“OK,” I said. “I’m imagining.”
“Have you noticed how a used newspaper kind of becomes community property? Seen what they do on a train, for instance? Or a subway? A guy reads his paper, leaves it on the seat when he gets out, another guy picks it up right away? He’d rather die than pick up half a candy bar, but he’ll pick up a used newspaper with no problem at all?”
“OK,” I said.
“Our guy is about forty,” she said. “Tall, maybe six-one, trim, maybe one-ninety, short black hair going gray, fairly upmarket. He wears good clothes, chinos, golf shirts, and he kind of saunters through the lot to the can.”
“Saunters?”
“It’s a word,” she said. “Like he’s strolling, lost in thought, not a care in the world. Like maybe he’s coming back from Sunday brunch. Then he notices the newspaper sitting in the top of the can, and he picks it up and checks the headlines for a moment, and he kind of tilts his head a little and he puts the paper under his arm like he’ll read some more of it later and he strolls on.”
“Saunters on,” I said.
“It’s incredibly natural,” she said. “I was right there watching it happen and I almost discounted it. It’s almost subliminal.”
I thought about it. She was right. She was a good student of human behavior. Which made her a good cop. If I ever did actually get around to a performance review, she was going to score off the charts.
“Something else you speculated about,” she said. “He saunters on out to the marina and gets on a boat.”
“He lives on it?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I mean, it’s got bunks and all, but I think it’s a hobby boat.”
“How do you know it’s got bunks?”
“I’ve been aboard,” she said.
“When?”
“The second Sunday,” she said. “Don’t forget, all I’d seen up to that point was the business with the newspaper. I still hadn’t positively identified the document. But he went out on another boat with some other guys, so I checked it out.”
“How?”
“Exemplary application of relevant skills,” she said. “I wore a bikini.”
“Wearing a bikini is a skill?” I said. Then I looked away. In her case, it would be more like world-class performance art.
“It was still hot then,” she said. “I blended in with the other yacht bunnies. I strolled out, walked up his little gangplank. Nobody noticed. I picked the lock on the hatch and searched for an hour.”
I had to ask.
“How did you conceal lock picks in a bikini?” I said.
“I was wearing shoes,” she said.
“Did you find the blueprint?”
“I found all of them.”
“Did the boat have a name?”
She nodded. “I traced it. There’s a yacht registry for all that stuff.”
“So who’s the guy?”
“This is the part you’re going to hate,” she said. “He’s a senior Military Intelligence officer. A lieutenant colonel, a Middle East specialist. They just gave him a medal for something he did in the Gulf.”
“Shit,” I said. “But there might be an innocent explanation.”
“There might,” she said. “But I doubt it. I just met with Gorowski an hour ago.”
“OK,” I said. That explained the dress greens. Much more intimidating than wearing a bikini, I guessed. “And?”
“And I made him explain his end of the deal. His little girls are twelve months and two. The two-year-old disappeared for a day, two months ago. She won’t talk about what happened to her while she was gone. She just cries a lot. A week later our friend from Military Intelligence showed up. Suggested that the kid’s absence could last a lot longer than a day, if daddy didn’t play ball. I don’t see any innocent explanation for that kind of stuff.”
“No,” I said. “Nor do I. Who is the guy?”
“His name is Francis Xavier Quinn,” she said.
The cook brought the next course, which was some kind of a rib roast, but I didn’t really notice it because I was still thinking about Francis Xavier Quinn. Clearly he had come out of the California hospital and left the Quinn part of his name behind him in the trash with his used gowns and his surgical dressings and his John Doe wrist bands. He had just walked away and stepped straight into a new identity, ready made. An identity that he felt comfortable with, one that he would always remember deep down at the primeval level he knew hidden people had to operate on. No longer United States Army Lieutenant Colonel Quinn, F.X., Military Intelligence. From that point on, he was just plain Frank Xavier, anonymous citizen.
“Rare or well?” Beck asked me.
He was carving the roast with one of the black-handled knives from the kitchen. They had been stored in a knife block and I had thought about using one of them to kill him with. The one he was using right then would have been a good choice. It was about ten inches long, and it was razor sharp, judging by how well the meat was slicing. Unless the meat happened to be unbelievably tender.
“Rare,” I said. “Thank you.”
He carved me two slices and I regretted it instantly. My mind flashed back seven hours to the body bag. I had pulled the zipper down and seen another knife’s work. The image was so vivid I could still feel the cold metal tag between my fingers. Then I flashed back ten whole years, right back to the beginning with Quinn, and the loop was complete.
“Horseradish?” Elizabeth said.
I paused. Then I took a spoonful. The old army rule was Eat every time you can, sleep every time you can, because you didn’t know when you were going to get another chance to do either. So I shut Quinn out of my mind and helped myself to vegetables and started eating. Restarted thinking. Everything I’d heard, everything I’d seen. I kept coming back to the Baltimore marina in the bright sunlight, and to the envelope and the newspaper. Not this, but that. And to the thing Duffy had said to me: You haven’t found anything useful. Not a thing. No evidence at all.
“Have you read Pasternak?” Elizabeth asked me.
“What do you think of Edward Hopper?” Richard asked.
“You think the M16 should be replaced?” Beck said.
I surfaced again. They were all looking at me. It was like they were starved for conversation. Like they were all lonely. I listened to the waves crashing around three sides of the house and understood how they could feel that way. They were very isolated. But that was their choice. I like isolation. I can go three weeks without saying a word.
“I saw Doctor Zhivago at the movies,” I said. “I like the Hopper painting with the people in the diner at night.”
“Nighthawks,” Richard said.
I nodded. “I like the guy on the left, all alone.”
“Remember the name of the diner?”
“Phillies,” I said. “And I think the M16 is a fine assault rifle.”
“Really?” Beck said.
“It does what an assault rifle is supposed to do,” I said. “You can’t ask for much more than that.”
“Hopper was a genius,” Richard said.
“Pasternak was a genius,” Elizabeth said. “Unfortunately the movie trivialized him. And he hasn’t been well translated. Solzhenitsyn is overrated by comparison.”
“I guess the M16 is an improved rifle,” Beck said.
“Edward Hopper is like Raymond Chandler,” Richard said. “He captured a particular time and place. Of course, Chandler was a genius, too. Way better than Hammett.”
“Like Pasternak is better than Solzhenitsyn?” his mother said.
They went on like that for a good long time. Day fourteen, a Friday, nearly over, eating a beef dinner with three doomed people, talking about books and pictures and rifles. Not this, but that. I tuned them out again and trawled back ten years and listened to Sergeant First Class Dominique Kohl instead.
“He’s a real Pentagon insider,” she said to me, the seventh time we met. “Lives close by in Virginia. That’s why he k
eeps his boat up in Baltimore, I guess.”
“How old is he?” I asked.
“Forty,” she said.
“Have you seen his full record?”
She shook her head. “Most of it is classified.”
I nodded. Tried to put the chronology together. A forty-year-old would have been eligible for the last two years of the Vietnam draft, at the age of eighteen or nineteen. But a guy who wound up as an intel light colonel before the age of forty had almost certainly been a college graduate, maybe even a Ph.D., which would have gotten him a deferment. So he probably didn’t go to Indochina, which in the normal way of things would have slowed his promotion. No bloody wars, no dread diseases. But his promotion hadn’t been slow, because he was a light colonel before the age of forty.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Kohl said. “How come he’s already two whole pay grades above you?”
“Actually I was thinking about you in a bikini.”
She shook her head. “No you weren’t.”
“He’s older than me.”
“He went up like a bottle rocket.”
“Maybe he’s smarter than me,” I said.
“Almost certainly,” she said. “But even so, he’s gone real far, real fast.”
I nodded.
“Great,” I said. “So now we’re messing with a big star from the intel community.”
“He’s got lots of contact with foreigners,” she said. “I’ve seen him with all kinds of people. Israelis, Lebanese, Iraqis, Syrians.”
“He’s supposed to,” I said. “He’s a Middle East specialist.”
“He comes from California,” she said. “His dad was a railroad worker. His mom stayed at home. They lived in a small house in the north of the state. He inherited it, and it’s his only asset. And we can assume he’s been on military pay since college.”
“OK,” I said.
“He’s a poor boy, Reacher,” she said. “So how come he rents a big house in MacLean, Virginia? How come he owns a yacht?”
“Is it a yacht?”
“It’s a big sailboat with bedrooms. That’s a yacht, right?”
“POV?”
“A brand-new Lexus.”
I said nothing.
“Why don’t his own people ask these kind of questions?” she said.
“They never do,” I said. “Haven’t you noticed that? Something can be plain as day and it passes them by.”
“I really don’t understand how that happens,” she said.
I shrugged.
“They’re human,” I said. “We should cut them some slack. Preconceptions get in the way. They ask themselves how good he is, not how bad he is.”
She nodded. “Like I spent two days watching the envelope, not the newspaper. Preconceptions.”
“But they should know better.”
“I guess.”
“Military Intelligence,” I said.
“The world’s biggest oxymoron,” she replied, in the familiar old ritual. “Like safe danger.”
“Like dry water,” I said.
“Did you enjoy it?” Elizabeth Beck asked me, ten years later.
I didn’t answer. Preconceptions get in the way.
“Did you enjoy it?” she asked again.
I looked straight at her. Preconceptions.
“Sorry?” I said. Everything I had heard.
“Dinner,” she said. “Did you enjoy it?”
I looked down. My plate was completely empty.
“It was fabulous,” I said. Everything I had seen.
“Really?”
“No question,” I said. You haven’t found anything useful.
“I’m glad,” she said.
“Forget Hopper and Pasternak,” I said. “And Raymond Chandler. Your cook is a genius.”
“You feeling OK?” Beck said. He had left half his meat on his plate.
“Terrific,” I said. Not a thing.
“You sure?”
I paused. No evidence at all.
“Yes, I really mean it,” I said.
And I really did mean it. Because I knew what was in the Saab. I knew for sure. No doubt about it. So I felt terrific. But I felt a little ashamed, too. Because I had been very, very slow. Painfully slow. Disgracefully slow. It had taken me eighty-six hours. More than three and a half days. I had been every bit as dumb as Quinn’s old unit. Something can be plain as day and it passes them by. I turned my head and looked straight at Beck like I was seeing him for the very first time.
CHAPTER 11
I knew, but I calmed down fast during dessert and coffee. And I gave up on feeling terrific. Gave up on feeling ashamed, too. Those emotions were crowded out. I started to feel a little concerned instead. Because I started to see the exact dimensions of the tactical problem. And they were huge. They were going to force a whole new definition of working alone and undercover.
Dinner ended and everybody scraped their chairs back and stood up. I stayed in the dining room. I left the Saab’s headliner undisturbed. I was in no hurry. I could get to it later. There was no point risking trouble to confirm something I already knew. I helped the cook clean up instead. It seemed polite. Maybe it was even expected. The Becks went off somewhere and I carried dishes through to the kitchen. The mechanic was in there, eating a bigger portion of beef than I had gotten. I looked at him and started to feel a little ashamed again. I hadn’t paid him any attention at all. Hadn’t thought much about him. I had never even asked myself what he was for. But now I knew.
I loaded the dishes into the machine. The cook did economical things with the leftovers and wiped off the counters and within about twenty minutes we had everything squared away. Then she told me she was headed for bed so I said good night to her and went out the back door and walked across the rocks. I wanted to look at the sea. Wanted to gauge the tide. I had no experience with the ocean. I knew the tides came in and out maybe twice a day. I didn’t know when or why. Something to do with the moon’s gravity, maybe. Possibly it turned the Atlantic into a giant bathtub sloshing east and west between Europe and America. Maybe when it was low tide in Portugal it was high tide in Maine, and vice versa. I had no idea. Right then the tide looked to be changing from high to low. From in to out. I watched the waves for five more minutes and then headed back to the kitchen. The mechanic had left. I used the bunch of keys Beck had given me to lock the inner door. I left the outer door open. Then I walked through the hallway and checked the front. I guessed I was supposed to do stuff like that now. It was locked and chained. The house was quiet. So I went upstairs to Duke’s room and started planning the endgame.
There was a message from Duffy waiting for me in my shoe. It said: You OK? I replied: Sincere thanks for the phones. You saved my ass.
She came back with: Mine too. Equal element of self-interest.
I didn’t reply to that. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just sat there in the silence. She had won a minor postponement, but that was all. Her ass was toast, whatever happened next. Nothing I could do about that.
Then she sent: Have searched all files and cannot repeat cannot find authorization for 2nd agent.
I sent: I know.
She came back with just two characters: ??
I sent: We need to meet. I will either call or just show up. Stand by.
Then I shut down the power and nailed the device back into my heel and wondered briefly whether I would ever take it out again. I checked my watch. It was nearly midnight. Day fourteen, a Friday, was nearly over. Day fifteen, a Saturday, was about to begin. Two weeks to the day since I had barged through the crowd outside Symphony Hall in Boston, on my way to a bar I never reached.
I lay down on the bed, fully dressed. I figured the next twenty-four or forty-eight hours were going to be crucial, and I wanted to spend five of the first six of them fast asleep. In my experience tiredness causes more foul-ups than carelessness or stupidity put together. Probably because tiredness itself creates carelessness and stupidity. So I got
comfortable and closed my eyes. Set the alarm in my head for two o’clock in the morning. It worked, like it always does. I woke up after a two-hour nap, feeling OK.
I rolled off the bed and crept downstairs. Went through the hallway and the kitchen and unlocked the back door. I left all my metal stuff on the table. I didn’t want the detector to make a noise. I stepped outside. It was very dark. There was no moon. No stars. The sea was loud. The air was cold. There was a breeze. It smelled of dampness. I walked around to the fourth garage and opened the doors. The Saab was still there, undisturbed. I eased the hatch open and pulled out my bundle. Carried it around and stowed it in its dip. Then I went back for the first bodyguard. He had been dead for several hours and the low temperature was bringing rigor on early. He was pretty stiff. I hauled him out and jacked him up on my shoulder. It was like carrying a two-hundred-pound tree trunk. His arms stuck out like branches.
I carried him to the V-shaped cleft that Harley had shown me. Laid him down next to it and started counting waves. Waited for the seventh. It rolled in and just before it got to me I nudged the body into the cleft. The water came in under it and pushed it right back up at me. It was like the guy was trying to grab me with his rigid arms and take me with him. Or like he wanted to kiss me good-bye. He floated there for a second quite lazily and then the wave receded and the cleft drained and he was gone.
It worked the same way for the second guy. The ocean took him away to join his buddy, and the maid. I squatted there for a moment, feeling the breeze on my face, listening to the tireless tide. Then I went back and closed up the Saab’s hatch and slid into the driver’s seat. Finished the job on the headliner and reached back and pulled out the maid’s notes. There were eight legal-size pages of them. I read them all in the dim glow from the dome light. They were full of specifics. They had plenty of fine detail. But in general they didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. I checked them twice and when I was finished I butted them into a neat stack and carried them back to the tip of the point. Sat down on a rock and folded each page into a paper boat. Somebody had showed me how, when I was a kid. Maybe it had been my dad. I couldn’t remember. Maybe it had been my brother. I launched the eight little boats on the receding tide one after the other and watched them sail and bob away into the pitch darkness in the east.
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