by Lee Child
“What?” Duffy asked.
“This is weird,” he said. “Thing like this has a hearing-aid battery, nothing more. Low power, short range. Can’t be picked up beyond about two miles. So where’s the guy tracking it?”
The mouth of the ramp was empty. I had been the last guy up it. We stood there with our eyes watering in the cold wind, staring at nothing. Traffic hissed by behind the trees, but nothing came up the ramp.
“How long have you been here now?” Eliot asked.
“About four minutes,” I said. “Maybe five.”
“Makes no sense,” he said. “That puts the guy maybe four or five miles behind you. And he can’t hear this thing from four or five miles.”
“Maybe there’s no guy,” I said. “Maybe they trust me.”
“So why put this thing in there?”
“Maybe they didn’t. Maybe it’s been in there for years. Maybe they forgot all about it.”
“Too many maybes,” he said.
Duffy spun right and stared at the trees.
“They could have stopped on the highway shoulder,” she said. “You know, exactly level with where we are now.”
Eliot and I spun to our right and stared, too. It made good sense. It was no kind of clever surveillance technique to pull into a rest stop and park right next to your target.
“Let’s take a look,” I said.
There was a narrow strip of neat grass and then an equally narrow area where the highway people had tamed the edge of the woods with planted shrubs and bark chips. Then there were just trees. The highway had mown them down to the east and the rest area had leveled them to the west but in between was a forty-foot thicket that could have been growing there since the dawn of time. It was hard work getting through it. There were vines and scratchy brambles and low branches. But it was April. Getting through in July or August might have been impossible.
We stopped just before the trees petered out into lower growth. Beyond that was the flat grassy highway shoulder. We eased forward as far as we dared and craned left and right. There was nobody parked there. The shoulder was clear as far as we could see in both directions. Traffic was very light. Whole five-second intervals went by with no vehicles in view at all. Eliot shrugged like he didn’t understand it and we turned around and forced our way back.
“Makes no sense,” he said again.
“They’re short of manpower,” I said.
“No, they’re on Route One,” Duffy said. “They must be. It runs parallel with I-95 the whole way down the coast. From Portland, way down south. It’s probably less than two miles away most of the time.”
We turned east again, like we could see through the trees and spot a car idling on the shoulder of a distant parallel road.
“It’s how I’d do it,” Duffy said.
I nodded. It was a very plausible scenario. There would be technical disadvantages. With up to two miles of lateral displacement any slight fore-aft discrepancy due to traffic would make the signal drift in and out of range. But then, all they wanted to know was my general direction.
“It’s possible,” I said.
“No, it’s likely,” Eliot said. “Duffy’s right. It’s pure common sense. They want to stay out of your mirrors as long as they can.”
“Either way, we have to assume they’re there. How far does Route One stay close to I-95?”
“Forever,” Duffy said. “Way farther than New London, Connecticut. They split around Boston, but they come back together.”
“OK,” I said. Checked my watch. “I’ve been here about nine minutes now. Long enough for the bathroom and a cup of coffee. Time to put the electronics back on the road.”
I told Eliot to put the transmitter in his pocket and drive Duffy’s Taurus south at a steady fifty miles an hour. I told him I would catch him in the truck somewhere before New London. I figured I would worry about how to get the transmitter back in the right place later. Eliot took off and I was left alone with Duffy. We watched her car disappear south and then swiveled around north and watched the incoming ramp. I had an hour and one minute and I needed the soldering iron. Time ticking away.
“How is it up there?” Duffy asked.
“A nightmare,” I said. I told her about the eight-foot granite wall and the razor wire and the gate and the metal detectors on the doors and the room with no inside keyhole. I told her about Paulie.
“Any sign of my agent?” she asked.
“I only just got there,” I said.
“She’s in that house,” she said. “I have to believe that.”
I said nothing.
“You need to make some progress,” she said. “Every hour you spend there puts you deeper in trouble. And her.”
“I know that,” I said.
“What’s Beck like?” she asked.
“Bent,” I said. I told her about the fingerprints on the glass and the way the Maxima had disappeared. Then I told her about the Russian roulette.
“You played?”
“Six times,” I said, and stared at the ramp.
She stared at me. “You’re crazy. Six to one, you should be dead.”
I smiled. “You ever played?”
“I wouldn’t. I don’t like those odds.”
“You’re like most people. Beck was the same. He thought the odds were six to one. But they’re nearer six hundred to one. Or six thousand. You put a single heavy bullet in a well-made well-maintained gun like that Anaconda and it would be a miracle if the cylinder came to rest with the bullet near the top. The momentum of the spin always carries it to the bottom. Precision mechanism, a little oil, gravity helps you out. I’m not an idiot. Russian roulette is a lot safer than people think. And it was worth the risk to get hired.”
She was quiet for a spell.
“You got a feeling?” she asked.
“He looks like a rug importer,” I said. “There are rugs all over the damn place.”
“But?”
“But he isn’t,” I said. “I’d bet my pension on it. I asked him about the rugs and he didn’t say much. Like he wasn’t very interested in them. Most people like to talk about their businesses. Most people, you can’t shut them up.”
“You get a pension?”
“No,” I said.
Right then a gray Taurus identical to Duffy’s except for the color burst up over the rise of the ramp. It slowed momentarily while the driver scanned around and then accelerated hard straight toward us. It was the old guy at the wheel, the one I had left in the gutter near the college gate. He slammed to a stop next to my blue truck and opened his door and heaved himself up and out in exactly the same way he had gotten out of the borrowed police Caprice. He had a big black-and-red Radio Shack bag in his hand. It was bulky with boxes. He held it up and smiled and stepped forward to shake my hand. He had a fresh shirt on, but his suit was the same. I could see blotches where he had tried to sponge the fake blood out. I could picture him, standing at his motel room sink, getting busy with the hand towel. He hadn’t been very successful. It looked like he had been careless with the ketchup at dinner.
“They got you running errands already?” he asked.
“I don’t know what they got me doing,” I said. “We got a lead seal problem.”
He nodded. “I figured. Shopping list like that, what else could it be?”
“You done one before?”
“I’m old-school,” he said. “We did ten a day, once upon a time, way back. Truck stops all over the place, we’d be in and out before the guy had even ordered his soup.”
He squatted down and emptied the Radio Shack bag on the blacktop. He had a soldering iron and a spool of dull solder. And an inverter that would power the iron from his car’s cigar lighter. That meant he had to keep his engine running, so he started it up and reversed a little way so that the cord would reach.
The seal was basically a drawn lead wire with large tags molded on each end. The tags had been crushed together with some kind of a heated device so they
had fused together in a large embossed blob. The old guy left the fused ends strictly alone. It was clear he had done this before. He plugged the iron in and let it heat. He tested it by spitting on the end. When he was satisfied he dabbed the tip on the sleeve of his suit coat and then touched it to the wire where it was thin. The wire melted and parted. He eased the gap wider like opening a tiny handcuff and slipped the seal out of its channel. He ducked into his car and laid it on the dash. I grabbed the door lever and turned it.
“OK,” Duffy said. “So what have we got?”
We had rugs. The door rattled upward and daylight flooded the load area and we saw maybe two hundred rugs, all neatly rolled and tied with string and standing upright on their ends. They were all different sizes, with the taller rolls at the cab end and the shorter ones at the door end. They stepped down toward us like some kind of ancient basalt rock formation. They were rolled face-in, so all we saw were the back surfaces, coarse and dull. The string around them was rough sisal, old and yellowed. There was a strong smell of raw wool and a fainter smell of vegetable dye.
“We should check them,” Duffy said. There was disappointment in her voice.
“How long have we got?” the old guy asked.
I checked my watch.
“Forty minutes,” I said.
“Better just sample them,” he said.
We hauled a couple out from the front rank. They were rolled tight. No cardboard tubes. They were just rolled in on themselves and tied tight with the string. One of them had a fringe. It smelled old and musty. The knots in the string were old and flattened. We picked at them with our nails but we couldn’t get them undone.
“They must cut the string,” Duffy said. “We can’t do that.”
“No,” the old guy said. “We can’t.”
The string was coarse and looked foreign. I hadn’t seen string like that for a long time. It was made from some kind of a natural fiber. Jute, maybe, or hemp.
“So what do we do?” the old guy asked.
I pulled another rug out. Hefted it in my hands. It weighed about what a rug should weigh. I squeezed it. It gave slightly. I rested it end-down on the road and punched it in the middle. It yielded a little, exactly how a tightly-rolled rug would feel.
“They’re just rugs,” I said.
“Anything under them?” Duffy asked. “Maybe those tall ones in back aren’t tall at all. Maybe they’re resting on something else.”
We pulled rugs out one by one and laid them on the road in the order we would have to put them back in. We built ourselves a random zigzag channel through the load space. The tall ones were exactly what they appeared to be, tall rugs, rolled tight, tied with string, standing upright on their ends. There was nothing hidden. We climbed out of the truck and stood there in the cold surrounded by a crazy mess of rugs and looked at each other.
“It’s a dummy load,” Duffy said. “Beck figured you would find a way in.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Or else he just wanted you out of the way.”
“While he’s doing what?”
“Checking you out,” she said. “Making sure.”
I looked at my watch. “Time to reload. I’m already going to have to drive like a madman.”
“I’ll come with you,” she said. “Until we catch up with Eliot, I mean.”
I nodded. “I want you to. We need to talk.”
We put the rugs back inside, kicking and shoving them until they were neatly arranged in their original positions. Then I pulled the roller door down and the old guy got to work with the solder. He slipped the broken seal back through its channel and eased the parted ends close together. He heated the iron and bridged the gap with its tip and touched the free end of the solder roll to it. The gap filled with a large silvery blob. It was the wrong color and it was way too big. It made the wire look like a cartoon drawing of a snake that has just swallowed a rabbit.
“Don’t worry,” he said.
He used the tip of the iron like a tiny paintbrush and smoothed the blob thinner and thinner. He flicked the tip occasionally to get rid of the excess. He was very delicate. It took him three long minutes but at the end of them he had the whole thing looking pretty much like it had before he arrived. He let it cool a little and then blew hard on it. The new silvery color instantly turned to gray. It was as close to an invisible repair as I had ever seen. Certainly it was better than I could have done myself.
“OK,” I said. “Very good. But you’re going to have to do another one. I’m supposed to bring another truck back. We better take a look at that one, too. We’ll meet up in the first northbound rest area after Portsmouth, New Hampshire.”
“When?”
“Be there five hours from now.”
Duffy and I left him standing there and headed south as fast as I could get the old truck to move. It wouldn’t do much better than seventy. It was shaped like a brick and the wind resistance defeated any attempt to go faster. But seventy was OK. I had a few minutes in hand.
“Did you see his office?” she asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “We need to check it out. In fact we need to check out his whole harbor operation.”
“We’re working on it,” she said. She had to talk loud. The engine noise and gearbox whine were twice as bad at seventy as they had been at fifty. “Fortunately Portland is not too much of a madhouse. It’s only the forty-fourth busiest port in the U.S. About fourteen million tons of imports a year. That’s about a quarter-million tons a week. Beck seems to get about ten of them, two or three containers.”
“Does Customs search his stuff?”
“As much as they search anybody’s. Their current hit rate is about two percent. If he gets a hundred and fifty containers a year maybe three of them will be looked at.”
“So how is he doing it?”
“He could be playing the odds by limiting the bad stuff to, say, one container in ten. That would bring the effective search rate down to zero-point-two percent. He could last years like that.”
“He’s already lasted years. He must be paying somebody off.”
She nodded beside me. Said nothing.
“Can you arrange extra scrutiny?” I asked.
“Not without probable cause,” she said. “Don’t forget, we’re way off the books here. We need some hard evidence. And the possibility of a payoff makes the whole thing a minefield, anyway. We might approach the wrong official.”
We drove on. The engine roared and the suspension swayed. We were passing everything we saw. Now I was watching the mirrors for cops, not tails. I was guessing that Duffy’s DEA papers would take care of any specific legal problems, but I didn’t want to lose the time it would take for her to have the conversation.
“How did Beck react?” she asked. “First impression?”
“He was puzzled,” I said. “And a little resentful. That was my first impression. You notice that Richard Beck wasn’t guarded at school?”
“Safe environment.”
“Not really. You could take a kid out of a college, easy as anything. No guards means no danger. I think the bodyguard thing for the trip home was just some kind of a sop to the fact that the kid is paranoid. I think it was purely an indulgence. I don’t think old man Beck can have thought it was really necessary, or he would have provided security at school as well. Or kept him out of school altogether.”
“So?”
“So I think there was some kind of a done deal somewhere in the past. As a result of the original kidnap, maybe. Something that guaranteed some kind of stability. Hence no bodyguards in the dorm. Hence Beck’s resentment, like somebody had suddenly broken an agreement.”
“You think?”
I nodded at the wheel. “He was surprised, and puzzled, and annoyed. His big question was who?”
“Obvious question.”
“But this was a how-dare-they kind of a question. There was attitude in it. Like somebody was out of line. It wasn’t just an inquiry. It was an exp
ression of annoyance at somebody.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I described the truck. I described your guys.”
She smiled. “Safe enough.”
I shook my head. “He’s got a guy called Duke. First name unknown. Ex-cop. His head of security. I saw him this morning. He’d been up all night. He looked tired and he hadn’t showered. His suit coat was all creased, low down at the back.”
“So?”
“Means he was driving all night. I think he went down there to get a look at the Toyota. To check the rear license plate. Where did you stash it?”
“We let the state cops take it. To keep the plausibility going. We couldn’t take it back to the DEA garage. It’ll be in a compound somewhere.”
“Where will the plate lead?”
“Hartford, Connecticut,” she said. “We busted a small-time Ecstasy ring.”
“When?”
“Last week.”
I drove on. The highway was getting busier.
“Our first mistake,” I said. “Beck’s going to check it out. And then he’s going to be wondering why some small-time Ecstasy dealers from Connecticut are trying to snatch his son. And then he’s going to be wondering how some small-time Ecstasy dealers from Connecticut can be trying to snatch his son a week after they all got hauled off to jail.”
“Shit,” Duffy said.
“It gets worse,” I said. “I think Duke got a look at the Lincoln, too. It’s got a caved-in front and no window glass left, but it hasn’t got any bullet holes in it. And it doesn’t look like a real grenade went off inside. That Lincoln is living proof this whole thing was phony baloney.”
“No,” she said. “The Lincoln is hidden. It didn’t go with the Toyota.”
“Are you sure? Because the first thing Beck asked me this morning was chapter and verse about the Uzis. It was like he was asking me to damn myself right out of my own mouth. Two Uzi Micros, twenty-round mags, forty shots fired, and not a single mark on the car?”