had left. I fanned the bills so he could see all five double-digits and laid them on his counter.
I said, ‘I need to know the room numbers where you put the people who came in around midnight.’
‘What people?’
‘Two women, thirteen men.’
‘Nobody came in around midnight.’
‘One of the women was a babe. Young. Bright blue eyes. Not easy to forget.’
‘Nobody came in.’
‘You sure?’
‘Nobody came in.’
I pushed the five bills towards him. ‘You totally sure?’
He pushed the bills right back.
He said, ‘I’d like to take your money, believe me. But nobody came in tonight.’
* * *
I didn’t take the subway. I walked instead. A calculated risk. It exposed me to however many of the six hundred federal agents happened to be in the vicinity, hut I wanted my cell phone to work. I had concluded that cell phones don’t work in the subway. I had never seen anyone using one down there. Presumably not because of etiquette. Presumably because of a lack of signal. So I walked. I used 32nd Street to get over to Broadway, and then I followed Broadway south, past luggage outlets and junk jewellery stores and counterfeit perfume wholesalers, all of them closed up and shuttered for the night. It was dark down there, and messy. A micro-neighbourhood. I could have been in Lagos, or Saigon.
I paused at the corner of 28th Street to let a taxi slide by. The phone in my pocket started to vibrate.
* * *
I backed into 28th and sat down on a shadowed stoop and opened the phone.
Lila Hoth said, ‘Well?’
I said, ‘I can’t find you.’
‘I know.’
‘So I’ll deal.’
‘You will?’
‘How much cash have you got?’
‘How much do you want?’
‘All of it.’
‘Have you got the stick?’
‘I can tell you exactly where it is.’
‘But you don’t actually have it?’
‘No.’
‘So what was the thing you showed us in the hotel?’
‘A decoy.’
‘Fifty thousand dollars.’
‘A hundred.’
‘I don’t have a hundred thousand dollars.’
I said, ‘You can’t get on a bus or a train or a plane. You can’t get out. You’re trapped, Lila. You’re going to die here. Don’t you want to die a success? Don’t you want to be able to send that coded e-mail home? Mission accomplished?’
‘Seventy-five thousand.’
‘A hundred.’
‘OK, but only half tonight.’
‘I don’t trust you.’
‘You’ll have to.’
I said, ‘Seventy-five, all of it tonight.’
‘Sixty.’
‘Deal.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Way uptown,’ I lied. ‘But I’m on the move. I’ll meet you in Union Square in forty minutes.’
‘Where is that?’
‘Broadway, between 14th Street and 17th.’
‘Is it safe?’
‘Safe enough.’
‘I’ll be there,’ she said.
‘Just you,’ I said. ‘Alone.’
She clicked off.
* * *
I moved on two blocks to the north end of Madison Square Park and sat on a bench a yard from a homeless woman who had a shopping cart piled high like a dump truck. I fished in my pocket for Theresa Lee’s NYPD business card. I read it in the dim glow of a street light. I dialled her cell number. She answered after five rings.
‘This is Reacher,’ I said. ‘You told me to call you if I
needed you.’
‘What can I do for you?’
‘Am I still off the hook with the NYPD?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘So tell your counterterrorism people that forty minutes from now I’ll be in Union Square and I’ll be approached by a minimum of two and a maximum of maybe six of Lila Hoth’s crew. Tell your guys they’re theirs for the taking. But tell them to leave me alone.’
‘Descriptions?’
‘You looked in the bag, right? Before you delivered it?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then you’ve seen their pictures.’
‘Where in the square?’
‘I’ll aim for the southwest corner.’
‘So you found her?’
‘First place I looked. She’s in a hotel. She paid off the night porter. And put a scare in him. He denied everything and called her room from the desk the minute I was out of the lobby.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because she called me less than a minute later. I like coincidences as much as the next guy, but that kind of timing is too good to be true.’
‘Why are you meeting with her crew?’
‘I set up a deal with her. I told her to come alone. But she’ll double-cross me and send some of her people instead. It will help me if your guys grab them up. I don’t want to have to shoot them all.’
‘Got a conscience?’
‘No, I’ve got thirty rounds of ammunition. Which isn’t really enough. I need to parcel it out.’
* * *
Nine blocks later I entered Union Square. I walked all around it once and crossed it on both diagonals. Saw nothing that worried me. Just somnolent shapes on benches. One of New York City’s zero-dollar hotels. I sat down near the statue of Gandhi and waited for the rats to come out.
SEVENTY-FOUR
Twenty minutes into my forty I saw the NYPD’s counterterrorism squad begin to assemble. Good moves. They came in beat-up unmarked sedans and confiscated minivans full of dents and scrapes. I saw an off-duty taxicab park outside a coffee shop on 16th Street. I saw two guys climb out of the back and cross the road. Altogether I counted sixteen men, and I was prepared to accept that I had missed maybe four or five others. If I didn’t know better I would have suspected that a long late session in a martial arts gym had just let out. All the guys were young and fit and bulky and moved like trained athletes. They were all carrying gym bags. They were all inappropriately dressed. They had on Yankees warm-up jackets, or dark windbreakers like mine, or thin fleece parkas, like it was already November. To hide their Kevlar vests, I guessed, and maybe their badges, which would be on chains around their necks.