Median delay before the next train, five minutes.
“It’s a practical thing,” I said. “If you want something done properly, you do it yourself.”
The guy dropped the angle of his arm below the horizontal. Now he was aiming at my knees.
“I’ll shoot,” he said. “You don’t think or talk or remember with your legs.”
No witnesses.
If all else fails, start talking.
I asked, “Why do you want it?”
“Want what?”
“You know what.”
“National security.”
“Offense or defense?”
“Defense, of course. It would ruin our credibility. It would set us back years.”
“You think?”
“We know.”
I said, “Keep working on those intellectual gifts.”
He aimed his gun more precisely. At my left shin.
He said, “I’ll count to three.”
I said, “Good luck with that. Tell me if you get stuck along the way.”
He said, “One.”
Then: The rails hissed in the track bed next to me. Strange metallic harmonic sounds speeding ahead of a train way back in the tunnel. The harmonics were chased all the way by the push of hot air and a deeper rumbling. A curve in the tunnel wall was lit up by a headlight. Nothing happened for a long second. Then the train rushed into view, moving fast, canted over by the camber of the curve. It rocked and straightened and came on at speed and then the brakes bit down and moaned and shrieked and the train slowed and pulled in right alongside us, all bright shining stainless steel and hot light, hissing, grinding, and groaning.
An uptown R train.
Maybe fifteen cars, each one of them dotted with a small handful of passengers.
Witnesses.
I glanced back at the lead agent. His Glock was back under his coat.
We were at the north end of the platform. The R train uses older cars. Each car has four sets of doors. The lead car was halted right next to us. I was more or less in line with the first set of doors. The DoD guys were closer to sets three and four.
The doors opened, the whole length of the train.
Way down at the back end two people got out. They walked away and were gone.
The doors stayed open.
I turned to face the train.
The DoD guys turned to face the train.
I stepped forward.
They stepped forward.
I stopped.
They stopped.
Choices: I could get on through door one, whereupon they would get on through doors three and four. Into the same car. We could ride together all night long. Or I could let the train go without me and spend a minimum twenty more minutes trapped with them on the same platform as before.
The doors stayed open.
I stepped forward.
They stepped forward.
I stepped into the car.
They stepped into the car.
I paused a beat and backed right out again. Back to the platform.
They backed out.
We all stood still.
The doors closed in front of me. Like a final curtain. The rubber bumpers thumped together.
I felt the draw of electricity in the air. Volts and amps. Massive demand. The motors spun up and whined. Five hundred tons of steel started to roll.
The R train uses older cars. They have toe boards and rain gutters. I ducked forward and hooked my fingers into the gutter and jammed my right toes onto the board. Then my left. I flattened myself against the metal and the glass. I hugged the car’s exterior curve like a starfish. The MP5 dug into my chest. I clung on, fingers and toes. The train moved. Breeze tugged at me. The hard edge of the tunnel came right at me. I held my breath and spread my hands and feet wider and ducked my head and laid my cheek against the glass. The train sucked me sideways into the tunnel with about six inches to spare. I glanced back past my locked elbow and saw the lead agent standing still on the platform, one hand in his hair, the other raising his Glock and then lowering it again.
Chapter 76
It was a nightmare ride. Incredible speed, howling blackness, battering noise, unseen obstructions hurtling straight at me, extreme physical violence. The whole train swayed and bounced and bucked and jerked and rocked under me. Every single expansion joint threatened to tear me loose. I dug all eight fingers hard into the shallow gutter and pressed upward with the balls of my thumbs and downward with my toes and held on desperately. Wind tore at my clothes. The door panels swayed and juddered. My head bounced against them like a jackhammer.
I rode nine blocks like that. Then we hit 23rd Street and the train braked hard. I was pitched forward against my left hand’s grip and my right foot’s resistance. I hung on tight and was carried sideways straight into the station’s dazzling brightness at thirty miles an hour. The platform rushed past. I was clamped on the lead car like a limpet. It stopped right at the north end of the station. I arched my body and the doors slid open under me. I stepped inside and collapsed into the nearest seat.
Nine blocks. Maybe a minute. Enough to cure me of subway surfing for life.
There were three other passengers in my car. None of them even looked at me. The doors sucked shut. The train moved on.
* * *
I got out at Herald Square. Where 34th Street meets Broadway and Sixth. Ten to four in the morning. Still on schedule. I was twenty blocks and maybe four minutes north of where I got on the train in Union Square. Too far and too fast for organized DoD resistance. I came up from under the ground and walked east to west along Macy’s imposing flank. Then I headed south on Seventh all the way to the door of Lila Hoth’s chosen hotel.
The night porter was behind the counter. I didn’t unzip my jacket for him. I didn’t think it would be necessary. I just walked up to him and leaned over and slapped him on the ear. He fell off his stool. I vaulted over the counter and caught him by the throat and hauled him upright.
I said, “Tell me the room numbers.”
And he did. Five separate rooms, not adjacent, all of them on the eighth floor. He told me which one the women were in. The men were spread out over the other four. Originally thirteen guys, and eight available beds. Five short straws.
Or five on sentry duty.
I took the roll of black duct tape out of my pocket and used about eight yards of it to bind the porter’s arms and legs. A dollar and a half from any hardware store, but as much a part of standard-issue Special Forces equipment as the thousand-dollar rifles and the satellite radios and the navigation systems. I stuck a final six-inch length across his mouth. I stole his pass card. Just tore it right off its curly cord. Then I left him out of sight on the floor behind the counter and headed for the elevator bank. Got in and pressed the highest number available, which was eleven. The doors slid shut and the car bore me upward.
At that point I unzipped my jacket.
I settled the gun at a nice angle on its strap and I took the leather glove out of my other pocket and slipped it on my left hand. The MP5SD has no fore grip. Not like the stubby K variant, which has a fat little handle under the muzzle. With the SD you use your right hand on the pistol grip and your left hand supports the barrel casing. The inner barrel has thirty holes drilled in it. The powder in the round neither burns nor explodes. It does both. It deflagrates. It creates a bubble of superheated gas. Some of the gas escapes through the thirty holes, which quiets the noise and slows the bullet to a subsonic velocity. No point in silencing a gun if its bullet is going to create a supersonic snap all its own. A slow bullet is a quiet bullet. Just like the VAL Silent Sniper. The escaping gas comes through the thirty holes and expands and swirls around in the inner silencer chamber. Then it passes to the second chamber and expands some more and swirls some more. Expanding cools the gas. Basic physics. But not by much. Maybe it reduces from superheated to extremely hot. And the outer barrel casing is metal. Hence the glove. No one uses an MP5SD w
ithout one. Springfield was the kind of guy who thinks of everything.
On the left side of the gun was a combined safety and fire selector switch. The older versions of the SD that I remembered had a three-position lever. S, E, and F. S for safe, E for single shots, and F for automatic fire. German abbreviations, presumably. E for ein, or one, and so on and so forth, even though Heckler & Koch had been owned by a British corporation for many years. I guessed they decided that tradition counts. But Springfield had given me a newer model. The SD4. It had a four-position selector switch. No abbreviations. Just pictograms. For foreign convenience, or illiterate users. A plain white dot for safe, one little white bullet shape for single shots, three bullet shapes for three-round bursts, and a long string of bullet shapes for continuous automatic fire.
I chose three-round bursts. My favorite. One pull of the trigger, three nine-millimeter rounds inside a quarter of a second. An inevitable degree of muzzle climb, minimized by careful control and the weight of the silencer, resulting in a neat little stitch of three fatal wounds climbing a vertical line maybe an inch and a half high.
Works for me.
Thirty rounds. Ten bursts. Eight targets. One burst each, plus two left over for emergencies.
The elevator chimed open on the eleventh floor, and I heard Lila Hoth’s voice in my head, talking about old campaigns long ago in the Korengal: You must save the last bullet for yourself, because you do not want to be taken alive, especially by the women.
I stepped out of the elevator into a silent corridor.
Standard tactical doctrine for any assault: Attack from the high ground. The eighth floor was three below me. Two ways down: stairs or elevator. I preferred the stairs, especially with a silenced weapon. The smart defensive tactic would be to put a man in the stairwell. Early warning for them. Easy pickings for me. He could be dealt with quietly and at leisure.
The stairwell had a battered door set next to the elevator core. I eased it open and started down. The stairs were dusty concrete. Each floor was marked with a large number painted by hand in green paint. I was quiet all the way down to nine. Supersilent after that. I paused and peered over the metal rail.
No sentry in the stairwell.
The landing inside the eighth floor door was empty. Which was a disappointment. It made the job on the other side of the door twenty-five percent harder. Five men in the corridor, not four. And the way the rooms were distributed meant that some of them would be on my left, and some on my right. Three and two, or two and three. A long second spent facing the wrong way, and then a crucial spin.
Not easy.
But it was four in the morning. The lowest ebb. A universal truth. The Soviets had studied it, with doctors.
I paused on the stairwell side of the door and took a deep breath. Then another. I put my gloved hand on the handle. I took the slack out of the MP5’s trigger.
I pulled the door.
I held it at forty-five degrees with my foot. Cradled the MP5’s barrel in my glove. Looked and listened. No sound. Nothing to see. I stepped into the corridor. Whipped one way. Whipped the other.
No one there.
No sentries, no guards, no nothing. Just a length of dirty matted carpet and dim yellow light and two rows of closed doors. Nothing to hear, except the subliminal hum and shudder of the city and muted faraway sirens.
I closed the stairwell door behind me.
I checked numbers and walked quickly to Lila’s door. Put my ear on the crack and listened hard.
I heard nothing.
I waited. Five whole minutes. Ten. No sound. No one can stay still and silent longer than me.
I dipped the porter’s pass card into the slot. A tiny light flashed red. Then green. There was a click. I smashed the handle down and was inside a split second later.
The room was empty.
The bathroom was empty.
There were signs of recent occupation. The toilet roll was loose and ragged. The sink was wet. A towel was used. The bed was rucked. The chairs were out of position.
I checked the other four rooms. All empty. All abandoned. Nothing left behind. No evidence pointing toward an imminent return.
Lila Hoth, one step ahead.
Jack Reacher, one step behind.
I took my glove off and zipped up again and rode down to the lobby. I hauled the night porter into a sitting position against the back of his counter and tore the tape off his mouth.
He said, “Don’t hit me again.”
I said, “Why shouldn’t I?”
“Not my fault,” he said. “I told you the truth. You asked what rooms I put them in. Past tense.”
“When did they leave?”
“About ten minutes after you came the first time.”
“You called them?”
“I had to, man.”
“Where did they go?”
“I have no idea.”
“What did they pay you?”
“A thousand,” he said.
“Not bad.”
“Per room.”
“Insane,” I said. Which it was. For that kind of money they could have gone back to the Four Seasons. Except they couldn’t. Which was the point.
I paused in the shadows on the Seventh Avenue sidewalk. Where did they go? But first, how did they go? Not in cars. On the way in they had fifteen people. They would have needed three cars, minimum. And faded old piles with night porters working alone don’t have valet parking.
Taxis? Possible, on the way in, late in the evening from midtown. Going out again, at three in the morning on Seventh Avenue? Eight people would have required at least two simultaneous empty cabs.
Unlikely.
Subway? Possible. Probable, even. There were three lines within a block’s walk. Nighttime schedules, a maximum twenty-minute wait on the platform, but then escape either uptown or downtown. But to where? Nowhere that needed a long walk at the other end. A gaggle of eight people hustling hard on the sidewalk was very noticeable. There were six hundred agents on the streets. The only other hotel option I knew was way west of even the Eighth Avenue line. A fifteen-minute walk, maybe more. Too big a risk of exposure.
So, the subway, but to where?
New York City. Three hundred and twenty square miles. Two hundred and five thousand acres. Eight million separate addresses. I stood there and sorted possibilities like a machine.
I drew a blank.
Then I smiled.
You talk too much, Lila.
I heard her voice in my head again. From the tea room at the Four Seasons. She was talking about the old Afghan fighters. Complaining about them, from her pretended perspective. In reality she was boasting about her own people, and the Red Army’s fruitless back-and-forth skirmishing against them. She had said: The mujahideen were intelligent. They had a habit of doubling back to positions we had previously written off as abandoned.
I set off back to Herald Square. To the R train. I could get out at Fifth and 59th. From there it was a short walk to the old buildings on 58th Street.
Chapter 77
The old buildings on 58th Street were all dark and quiet. Four-thirty in the morning, in a neighborhood that does little business before ten. I was watching from fifty yards away. From a shadowed doorway on the far sidewalk across Madison Avenue. There was crime-scene tape across the door with the single bell push. The left-hand building of the three. The one with the abandoned restaurant on the ground floor.
No lights in the windows.
No signs of activity.
The crime-scene tape looked unbroken. And inevitably it would have been accompanied by an official NYPD seal. A small rectangle of paper, glued across the gap between door and jamb, at keyhole height. It was probably still there, untorn.
Which meant there was a back door.
Which was likely, with a restaurant on the premises. Restaurants generate all kinds of unpleasant garbage. All day long. It smells, and it attracts rats. Not acceptable to pile it on the sidewalk. Better to dump
it in sealed cans outside the kitchen door, and then wheel the cans to the curb for the nighttime pick-up.
I moved twenty yards south to widen my angle. Saw no open alleys. The buildings were all cheek-by-jowl, all along the block. Next to the door with the crime-scene tape was the old restaurant’s window. But next to that was another door. Architecturally it was part of the restaurant building’s neighbor. It was set into the ground floor of the next building along. But it was plain, it was black, it was unlabeled, it was a little scarred, it had no step, and it was a lot wider than a normal door. It had no handle on the outside. Just a keyhole. Without a key it opened only from the inside. I made a bet with myself that it let out of a covered alley. I figured that the restaurant’s neighbor was two rooms wide on the ground floor, and three rooms wide above. At the second floor level the block was solid. But below that, at street level, there were passageways leading to rear entrances, all of them discreetly boxed in and built over. Air rights in Manhattan are worth a fortune. The city sells itself up and down, as well as side to side.
I moved back to my shadowed doorway. I was counting time in my head. Forty-four minutes from the time Lila’s guys had been due to grab me up. Maybe thirty-four from the time Lila had expected their mission-accomplished call. Maybe twenty-four from the time she had finally accepted that things had not gone well. Maybe fourteen from the time she had first been tempted to call me.
Lila, you talk too much.
I pressed back in the darkness and waited. The scene in front of me was absolutely deserted. Occasional cars or taxicabs on Madison. No traffic at all on 58th. No pedestrians anywhere. No dog walkers, no partygoers staggering home. Garbage collection was over. Bagel deliveries hadn’t started.
The dead of night.
The city that doesn’t sleep was at least resting comfortably.
I waited.
Three minutes later the phone in my pocket started to vibrate.
I kept my eyes on the restaurant building and opened the phone. Raised it to my ear and said, “Yes?”
She asked, “What happened?”
“You didn’t show.”
“Did you expect me to?”
“I didn’t give it much thought.”
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