by Lee Child
I waited.
I was out in the cold seven more minutes, which when added to the original fifteen made twenty-two, which told me Bennett had indeed quit early and holed up somewhere central to wait on events. I heard his footsteps all the way at the far end of the path, a soft, whispering sound, amplified but also modified by the parallel board fences. Then as he got closer I heard the muted crunch of his soles on the thin scattering of grit, and at one point I heard a brief rat-a-tat scuffle, as if he had swayed on the uneven ground and something in his hand had brushed against the boards. Something leather, I thought, given the sound.
He stepped into the clearing, and stopped. I could see his face, just vaguely, a pale gleam, but I couldn’t see anything else. I couldn’t see his hands.
I waited.
Then he spoke, in his normal sing-song voice, as if we were in a room together and I was six feet away. He said, ‘Reacher? I’m guessing you’re ninety degrees to my left or my right. I have a flashlight with me. I’m not going to shine it on you. I’m going to shine it on myself, and then I’m going to shine it back down the footpath so you can see I came alone.’
I said nothing.
I saw a flashlight beam click on, dancing on the ground, and then it reversed itself in his hand and he played it all over himself, fast, like it was foam and he was on fire. He was in his regular clothes. The thing in his hand was a briefcase. He ended up with the beam high over his head, shining straight down, like a shower rose.
I said, ‘OK, I believe you.’
He glanced my way, inside his cone of light, and then he swung the beam down and picked out his way to the door. I followed him in, and he balanced the flashlight upright on the floor, so the bounce off the ceiling lit us all up. He took a long hard look at Charlie White, and then he turned back to me.
I asked him, ‘What happened to the binoculars?’
He said, ‘I had them removed.’
‘Why?’
‘They weren’t just binoculars. Remember? They were video feeds. Think back through history. Who gets in the least trouble? The guy on the tape, or the guy not on the tape, because there was no tape in the first place?’
‘You were looking out for us?’
‘We’re here to help each other.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I was expecting some action tonight.’
‘You got my information?’
He paused a second, and said, ‘I’ve got information.’
‘But not mine?’
‘I think it’s yours in a way. I think you should own it. A lot of the ideas were yours.’
‘What ideas?’
‘The wrong ideas,’ he said.
He squatted down and popped his briefcase lid, and I saw a photograph inside, black and white, which he picked up and lifted into the light. He offered it to me and Nice equally, like a ceremony, so she took its left edge and I took its right edge, and we held it between us. It was not a regular printed photograph. It had come out of a computer. The paper was thin, and the surface was dull. An e-mailed attachment, maybe, printed out on an office machine.
The picture showed a dead man in what looked like a hospital bed. In what looked like a foreign hospital. The finish on the wall looked different. Somewhere hot, maybe. The kind of place where a hospital could have yellow clay tiles on the floor. The bed was narrow, and made of iron pipe painted white. The sheet was tight and straight, and the blanket was pale and unmarked. High standards from the nursing staff, maybe. Or mugging for the camera. Because the picture was clearly part of an official documentary record. Someone had stood at the foot of the bed and taken a picture for a file. The angle and the framing said so. Like a crime scene photograph. There was a date and a time stamped in. Depending on exactly where in the world it was, it was either very recent, or extremely recent.
The man in the bed had not died easy. That was clear. He had what looked like a bullet wound in his forehead. The skin was all torn up. Not an entry wound. Not an exit wound, either. It was a furrow. Like a glancing blow, that shreds flesh but only cracks bone, instead of piercing it. Maybe an unlucky ricochet.
It was not a new wound. Far from it. I could practically smell it through the paper. I had seen wounds like that before. It was between twelve and twenty days old. That was my guess. And it hadn’t healed. Hadn’t even begun. It looked like it had gone septic early, and gotten messy, and no doubt the infection had caused a raging fever, and it looked like the guy had fallen for it hard, racked and sweating, tossing and shivering, losing weight, getting pale, becoming nothing more than glittering skin wrapped tight over jutting cheekbones, and then finally getting his picture taken by a bored government clerk. Rest in peace, wherever. It was impossible to say what the guy had looked like three weeks before, other than he was probably white, and his skull was a normal size.
I said, ‘So?’
Bennett said, ‘That’s one of the retired snipers we keep an eye on.’
‘And?’
‘He got hired all the way to Venezuela. But things went wrong over there. You know how it is. Everyone betrays everyone else. Our boy got in a gunfight with the police, and he got away, but not before getting hit in the head. Which he didn’t get treated, because now he was on the run. He holed up in a chicken house somewhere, and tried to gut it out. He ate raw eggs and drank from a hosepipe at night. But the infection was bad. A woman found him delirious, and took him to the hospital in the back of her pick-up truck. By that point his blood work looked like toxic waste. He died a day later. He had no name and no ID. But he looked foreign to them, so they put his fingerprints on the Interpol system.’
‘And?’
‘That’s William Carson.’
FORTY-NINE
BENNETT SAID, ‘KOTT is the only one not accounted for now. Which raises two possibilities. Which throws them into a panic, obviously. Because now they have to choose. Either you’re wrong, and the same guy could make both shots, or they’re wrong, and there are more snipers in the world than they know about.’
I said, ‘Which way are they leaning?’
‘I’m sure they’d like to blame you, but they’re supposed to be rational. The truth is they just don’t know.’
‘Not even the psychological subcommittee?’
‘Not even.’
‘It’s option one,’ I said. ‘Kott is on his own.’
‘What tells you that?’
‘A toothless hillbilly in Arkansas.’
‘Are you admitting you were wrong?’
‘I’m admitting I was misled.’
‘By what?’
‘Doesn’t matter yet. Doesn’t change what we have to do next.’
‘Which is what?’
‘We have to get Little Joey out of his house.’
‘How?’
‘We’re going to negotiate with him. Face to face, because of the size of the deal.’
‘Which is what?’
‘We’re going to sell Charlie to him.’
‘Like a ransom?’
I shook my head. ‘Like a purchase price. All anyone knows so far is that Charlie was snatched up by persons unknown, so now we can sell him on, under the table, and Joey can beat whatever kind of information he wants right out of him, and no one will ever be the wiser. Done deal, right there. Because now Joey’s got the account numbers and the passwords and he knows where the bodies are buried. He’s the new boss, automatically.’
‘Will he go for that?’
‘Are you kidding?’
‘I mean, will he understand the logic?’
‘It’s a DNA thing. Like rats. He’ll come running. Which is what we want.’
‘Why were you not more surprised by Carson?’
‘Just a feeling.’
‘About what?’
‘Joey doubled his guard. He didn’t triple it. Yet he likes to put on a show. There were only two people in the house. Joey and Kott.’
‘Why not Joey and Carson?’
‘It wa
s Kott’s bullet in Paris. Chemistry says so. Trust me. This is all about John Kott.’
‘No, this is all about the G8.’
‘The G8 is safe. Trust me on that, too.’
‘It can’t be safe until we get him. He’s the last one.’
‘The G8 was never the target,’ I said.
‘So what is?’
‘I need my information about the glass.’
‘You’ll get it. What’s the target?’
‘Something that doesn’t change what we have to do next.’
‘We’re not doing anything next. They’re still talking.’
‘Who’s talking?’
‘The committees.’
‘John Kott is in Little Joey’s house. That’s all they need to know. Tell them that from me.’
‘They’ll say your credibility is damaged.’
‘Then I’ll do what my mother told me, whenever I got mad. I’ll count to three.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Can you count to three?’
‘Of course I can.’
‘Show me.’
‘One, two, three.’
I said, ‘Do it like time ticking away.’
He said, ‘One second, two second, three second.’
‘Is that how they say it in Wales?’
‘That’s how they say it everywhere.’
‘No, it isn’t. We say one thousand, two thousand.’
‘It’s supposed to sound like a ticking clock. Which it does. Second, second, second. Like something with a pendulum, in your grandma’s front parlour.’
‘That’s pretty good.’
‘What was your point?’
I said, ‘John Kott is in Little Joey’s house.’
Bennett paused a beat, and then he looked over towards the corner of the hut, and he said, ‘We should confirm these wild rumours with Mr White.’
Old Charlie backed away a little when he heard those words. No doubt the Romford Boys asked questions from time to time, of reluctant sources, and no doubt they used methods that ran the whole gamut from brutal to fatal. And apparently he didn’t expect a government agent to be lenient in comparison.
Bennett stepped over and considered the guy for a long moment. Then he took a switchblade from his pocket. A flick knife, in Britain. He thumbed the button and the blade popped out, with a solid thunk. An antique, probably. They had been illegal for so long it had gotten hard to find a good one. He balanced the handle on his thumb, with his four fingers spread along the upper edge, and he moved the blade close to Charlie’s cheek, like he was a barber about to start a shave with a straight razor.
Charlie eased backward, until his head was jammed hard against the wood of the wall.
Casey Nice said, ‘Are we on the record here?’
Bennett said, ‘Don’t worry.’
He used the blade to pick at the edge of the duct tape I had wrapped around Charlie’s mouth. He got some of it lifted and used a fingernail to pouch it out. He made a quarter-inch cut, and then started over, lifting, picking, cutting, a quarter-inch at a time, until the whole two-inch width was severed. He used the blade again, to lift a tab, which he grasped finger-andthumb with his left hand, and then he peeled the tape away from Charlie’s lips, neither fast nor slow, like a nurse changing a dressing. Charlie coughed and ducked his mouth to his shoulder, to wipe it.
Bennett asked him, ‘Who is staying with Joey?’
Charlie said, ‘I don’t know.’
Bennett still had the switchblade open. Charlie’s hands were still taped behind his back. He was wedged as tight in the corner as he could get. No further movement was feasible.
Bennett said, ‘You sell guns to hoodlums everywhere in this country. You peddle heroin and cocaine. You lend a man with mouths to feed fifty pounds, but he pays you back a hundred, or you break his legs. You bring teenage girls from Latvia and Estonia and you turn them out, and when they’re all used up, they go to Joey’s. So on a scale of one to ten, how likely is it that anyone in the whole wide world will give a shit about what I do to you next?’
Charlie didn’t speak.
Bennett said, ‘I need an answer, Mr White. Just so we understand each other. On a scale of one to ten. Where ten is very likely and one is not very likely. Pick a number.’
Charlie didn’t speak.
‘I get it,’ Bennett said. ‘You can’t find the right answer. Because it’s a trick question. The numbers don’t go low enough. No one in the whole wide world is going to give a shit. Not one single person. And they won’t even know anyway. Tomorrow you’ll be in Syria or Egypt or Guantanamo Bay, even. We do things differently now. Your organization is harbouring a rifleman planning to shoot the British prime minister and the American president. You’re the new Osama bin Laden. Or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, at the very least.’
Charlie White said, ‘That’s bullshit.’
‘Which part?’
‘All of it. I wouldn’t have the prime minister shot.’
‘Why not?’
‘I voted for him.’
‘Who is staying with Joey?’
‘I don’t know who it is.’
‘But you know someone is there?’
‘I never met the man.’
Bennett said, ‘He killed Karel Libor for you, and he gave you a lot of money, and he induced you to shake hands with the Serbians, and you’re providing twenty-four-seven shelter and security for him, and for a deal of that magnitude you never talked to him face to face?’
Charlie said nothing.
Bennett said, ‘I think you talked extensively. I think you know every detail. Including the target.’
Charlie said, ‘I want my lawyer.’
Bennett said, ‘Which part of Guantanamo Bay don’t you understand?’
Charlie said nothing.
Bennett said, ‘Hypothetically, then. For now. If a hypothetical man in your hypothetical situation was involved in a deal of that type, would he not want to approve certain details?’
‘Of course he would. Hypothetically.’
‘Including the target?’
‘Of course the target.’
‘Why?’
‘It would have to be acceptable.’
‘Who would be off limits?’
‘Women and children, obviously. And the royal family.’
‘And the prime minister?’
‘That would be a big step. Hypothetically, I mean. I believe such people haven’t dabbled in that kind of politics before.’
‘Just the folding kind?’
‘Hypothetically.’
‘So you know what the target is. Because you approved it.’ No answer.
Bennett said, ‘This is like one of those philosophy questions that people debate in the newspapers. Suppose you had until the sun comes up to find the ticking bomb? How far could you go, legally and ethically?’
No answer.
‘What’s the target, Mr White?’
Charlie said nothing. He was looking at Bennett, looking at me, looking at Bennett, back and forth, with some kind of a plea in his eyes, as if he wanted permission to give each of us a different answer.
I said, ‘Leave it for now, Bennett. It doesn’t change what we have to do next.’
Bennett looked at me, and at Charlie, and at Nice, and then he shrugged and stepped back to where he had been before, by the window, and as he got there the busted door crashed open and a man with a gun stepped in, followed immediately by another, the hut suddenly hot and cramped, six of us in there, and then it got worse. A leg the size of a tree trunk appeared, bent at the knee, and a massive shoulder, and a bent back, and a lowered head, way down under the lintel, where it said Bowling Club outside, and then Little Joey was right there in front of us, in the hut, upright, nearly seven feet tall, the pent of the roof exactly framing his massive head and shoulders.
FIFTY
JOEY’S HUGE BULK pushed his two guys forward, and we didn’t have room to retreat, so we ended up all packed tog
ether like in a subway car, which meant contact between us and them was made early, with one of Joey’s guys pressing up against Casey Nice, and seizing her elbow, and moving her in front of him, presumably with his gun in her back, and the other guy doing the same thing to Bennett, so I had no snap shot. The Glock stayed in my pocket. There was nothing I could do at all, except get a crick in my neck.
Up close and personal Joey was worse than I had feared. He was nothing like the athletes I had seen, years before, from visiting colleges on the West Point campus, the football players and the basketball teams. Those guys had been immense, but quiet and focused and above all contained, as if their frontal lobes were fully in command. Joey didn’t look that way. He was the furthest thing possible from a small nervous guy, but he was twitching and throbbing with the same kinds of spasms. He looked deranged. His eyes were buried deep and his lower lip was hanging down over his absent chin. His teeth were wet. His right foot was tapping on the floor. His left hand was bunched in a fist, and his right hand was arched open, completely rigid.
He looked at Charlie White first, and then he looked away. He looked at Casey Nice, up, down, and then at me, the same, up, down, and then at Bennett, right into his eyes, and he said, ‘You think I didn’t notice the fence blew down? And the tree? You think I’m stupid? You think you’re the only one who can afford night-vision binoculars? We thought you’d gone. But we checked anyway. And look what we found.’
No reply from Bennett. I recognized both of Joey’s guys. They had been in the little supermarket’s parking lot. The security cordon, from the black Jaguar. Two of the four. The pick of the litter. Next to their boss they looked like miniature humans. I assumed the other two were out in the lot. In the cold and the dark. I assumed the driver was still with the Bentley, at the far end of the yard-wide footpath. I put my hands in my pockets. On the right I had the Glock, and on the left I had the linoleum knife. I glanced out the window at the shadowy contours of the street four hundred yards away, and I hoped Kott didn’t have a night-vision scope on his rifle. He could have chosen which eye to plug me through.