by Lee Child
I strolled back, hunched into my coat, trying to look like a reflective guy getting a couple of minutes’ peace. It was quiet. The shore birds were gone. It was too dark for them. They would be safe in their roosts. I turned around and headed for the back door. Went in through the porch and into the kitchen. The metal detector beeped. Duke and the mechanic guy and the cook all turned to look at me. I paused a beat and pulled out the keys. Held them up. They looked away. I walked in and dropped the keys on the table in front of Duke. He left them there.
The third benefit of Duke’s exhaustion unfolded steadily all the way through dinner. He could barely stay awake. He didn’t say a word. The kitchen was warm and steamy and we ate the kind of food that would put anybody to sleep. We had thick soup and steak and potatoes. There was a lot of it. The plates were piled high. The cook was working like a production line. There was a spare plate with a whole portion of everything just sitting untouched on a counter. Maybe somebody was in the habit of eating twice.
I ate fast and kept my ears open for the phone. I figured I could grab the car keys and be outside before the first ring finished. Inside the Cadillac before the second. Halfway down the drive before the third. I could smash through the gate. I could run Paulie over. But the phone didn’t ring. There was no sound in the house at all, except people chewing. There was no coffee. I was on the point of taking that personally. I like coffee. I drank water instead. It came from the faucet over the sink and tasted like chlorine. The maid came in from the family dining room before I finished my second glass. She walked over to where I was sitting, awkward in her unfashionable shoes. She was shy. She looked Irish, like she had just come all the way from Connemara to Boston and couldn’t find a job down there.
“Mr. Beck wants to see you,” she said.
It was only the second time I had heard her speak. She sounded a little Irish, too. Her cardigan was wrapped tight around her.
“Now?” I asked.
“I think so,” she said.
He was waiting for me in the square room with the oak dining table where I had played Russian roulette for him.
“The Toyota was from Hartford, Connecticut,” he said. “Angel Doll traced the plate this morning.”
“No front plates in Connecticut,” I said, because I had to say something.
“We know the owners,” he said.
There was silence. I stared straight at him. It took me a fraction of a second just to understand him.
“How do you know them?” I asked.
“We have a business relationship.”
“In the rug trade?”
“The nature of the relationship needn’t concern you.”
“Who are they?”
“That needn’t concern you either,” he said.
I said nothing.
“But there’s a problem,” he said. “The people you described aren’t the people who own the truck.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded. “You described them as tall and fair. The guys who own the truck are Spanish. Small and dark.”
“So who were the guys I saw?” I asked, because I had to ask something.
“Two possibilities,” he said. “One, maybe somebody stole their truck.”
“Or?”
“Two, maybe they expanded their personnel.”
“Either one is possible,” I said.
He shook his head. “Not the first. I called them. There was no answer. So I asked around. They’ve disappeared. No reason why they should disappear just because someone stole their truck.”
“So they expanded their roster.”
He nodded. “And decided to bite the hand that feeds them.”
I said nothing.
“Are you certain they used Uzis?” he asked.
“That’s what I saw,” I said.
“Not MP5Ks?”
“No,” I said. I looked away. No comparison. Not even close. The MP5K is a short Heckler & Koch submachine gun designed early in the 1970s. It has two big fat handles molded from expensive plastic. It looks very futuristic. Like a movie prop. Next to it an Uzi looks like something hammered together by a blind man in his basement.
“No question,” I said.
“No possibility the kidnap was random?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Million to one.”
He nodded again.
“So they’ve declared war,” he said. “And they’ve gone to ground. They’re hiding out somewhere.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I have no idea.”
There was silence. No sound from the sea. The swells came and went inaudibly.
“Are you going to try to find them?” I asked.
“You bet your ass,” Beck said.
Duke was waiting for me in the kitchen. He was angry and impatient. He wanted to take me upstairs and get me locked down for the night. I didn’t protest. A locked door with no inside keyhole is a very good alibi.
“Tomorrow, six-thirty,” he said. “Back on duty.”
I listened hard and heard the lock click and waited for his footsteps to recede. Then I got busy with my shoe. There was a message waiting. It was from Duffy: back OK? I hit reply and typed: Bring a car one mile short of the house. Leave it there with key on seat. Quiet approach, no lights.
I hit send. There was a short delay. I guessed she was using a laptop. She would be waiting in her motel room with it plugged in and switched on. It would go: Bing! You’ve Got Mail!
She came back with: Why? When?
I sent: Don’t ask. Midnight.
There was a long delay. Then she sent: OK.
I sent: Retrieve it six am, stealthy.
She replied: OK.
I sent: Beck knows the Toyota owners.
Ninety painful seconds later she came back with: How?
I sent: quote business relationship unquote.
She asked: Specifics?
I sent: Not given.
She replied with one simple word: Shit.
I waited. She sent nothing more. She was probably conferring with Eliot. I could picture them, talking fast, not looking at each other, trying to decide. I sent a question: How many did you arrest in Hartford? She came back with: All of them, i.e. three. I asked: Are they talking? She replied: Not talking at all. I asked: Lawyers? She came back with: No lawyers.
It was a very ponderous way to have a conversation. But it gave me plenty of time to think. Lawyers would have been fatal. Beck could have gotten to their lawyers, easily. Sooner or later it would have occurred to him to check if his buddies had been arrested.
I sent: Can you keep them incommunicado?
She sent: Yes, two or three days.
I sent: Do it.
There was a long pause. Then she came back with: What is Beck thinking?
I sent: That they’ve declared war and gone to ground.
She asked: What are you going to do?
I sent: Not sure.
She sent: Will leave car, advise use it to pull out.
I replied: Maybe.
There was another long pause. Then she sent: Turn unit off, save battery. I smiled to myself. Duffy was a very practical woman.
I lay fully dressed on the bed for three hours, listening for a phone. I didn’t hear one. I got up just before midnight and rolled the Oriental rug back and lay down on the floor with my head against the oak boards and listened. It’s the best way to pick up the small sounds inside a building. I could hear the heating system running. I could hear the wind around the house. It was moaning softly. The ocean itself was quiet. The house was still. It was a solid stone structure. No creaking, no cracking. No human activity. No talking, no movement. I guessed Duke was sleeping the sleep of the dead. That was the third benefit of his exhaustion. He was the only one I was worried about. He was the only professional.
I laced my shoes tight and took off my jacket. I was still dressed in the black denim the maid had supplied. I slid the window all the way up and sat on the sill,
facing the room. I stared at the door. Twisted around and looked outside. There was a slim sliver of moon. Some starlight. A little wind. Ragged silver clouds. The air was cold and salty. The ocean was moving slow and steady.
I swung my legs out into the night and shuffled sideways. Then I rolled over onto my stomach and scrabbled with my toes until I found a fold in the stone carving where an accent line had been set into the facade. I got my feet set and held the sill with both hands and craned my body outward. Used one hand to pull the window down to within two inches of closed. Eased sideways and felt for a drainpipe running down from the roof gutter. I found one about a yard away. It was a fat cast-iron pipe maybe six inches in diameter. I got my right palm flat on it. It felt solid. But it felt distant. I’m not an agile person. Put me in the Olympics and I’d be a wrestler or a boxer or a weight-lifter. Not a gymnast.
I brought my right hand back and shuffled sideways with my toes until I was as far to the right as I could get. I jumped my left hand along the sill until it was tight in the corner of the window frame. Stretched out with my right. Got it hooked around the far side of the pipe. The iron was painted and it felt cold and a little slick with night dew. I put my thumb in front and my fingers behind. Tested my grip. Craned out a little more. I was spread-eagled on the wall. I equalized the pressure between my hands and pulled inward. Kicked my feet off the ledge and jumped them sideways, one each side of the pipe. Pulled inward again and let go of the sill and brought my left hand over to join my right. Now I had the pipe in both hands. My grip held. My feet were flat on the wall. My ass was sticking right out, fifty feet above the rocks. The wind caught my hair. It was cold.
A boxer, not a gymnast. I could hold on there all night. No problem with that. But I wasn’t certain how to move myself down. I tensed my arms and pulled myself in toward the wall. Slid my hands downward as I did so, six inches. Slid my feet down a matching distance. Let my weight fall backward. That seemed to work. I did it again. I bounced down, six inches at a time. Wiped each palm in turn to fight the dew. I was sweating, even though it was cold. My right hand hurt from my bout with Paulie. I was still forty-five feet above the ground. I inched downward. Got myself level with the second floor. It was slow progress, but it was safe. Except that I was putting two hundred and fifty pounds of shock into an old iron pipe every few seconds. The pipe was probably a hundred years old. And iron rusts and rots.
It moved a little. I felt it shudder and shake and shiver. And it was slippery. I had to lock my fingers behind it to make sure my grip would hold. My knuckles were scraping on the stone. I bounced down, six inches at a time. I developed a rhythm. I would pull close, then fall back and slide my hands down and try to cushion the shock by easing my arms out straight. I let my shoulders take the impact. Then I would be bent at the waist at a tighter angle than before so I would move my feet down six inches and start again. I made it down to the first-floor windows. The pipe felt stronger there. Maybe it was anchored in a concrete base. I bounced down, faster. Made it all the way to the ground. Felt the solid rock under my feet and breathed out in relief and stepped away from the wall. Wiped my hands on my pants and stood still and listened. It felt good to be out of the house. The air was like velvet. I heard nothing. There were no lights in the windows. I felt the sting of cold on my teeth and realized I was smiling. I glanced up at the hunter’s moon. Shook myself and walked quietly away to reclaim the guns.
They were still there in the rag in the dip behind the weed stalks. I left Doll’s PSM where it was. I preferred the Glock. I unwrapped it and checked it carefully, out of habit. Seventeen bullets in the gun, seventeen in each of the spare magazines. Fifty-one nine-millimeter Parabellums. If I fired one, I’d probably have to fire them all. By which time somebody would have won and somebody would have lost. I put the magazines in my pockets and the gun itself in my waistband and tracked all the way around the far side of the garage block for a preliminary distant look at the wall. It was still all lit up. The lights blazed harsh and blue and angry, like a stadium. The lodge was bathed in the glow. The razor wire glittered. The light was a solid bar, thirty yards deep, bright as day, with absolute darkness beyond. The gate stood closed and chained. The whole thing looked like the outer perimeter of a nineteenth-century prison. Or an asylum.
I gazed at it until I had figured out how to get past it and then I headed around inside the cobbled courtyard. The apartment above the garages was dark and quiet. The garage doors were all closed, but none of them had locks. They were big old-fashioned timber things. They had been installed way back before anybody had thought of stealing cars. Four sets of doors, four garages. The left-hand one held the Cadillac. I had already been in there. So I checked the others, slow and quiet. The second had yet another Lincoln Town Car in it, black, the same as Angel Doll’s, the same as the one the bodyguards had used. It was waxed and shiny and its doors were locked.
The third garage was completely empty. Nothing in it at all. It was clean and swept. I could see broom tracks in the dusty oil patches on the floor. There were a few carpet fibers here and there. Whoever had swept up had missed them. They were short and stiff. I couldn’t make out the color in the darkness. They looked gray. They looked like they had been pulled out of a rug’s burlap backing. They meant nothing to me. So I moved on.
I found what I wanted in the fourth garage. I opened the doors wide and let in just about enough moonlight to see by. The dusty old Saab the maid had used for her marketing was in there, parked head-in close to a workbench. There was a grimy window behind the bench. Gray moonlight on the ocean outside. The bench had a vise screwed to it and was covered in tools. The tools were old. Their handles were wood that had darkened with age and oil. I found a bradawl. It was just a blunt steel spike set into a handle. The handle was bulbous, turned from oak. The spike was maybe two inches long. I put it into the vise, maybe a quarter-inch deep. Tightened the vise hard. Pulled on the handle and bent the spike into a neat right angle. Loosened the vise and checked my work and put it away in my shirt pocket.
Then I found a chisel. It was a woodworking item. It had a half-inch blade and a nice ash handle. It was probably seventy years old. I hunted around and found a carborundum whetstone and a rusty can of sharpening fluid. Dabbed some fluid on the stone and spread it with the tip of the chisel. Worked the steel back and forth until it showed bright. One of the many high schools I went to was an old-fashioned place in Guam where shop was graded by how well you did with the scut work, like sharpening tools. We all scored high. It was the kind of accomplishment we were interested in. That class had the best knives I ever saw. I turned the chisel over and did the other face. I got the edge square and true. It looked like high-grade Pittsburgh steel. I wiped it on my pants. Didn’t test the edge on my thumb. I didn’t particularly want to bleed. I knew it was razor sharp just by looking at it.
I came out into the courtyard and squatted down in the angle of the walls and loaded my pockets. I had the chisel if things needed to stay quiet, and I had the Glock if it was OK to go noisy. Then I scoped out my priorities. The house first, I decided. There was a strong possibility that I would never get another look at it.
The outer door to the kitchen porch was locked, but the mechanism was crude. It was a token three-lever affair. I put the bent spike of the bradawl in like a key and felt for the tumblers. They were big and obvious. It took me less than a minute to get inside. I stopped again and listened carefully. I didn’t want to walk in on the cook. Maybe she was up late, baking a special pie. Or maybe the Irish girl was in there doing something. But there was only silence. I crossed the porch and knelt down in front of the inner door. Same crude lock. Same short time. I backed off a foot and swung the door open. Smelled the kitchen smells. Listened again. The room was cold and deserted. I put the bradawl on the floor in front of me. Put the chisel next to it. Added the Glock and the spare magazines. I didn’t want to set the metal detector off. In the still of the night it would have sounded like a siren. I slid the
bradawl along the floor, tight against the boards. Pushed it right through the doorway and into the kitchen. Did the same with the chisel. Kept it tight against the floor and rolled it all the way inside. Almost all commercial metal detectors have a dead zone right at the bottom. That’s because men’s dress shoes are made with a steel shank in the sole. It gives the shoe flexibility and strength. Metal detectors are designed to ignore shoes. It makes sense, because otherwise they would beep every time a guy with decent footwear passed through.
I slid the Glock through the dead zone and followed it with one magazine at a time. Pushed everything as far inside as I could reach. Then I stood up and walked through the door. Closed it quietly behind me. Picked up all my gear and reloaded my pockets. Debated taking my shoes off. It’s easier to creep around quietly in socks. But if it comes to it, shoes are great weapons. Kick somebody with your shoes on, and you disable them. With your shoes off, you break a toe. And they take time to put back on. If I had to get out fast, I didn’t want to be running around on the rocks barefoot. Or climbing the wall. I decided to keep them on and walk carefully. It was a solidly-built house. Worth the risk. I went to work.
First I searched the kitchen for a flashlight. Didn’t find one. Most houses on the end of a long power line spur have outages from time to time, so most people who live in them keep something handy. But the Becks didn’t seem to. The best I could find was a box of kitchen matches. I put three in my pocket and struck one on the box. Used the flickering light to look for the big bunch of keys I had left on the table. Those keys would have helped me a lot, but they weren’t there. Not on the table, not on some hook near the door, not anywhere. I wasn’t very surprised. It would have been too good to be true to find them.