by Lee Child
“That’s your plan?”
“Think about it from Gregory’s point of view. This is a guy who got where he is by taking no chances at all. He’s thinking about slamming the door on an assassination attempt and getting the hell out of there. A high-stress situation. He can’t afford confusion. He needs it clear and simple. Maybe arrows on the wall. Maybe emergency lighting, like on an airplane. All we need to do is find the street door at the far end. We can go in and follow the arrows backward. Maybe we’ll come out behind an oil painting on his office wall.”
“We’ll have all the same people ahead of us. Except in reverse order. They’ll come pouring in through the office door.”
“We can only hope.”
“I don’t see what we gain.”
“Two things,” Reacher said. “We’ll have no one behind us, and we’ll be taking them out from the top to the bottom, instead of the bottom to the top. Much more efficient.”
“Wait,” Hogan said. “There are guys on the street corners. Symmetrical. The back corners become the front corners. It won’t be easy to get in.”
“If I wanted easy I would have joined the Marines.”
* * *
—
They left the pawn shop the same way they came in, through the back hallway, through the rear door, out to the cross street. They hustled back to the car, at first cautious, and then fast. The car was still there. No ticket. Even the traffic cops were east of Center. Abby drove. She knew her way around. She made a wide loop, well out of sight of the taxi office. She stopped two blocks behind it, on a quiet street, outside a mom-and-pop store that sold washing machine hoses. She left the motor running. Hogan got out, and she scooted across to the passenger seat. Hogan walked around the hood and got in again behind the wheel. Reacher stayed in the back.
“Ready?” he said.
A tight nod from Hogan.
A determined nod from Abby.
“OK, let’s do it,” he said.
Hogan drove the rest of the block and made a left at the end. A block ahead in the new direction were two guys on the corner. On the far sidewalk. Black suits, white shirts. Previously the far left corner, now the near right corner. Symmetrical. They were standing with their backs to the block they were guarding, looking outward, like good sentries should.
What they saw was one of their own cars cruising toward them. A black Lincoln. Indistinct faces behind the windshield. Black glass in the back. It made the left in front of them. Into the cross street. Gregory’s real estate on the right, civilian real estate on the left. And way up ahead, two more guys, on the next corner. Previously the far right, now the near left.
The car slowed and stopped on the curb. The rear window rolled down and a hand came out and beckoned. The guys on the corner took a step toward it, automatically. Reflex action. Then they stopped and thought about it. But they didn’t change their minds. Why would they? It was their car, and anyone important enough to be out and about during Situation C wouldn’t want to be kept waiting. So they started up again and hustled.
Mistake.
The front door opened when they were ten feet away, and Abby stepped out. The rear door opened just as they got there, and Reacher stepped out. He head-butted the first to arrive, barely any effort or movement, all about timing and momentum, like a soccer forward meeting a hard cross from out wide. The guy went down in the gutter. His head cracked on the curbstone. Not his day.
Reacher moved on, to the second guy. A face he suddenly realized he knew. From the bar with the tiny pizzas and Abby waiting tables. The guy on the door. Run along now, kid, he had said to her. I’ll see you again, Reacher had said to him. I hope.
Good things come to those who wait.
Reacher popped him with a short left to the face, just a tap, to straighten him up, for a second short left, this time to the gut, to bend him over, to bring his head down to a convenient position, which was chest height to Reacher, maybe a little below, so he could grab it and twist it and jerk it with all the torque in his upper body. The neck broke and the guy went down. Pretty close to his pal. Reacher squatted between them and took the magazines out of their pistols.
The Lincoln drove away.
Reacher watched. The guys on the far corner had come closer. Inevitable. Symmetrical. For the same reasons. They were still coming closer. Now they were running. Hogan accelerated hard and mounted the sidewalk and smashed straight into them. Not pretty. They came flailing up in the air, proving all the clichés true, like rag dolls, like they were flying. Probably they were already dead. From the impact. Certainly they made no attempt to cushion their fall. They just smashed down, sliding, rolling, scraping, arms and legs everywhere. Hogan parked the car and got out. Reacher got up and started walking.
They met in the middle of the block. Abby was already there. She pointed back the way Hogan had come.
She said, “It’s that way.”
“How can you tell?” Reacher asked.
It was not the kind of street he was expecting. Not like behind the pawn shop. There was no sullen brick, no barred windows, no drooping wires or cables. Instead there was a neat line of newly restored buildings. Like the street with the law project office. Clean and bright. In this case mostly retail stores. Nicer and better than the strip with the taxi company and the bail bond operation. It was a block with two fronts, one coming up, one staying down.
Abby said, “I figured he would start from the outside in. He couldn’t keep it a secret if he started from the inside out. He couldn’t have construction workers trooping through the taxi office. Not without questions being asked. So he started back here, during the renovations, which was the perfect cover. He would have had access to detailed plans and surveys. He would have known what was connected to what. So he got it done. The back of one of these stores leads to the back of his office.”
“Symmetrical,” Hogan said.
“Only in principle,” Abby said. “I’m sure the reality is a warren full of dog-leg turns. This block is more than a hundred years old.”
“Which store?” Reacher asked.
“Human nature,” Abby said. “I figured in the end he couldn’t bring himself to rent it out. He needed to be absolutely sure. He didn’t want to worry about someone putting a display cabinet against his secret door. He needed control. So I looked for vacant units. There’s only one. The window is papered over. It’s that way.”
She pointed again, back the way Hogan had come.
* * *
—
The vacant store was a classic unit, built in an old-fashioned style, with a floor to ceiling display window that curved around inward, to meet the front door maybe twelve feet back from the sidewalk, at the end of what amounted to a viewing arcade, with mosaic tile on the floor. The door itself was glass in a frame, papered over. Reacher guessed the lock would be simple. Like an old-fashioned household item. Twist the stubby lever, pull, and you were good to go. No key required. A key might be in the wrong pants pocket at the critical moment. And keys were slow. Gregory didn’t want slow. He would be running, probably for his life. He wanted twist, pull, go.
“Is there an alarm?” Hogan asked. “He’s a paranoid guy. He would want to know if someone was messing around back here.”
Reacher nodded.
“I’m sure he would,” he said. “But in the end I think he acted realistic. Alarms go wrong. He didn’t want to risk it beeping when he was out of the office. Because Danilo might be there to hear it. In which case questions would be asked, for sure. The secret wouldn’t last for long. So I think no alarm. But I’m sure it was a tough decision.”
“OK, then.”
“Ready?”
A tight nod from Hogan.
A determined nod from Abby.
Reacher took out his ATM card. The best way past such a household item. He fiddled it into the crack,
and curved and curled it around, until it jammed against the tongue of the lock. He yanked the door back toward the hinge, and some combination of sudden pressures told the crude mechanism the key had been turned, so the lock sprang back obediently.
Reacher pushed the door and stepped inside.
Chapter 45
The store had been renovated but never occupied. It was still full of faint construction smells. Wallboard, spackle, paint. The paper on the window gave a soft, cloudy light. The place was just an empty white space. A huge bare cube. Not fitted out in any way. Reacher knew nothing about the retail trade. From what he saw, he assumed the merchant was responsible for bringing in what was needed. Counters, registers, shelves, and racks.
The back wall had a single door in it, properly cased with millwork, painted white, with a big brass lever handle. Not a secret door. Behind it was a short dark hallway. Restroom to the left, office to the right. At the end of the hallway was another door. Properly cased with millwork, painted white, with a big brass handle. Not secret. Behind it was another raw space, full width, maybe twenty feet deep. The left side was for storing stock, maybe. The right side was mechanical. There was a forced-air furnace and a water heater and an air conditioning unit. The air shared the same ductwork as the heat. The ducts were still new and bright. The joins were taped with duct tape. What it was for, originally. There were water pipes and gas pipes coming up out of the concrete floor. There was an HVAC unit in the rear wall. Reacher had seen similar items in hotel rooms. Tall, narrow, all-in-one units. There were electrical panels standing open in the gloom. None of the breakers were labeled.
There were no more doors.
Abby said nothing.
Reacher turned and looked back. Everything else was right. A straight shot out through the hallway, onward through the retail space, twist, pull, go, and out to the street. Fast. Unimpeded. Nothing in the way. All good. Except no more doors.
“He’s paranoid,” Hogan said. “Even though he never rented the unit, he knew he could still get people coming in here from time to time. City inspectors, pest control, maybe an emergency plumber if there’s a leak. He didn’t want guys like that seeing a door and wondering what was behind it. They might have taken a look. Professional curiosity. Therefore the door is disguised somehow. Maybe it’s not even a door at all. Maybe it’s just a bust-out panel of wallboard. No studs behind it.”
He tapped his way along the wall. The sound didn’t change. Halfway between hollow and solid, everywhere.
“Wait,” Reacher said. “We’ve got a forced-air furnace and an air conditioner feeding the same network of ducts, presumably controlled by some kind of a complicated thermostat on a wall somewhere. A brand new installation, still bright and shiny.”
“So?” Hogan said.
“Why did they need a separate HVAC unit in the wall? If they wanted more heat or air back here, they could have put a couple extra vents in the ceiling. It would have cost them a dollar.”
They gathered in front of the unit. They looked at it like a sculpture in a gallery. It was about head height to Abby. The bottom two-thirds was a plain metal panel attached by turnbuckle screws. Then came two rotary controls, one for heat-off-cool, the other for temperature, cold to warm, illustrated by a circular swipe that shaded from blue to red. Above the controls was a grille where the air came out, either warmed or cooled as instructed.
Reacher hooked his fingertips in the grille and pulled.
The whole panel came away as one. It snicked off magnetic closures and clattered to the floor. Behind it was a long straight corridor running away into darkness.
* * *
—
There were no arrows on the wall. No emergency lighting, like on an airplane. Abby lit up her phone, and its dim glow showed them the view maybe ten feet ahead and ten feet behind. The corridor was about three feet wide, newly and crisply built. It smelled the same as the vacant store. Wallboard, spackle, paint. It ran straight for a spell, and then it turned ninety degrees right, and then ninety degrees left. As if picking its way around and between other people’s rooms. Their restrooms and their offices and their storerooms, in places a mysterious yard narrower than they should have been. Reacher pictured Gregory with the detailed plans, stealing a foot here and a foot there, sketching out false walls, piecing it all together. A labyrinthine route, but crisp and clear and coherent all the same. Couldn’t trip, couldn’t stumble, couldn’t get lost. Reacher pictured a flashlight clipped to the wall at the entrance, Gregory grabbing it and hustling, crashing from corner to corner, bursting through the HVAC panel, running out through the vacant store.
They walked on, slowly. The twists and turns made it hard to keep track of overall distance. Reacher remembered the block as a whole as square and pretty large by old-town standards. Maybe four hundred feet on a side. The taxi office and the conference room and the offices behind it would account for maybe a hundred feet. Maybe a hundred and fifty, depending how spacious. Which gave them a net two hundred and fifty feet to travel. Which could have been a real-world five hundred or more, because of all the dog-leg turns. Should take about six minutes, Reacher thought, at their slow and cautious pace.
It took five and a half. They made one last turn and then up ahead in the glow of Abby’s phone they saw the end of the corridor. The whole end wall was a sheet of heavy steel. Side to side, and floor to ceiling. Cut into it was a hatch about the size of the HVAC panel at the other end of the route. A hunch down, step over proposition. Like a submarine. On the right side there were heavy hinges welded to the steel. The metal was discolored from the heat. On the left was a heavy bolt. Currently drawn back. Gregory would push the hatch, step inside, slam the hatch behind him, and shoot the bolt. No pursuers. No key required. Faster. There was a flashlight clipped to the wall, right next to the bolt.
They backed off two corners and spoke so low they could barely hear each other. Reacher whispered, “I guess the real question is whether the hinges squeal. If yes, we do it fast. If no, we do it slow. Ready?”
A tight nod from Hogan.
A determined nod from Abby.
They retraced their steps. Two turns. Back to the steel hatch. Abby held her phone close to a hinge. It looked like a quality item. Forged steel. A glassy surface. But no trace of grease or oil. Unpredictable. The hatch had no handle. Not as such. Just two thick hoops for the bolt to lock into. Reacher hooked his finger through one of them. In his mind he rehearsed what he would do next, either fast or slow. The hatch would be hidden on the inside by some kind of camouflage. Nothing too fancy. Nothing that would have involved visible workers. Nothing that would have changed the room’s appearance. Nothing that Danilo would have noticed on his return. Probably an existing piece of furniture. As tall as Abby. Probably a bookcase. He would have to open the hatch and move it aside. Either fast or slow.
It turned out fast. Reacher eased the hatch open, and inside the first inch of travel both hinges let out a piercing squeal. So he flung it open the rest of the way and the glow of Abby’s phone showed him the rough lumber back of a piece of heavy wooden furniture. He shoved it hard and it fell forward and toppled over and crashed down. Completely unstable. A bookcase for sure. He scrambled out over it, into the room.
* * *
—
Gregory had been sitting at his desk, in his green leather chair, running important things through his mind. Then he heard the hinges squeal behind him, and he spun his chair halfway around, just in time for the bookcase to fall on him. It was made of Baltic oak, all solid, no veneer. It was loaded with books and trophies and photos in frames. First the front edge of a shelf broke his shoulder, and then an imperceptible millisecond later the next shelf up cracked his skull, and then the full bulk of the thing crushed him down, tipping his chair, driving the side of his head against the edge of the desk top, but driving the rest of him onward to the floor, so that his neck bent g
rotesquely and snapped like a twig, killing him instantly. Reacher’s extra weight as he clambered out over the felled furniture did him no further damage at all.
* * *
—
Reacher saw the back of the bookcase ahead of him, tilted up like a ramp. It had fallen against a desk. He scrambled over it and saw a double door, standing open, and an outer office beyond it, with a guy rising up out of a chair behind a desk, all kinds of shock and surprise on his face. This was Danilo, Reacher assumed. There was a door from the outer office to the corridor beyond. It was open, too. Coming through it were the sounds of scraping chairs and feet hitting linoleum floors. The loud screech and the loud crash had gotten folks’ attention.
Reacher had a Glock in his right hand and a Glock in his left. With his right he was covering Danilo. With his left he was covering the door. Hogan arrived behind him. Then Abby.
She said, “Gregory is dead under the bookcase.”
Reacher said, “How?”
“It fell on him. He was at his desk. The bookcase was behind him. I think it broke his neck.”
“I pushed it on him.”
“I guess technically.”
Reacher paused a beat.
“He was a lucky man,” he said.
Then he nodded at Danilo and said to Hogan, “Place this guy under arrest. Keep him safe and unharmed. He and I need to have an important discussion.”
“About what?”
“It’s what we say in the army when we’re going to beat someone to death.”
“Got it.”
Then time unspooled in a way that afterward Reacher thought was partly inevitable, even preordained, partly driven by culture, partly by peer pressure, by blind obedience, by hopeless lack of alternatives. Hard to comprehend. But it helped him understand the pile of bodies in the doorway in back of the lumber yard. They kept on coming. First a solid guy, taking in the scene, going for his gun. Reacher let him get it out. Allowed him to make his intent crystal clear. Then he shot him center mass. A single round. Then a second guy barreled in, pumped up with some kind of ludicrous I-can-do-better bravado. But he couldn’t. Reacher dropped him and he fell right on top of the first guy. Which is how the pile started. It deterred no one. They kept on adding to it. One after the other. We’ll have all the same people ahead of us. Except in reverse order. Hogan was absolutely right. First came the senior figures from the offices, then the smart muscle from inside the building, then finally the dumb muscle from out on the street corners, all of them driven, all of them relentless, all of them doomed. At first Reacher thought of their sacrifice in medieval terms, but then he revised his estimate backward, all the way to the dawn of time, a hundred thousand generations, to the pure insane grip of the tribe, and the absolute terror of being without it.