Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  I made it back to the kitchen after completing a whole circle. Stepped inside. I didn’t make a sound. The metal detector stayed quiet. The cook didn’t hear me coming. I caught her from behind. Clamped a hand over her mouth and dragged her over to a counter. I wasn’t taking any chances after what Richard had done to me. I found a linen towel in a drawer and used it as a gag. Found another to tie her wrists. Found another to tie her ankles. I left her sitting uncomfortably on the floor next to the sink. I found a fourth towel and put it in my pocket. Then I stepped out into the hallway.

  It was quiet. I could hear Elizabeth Beck’s voice, faintly. Her parlor door was standing open. I couldn’t hear anything else. I went straight to the door of Beck’s den. Opened it. Stepped inside. Closed it again.

  I was met by a haze of cigar smoke. Quinn had just lit up. I got the feeling he had been laughing about something. Now he was frozen with shock. Beck was the same. Pale, and frozen. They were just staring at me.

  “I’m back,” I said.

  Beck had his mouth open. I hit him with a cigarette punch. His mouth slammed shut and his head snapped back and his eyes rolled up and he went straight down on the three-deep rugs on the floor. It was a decent blow, but not my best. His son had saved his life after all. If I hadn’t been so tired from swimming, a better punch would have killed him.

  Quinn came straight at me. Straight out of the chair. He dropped his cigar. Went for his pocket. I hit him in the stomach. Air punched out of him and he folded forward and dropped to his knees. I hit him in the head and pushed him down on his stomach. Knelt on his back, with my knees high up between his shoulder blades.

  “No,” he said. He had no air. “Please.”

  I put the flat of one hand on the back of his head. Took my chisel out of my shoe and slid it in behind his ear and up into his brain, slowly, inch by inch. He was dead before it was halfway in, but I kept it going until it was buried all the way to the hilt. I left it there. I wiped the handle with the towel from my pocket and then I spread the towel over his head and stood up, wearily.

  “Ten-eighteen, Dom,” I said to myself.

  I stepped on Quinn’s burning cigar. Took Beck’s car keys out of his pocket and slipped back into the hallway. Walked through the kitchen. The cook followed me with her eyes. I stumbled around to the front of the house. Slid into the Cadillac. Fired it up and took off west.

  It took me thirty minutes to get to Duffy’s motel. She and Villanueva were together in his room with Teresa Justice. She wasn’t Teresa Daniel anymore. She wasn’t dressed like a doll anymore, either. They had her in a motel robe. She had showered. She was coming around fast. She looked weak and wan, but she looked like a person. Like a federal agent. She stared at me in horror. At first I thought she was confused about who I was. She had seen me in the cellar. Maybe she thought I was one of them.

  But then I saw myself in the mirror on the closet door and I saw her problem. I was wet from head to toe. I was shaking and shivering. My skin was dead white. The cut on my lip had opened and turned blue on the edges. I had fresh bruises where the waves had butted me against the rock. I had seaweed in my hair and slime on my shirt.

  “I fell in the sea,” I said.

  Nobody spoke.

  “I’ll take a shower,” I said. “In a minute. Did you call ATF?”

  Duffy nodded. “They’re on their way. Portland PD has already secured the warehouse. They’re going to seal the coast road, too. You got out just in time.”

  “Was I ever there?”

  Villanueva shook his head. “You don’t exist. Certainly we never met you.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Old school,” he said.

  I felt better after the shower. Looked better, too. But I had no clothes. Villanueva lent me a set of his. They were a little short and wide. I used his old raincoat to hide them. I wrapped it tight around me, because I was still cold. We had pizza delivered. We were all starving. I was very thirsty, from the salt water. We ate and we drank. I couldn’t bite on the pizza crust. I just sucked the topping off. After an hour, Teresa Justice went to bed. She shook my hand. Said good night, very politely. She had no idea who I was.

  “Roofies wipe out their short-term memory,” Villanueva told me.

  Then we talked business. Duffy was very down. She was living a nightmare. She had lost three agents in an illegal operation. And getting Teresa out was no kind of upside. Because Teresa shouldn’t have been in there in the first place.

  “So quit,” I said. “Join ATF instead. You just handed them a big result on a plate. You’ll be flavor of the month.”

  “I’m going to retire,” Villanueva said. “I’m old enough and I’ve had enough.”

  “I can’t retire,” Duffy said.

  In the restaurant the night before the arrest, Dominique Kohl had asked me, “Why are you doing this?”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant. “Having dinner with you?”

  “No, working as an MP. You could be anything. You could be Special Forces, Intelligence, Air Cavalry, Armored, anything you wanted.”

  “So could you.”

  “I know. And I know why I’m doing this. I want to know why you’re doing it.”

  It was the first time anybody had ever asked me.

  “Because I always wanted to be a cop,” I said. “But I was predestined for the military. Family background, no choice at all. So I became a military cop.”

  “That’s not really an answer. Why did you want to be a cop in the first place?”

  I shrugged. “It’s just the way I am. Cops put things right.”

  “What things?”

  “They look after people. They make sure the little guy is OK.”

  “That’s it? The little guy?”

  I shook my head.

  “No,” I said. “Not really. I don’t really care about the little guy. I just hate the big guy. I hate big smug people who think they can get away with things.”

  “You produce the right results for the wrong reasons, then.”

  I nodded. “But I try to do the right thing. I think the reasons don’t really matter. Whatever, I like to see the right thing done.”

  “Me too,” she said. “I try to do the right thing. Even though everybody hates us and nobody helps us and nobody thanks us afterward. I think doing the right thing is an end in itself. It has to be, really, doesn’t it?”

  “Did you do the right thing?” I asked, ten years later.

  Duffy nodded.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “No doubt at all?”

  “No,” she said.

  “You sure?”

  “Totally.”

  “So relax,” I said. “That’s the best you can ever hope for. Nobody helps and nobody says thanks afterward.”

  She was quiet for a spell.

  “Did you do the right thing?” she said.

  “No question,” I said.

  We left it at that. Duffy had put Teresa Justice in Eliot’s old room. That left Villanueva in his, and me in Duffy’s. She seemed a little awkward about what she had said before. About our lack of professionalism. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to reinforce it or trying to withdraw it.

  “Don’t panic,” I said. “I’m way too tired.”

  And this time, I proved I was. Not for lack of trying. We started. She made it clear she wanted to withdraw her earlier objection. Made it clear she agreed that saying yes was better than saying no. I was very happy about that, because I liked her a lot. So we started. We got naked and got in bed together and I remember kissing her so hard it made my mouth hurt. But that’s all I remember. I fell asleep. I slept the sleep of the dead. Eleven hours straight. They were all gone when I woke up. Gone to face whatever their futures held for them. I was alone in the room, with a bunch of memories. It was late morning. Sunlight was coming in through the shades. Motes of dust were dancing in the air. Villanueva’s spare outfit was gone from the back of the chair. There was a shopping bag there instead.
It was full of cheap clothes. They looked like they would fit me very well. Susan Duffy was a good judge of sizes. There were two complete sets. One was for cold weather. One was for hot. She didn’t know where I was headed. So she had catered for both possibilities. She was a very practical woman. I figured I would miss her. For a time.

  I dressed in the hot weather stuff. Left the cold weather stuff right there in the room. I figured I could drive Beck’s Cadillac out to I-95. To the Kennebunk rest area. I figured I could abandon it there. Figured I could catch a ride south without any problem. And I-95 goes to all kinds of places, all the way down to Miami.

  The Enemy

  one

  As serious as a heart attack. Maybe those were Ken Kramer’s last words, like a final explosion of panic in his mind as he stopped breathing and dropped into the abyss. He was out of line, in every way there was, and he knew it. He was where he shouldn’t have been, with someone he shouldn’t have been with, carrying something he should have kept in a safer place. But he was getting away with it. He was playing and winning. He was on top of his game. He was probably smiling. Until the sudden thump deep inside his chest betrayed him. Then everything turned around. Success became instant catastrophe. He had no time to put anything right.

  Nobody knows what a fatal heart attack feels like. There are no survivors to tell us. Medics talk about necrosis, and clots, and oxygen starvation, and occluded blood vessels. They predict rapid useless cardiac fluttering, or else nothing at all. They use words like infarction and fibrillation, but those terms mean nothing to us. You just drop dead is what they should say. Ken Kramer certainly did. He just dropped dead, and he took his secrets with him, and the trouble he left behind nearly killed me too.

  I was alone in a borrowed office. There was a clock on the wall. It had no second hand. Just an hour hand, and a minute hand. It was electric. It didn’t tick. It was completely silent, like the room. I was watching the minute hand, intently. It wasn’t moving.

  I waited.

  It moved. It jumped ahead six degrees. Its motion was mechanical and damped and precise. It bounced once and quivered a little and came to rest.

  A minute.

  One down, one to go.

  Sixty more seconds.

  I kept on watching. The clock stayed still for a long, long time. Then the hand jumped again. Another six degrees, another minute, straight-up midnight, and 1989 was 1990.

  I pushed my chair back and stood up behind the desk. The phone rang. I figured it was someone calling to wish me a happy new year. But it wasn’t. It was a civilian cop calling because he had a dead soldier in a motel thirty miles off-post.

  “I need the Military Police duty officer,” he said.

  I sat down again, behind the desk.

  “You got him,” I said.

  “We’ve got one of yours, dead.”

  “One of mine?”

  “A soldier,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Motel, in town.”

  “Dead how?” I asked.

  “Heart attack, most likely,” the guy said.

  I paused. Turned the page on the army-issue calendar on the desk, from December 31st to January 1st.

  “Nothing suspicious?” I said.

  “Don’t see anything.”

  “You seen heart attacks before?”

  “Lots of them.”

  “OK,” I said. “Call post headquarters.”

  I gave him the number.

  “Happy New Year,” I said.

  “You don’t need to come out?” he said.

  “No,” I said. I put the phone down. I didn’t need to go out. The army is a big institution, a little bigger than Detroit, a little smaller than Dallas, and just as unsentimental as either place. Current active strength is 930,000 men and women, and they are as representative of the general American population as you can get. Death rate in America is around 865 people per 100,000 population per year, and in the absence of sustained combat soldiers don’t die any faster or slower than regular people. On the whole they are younger and fitter than the population at large, but they smoke more and drink more and eat worse and stress harder and do all kinds of dangerous things in training. So their life expectancy comes out about average. Soldiers die at the same speed as everyone else. Do the math with the death rate versus current strength, and you have twenty-two dead soldiers every single day of every single year, accidents, suicides, heart disease, cancer, stroke, lung disease, liver failure, kidney failure. Like dead citizens in Detroit, or Dallas. So I didn’t need to go out. I’m a cop, not a mortician.

  The clock moved. The hand jumped and bounced and settled. Three minutes past midnight. The phone rang again. It was someone calling to wish me a happy new year. It was the sergeant in the office outside of mine.

  “Happy New Year,” she said to me.

  “You too,” I said. “You couldn’t stand up and put your head in the door?”

  “You couldn’t put yours out the door?”

  “I was on the phone.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Nobody,” I said. “Just some grunt didn’t make it to the new decade.”

  “You want coffee?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

  I put the phone down again. At that point I had been in more than six years, and army coffee was one of the things that made me happy to stay in. It was the best in the world, no question. So were the sergeants. This one was a mountain woman from north Georgia. I had known her two days. She lived off-post in a trailer park somewhere in the North Carolina Badlands. She had a baby son. She had told me all about him. I had heard nothing about a husband. She was all bone and sinew and she was as hard as woodpecker lips, but she liked me. I could tell, because she brought me coffee. They don’t like you, they don’t bring you coffee. They knife you in the back instead. My door opened and she came in, carrying two mugs, one for her and one for me.

  “Happy New Year,” I said to her.

  She put the coffee down on my desk, both mugs.

  “Will it be?” she said.

  “Don’t see why not,” I said.

  “The Berlin Wall is halfway down. They showed it on the television. They were having a big party over there.”

  “I’m glad someone was, somewhere.”

  “Lots of people. Big crowds. All singing and dancing.”

  “I didn’t see the news.”

  “This all was six hours ago. The time difference.”

  “They’re probably still at it.”

  “They had sledgehammers.”

  “They’re allowed. Their half is a free city. We spent forty-five years keeping it that way.”

  “Pretty soon we won’t have an enemy anymore.”

  I tried the coffee. Hot, black, the best in the world.

  “We won,” I said. “Isn’t that supposed to be a good thing?”

  “Not if you depend on Uncle Sam’s paycheck.”

  She was dressed like me in standard woodland camouflage battledress uniform. Her sleeves were neatly rolled. Her MP brassard was exactly horizontal. I figured she had it safety-pinned in back where nobody could see. Her boots were gleaming.

  “You got any desert camos?” I asked her.

  “Never been to the desert,” she said.

  “They changed the pattern. They put big brown splotches on it. Five years’ research. Infantry guys are calling it chocolate chip. It’s not a good pattern. They’ll have to change it back. But it’ll take them another five years to figure that out.”

  “So?”

  “If it takes them five years to revise a camo pattern, your kid will be through college before they figure out force reduction. So don’t worry about it.”

  “OK,” she said, not believing me. “You think he’s good for college?”

  “I never met him.”

  She said nothing.

  “The army hates change,” I said. “And we’ll always have enemies.”

  She said nothing. My phone ra
ng again. She leaned forward and answered it for me. Listened for about eleven seconds and handed me the receiver.

  “Colonel Garber, sir,” she said. “He’s in D.C.”

  She took her mug and left the room. Colonel Garber was ultimately my boss, and although he was a pleasant human being it was unlikely he was calling eight minutes into New Year’s Day simply to be social. That wasn’t his style. Some brass does that stuff. They come over all cheery on the big holidays, like they’re really just one of the boys. But Leon Garber wouldn’t have dreamed of trying that, with anyone, and least of all with me. Even if he had known I was going to be there.

  “Reacher here,” I said.

  There was a long pause.

  “I thought you were in Panama,” Leon Garber said.

  “I got orders,” I said.

  “From Panama to Fort Bird? Why?”

  “Not my place to ask.”

  “When was this?”

  “Two days ago.”

  “That’s a kick in the teeth,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Is it?”

  “Panama was probably more exciting.”

  “It was OK,” I said.

  “And they got you working duty officer on New Year’s Eve already?”

  “I volunteered,” I said. “I’m trying to make people like me.”

  “That’s a hopeless task,” he said.

  “A sergeant just brought me coffee.”

  There was another pause. “Someone just call you about a dead soldier in a motel?” he asked.

  “Eight minutes ago,” I said. “I shuffled it off to headquarters.”

  “And they shuffled it off to someone else and I just got pulled out of a party to hear all about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the dead soldier in question is a two-star general.”

  The phone went quiet.

  “I didn’t think to ask,” I said.

  The phone stayed quiet.