Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  Froelich shook her head.

  “No, I’m afraid their interpretation was correct,” she said. “Normally Armstrong would have been well out in the middle of the field, letting people get a good look at him. Right there in the center of things. We don’t usually make them skulk around the edges. It was a last-minute change to keep him near the church. Based on Reacher’s input. And normally there’s absolutely no way I would allow a rear-wheel-drive limo on the grass. Too easy to bog down and get stuck. That’s an article of faith. But I knew the ground was dry and hard. It was practically frozen. So I improvised. That maneuver would have struck an insider as completely off the wall. It would have been the very last thing they were expecting. They would have been totally surprised by it.”

  Silence for a beat.

  “Then Bannon’s theory is perfectly plausible,” Neagley said. “I’m very sorry.”

  Stuyvesant nodded, slowly. Strike two.

  “Reacher?” he said.

  “Can’t argue with a word of it.”

  Strike three. Stuyvesant’s head dropped, like his last hope was gone.

  “But I don’t believe it,” Reacher said.

  Stuyvesant’s head came up again.

  “I’m glad they’re pursuing it,” Reacher said. “Because it needs to be pursued, I guess. We need to eliminate all possibilities. And they’ll go at it like crazy. If they’re right, they’ll take care of it for us, that’s for sure. So it’s one less thing for us to worry about. But I’m pretty sure they’re wasting their time.”

  “Why?” Froelich asked.

  “Because I’m pretty sure neither of these guys ever worked here.”

  “So who are they?”

  “I think they’re both outsiders. I think they’re between two and ten years older than Armstrong himself, both of them brought up and educated in remote rural areas where the schools were decent but the taxes were low.”

  “What?”

  “Think of everything we know. Think of everything we’ve seen. Then think of the very smallest part of it. The very tiniest component.”

  “Tell us,” Froelich said.

  Stuyvesant checked his watch again. Shook his head.

  “Not now,” he said. “We need to move. You can tell us later. But you’re sure?”

  “They’re both outsiders,” Reacher said. “Guaranteed. It’s in the Constitution.”

  13

  Every city has a cusp, where the good part of town turns bad. Washington D.C. was no different. The border between desirable and undesirable ran in a ragged irregular loop, bulging outward here and there to accommodate reclaimed blocks, swooping inward in other areas to claim inroads of its own. It was pierced in some places by gentrified corridors. Elsewhere it worked gradually, shading imperceptibly over hundreds of yards down streets where you could buy thirty different blends of tea at one end and cash checks at the other for thirty percent of the proceeds.

  The shelter selected for Armstrong’s appearance was halfway into the no-man’s-land north of Union Station. To the east were train tracks and switching yards. To the west was a highway running underground in a tunnel. All around were decayed buildings. Some of them were warehouses and some of them were apartments. Some of them were abandoned, some of them were not. The shelter itself was exactly what Froelich had described. It was a long low one-story building made of brick. It had large metal-framed windows evenly spaced in the walls. It had a yard next to it twice its own size. The yard was closed in on three sides by high brick walls. It was impossible to decipher the building’s original purpose. Maybe it had been a stable, back when Union Station’s freight had been hauled away by horses. Maybe later it was updated with new windows and used as a trucking depot after the horses faded away. Maybe it had served time as an office. It was impossible to tell.

  It housed fifty homeless people every night. They were woken early every morning and given breakfast and turned out on the streets. Then the fifty cots were stacked and stored and the floor was washed and the air was misted with disinfectant. Metal tables and chairs were carried in and placed where the beds had been. Lunch was available every day, and dinner, and then the reverse conversion to a dormitory took place at nine every evening.

  But this day was different. Thanksgiving Day was always different, and this year it was more different than usual. Wake-up call happened a little earlier and breakfast was served a little faster. The overnighters were shown the door a full half hour before normal, which was a double blow to them because cities are notoriously quiet on Thanksgiving Day and panhandling receipts are dismal. The floor was washed more thoroughly than usual and more disinfectant was sprayed into the air. The tables were positioned more exactly, the chairs were lined up more precisely, more volunteers were on hand, and all of them were wearing fresh white sweatshirts with the benefactor’s name brightly printed in red.

  The first Secret Service agents to arrive were the line-of-sight team. They had a large-scale city surveyor’s map and a telescopic sight removed from a sniper rifle. One agent walked through every step that Armstrong was scheduled to take. Every separate pace he would stop and turn around and squint through the scope and call out every window and every rooftop he could see. Because if he could see a rooftop or a window, a potential marksman on that rooftop or in that window could see him. The agent with the map would identify the building concerned and check the scale and calculate the range. Anything under seven hundred feet he marked in black.

  But it was a good location. The only available sniper nests were on the roofs of the abandoned five-story warehouses opposite. The guy with the map finished up with a straight line of just five black crosses, nothing more. He wrote checked with scope, clear daylight, 0845 hrs, all suspect locations recorded across the bottom of the map and signed his name and added the date. The agent with the scope countersigned and the map was rolled and stored in the back of a department Suburban, awaiting Froelich’s arrival.

  Next on scene was a convoy of police vans with five separate canine units in them. One unit cleared the shelter. Two more entered the warehouses. The last two were explosives hunters who checked the surrounding streets in all directions on a four-hundred-yard radius. Beyond four hundred yards, the maze of streets meant there were too many potential access routes to check, and therefore too many to bomb with any realistic chance of success. As soon as a building or a street was pronounced safe a D.C. patrolman took up station on foot. The sky was still clear and the sun was still out. It gave an illusion of warmth. It kept grousing to a minimum.

  By nine thirty the shelter was the epicenter of a quarter of a square mile of secure territory. D.C. cops held the perimeter on foot and in cars and there were better than fifty more loose in the interior. They made up the majority of the local population. The city was still quiet. Some of the shelter inhabitants were hanging around. There was nowhere productive to go, and they knew from experience that to be early in the lunch line was better than late. Politicians didn’t understand portion control, and pickings could be getting slim after the first thirty minutes.

  Froelich arrived at ten o’clock exactly, driving her Suburban, Reacher and Neagley riding with her. Stuyvesant was right behind in a second Suburban. Behind him were four more trucks carrying five department sharpshooters and fifteen general-duty agents. Froelich parked on the sidewalk tight against the base of the warehouse wall. Normally she might have just blocked the street beyond the shelter entrance, but she didn’t want to reveal the direction of Armstrong’s intended approach to onlookers. He was actually scheduled to come in from the south, but that information and ten minutes with a map could predict his route all the way from Georgetown.

  She assembled her people in the shelter’s yard and sent the sharpshooters to secure the warehouse roofs. They would be up there three hours before the event started, but that was normal. Generally they were the first to arrive and the last to leave. Stuyvesant pulled Reacher aside and asked him to go up there with them.

  �
��Then come find me,” he said. “I want a firsthand report about how bad it is.”

  So Reacher walked across the street with an agent called Crosetti and they ducked past a cop into a damp hallway full of trash and rat droppings. There were stairs winding up through a central shaft. Crosetti was in a Kevlar vest and was carrying a rifle in a hard case. But he was a fit guy. He was half a flight ahead of Reacher at the top.

  The stairs came out inside a rooftop hutch. There was a wooden door that opened outward into the sunlight. The roof was flat. It was made of asphalt. There were pigeon corpses here and there. There were dirty skylights made of wired glass and small metal turrets on top of ventilation pipes. The roof was lipped with a low wall, set on top with eroded coping stones. Crosetti walked to the left edge, and then the right. Made visual contact with his colleagues on either side. Then he walked to the front to check the view. Reacher was already there.

  The view was good and bad. Good in the conventional sense because the sun was shining and they were five floors up in a low-built part of town. Bad because the shelter’s yard was right there underneath them. It was like looking down into a shoe box from a distance of three feet up and three feet away. The back wall where Armstrong would be standing was dead ahead. It was made out of old brick and looked like the execution wall in some foreign prison. Hitting him would be easier than shooting a fish in a barrel.

  “What’s the range?” Reacher asked.

  “Your guess?” Crosetti said.

  Reacher put his knees against the lip of the roof and glanced out and down.

  “Ninety yards?” he said.

  Crosetti unsnapped a pocket in his vest and took out a range finder.

  “Laser,” he said. He switched it on and lined it up.

  “Ninety-two to the wall,” he said. “Ninety-one to his head. That was a pretty good guess.”

  “Windage?”

  “Slight thermal coming up off the concrete down there,” Crosetti said. “Nothing else, probably. No big deal.”

  “Practically like standing right next to him,” Reacher said.

  “Don’t worry,” Crosetti said. “As long as I’m up here nobody else can be. That’s the job today. We’re sentries, not shooters.”

  “Where are you going to be?” Reacher asked.

  Crosetti glanced all around his little piece of real estate and pointed.

  “Over there, I guess,” he said. “Tight in the far corner. I’ll face parallel with the front wall. Slight turn to my left and I’m covering the yard. Slight turn to my right, I’m covering the head of the stairwell.”

  “Good plan,” Reacher said. “You need anything?”

  Crosetti shook his head.

  “OK,” Reacher said. “I’ll leave you to it. Try to stay awake.”

  Crosetti smiled. “I usually do.”

  “Good,” Reacher said. “I like that in a sentry.”

  He went back down five flights through the darkness and stepped out into the sun. Walked across the street and glanced up. Saw Crosetti nestled comfortably in the angle of the corner. His head and his knees were visible. So was his rifle barrel. It was jutting upward against the bright sky at a relaxed forty-five degrees. He waved. Crosetti waved back. He walked on and found Stuyvesant in the yard. He was hard to miss, given the color of his sweater and the brightness of the daylight.

  “It’s OK up there,” Reacher said. “Hell of a firing platform, but as long as your guys hold it we’re safe enough.”

  Stuyvesant nodded and turned around and scanned upward. All five warehouse roofs were visible from the yard. All five were occupied by sharpshooters. Five silhouetted heads, five silhouetted rifle barrels.

  “Froelich is looking for you,” Stuyvesant said.

  Nearer the building, staff and agents were hauling long trestle tables into place. The idea was to form a barrier with them. The right-hand end would be hard against the shelter’s wall. The left-hand end would be three feet from the yard wall opposite. There would be a pen six feet deep behind the line of tables. Armstrong and his wife would be in the pen with four agents. Directly behind them would be the execution wall. Up close it didn’t look so bad. The old bricks looked warmed by the sun. Rustic, even friendly. He turned his back on them and looked up at the warehouse roofs. Crosetti waved again. I’m still awake, the wave said.

  “Reacher,” Froelich called.

  He turned around and found her walking out of the shelter toward him. She was carrying a clipboard thick with paper. She was up on her toes, busy, in charge, in command. She looked magnificent. The black clothes emphasized her litheness and made her eyes blaze with blue. Dozens of agents and scores of cops swirled all around her, every one of them under her personal control.

  “We’re doing fine here,” she said. “So I want you to take a stroll. Just check around. Neagley’s already out there. You know what to look for.”

  “Feels good, doesn’t it?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Doing something really well,” he said. “Taking charge.”

  “Think I’m doing well?”

  “You’re the best,” he said. “This is tremendous. Armstrong’s a lucky man.”

  “I hope,” she said.

  “Believe it,” he said.

  She smiled, quickly and shyly, and moved on, leafing through her paperwork. He turned the other way and walked back out to the street. Turned right and planned a route in his head that would keep him on a block-and-a-half radius.

  There were cops on the corner and the beginnings of a ragged crowd of people waiting for the free lunch. There were two television trucks setting up fifty yards down the street from the shelter. Hydraulic masts were unfolding themselves and satellite dishes were rotating. Technicians were unrolling cable and shouldering cameras. He saw Bannon with six men and a woman he guessed were the FBI task force. They had just arrived. Bannon had a map unrolled on the hood of his car and his agents were clustered around looking at it. Reacher waved to Bannon and turned left and passed the end of an alley that led down behind the warehouses. He could hear a train on the tracks ahead of him. The mouth of the alley was manned by a D.C. cop, facing outward, standing easy. There was a police cruiser parked nearby. Another cop in it. Cops everywhere. The overtime bill was going to be something to see.

  There were broken-down stores here and there, but they were all closed for the holiday. Some of the storefronts were churches, also closed. There were auto body shops nearer the railroad tracks, all shuttered and still. There was a pawnshop with a very old guy outside washing the windows. He was the only thing moving on the street. His store was tall and narrow and had concertina barriers inside the glass. The display space was crammed with junk of every description. There were clocks, coats, musical instruments, alarm radios, hats, record players, car stereos, binoculars, strings of Christmas lights. There was writing on the windows, offering to buy just about any article ever manufactured. If it didn’t grow in the ground or move by itself, this guy would give you money for it. He also offered services. He would cash checks, appraise jewelry, repair watches. There was a tray of watches on view. They were mostly old-fashioned wind-up items, with bulging crystals and big square luminescent figures and sculpted hands. Reacher glanced again at the sign: Watches Repaired. Then he glanced again at the old guy. He was up to his elbows in soap suds.

  “You fix watches?” he asked.

  “What have you got?” the old guy said. He had an accent. Russian, probably.

  “A question,” Reacher said.

  “I thought you had a watch to fix. That was my business, originally. Before quartz.”

  “My watch is fine,” Reacher said. “Sorry.”

  He pulled back his cuff to check the time. Quarter past eleven.

  “Let me see that,” the old guy said.

  Reacher extended his wrist.

  “Bulova,” the old guy said. “American military issue before the Gulf War. A good watch. You buy it from a soldier?”

  �
��No, I was a soldier.”

  The old guy nodded. “So was I. In the Red Army. What’s the question?”

  “You ever heard of squalene?”

  “It’s a lubricant.”

  “You use it?”

  “Time to time. I don’t fix so many watches now. Not since quartz.”

  “Where do you get it?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No,” Reacher said. “I’m asking a question.”

  “You want to know where I get my squalene?”

  “That’s what questions are for. They seek to elicit information.”

  The old guy smiled. “I carry it around with me.”

  “Where?”

  “You’re looking at it.”

  “Am I?”

  The old guy nodded. “And I’m looking at yours.”

  “My what?”

  “Your supply of squalene.”

  “I haven’t got any squalene,” Reacher said. “It comes from sharks’ livers. Long time since I was next to a shark.”

  The old man shook his head. “You see, the Soviet system was very frequently criticized, and believe me I’ve always been happy to tell the truth about it. But at least we had education. Especially in the natural sciences.”

  “C-thirty H-fifty,” Reacher said. “It’s an acyclic hydrocarbon. Which when hydrogenated becomes squalane with an a.”

  “You understand any of that?”

  “No,” Reacher said. “Not really.”

  “Squalene is an oil,” the old guy said. “It occurs naturally in only two places in the known biosphere. One is inside a shark’s liver. The other is as a sebaceous product on the skin around the human nose.”

  Reacher touched his nose. “Same stuff? Sharks’ livers and people’s noses?”