by Lee Child
“I’m in too,” Vantresca said. “Same reason, essentially.”
“Me as well,” Barton said.
Silence for a beat.
“Full disclosure,” Reacher said. “This will not be a walk in the park.”
No objections.
“What first?” Vantresca asked.
“You and Barton figure out which tower. And which three floors. The rest of us will go pay a visit to their main office. Behind the taxi company, across from the pawn shop, next to the bail bond operation.”
“Why?”
“Because some of the greatest mistakes in history are made by secret satellite operations cut off from the mothership. No command and control. No information, no orders, no leadership. No resupply. Complete isolation. That’s what I want for these guys. Quickest way to get it is just go right ahead and destroy the mothership. No need to pussyfoot around. The time for subtlety is long gone.”
“You really don’t like these people.”
“You didn’t speak well of them yourself.”
“They’ll have sentries all over the place.”
“Doubly so now,” Reacher said. “I’ve been calling Gregory on the phone and yanking his chain. No doubt he’s a big brave fellow, but even so, I bet he called in extra reinforcements. Just to be sure.”
“Then it was a dumb idea to yank his chain.”
“No, I want them all in one place. Well, all in two places. The mothership, and the satellite. Nowhere else. No loose ends. No waifs or strays. We could call it Situation D. Much more satisfactory. Massed targets are always more efficient than running after lone fugitives individually. That would take days, in a place like this. We would be chasing around all over town. Best avoided, surely. We’re in a hurry here. We should let them do some of the work for us.”
“You’re nuts, you know that?”
“Says the guy prepared to drive in a straight line at twenty-five miles an hour toward nuclear-tipped antitank artillery.”
“That was different.”
“How exactly?”
Vantresca said, “I guess I’m not sure.”
“Find the tower,” Reacher said. “Get the floor numbers.”
* * *
—
They used the moneylender’s Lincoln again. Commonplace, west of Center. And untouchable. Abby drove. Hogan sat next to her in the front. Reacher sprawled in the back. The streets were quiet. Not much traffic. No cops at all. The cops were east of Center, every single one of them. Guaranteed. By that point the fire department would be pulling crispy skeletons out of the wreckage. One after the other. A big sensation. Everyone would want to be there. Stories, for the grandchildren.
Abby stopped on a hydrant, four blocks directly behind the pawn shop, which was directly across the street from the taxi dispatcher. A straight line on a map. A simple linear progression.
“How far out will the sentries be posted?” Reacher asked.
“Not far,” Hogan said. “They have to cover the full 360. They can’t waste manpower. They’ll keep it tight. All four corners of the block their office is on. That would be my assessment. Maybe they’re even stopping traffic. But nothing more than that.”
“So they can see the front of the pawn shop and the front of the taxi dispatcher.”
“From both ends of the street. Probably two guys per corner.”
“But they can’t see the back of the pawn shop.”
“No,” Hogan said. “To go one street wider in every direction would cost them three times the manpower. Simple math. They can’t afford it.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “Good to know. We’ll go in the back of the pawn shop. We should anyway. We should get Maria’s heirlooms back. They lowballed her, with eighty dollars. I didn’t like that. We should express our disapproval. Maybe their guilty consciences will prompt them to make a generous donation to a medical charity.”
They got out and left the car on the curb next to the fireplug. Reacher figured a parking ticket was the least of Gregory’s problems. They walked the first block. Then the second. Then they got cautious. Maybe no one was posted a block further out, but they could eyeball a block further out. That would be dead easy. They could raise their sight lines from time to time, to stare off into the distance. They could make out faces a block away, and speed, and intent, and body language. Accordingly Reacher kept close to the storefront windows, in the sharp afternoon shadows, widely separated from Abby, who followed twenty feet behind, and then Hogan, all of them strolling, randomly stopping, showing no link between them, in terms of lock step speed or direction or purpose.
Reacher turned left, into the mouth of the cross street. Out of sight. He waited. Abby joined him. Then Hogan. They formed up and walked on together, ten paces on the far sidewalk. Then they stopped again. Geographically speaking, the pawn shop’s rear exit would be ahead on the right. But there were many rear exits ahead on the right, and they were all the same, and they were all unmarked. There were twelve in total. Every establishment had one.
Reacher clicked back in his head to their earlier visit. The search and rescue mission in Abby’s old Toyota. A grimy pawn shop, across a narrow street from a taxi dispatcher and a bail bond operation, Maria coming out the door, Abby pulling over, Aaron winding down his window and calling out her name.
“I remember it as the middle of the block,” he said.
“Except twelve has no middle,” Abby said. “Twelve has six to the left and six to the right and nothing in the actual middle.”
“Because it’s an even number. The middle is a choice of two. The last of the first six or the first of the last six.”
Abby said, “I remember it as not the exact middle of the block.”
“Before the middle or after it?”
“Maybe after it. Maybe even two-thirds of the way along. I remember seeing her, and pulling over. I think it was after the middle of the block.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “We’ll start by taking a look at numbers seven, eight, and nine.”
The buildings were all joined together, and their rear façades were all the same, tall and mean and narrow, built of sullen hundred-year-old brick, pierced here and there randomly by barred windows, festooned all over with wires and cables, drooping and looping from one connection to another. Not always mechanically robust. The rear doors themselves were all the same. All stout identical hundred-year-old items, inward opening, made of wood, but at some point maybe fifty years previously someone had screwed sheets of metal over the lower halves, for durability. Maybe a new landlord, making improvements. The metal sheets showed half a century of wear and tear, from loading and unloading, shipping and receiving, kicking open, kicking shut, banging in and out with hand trucks and trolleys and dollies.
Reacher checked.
Less so on number eight than seven or nine.
In fact much less. In fact not bad at all, for fifty years.
Number eight. The exact definition of two-thirds the way along a block of twelve.
He said, “I think this is the one. Not much comes in or out of a pawn shop on a hand truck or a dolly. Only an occasional item. Like if Barton hocked his speaker cabinet. But most everything else comes in and out in a hand or a pocket.”
The door was locked from the inside. Not a fire exit. Not a bar, not a restaurant. A different regulation. The wood of the door was solid. The frame, maybe not so much. Softer lumber, infrequently painted, maybe a little rotted and spongy.
He asked, “What would the Marine Corps do?”
“Bazooka,” Hogan said. “Best way into any building. Pull the trigger, step through the smoking hole.”
“Suppose you didn’t have a bazooka.”
“Obviously we’ll have to kick the door down. But we better get it done first time. They got a dozen guys within range of a holler for help. We can
’t get hung up back here.”
“Did they teach you kicking down doors in the Corps?”
“No, they gave us bazookas.”
“Force equals mass times acceleration. Take a running start, stamp your foot flat through the door.”
“I’m doing this?”
“Below the handle.”
“I thought it was above the handle.”
“Nearest the keyhole. That’s where the tongue of the lock is. That’s where the most amount of wood has been chiseled out of the frame. Hence where it’s weakest. That’s what you’re looking for. It’s always the frame that breaks. Never the door.”
“Now?”
“We’ll be right behind you.”
Hogan backed off, perpendicular to the door, ten or twelve feet, and he lined up and rocked back and forth, and then he launched, with the kind of grim bouncy focus Reacher had seen on TV, from high jumpers going for the record. He was a musician and a younger man, with physical rhythm and grace and energy, which was why Reacher was making him do the job. The decision paid off big time. Hogan flowed in and jumped up and twisted in mid air and smashed his heel below the handle, like a short-order cook stamping on a roach, hard and snappy and perfectly timed. The door crashed back and Hogan stutter-stepped through and stumbled inside, all windmilling arms and momentum, and then Reacher crowded in after him, and then Abby, into a short dark hallway, toward a half-glass door with Private written on it backward in gold.
There was no reason to stop. No real possibility, either. Hogan burst through the half-glass door, followed by Reacher, followed by Abby, into the shop itself, behind the counter, right by the register, in front of which was a small weasel-like guy, turning to face them, full of shock and surprise. Hogan hit him in the chest with a lowered shoulder, which bounced him off the counter straight into Reacher, who caught him, and spun him around, and touched an H&K to the side of his head. He wasn’t sure which one. He had chosen blind. But no matter. By that point he knew all of them worked.
Abby took the guy’s gun. Hogan found his daily ledger. A big book, handwritten. Maybe a city regulation. Maybe just pawnbroker tradition. Hogan slid his finger up a bunch of lines.
“Here it is,” he said. “Maria Shevick, wedding bands, small solitaires, a watch with a broken crystal. Eighty dollars.”
Reacher asked the guy, “Where is that stuff?”
The guy said, “I could get it for you.”
“You think eighty bucks was fair?”
“Fair is what the market will bear. It depends how desperate people are.”
“How desperate are you right now?” Reacher asked.
“I could certainly get that stuff for you.”
“What else?”
“I could maybe add a couple of pieces. Something nice. Maybe bigger diamonds.”
“You got money?”
“Sure I do, yes, of course.”
“How much?”
“Probably five grand. You can have it all.”
“I know we can,” Reacher said. “That goes without saying. We can take what we want. But that’s the least of your worries. Because this is about more than just a mean transaction. You ran across the street and ratted the old lady out. You caused no end of trouble. Why was that?”
“Are you from Kiev?”
“No,” Reacher said. “But I had their chicken once. It was pretty good.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Gregory is going down. We need to decide if you’re going down with him.”
“I get a text, I got to respond. No choice. Those are the terms, man.”
“What terms?”
“This was my store once. He took it from me. He made me lease it back. There are unwritten conditions.”
“You got to run across the street.”
“No choice.”
“What’s it like over there?”
“Like?” the guy said.
“The layout,” Reacher said.
“You go in a hallway on the left. There’s a door on the right to the taxi room. It’s a real operation. But you go straight on, to the back. There’s a conference room. You walk through it, to another corridor, in the opposite back corner. That’s how you get to the offices. The last one is Danilo’s. You go through Danilo’s office to get to Gregory’s office.”
“How often do you go over there?”
“Only when I have to.”
“You work for them, but you don’t want to.”
“That’s the truth of it.”
“Everyone says that.”
“I’m sure they do. But I mean it.”
Reacher said nothing.
Abby said, “No.”
Hogan said, “No.”
Reacher said, “Go get the stuff we talked about.”
The guy went and got it. The wedding bands, the small solitaires, the broken watch. He put them all in an envelope. Reacher put the envelope in his pocket. Plus all the cash from the register. About five grand. Hopefully the merest drop in the bucket, pretty soon, but Reacher liked cash. He always had. He liked the heft, and the deadness. Hogan roamed the store’s shelves and tore the cords off all the dusty old stereo items, and he tied the guy up with them, secure, uncomfortable, but survivable. Eventually someone would find him and let him go. What happened after that would be up to him.
They left the guy on the floor behind the counter. They stepped out to the well of the store. They looked out the dusty front windows, at the taxi dispatcher across the street.
Chapter 44
They managed to scope out the whole of the block by staying back in the pawn shop, back in the shadows, traversing side to side, peering out at oblique angles. There were two guys on the sidewalk outside the taxi office door, and two guys some distance away on the left-hand street corner, and two guys the same distance away on the right. Six men visible. Plus probably the same again inside. At least. Maybe two in the hallway the pawnbroker had described, plus two in the conference room, plus two at the mouth of the corridor that led onward to the offices. Each of which was no doubt occupied by a made man with a gun in his pocket and a spare in a drawer.
Not good. What the military academies would call a tactical challenge. A head-on assault against a numerically superior opponent in a tightly constrained battle space. Added to which, the guys from the street corners would fold into the action from the rear. Bad guys in front, bad guys behind, no body armor, no grenades, no automatic weapons, no shotguns, no flamethrower.
Reacher said, “I guess the real question is whether Gregory trusts Danilo.”
“Does that matter?” Hogan said.
“Why wouldn’t he?” Abby asked.
“Two reasons,” Reacher said. “First, he trusts no one. You don’t get to be Gregory by trusting people. He’s a snake, so he assumes everyone else is a snake. And second, Danilo is by far his biggest threat. The second in command. The leader in waiting. It’s on the news every night. The generals get deposed, and the colonels take over.”
“Does this help us?”
“You have to go through Danilo’s office to get to Gregory’s office.”
“That’s normal,” Hogan said. “Everyone does it that way. That’s how a chief of staff operates.”
“Think about it in reverse. In order to leave his own office, Gregory has to walk through Danilo’s office. And he’s paranoid, with good reason. And with good results. He’s still alive. In his head this is not necessarily like a CEO in a movie, saying goodnight to his secretary, and calling her sweetheart. This is like walking into a death trap. This is assassination squads behind the desk. Or maybe even worse, this is a blockade, until he accedes to their demands. Maybe they’ll let him step down, with his dignity intact.”
Abby nodded.
“Human nature,” she said. “
Mostly bullshit, but sometimes it rings a bell.”
“What?” Hogan said.
“He built an emergency exit.”
* * *
—
They went back behind the counter, and sat on the floor against the cabinets, not far from the tied-up guy. A high-level staff conference. Always held behind the lines. Hogan played the part of the gloomy Marine. Partly because he was, and partly as a professional obligation. Every plan had to be stress tested, from every possible direction.
He said, “Worst case, we’re going to find exactly the same situation, but flipped around 180. Guys on the sidewalk the next street over, watching the back door, and then more guys inside, in narrow corridors, just the same. There’s a word for it.”
“Symmetrical,” Reacher said.
“Got to be.”
“Human nature,” Abby said. “Mostly bullshit, but sometimes it rings a bell.”
“What now?”
“It’s a bad look,” she said. “An escape hatch makes him look scared. Best case, it makes it look like he doesn’t trust the protection he bought, or the army of loyal soldiers standing in front of him. He can’t admit to any of those feelings. He’s Gregory. He has no weaknesses. His organization has no weaknesses.”
“So?”
“The emergency exit is secret. No one is guarding it because no one knows it exists.”
“Not even Danilo?”
“Most of all not Danilo,” Reacher said. “He’s the biggest threat. This was done behind Danilo’s back. I bet you could trawl through the records and find a two-week spell when he was sent away somewhere, and just before he got back, I bet you would find a couple of construction workers mysteriously dead in some kind of gruesome accident.”
“So that no one except Gregory would know where the secret tunnel is.”
“Exactly.”
“Which includes us. We don’t know where it is either.”
“Some guy’s cellar connects to some other guy’s cellar.”