“We have less than forty-eight hours,” she said. “Day after tomorrow Richard Beck heads home for his mother’s birthday. Our source says he does it every year. Cuts classes and all. His father sends a car with two pro bodyguards because the kid is terrified of a repeat abduction. We’re going to exploit that fear. We’re going to take down the bodyguards and kidnap him.”
She paused. Nobody spoke.
“Our aim is to get into Zachary Beck’s house,” she said. “We can assume the supposed kidnappers themselves wouldn’t exactly be welcome there. So what will happen is that Reacher will immediately rescue the kid from the supposed kidnappers. It will be a tight sequence, kidnap, rescue, like that. The kid comes over all grateful and Reacher is greeted like a hero around the family hearth.”
People sat quiet at first. Then they stirred. The plan was so full of holes it made a Swiss cheese look solid. I stared straight at Duffy. Then I found myself staring out the window. There were ways of plugging the holes. I felt my brain start to move. I wondered how many of the holes Duffy had already spotted. I wondered how many of the answers she had already gotten. I wondered how she knew I loved stuff like this.
“We have an audience of one,” she said. “All that matters is what Richard Beck thinks. The whole thing will be phony from beginning to end, but he’s got to be absolutely convinced it’s real.”
Eliot looked at me. “Weaknesses?”
“Two,” I said. “First, how do you take the bodyguards down without really hurting them? I assume you’re not that far off the books.”
“Speed, shock, surprise,” he said. “The kidnap team will have machine pistols with plenty of blank ammunition. Plus a stun grenade. Soon as the kid is out of the car, we toss a flashbang in. Lots of sound and fury. They’ll be dazed, nothing more. But the kid will assume they’re hamburger meat.”
“OK,” I said. “But second, this whole thing is like method acting, right? I’m some kind of a passerby, and coincidentally I’m the type of guy who can rescue him. Which makes me smart and capable. So why wouldn’t I just haul his ass around to the nearest cops? Or wait for the cops to come to us? Why wouldn’t I stick around and give evidence and make all kinds of witness statements? Why would I want to immediately drive him all the way home?”
Eliot turned to Duffy.
“He’ll be terrified,” she said. “He’ll want you to.”
“But why would I agree? It doesn’t matter what he wants. What matters is what is logical for me to do. Because we don’t have an audience of one. We have an audience of two. Richard Beck and Zachary Beck. Richard Beck there and then, and Zachary Beck later. He’ll be looking at it in retrospect. We’ve got to convince him just as much.”
“The kid might ask you not to go to the cops. Like last time.”
“But why would I listen to him? If I was Mr. Normal the cops would be the first thing on my mind. I’d want to do everything strictly by the book.”
“He would argue with you.”
“And I would ignore him. Why would a smart and capable adult listen to a crazy kid? It’s a hole. It’s too cooperative, too purposeful, too phony. Too direct. Zachary Beck would rumble it in a minute.”
“Maybe you get him in a car and you’re being chased.”
“I’d drive straight to a police station.”
“Shit,” Duffy said.
“It’s a plan,” I said. “But we need to get real.”
I looked out of the window again. It was bright out there. I saw a lot of green stuff. Trees, bushes, distant wooded hillsides dusted with new leaves. In the corner of my eye I saw Eliot and Duffy looking down at the floor of the room. Saw the five guys sitting still. They looked like a capable bunch. Two of them were a little younger than me, tall and fair. Two were about my age, plain and ordinary. One was a lot older, stooped and gray. I thought long and hard. Kidnap, rescue, Beck’s house. I need to be in Beck’s house. I really do. Because I need to find Quinn. Think about the long game. I looked at the whole thing from the kid’s point of view. Then I looked at it again, from his father’s point of view.
“It’s a plan,” I said again. “But it needs perfecting. So I need to be the sort of person who wouldn’t go to the cops.” Then I paused. “No, better still, right in front of Richard Beck’s eyes, I need to become the sort of person who can’t go to the cops.”
“How?” Duffy said.
I looked straight at her. “I’ll have to hurt somebody. By accident, in the confusion. Another passerby. Some innocent party. Some kind of ambiguous circumstance. Maybe I run somebody over. Some old lady walking her dog. Maybe I even kill her. I panic and I run.”
“Too difficult to stage,” she said. “And not really enough to make you run, anyway. I mean, accidents happen, in circumstances like these.”
I nodded. The room stayed quiet. I closed my eyes and thought some more and saw the beginnings of a sketchy scene take shape right there in my mind.
“OK,” I said. “How about this? I’ll kill a cop. By accident.”
Nobody spoke. I opened my eyes.
“It’s a grand slam,” I said. “You see that? It’s totally perfect. It puts Zachary Beck’s mind at rest about why I didn’t act normally and go to the cops. You don’t go to the cops if you’ve just killed one of their own, even if it’s an accident. He’ll understand that. And it’ll give me a reason to stay on at his house afterward. Which I’ll need to do. He’ll think I’m in hiding. He’ll be grateful about the rescue and he’s a criminal anyway so his conscience won’t get in his way.”
There were no objections. Just silence, and then a slow indefinable murmur of assessment, agreement, consent. I scoped it out, beginning to end. Think about the long game. I smiled.
“And it gets better,” I said. “He might even hire me. In fact I think he’ll be very tempted to hire me. Because we’re creating the illusion that his family’s suddenly under attack and he’ll be down by two bodyguards and he’ll know I’m better than they were anyway because they lost and I didn’t. And he’ll be happy to hire me because as long as he thinks I’m a cop-killer and he’s sheltering me he’ll think he owns me.”
Duffy smiled, too.
“So let’s go to work,” she said. “We’ve got less than forty-eight hours.”
The two younger guys were tagged as the kidnap team. We decided they would be driving a Toyota pickup from the DEA’s stock of impounded vehicles. They would be using confiscated Uzis filled with nine-millimeter blanks. They would have a stun grenade filched from the DEA SWAT stores. Then we started to rehearse my role as the rescuer. Like all good scam artists we decided I should stick as close to the truth as possible, so I would be an ex-military drifter, in the right place at the right time. I would be armed, which in the circumstances would be technically illegal in Massachusetts, but which would be in character and plausible.
“I need a big old-fashioned revolver,” I said. “I have to be carrying something appropriate for a citizen. And the whole thing has to be a big drama, beginning to end. The Toyota comes at me, I need to disable it. I need to shoot it up. So I need three real bullets and three blanks, in strict sequence. The three real bullets for the truck, the three blanks for the people.”
“We could load any gun like that,” Eliot said.
“But I’ll need to see the chambers,” I said. “Right before I fire. I won’t fire a mixed load without a visual check. I need to know I’m starting in the right place. So I need a revolver. A big one, not some small thing, so I can see clearly.”
He saw my point. Made a note. Then we nominated the old guy as the local cop. Duffy proposed he should just blunder into my field of fire.
“No,” I said. “It has to be the right kind of mistake. Not just a careless shot. Beck senior needs to be impressed with me in the right kind of way. I need to do it deliberately, but recklessly. Like I’m a madman, but a madman who can shoot.”
Duffy agreed and Eliot thought through a mental list of available vehicles and offered
me an old panel van. Said I could be a delivery guy. Said it would give me a legitimate reason to be hanging out on the street. We made lists, on paper and in our heads. The two guys my age were sitting there without an assigned task, and they were unhappy about it.
“You’re backup cops,” I said. “Suppose the kid doesn’t even see me shoot the first one? He might have fainted or something. You need to chase us in a car, and I’ll take you out when I’m certain he’s watching.”
“Can’t have backup cops,” the old guy said. “I mean, what’s going on here? Suddenly the whole place is swarming with cops for no good reason?”
“College cops,” Duffy said. “You know, those rent-a-cop guys colleges have? They just happen to be there. I mean, where else would you find them?”
“Excellent,” I said. “They can start from right inside the campus. They can control the whole thing by radio from the rear.”
“How will you take them out?” Eliot asked me, like it was an issue.
I nodded. I saw the problem. I would have fired six shots by then.
“I can’t reload,” I said. “Not while I’m driving. Not with blanks. The kid might notice.”
“Can you ram them? Force them off the road?”
“Not in a crummy old van. I’ll have to have a second revolver. Preloaded, waiting inside the van. In the glove compartment, maybe.”
“You’re running around with two six-shooters?” the old guy said. “That’s a little odd, in Massachusetts.”
I nodded. “It’s a weak point. We’re going to have to risk a few.”
“So I should be in plain clothes,” the old guy said. “Like a detective. Shooting at a uniformed cop is beyond reckless. That would be a weak point, too.”
“OK,” I said. “Agreed. Excellent. You’re a detective, and you pull out your badge, and I think it’s a gun. That happens.”
“But how do we die?” the old guy asked. “We just clutch our stomachs and fall over, like an old Wild West show?”
“That’s not convincing,” Eliot said. “This whole thing has got to look exactly right. For Richard Beck’s sake.”
“We need Hollywood stuff,” Duffy said. “Kevlar vests and condoms filled with fake blood that explode off of a radio signal.”
“Can we get it?”
“From New York or Boston, maybe.”
“We’re tight for time.”
“Tell me about it,” Duffy said.
That was the end of day nine. Duffy wanted me to move into the motel and offered to have somebody drive me back to my Boston hotel for my luggage. I told her I didn’t have any luggage and she looked at me sideways but didn’t say anything. I took a room next to the old guy. Somebody drove out and got pizza. Everybody was running around and making phone calls. They left me alone. I lay on my bed and thought the whole thing through again, beginning to end, from my point of view. I made a list in my head of all the things we hadn’t considered. It was a long list. But there was one item bothering me above all. Not exactly on the list. Kind of parallel to it. I got off my bed and went to find Duffy. She was out in the lot, hurrying back to her room from her car.
“Zachary Beck isn’t the story here,” I told her. “He can’t be. If Quinn’s involved, then Quinn’s the boss. He wouldn’t play second fiddle. Unless Beck is a worse guy than Quinn, and I don’t even want to think about that.”
“Maybe Quinn changed,” she said. “He was shot twice in the head. Maybe that kind of rewired his brains. Diminished him, somehow.”
I said nothing. She hurried away. I went back to my room.
Day ten started with the arrival of the vehicles. The old guy got a seven-year-old Chevy Caprice to act as his police unmarked. It was the one with the Corvette motor in it, from the final model year before General Motors stopped making them. It looked just right. The pickup was a big thing painted faded red. It had a bull bar on the front. I saw the younger guys talking about how they would use it. My ride was a plain brown panel van. It was the most anonymous truck I had ever seen. It had no side windows and two small rear windows. I checked inside for a glove compartment. It had one.
“OK?” Eliot asked me.
I slapped its side like van people do and it boomed faintly in response.
“Perfect,” I said. “I want the revolvers to be big .44 Magnums. I want three heavy soft-nosed bullets and nine blanks. Make the blanks as loud as you can get.”
“OK,” he said. “Why soft-nose?”
“I’m worried about ricochets,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt anybody by accident. Soft-nose slugs will deform and stick to what they hit. I’m going to fire one into the radiator and two at the tires. I want you to pump the tires way high so they’ll explode when I hit them. We’ve got to make it spectacular.”
Eliot hurried away and Duffy came up to me.
“You’ll need these,” she said. She had a coat and a pair of gloves for me. “You’ll look more realistic if you’re wearing them. It’ll be cold. And the coat will hide the gun.”
I took them from her and tried on the coat. It fit pretty well. She was clearly a good judge of sizes.
“The psychology will be tricky,” she said. “You’re going to have to be flexible. The kid might be catatonic. You might need to coax some reaction out of him. But ideally he’ll be awake and talking. In which case I think you need to show a little reluctance about getting yourself more and more involved. Ideally you need to let him talk you into driving him all the way home. But at the same time you need to be dominant. You need to keep events moving along so he doesn’t have time to dwell on exactly what he’s seeing.”
“OK,” I said. “In which case I’m going to change my ammunition requisition. I’m going to make the second bullet in the second gun a real one. I’ll tell him to get down on the floor and then I’ll blow out the window behind him. He’ll think it was the college cops shooting at us. Then I’ll tell him to get up again. It’ll increase his sense of danger and it’ll get him used to doing what I tell him and it’ll make him a little happier to watch the college cops get it in the neck. Because I don’t want him fighting me, trying to stop me. I might wreck the van and kill both of us.”
“In fact you need to bond with him,” she said. “He needs to speak well of you, later. Because I agree, getting hired on up there would hit the jackpot. It would give you access. So try to impress the kid. But keep it very subtle. You don’t need him to like you. You just need to make him think you’re a tough guy who knows what he’s doing.”
I went to find Eliot and then the two guys playing the college cops came to find me. We arranged that they would fire blanks at me first, then I would fire one blank at them, then I would shoot out the van’s rear window, and then I would fire another blank, and finally I would fire my last three blanks in a spaced group. On the final shot they would blow out their own windshield with a real bullet from one of their own guns and then they would go sliding off the road like they had lost a tire or been hit.
“Don’t get confused which load is which,” one of them said.
“You either,” I said back.
We had more pizza for lunch and then went out to cruise the target area. We parked a mile short and went over a couple of maps. Then we risked three separate passes in two cars right past the college gate. I would have preferred more time to study but we were worried about being conspicuous. We drove back to the motel in silence and regrouped in Eliot’s room.
“Looks OK,” I said. “Which way will they turn?”
“Maine is north of here,” Duffy said. “We can assume he lives somewhere near Portland.”
I nodded. “But I think they’ll go south. Look at the maps. You get to the highway faster that way. And standard security doctrine is to get on wide busy roads as soon as possible.”
“It’s a gamble.”
“They’ll go south,” I said.
“Anything else?” Eliot asked.
“I’d be nuts to stick with the van,” I said. “Old man Beck
will figure if I was doing this for real I’d ditch it and steal a car.”
“Where?” Duffy asked.
“The map shows a mall next to the highway.”
“OK, we’ll stash one there.”
“Spare keys under the bumper?” Eliot asked.
Duffy shook her head. “Too phony. We need this whole thing to be absolutely convincing. He’ll have to steal it for real.”
“I don’t know how,” I said. “I’ve never stolen a car.”
The room went quiet.
“All I know is what I learned in the army,” I said. “Military vehicles are never locked. And they don’t have ignition keys. They start off a button.”
“OK,” Eliot said. “No problem is insuperable. We’ll leave it unlocked. But you’ll act like it is locked. You’ll pretend to jimmy the door. We’ll leave a load of wire and a bunch of coat hangers nearby. Maybe you could ask the kid to find something for you. Make him feel involved. It’ll help the illusion. Then you screw around with it and, hey, the door pops open. We’ll loosen the shroud on the steering column. We’ll strip the right wires and only the right wires. You find them and touch them together and you’re an instant bad guy.”
“Brilliant,” Duffy said.
Eliot smiled. “I do my best.”
“Let’s take a break,” Duffy said. “Start again after dinner.”
The final pieces fell into place after dinner. Two of the guys got back with the last of the equipment. They had a matched pair of Colt Anacondas for me. They were big brutal weapons. They looked expensive. I didn’t ask where they got them from. They came with a box of real .44 Magnums and a box of .44 blanks. The blanks came from a hardware store. They were designed for a heavy-duty nail gun. The sort of thing that punches nails straight into concrete. I opened each Anaconda cylinder and scratched an X against one of the chambers with the tip of a nail scissor. A Colt revolver’s cylinder steps around clockwise, which is different from a Smith & Wesson, which rotates counterclockwise. The X would represent the first chamber to be fired. I would line it up at the ten o’clock position where I could see it and it would step around and fall under the hammer with the first pull of the trigger.
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