by Lee Child
I put the key and the phone in my pocket and I walked away. I looped around to where the crowds were, and I sat on a wall, and I checked the phone in greater detail. Five out of the six callers were clearly friends. They would call him, or he would call them, and they would chat, sometimes up to twenty minutes. Back and forth, mutual, probably typical.
The sixth caller was different. He was incoming only. Not back and forth, and not mutual. And he was brief. Sometimes not more than forty-five seconds. He called every two or three days. He was the boss, I thought. Calling to issue instructions.
The phone said the boss’s name was Dragan.
I looked up and saw Pete Peterson getting out of a car about thirty yards away.
Peterson looked the same as he had in New York. Blue suit, boyish hair, the aches and pains and the battered hands of a one-time ballplayer. Cricket, most likely, I thought. A big deal in Australia. He looked tired. Maybe not good at sleeping sitting up.
I stood up and he walked over. He pointed at a café table outside a gift shop. We sat down face to face.
He said, ‘Tell me why you’re here.’
‘Flights are cheap now,’ I said. ‘It’s a great vacation.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘I was a company commander once. A long time ago. I did my share of paperwork. Those Xeroxes you showed me looked familiar. I recognized the technology. State-of-the-art photocopying at the time, but a couple generations out of date now.’
‘Our lab says the paper is about twenty-five years old.’
I nodded.
‘And it was stored for most of that time,’ I said. ‘The photocopies were sealed in the envelope and stacked with a bunch of other crap. You can tell by the way the metal butterfly closure has made a mark on the paper. All four sheets, deep and crisp and clear. Heavy pressure. That envelope was at the bottom of some random pile for nearly a quarter of a century. Long enough for the glue to perish on the flap. Let’s call it twenty-two years, for the sake of argument. Then three years ago someone found it. Maybe in an attic. Maybe by accident. A long-lost treasure. Right away they mailed it to the address here in Sydney. Then all kinds of mayhem broke out.’
‘Tell me the who and the how and the why.’
‘Someone wants vengeance,’ I said. ‘A quarter century ago something bad happened to them. Not here in Australia. Somewhere else. They had to flee. They moved here. All along they believed an old rumour, that back in the day someone had found out who the four men were, who had done the bad thing to them. But it was only a rumour. They had no actual information. Not until the photographs finally arrived.’
Peterson said, ‘Who are they?’
‘We’ll get to that,’ I said. ‘First we got to look at how they did it. Which you won’t like. Four unlabelled photographs don’t mean much. They must have run them through government software. Way before you did. They turned a list of faces into a list of names. Either they had an inside man, or someone took a bribe, or they hacked your systems.’
Peterson said nothing.
‘It gets worse,’ I said. ‘Four names don’t mean much either. Not unless you know when one of them happens to be headed for Australia. So you can be ready for him. Which means another inside man. Or more bribes. Or more hacking. Either your visa system, or the airline manifests, or the immigration desks themselves. Or all three, in a neat little sequence. They were plenty ready for me, for instance. That’s for damn sure. Some guy got to me less than twenty minutes after I stepped out of the baggage hall. Was it the same with the first three?’
‘Broadly,’ Peterson said. ‘Not twenty minutes. But within hours.’
‘Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. All international airports. The visa, the plane ticket, the arrival. Like one, two, three, go. They timed it perfectly.’
‘What guy got to you?’
I pointed.
‘Loading dock,’ I said. ‘Not talking. He hurt his head. But I got his phone. He works for a guy named Dragan.’
‘Who are they? And who are you, really? You said you didn’t know the other three.’
‘I don’t.’
‘But you said the four of you did a bad thing.’
‘Separately.’
‘What bad thing?’
‘It was only bad from their point of view. I was happy enough about it.’
‘What was it?’
‘I’m only guessing about the other three. But I’m sure I’m right. Unexplained men from shadowy military units. British and American. I asked myself, what was I doing a quarter century ago, that could have gotten me on a hit list? What could the other guys have been doing? The only possible answer was Kosovo. Before your time. Serbia and Croatia and all that stuff. The former Yugoslavia. All kinds of strife and civil war and atrocities. I was deployed there, briefly. Mostly during the clean-up.’
‘Doing what?’
I didn’t answer. I was neither proud of it nor not proud of it. It was a mission. One of many. But I remembered it pretty well.
Afterwards they gave me a medal. The Balkans, some police work, a search for two local men with wartime secrets to keep, both soon identified, and located, and visited, and shot in the head. All part of the peace process. No big deal.
I said, ‘It’s classified. Why they told you I was directing traffic.’
‘Assassination?’
‘You’re pretty smart, for a cricket player.’
‘Cricket players need to be. To understand the rules.’
‘They were very bad people.’
‘I believe you.’
‘I mean, really bad. You don’t want to know.’
‘How many?’
‘Two.’
‘And I guess they had brothers and cousins and so on, who moved to Sydney, and never forgot, because of their tribal culture.’
‘Which is why I’m here,’ I said. ‘People shouldn’t bottle things up. Much healthier to let it all out. I wanted to give them the chance.’
‘You’re taking a risk.’
‘I don’t like being on a list. A thing like that, I take it as a challenge. No doubt a flaw in my character, but it is what it is.’
Peterson did something with his phone. Some kind of encrypted communication.
He said, ‘The Sydney police department has the name Dragan in its database.’
‘Who is he?’
‘He’s a she. Maybe not a brother or a cousin. Maybe a sister. The Sydney police department thinks she’s a bad person in her own right. They think she runs drugs and prostitution and payday loans. But they can’t prove it.’
Then he went quiet.
Meaningfully quiet.
I said, ‘I’m going to go take a drive.’
‘Where?’
‘To see the sights,’ I said.
I got up and strolled back to the big brown sedan. It had a parking ticket under the wiper. I got in and fired it up. I headed for the beaches.
I parked in a municipal lot and took out the captured cell phone. I looked at the log again. I called Dragan back. The first time ever, from that particular phone. I was breaking the rules. A woman answered. She sounded surprised. Even affronted.
She said, ‘Why are you calling me?’
Her accent was obviously foreign, but fairly neutral. Not good enough for the movies.
I said, ‘This is not who you think it is.’
No reply.
I said, ‘Or maybe it should be. If you had thought harder in the first place. The boy you sent fell down on the job.’
‘Who are you?’
‘You tell me first. Tell me your name.’
‘My name is Dragan.’
‘And mine is Reacher. I’m the fourth man.’
‘You killed my brother.’
‘You say that like it’s a bad thing.’
‘Now I’m going to kill you.’
‘Which one was your brother? What rank?’
‘He was a colonel.’
‘He ordered his men to rape an eight-ye
ar-old to death. And her mother. Are you defending that?’
‘You’re a liar.’
‘I put my gun to his head and he cried like a baby. He begged and pleaded and wet his pants.’
‘You’re a liar.’
‘You should be glad he’s dead.’
‘You’re the last. I’m going to kill you.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Have it your way.’
I told her where I was. The beach, the municipal lot, the brown sedan.
By that point it was a few minutes after noon, so we all knew there was plenty of daylight ahead. We all knew we could take an hour to make a plan. They would assume I wouldn’t stay in the car. Maybe they would end up sending a guy to make sure, but most of their early energy would get spent figuring out where I would go next. Which they would recognize was a decision largely made by the terrain. The lot was served by a narrow road in. They would assume I would hide somewhere just outside the gate. Because then, as soon as they arrived, I would be instantly behind them. They wouldn’t be hunting me. I would be hunting them.
So they would park a hundred yards up the road, tickets be damned, and they would come in on foot. From what they would think was behind me.
So I would start two hundred yards up the road.
No, I thought. Three hundred. Their command post was all I was interested in. I was sure it would stay well to the rear. Command posts usually do.
I locked up the brown sedan and set out walking.
Just shy of three hundred yards up the road I found a café with a sandy patio covered in young people sitting cross-legged and playing guitars and bongo drums. I sat on the ground against a low wall with a bunch of other aficionados. Safe enough, I thought. I was below eye level, and a dull part of a colourful crowd. I could see down the road pretty well. Certainly I would see if anyone parked and got out.
I waited. The musicians seemed to have plenty of energy, which I was glad about. I figured I could be waiting a long time. Dragan would guess I would guess an hour, so she would make it two, except she would guess I would guess that too, so she would make it three. Or more. Or less.
I waited. I had waited for her brother. I broke into his house and sat in the dark. Not true that he cried and begged. I didn’t give him the chance. I put a double tap low in the back of his skull as soon as he stepped in the room.
I waited.
Then two ugly sedans rolled by. High-spec versions of the brown heap I had left in the lot. I watched them. They slowed down. They stopped. They parked a hundred yards ahead of me. Two hundred yards short of the beach lot gate.
Four men got out of the first car. Short black nylon jackets, black jeans, sunglasses. All kind of obvious. Decoys, I thought. Presumably the idea was I would wheel around, this way and that, always keeping them in sight, until I accidentally blundered backward into the guy who had really come for me.
Who got out of the second car.
He was a fat guy in a loud shirt and tattered shorts. The four obvious gangsters set out walking towards the beach, and the fat guy followed not far behind.
Nothing else happened.
I waited. Then I got up and started walking. I was a hundred yards behind the second car, and closing. I was about a hundred and fifty yards behind the five guys, and not closing, because they were walking too, same speed, same direction.
From forty yards out I saw there were still two people in the second car. One behind the wheel, and one in the back. The command post. Cell phone at the ready, no doubt. Ready to issue instructions if necessary. But mostly hoping to hear they got me. Alive. I figured that would have been her instruction.
Be careful what you wish for, I thought.
I walked on. Twenty yards out it was obvious the driver was a man, and the back-seat passenger was a woman. Black hair. Small, but not tiny. She was watching over the driver’s shoulder, staring out the windshield, trying to see what was happening up ahead. Her guys were almost to the parking lot.
I was almost to her back bumper.
I came down the driver’s side and tore open the driver’s door, at which point everything became a simple gamble, as to whether I could subdue and disarm the driver before the woman in the back could react, which was a bet I was pretty sure I could win, having done similar things before, with routine real-world manoeuvres, moves I had made a million times, not thinking or getting worked up, just grabbing the driver by the collar, and hauling him half out, and clubbing him in the face, and pulling his jacket up over his head, which would show me his belt, which had nothing stuck in it, and which would tell me if there was weight in his pocket, which there wasn’t, but I saw straps across his back, so I slammed him against the seat and took his gun from a shoulder holster, and knelt in on top of him and pointed the gun at the woman in the back. Who had her hand in her purse.
I said, ‘Keep still.’
I hit the driver again, just a maintenance dose, and reversed out of his compartment and got in the back.
I said, ‘Take your hand out your purse. If there’s a gun in it I’ll shoot you as soon as I see it. In the gut. So you die slow.’
She took her hand out. No gun.
I said, ‘Your brother did bad things. I think you know that. I think you were there. You must have been living under his protection. Which is why you had to flee when I killed him. I think you approved of what he did. I think you enjoyed it. I think you’re just as bad as him.’
She spat at me. Not the first time it had happened, but always a surprise. I swapped the gun into my left hand, and with my right I grabbed her by the throat. And squeezed. It was a small throat, but not tiny. But a very big hand. She was gone in a couple of minutes.
I got out of the car and walked back the way I had come. The guitar players and the bongo drummers were still at it. Beyond them Pete Peterson was leaning on the fender of his car.
‘We put a tracker on the brown car,’ he said. ‘We knew where you were and we worked out how you would do it. With the phone, and the outflanking manoeuvre.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘Now I’m here to drive you to the airport.’
‘Already?’
‘Better that way.’
‘When is my flight?’
‘Now, basically. We’ll just about make it.’
I left Australian airspace less than five hours after entering it. Which made me resent the price of the visa. On the other hand, it was valid for an extended period of time. All was not lost. I decided I would come back one day. For a proper vacation. When it was winter in America. Maybe via Bali again.
If you enjoyed THE FOURTH MAN don’t miss Lee Child’s upcoming thriller
BLUE MOON
COMING AUTUMN 2019 IN HARDBACK, EBOOK AND AUDIO
Find out where it all began in
KILLING FLOOR
Jack Reacher jumps off a bus in small town Georgia. And is thrown into the county jail for a murder he didn’t commit.
As the body count mounts, one thing is for sure. They picked the wrong guy to take the fall.
AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK, EBOOK AND AUDIOBOOK
COMING THIS APRIL IN PAPERBACK.
JACK REACHER NEVER LOOKS BACK … UNTIL NOW.
Travelling through the New England woods, Reacher sees a sign to a place he has never been – the town where his father was born. He takes the detour.
Close by, a young couple are stranded at a lonely motel. They’re trapped in an ominous game of life and death.
As the two stories begin to entwine, the stakes get ever higher. For Reacher, the past just got personal.
AVAILABLE NOW IN HARDBACK, EBOOK AND AUDIOBOOK
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First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Transworld Digital
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Copyright © Lee Child 2018
Cover design: Stephen Mulcahey
Lee Child has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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ISBN 9781473567023
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