Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  The collector’s cabinet was nearly six feet tall. It had two full-width drawers at the bottom and locked glass doors above them. Behind the glass were five Thompson submachine guns. They were the classic drum-magazine gangster weapons from the 1920s, the pieces you see in old grainy black-and-white photographs of Al Capone’s soldiers. They were displayed alternately facing left and right, resting on custom hardwood pegs that held them exactly level. They were all identical. And they all looked brand new. They looked like they had never been fired. Like they had never even been touched. The armchair was set to face the cabinet. There was nothing else of significance in the room. I sat down in the chair and got to wondering why anybody would want to spend time gazing at five old grease guns.

  Then I heard footsteps. A light tread, upstairs, directly over my head. Three paces, four, five. Fast quiet steps. Not just deference to the time of night. A real attempt at concealment. I got up out of the chair. Stood still. Turned the flashlight off and put it in my left hand. Put the chisel in my right. I heard a door close softly. Then there was silence. I listened hard. Focused on every tiny sound. The background rush of the heating system built to a roar in my ears. My breathing was deafening. Nothing from above. Then the footsteps started again.

  They were heading for the stairs. I locked myself inside the room. I knelt behind the door and tripped the tumblers, one, two, and listened to the creak of the staircase. It wasn’t Richard coming down. It wasn’t a twenty-year-old. There was a measured caution in the tread. Some kind of stiffness. Somebody getting slower and quieter as they approached the bottom. The sound disappeared altogether in the hallway. I pictured someone standing on the thick rugs, surrounded by the drapes and the paneling, looking around, listening hard. Maybe heading my way. I picked up the flashlight and the chisel again. The Glock was in my waistband. I had no doubt I could fight my way out of the house. No doubt at all. But approaching an alert Paulie over hundreds of yards of open ground and through the stadium lights would be difficult. And a firefight now would bury the mission forever. Quinn would disappear again.

  There was no sound from the hallway. No sound at all. Just a crushing silence. Then I heard the front door open. I heard the rattle of a chain and a lock springing back and the click of a latch and the sucking sound of a copper insulating strip releasing its grip on the edge of the door. A second later the door closed again. I felt a tiny shudder in the structure of the house as the heavy oak hit the frame. No beep from the metal detector. Whoever had passed through it wasn’t carrying a weapon. Or even a set of car keys.

  I waited. Duke was surely fast asleep. And he wasn’t the trusting type. I guessed he wouldn’t walk around at night without a gun. Neither would Beck. But either one of them might be smart enough just to stand there in the hallway and open and close the door to make me think they had gone out through it. When in fact they hadn’t. When in fact they were still standing right there, gun drawn, staring back into the gloom, waiting for me to show myself.

  I sat down sideways in the red leather chair. Took the Glock out of my pants and aimed it left-handed at the door. Soon as they opened it wider than nine millimeters I would fire. Until then, I would wait. I was good at waiting. If they thought they were going to wait me out, they had picked the wrong guy.

  But a whole hour later there was still absolute silence out in the hallway. No sound of any kind. No vibrations. There was nobody there. Certainly not Duke. He would have fallen asleep by then and hit the deck. Not Beck, either. He was an amateur. It takes tremendous skill to keep absolutely still and silent for a whole hour. So the door thing hadn’t been a trick. Somebody had gone out unarmed into the night.

  I knelt down and used the bradawl on the tumblers again. Lay full-length on the floor and reached up and pulled the door open. A precaution. Anybody waiting for the door to open would have their eyes locked at head height. I would see them before they saw me. But there was nobody waiting. The hallway was empty. I stood upright and locked the door behind me. Walked silently down the basement stairs and put the flashlight back in its place. Felt my way back upstairs. Crept to the kitchen and slid all my hardware along the floor and out the door into the porch. Locked it behind me and crouched down and picked up all my stuff and checked the view out back. Saw nothing except an empty gray world of moonlit rocks and ocean.

  I locked the porch door behind me and kept very close to the side of the house. Ducked through deep black shadows and made it back to the courtyard wall. Found the dip in the rock and wrapped the chisel and the bradawl in the rag and left them there. I couldn’t take them with me. They would tear the trash bag. I followed the courtyard wall onward toward the ocean. I aimed to get down on the rocks right behind the garage block, to the south, completely out of sight of the house.

  I made it halfway there. Then I froze.

  Elizabeth Beck was sitting on the rocks. She was wearing a white bathrobe over a white nightgown. She looked like a ghost, or an angel. She had her elbows on her knees and she was staring into the darkness in the east like a statue.

  I kept completely still. I was thirty feet away from her. I was dressed all in black but if she glanced to her left I would show up against the horizon. And sudden movement would give me away. So I just stood there. The ocean swell lapped in and out, quiet and lazy. It was a peaceful sound. Hypnotic motion. She was staring at the water. She must have been cold. There was a slight breeze and I could see it in her hair.

  I inched downward like I was trying to melt into the rock. Bent my knees and spread my fingers and eased myself down into a crouch. She moved. Just a quizzical turn of her head, like something had suddenly occurred to her. She looked right at me. Gave no sign of surprise. She stared directly at me for minute after minute. Her long fingers were laced together. Her pale face was lit by moonlight reflected off the lapping water. Her eyes were open, but clearly she wasn’t seeing anything. Or else I was low enough down against the sky that she thought I was a rock or a shadow.

  She sat like that for maybe ten more minutes, staring in my direction. She started shivering in the cold. Then she moved her head again, decisively, and looked away from me at the sea to her right. She unlaced her fingers and moved her hands and smoothed her hair back. Turned her face up to the sky. She stood up slowly. She was barefoot. She shuddered, like she was cold, or sad. She held her arms out sideways like a tightrope walker and stepped toward me. The ground was hurting her feet. That was clear. She balanced herself with her arms and tested every step. She came within a yard of me. Went right on by and headed back to the house. I watched her go. The wind caught her robe. Her nightdress flattened against her body. She disappeared behind the courtyard wall. A long moment later I heard the front door open. There was a tiny pause and then a soft clump as it closed. I dropped flat to the ground and rolled onto my back. Stared up at the stars.

  I lay like that as long as I dared and then got up and scrambled the final fifty feet to the edge of the sea. Shook out the trash bag and stripped off my clothes and packed them neatly into it. I wrapped the Glock inside my shirt with the spare magazines. Stuffed my socks into my shoes and packed them on top and followed them with the small linen towel. Then I tied the bag tight and held it by the neck. Slipped into the water, dragging it behind me.

  The ocean was cold. I had figured it would be. I was on the coast of Maine in April. But this was cold. It was icy. It was jarring and numbing. It took my breath away. Inside a second I was chilled to the bone. Five yards offshore my teeth were chattering and I was going nowhere and the salt stung my eyes.

  I kicked onward until I was ten yards out and I could see the wall. It glared with light. I couldn’t get through it. Couldn’t get over it. So I had to go around it. No choice. I reasoned with myself. I had to swim a quarter-mile. I was strong but not fast and I was towing a bag, so it would take me maybe ten minutes. Fifteen, at the absolute maximum. That was all. And nobody dies of exposure in fifteen minutes. Nobody. Not me, anyway. Not tonight.

 
I fought the cold and the swell and built a kind of sidestroke rhythm. I towed the bag with my left hand for ten leg-kicks. Then I changed to my right and kicked on. There was a slight current. The tide was coming in. It was helping me. But it was freezing me, too. It was coming in all the way from the Grand Banks. It was arctic. My skin was dead and slick. My breath was rasping. My heart was thumping. I started to worry about thermal shock. I thought back to books I had read about the Titanic. The people who didn’t make it into the lifeboats all died within an hour.

  But I wasn’t going to be in the water for an hour. And there were no actual icebergs around. And my rhythm was working. I was about level with the wall. The light spill stopped well short of me. I was naked and pale from the winter but I felt invisible. I passed the wall. Halfway there. I kicked onward. Pounded away. Raised my wrist clear of the water and checked the time. I had been swimming for six minutes.

  I swam for six more. Trod water and gasped for air and floated the bag ahead of me and looked back. I was well clear of the wall. I changed direction and headed for the shore. Came up through slick mossy rocks onto a gritty beach. Threw the bag up ahead of me and crawled out of the water on my knees. I stayed on all fours for a whole minute, panting and shivering. My teeth were chattering wildly. I untied the bag. Found the towel. Rubbed myself furiously. My arms were blue. My clothes snagged on my skin. I got my shoes on and stowed the Glock. Folded the bag and the towel and put them wet in my pocket. Then I ran, because I needed to get warm.

  I ran for nearly ten minutes before I found the car. It was the old guy’s Taurus, gray in the moonlight. It was parked facing away from the house, all set to go, no delay. Duffy was a practical woman, that was for sure. I smiled again. The key was on the seat. I started the motor and eased away slowly. Kept the lights off and didn’t touch the brake until I was off the palm-shaped promontory and around the first curve on the road inland. Then I lit up the headlights and turned up the heater and hit the gas hard.

  I was outside the Portland docks fifteen minutes later. I left the Taurus parked on a quiet street a mile short of Beck’s warehouse. Walked the rest of the way. This was the moment of truth. If Doll’s body had been found the place would be in an uproar and I would melt away and never be seen again. If it hadn’t, I would live to fight another day.

  The walk took the best part of twenty minutes. I saw nobody. No cops, no ambulances, no police tape, no medical examiners. No unexplained men in Lincoln Town Cars. I circled Beck’s warehouse itself on a wide radius. I glimpsed it through gaps and alleys. The lights were all on in the office windows. But that was the way I had left it. Doll’s car was still there by the roller door. Exactly where I had left it.

  I walked away from the building and came back toward it from a new angle, from the blind side where there was no window. I took the Glock out. Held it hidden low down by my leg. Doll’s car faced me. Beyond it on the left was the personnel door into the warehouse cubicle. Beyond that was the back office. I passed the car and the door and dropped to the floor and crawled under the window. Raised my head and looked inside. Nobody there. The secretarial area was empty, too. All quiet. I breathed out and put the gun away. Retraced my steps to Doll’s car. Opened the driver’s door and popped the trunk. He was still in there. He hadn’t gone anywhere. I took his keys out of his pocket. Closed the lid on him again and carried the keys in through the personnel door. Found the right key and locked it behind me.

  I was willing to risk fifteen minutes. I spent five in the warehouse cubicle, five in the back office, and five in the secretarial area. I wiped everything I touched with the linen towel, so I wouldn’t leave any prints behind. I found no specific trace of Teresa Daniel. Or of Quinn. But then, there were no names named anywhere. Everything was coded, people and merchandise alike. I came away with only one solid fact. Bizarre Bazaar sold several tens of thousands of individual items every year, to several hundred individual customers, in transactions totaling several tens of millions of dollars. Nothing made clear what the items were or who the customers were. Prices were clustered around three levels: some around fifty bucks, some around a thousand bucks, and some much more than that. There were no shipping records at all. No FedEx, no UPS, no postal service. Clearly distribution was handled privately. But an insurance file I found told me that the corporation owned only two delivery trucks.

  I walked back to the warehouse cubicle and shut the computer down. Retraced my steps to the entrance hallway and turned all the lights off as I went and left everything neat and tidy. I tested Doll’s keys in the front door and found the one that fit and clamped it in my palm. Turned back to the alarm box.

  Doll was clearly trusted to lock up, which meant he knew how to set the alarm. I was sure Duke would do it himself, from time to time. And Beck, obviously. Probably one or two of the clerks as well. A whole bunch of people. One of them would have a lousy memory. I looked at the notice board next to the box. Flipped through the memos where they were pinned three-deep. Found a four-figure code written on the bottom of a two-year-old note from the city about new parking regulations. I entered it on the keypad. The red light started flashing and the box started beeping. I smiled. It never fails. Computer passwords, unlisted numbers, alarm codes, someone always writes them down.

  I went out the front door and closed it behind me. The beeping stopped. I locked it and walked around the corner and slid into Doll’s Lincoln. Started it up and drove it away. I left it in a downtown parking garage. It could have been the same one that Susan Duffy had photographed. I wiped everything I had touched and locked it up and put the keys in my pocket. I thought about setting it on fire. It had gas in the tank and I still had two dry kitchen matches. Burning cars is fun. And it would increase the pressure on Beck. But in the end I just walked away. It was probably the right decision. It would take most of a day for anybody to grow aware of it parked there. Most of another day for them to decide to do something about it. Then another day for the cops to respond. They would trace the plate and come up against one of Beck’s shell corporations. So they would tow it away, pending further inquiry. They would bust open the trunk for sure, worried about terrorist bombs or because of the smell, but by then a whole bunch of other deadlines would have been reached and I would be long gone.

  I walked back to the Taurus and drove it to within a mile of the house. Returned Duffy’s compliment by U-turning and leaving it facing the right way for her. Then I went through my previous routine in reverse. I stripped on the gritty beach and packed the garbage bag. Waded into the sea. I wasn’t keen to do it. It was just as cold. But the tide had turned. It was going my way. Even the ocean was cooperating. I swam the same twelve minutes. Looped right around the end of the wall and came ashore behind the garage block. I was shaking with cold and my teeth were chattering again. But I felt good. I dried myself as well as I could on the damp linen rag and dressed fast before I froze. Left the Glock and the spare magazines and Doll’s set of keys hidden with the PSM and the chisel and the bradawl. Folded the bag and the towel and wedged them under a rock a yard away. Then I headed for my drainpipe. I was still shivering.

  The climb was easier going up than coming down. I walked my hands up the pipe and my feet up the wall. Got level with my window and grabbed the sill with my left hand. Jumped my feet across to the stone ledge. Brought my right hand over and pushed the window up. Hauled myself inside as quietly as I could.

  The room was icy. The window had been open for hours. I closed it tight and stripped again. My clothes were damp. I laid them out on the radiator and headed for the bathroom. Took a long hot shower. Then I locked myself in there with my shoes. It was exactly six in the morning. They would be picking up the Taurus. Probably Eliot and the old guy would be doing it. Probably Duffy would have stayed back at base. I took the e-mail device out and sent: Duffy? Ninety seconds later she came back with: Here. You OK? I sent: Fine. Check these names anywhere you can, inc. with MP Powell—Angel Doll, poss. associate Paulie, both poss. ex-military.


  She sent: Will do.

  Then I sent the question that had been on my mind for five and a half hours: What is Teresa Daniel’s real name?

  There was the usual ninety-second delay, and then she came back with: Teresa Justice.

  CHAPTER 6

  No point in going to bed, so I just stood at the window and watched the dawn. It was soon in full flow. The sun came up over the sea. The air was fresh and clear. I could see fifty miles. I watched an arctic tern coming in low from the north. It skimmed the rocks as it passed them. I guessed it was looking for a place to build a nest. The low sun behind it threw shadows as big as vultures. Then it gave up on the search for shelter and looped and wheeled and swooped away over the water and tumbled into the ocean. It came out a long moment later and silver droplets of freezing water trailed it back into the sky. It had nothing in its beak. But it flew on like it was happy enough. It was better adapted than me.

  There wasn’t much to see after that. There were a few herring gulls far in the distance. I squinted against the glare and looked for signs of whales or dolphins and saw nothing. I watched mats of seaweed drift around on circular currents. At six-fifteen I heard Duke’s footsteps in the corridor and the click of my lock. He didn’t come in. He just tramped away again. I turned and faced the door and took a deep breath. Day thirteen, Thursday. Maybe that was better than day thirteen falling on a Friday. I wasn’t sure. Whatever, bring it on. I took another breath and walked out through the door and headed down the stairs.

  Nothing was the same as the morning before. Duke was fresh and I was tired. Paulie wasn’t around. I went down to the basement gym and found nobody there. Duke didn’t stay for breakfast. He disappeared somewhere. Richard Beck came in to eat in the kitchen. There was just him and me at the table. The mechanic wasn’t there. The cook stayed busy at the stove. The Irish girl came in and out from the dining room. She was moving fast. There was a buzz in the air. Something was happening.