Personal

by Lee Child

  stepped forward a yard. I said, ‘Where are they?’

  He didn’t know what I was talking about. That was clear. His eyes were truly blank. No evasion there. Maybe the two outfits were cooperating to a limited extent, but important information was still compartmentalized.

  I said, ‘Where are the guns?’

  He didn’t answer. But now there was evasion in his eyes. And resolve. He knew, but he wasn’t going to tell me.

  Behind me I heard the same soft whimper and Casey Nice called out, ‘Reacher, hurry.’

  So I did. I jabbed the guy with the wrench again, and he swung his tyre iron to fend it off, with a jarring clang, and I jabbed again, and he parried again, by that point putting all his focus on our respective above-the-waist activities, which was exactly where I wanted it, because it meant I was able to step in and kick him in the nuts with absolutely no impediment at all.

  And it was a good kick. Mass and velocity, like baseball, like everything. The guy dropped his tyre iron, and folded forward and down, and tipped on to his knees, gasping and retching, hanging his head, kneeling there right in front of me. Which gave me plenty of time and space to pick my spot. I tapped him hard on the side of the head with the wrench, serious but not deadly, like a tennis player just warming up, and he rolled over on his side and lay still.

  Then I hustled back to the boxed-off room, to see how Casey Nice was doing.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THE FIRST GUY was lying mostly on his back with a footlong shard of glass in his eye. Dead, for sure. I could tell by the limp shapelessness of his body. Unmistakable. Life had recently departed. There wasn’t much blood. Just a slow trickle, now stopped, hanging on his cheek like a fat red worm. Plus a thick clear liquid, which might have been the inside of his eyeball.

  It was the second guy who was whimpering. The guy I had hit with the chair. He was on the floor in the doorway. His hair was all matted with blood, and there was a decent pool of it under his head. His eyes were closed. I didn’t think he was about to get up and give us any trouble. Not any time soon, anyway.

  Casey Nice was backed up against the desk, looking somewhere halfway between shaky and resolute. I had asked Shoemaker, Has she operated overseas before? Has she operated anywhere before?

  She had now.

  I said, ‘You OK?’

  She said, ‘I think so.’

  ‘You did a good job.’

  She didn’t answer.

  I said, ‘We need to search this place.’

  She said, ‘We need to call an ambulance.’

  ‘We will. After we search. We need guns. That’s what we came for.’

  ‘They won’t be here. It was a decoy.’

  ‘How many secure locations do they have? I think the guns are here. I asked the last guy, and he got all worried.’

  ‘We don’t have time.’

  I thought about Little Joey, in his Bentley. Nosing through the traffic. Red lights and gridlock. Or maybe not. I said, ‘We’ll be quick.’

  She said, ‘We better be.’

  We started by searching the main man’s pockets. I figured if he had a key, then we might be able to tell what kind of a lock we were looking for, and therefore where we might find it. A safe key would look different than a door key, which would look different than a locker key. And so on, and so forth. But all he had was a car key. It was a grimy old item on a creased leather fob that had Ealing Taxis printed on it in flaking gold leaf. Possibly one of the battered sedans in the shop was his. He had cash money too, spoils of war, which I added to our treasury. And a cell phone, which I put in my pocket. But he had nothing else of interest.

  We had already searched the boxed-off room, so we moved out to the main workshop floor. There was a toilet in the far corner, with nothing in it except basic facilities and about a trillion bacteria. It was like a huge three-dimensional petri dish. But it was hiding nothing except contagious disease. It had no hidden panels, and no opening sections in the walls, and no trapdoor in the floor.

  The rest of the space was one big open area, full of cars and clutter, as we had seen. Complete visual chaos, but conspicuously lacking in obvious hiding places. There were no doors in any of the walls, no closets, no large square boxes, no locked compartments. There was nothing thrust down the centres of the stacks of tyres.

  ‘No guns here,’ Nice said. ‘It’s an auto repair shop. What you see is what you get.’

  I didn’t answer.

  She said, ‘We have to go.’

  I thought about Little Joey, in his Bentley. Already through the city centre, by that point, probably. Out the other side, going fast on a wide road heading west.

  ‘We have to go,’ she said again.

  In his Bentley.

  ‘Wait,’ I said.

  ‘For what?’

  No large square boxes, no locked compartments.

  Bullshit.

  I said, ‘The main man wouldn’t drive a rent-a-wreck. Why would he? Karel Libor had a Range Rover. The Romford Boys use premium brands. Wouldn’t the Serbians too? They wouldn’t want to look like poor relations.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Why was the guy carrying the key to a clunker?’

  ‘Because they fix clunkers here. That’s their job. Or their cover.’

  ‘It’s not the boss man’s job to look after the keys.’ I went back to the boxed-off room, to the guy’s pocket, and came back with the key. It had a metal shaft and a plastic head, but not a big bulbous thing like a modern car has. No battery, no transponder, no security device. Just a key.

  I looked around. I started with the dusty sedan parked in the corner, with the soft tyres and the missing front wing. Because why would a car stay in the shop long enough to get soft tyres? That was no kind of an efficient business practice. A car needed to be on the road, earning its keep. If it was unfixable it needed to be towed away and crushed. Because the workshop needed to earn its keep, too. Every square foot had to turn a profit.

  I looked at the car’s trunk. It was a large square box, and a locked compartment, right there. Hiding in plain sight.

  I tried the key.

  It didn’t fit.

  Nice said, ‘Reacher, we have to go.’

  I tried the next car, and the next. The key didn’t fit. I tried the Skoda we had arrived in, even though I knew it would be hopeless. And it was. I went from car to car. The key didn’t fit any of them.

  Nice said, ‘We’re out of time.’

  I looked around, and gave it up.

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  I went back to the boxed-off room’s doorway, and knelt over the guy lying there. He had stopped whimpering, but he was still alive. He must have had a skull like concrete. I found the Skoda key in his pocket. I tossed it to Nice and said, ‘Start the car. I’ll get the roller door.’

  The roller door had a palm-sized button on a switch box, which was connected to its winding mechanism by a long swan-neck metal conduit. I pressed the button hard, and the motor jerked to life, and the slack was pulled out of the chain, and the door rattled and started to rise. The daylight came back, inch by inch. It spread across the floor, and up the wall on the other side of the space. I saw Casey Nice in the Skoda’s driver’s seat. I saw her looking down at the controls. I saw a puff of black smoke as the engine started.

  I saw another palm-sized button on another switch box. And another. And another. On the hoists. Hydraulic mechanisms, up and down. The hoists were empty, all but one. Which had a car raised high, its underside all black and dirty, its trunk way up there, above head height. Out of sight and out of mind. Some cop I was.

  I hustled back and gave Nice a wait sign. I hit the button. There was a grinding noise and the hoist came down, slowly, slowly, past my eye line, and onward. The car on the hoist was a boxy old thing, covered in dust. With soft tyres. The hoist slowed and settled, and the car rocked once, and went still, and the grinding noise stopped, and at the same time the roller door at the entrance hit the top of its travel, a
nd its noise stopped too, leaving only the heavy diesel beat of the Skoda’s idling engine.

  I stepped up to the dusty car’s trunk lid. Which was less dusty than the car itself. It had fingermarks all over it near the lock, and palm prints all over it near the lip. It had been raised and lowered about a hundred times since the passenger doors had last been opened.

  The key fit.

  The lid came up, on a noisy spring.

  The car was a decent-sized sedan, and its trunk was pretty deep and wide and long, big enough for a bunch of suitcases, or two or three golf bags, or whatever else a person might want to transport. And it was full.

  But not with suitcases or golf bags.

  It was full of handguns, and boxes of ammunition.

  The handguns were all Glocks, at first sight, all brand new, all wrapped in plastic, neatly stacked, mostly 17s, the original classic, some 17Ls, with longer barrels, and some 19s, with shorter barrels. All nine-millimetre, which matched the Parabellum ammunition stacked alongside, in boxes of a hundred.

  Casey Nice got out of the Skoda. She took a look, and she said, ‘Sherlock Homeless.’

  I said, ‘The 19 will fit your hand better. You OK with the short barrel?’

  She paused a beat and said, ‘Sure.’

  So I unwrapped a 19, and a regular 17 for myself, and I loaded them from one box of ammunition, and took two more boxes unopened. We left the hoist down and the trunk lid up, and we got in the Skoda, with Nice driving. We backed up and turned and headed for the exit.

  ‘Wait one,’ I said.

  She braked, and came to rest with the hood in the bar of daylight coming in the door. I said, ‘Where are we?’

  She said, ‘Wormwood Scrubs.’

  ‘Which is like where else, comparatively?’

  ‘The South Bronx, probably.’

  ‘But the British version. Where they don’t hear gunshots every day.’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘In fact when they do, they still call the cops. Who show up with SWAT and armoured vehicles and about a hundred detectives.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘And I never trust a weapon I can’t be sure will work.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We need to test-fire the Glocks.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Well, if we did it here, the cops would come, and they would get ambulances for those who need them, and then they would gather enough red-hot evidence to put a serious dent in this whole Serbian thing they seem to have out here. Which all in all might be considered a public service.’

  ‘Are you nuts?’

  ‘Aim for the cars. I always wanted to do that. Two rounds each, and then get the hell out.’

  Which is what we did. We wound down our windows, and we got our shoulders out, and we aimed behind us, and we fired four spaced shots, crashingly loud, through four separate windshields, and before the last echo came back off the bricks we started rolling, slow and sedate, completely ordinary, just a local minicab, properly booked by phone.

  We found the main road in from the west, and we headed for the centre of town. Less than a mile into it, we were passed on the opposite side by a fast little convoy, led by a big black Bentley coupé, which was followed by four black Jaguar sedans, and bringing up the rear was a small black panel van.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  WE PARKED IN a no-parking zone in a side street near the Paddington railroad station. The plan was to lock the car and walk away. It was a very busy area. There were plenty of onward transportation options. There were buses, and black cabs, and two subway stations nearby, and the regular trains. On foot we could head south to Hyde Park, or north through Maida Vale to St John’s Wood. We would be caught on camera, for sure, no doubt many times, but it would take hundreds of hours of patient viewing to figure out who we were, and where we had come from, and where we had gone, and why.

  I checked my appearance, to make sure I was fit for public consumption. My jacket was made of thin, stretchy material, no doubt good for all kinds of freedom of movement on the golf course, but it clung to the shape of whatever I had in my pockets. Which might have been OK with golf balls, but which wasn’t OK with the Glock. I wanted it on the right, and it barely fit. Mostly because there was something else in there already.

  It was the main man’s cell phone. It was a drugstore burner, pretty much the same as the pair we had found in the Romford Boys’ glove compartment. I passed it to Casey Nice and said, ‘See if you can find the call log.’

  She did something with arrows and a menu, and she scrolled up and down, and she said, ‘He made a thirty-second call to what looks like a local cellular number, and three minutes later the same number called him back, for one minute. That’s the last of the activity.’

  I nodded. ‘Probably the APB on us went out in the middle of the night, and all the bad guys in London got briefed first thing this morning, so the Serbian guy called Romford and said, hey, those people you’re looking for? I’ve got them locked in a room. But maybe he was only talking to a lieutenant at that point, who said we’ll call you back, and who then went to tell Charlie White the news, and Charlie White called back himself, and made the arrangements.’

  ‘Would a minute be long enough for arrangements?’

  ‘All they needed was an address. I’m sure Bentleys have satellite navigation. Even our pick-up truck in Arkansas had satellite navigation.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Although I didn’t hear the phone ring.’

  She used the menu again, and the arrows.

  She said, ‘It’s set on silent.’

  I nodded again. ‘So that’s what happened.’

  ‘I should give this Romford number to General O’Day. Don’t you think? MI5 could trace it.’

  ‘To a cash payment in Boots the Chemist. Doesn’t help.’

  ‘What’s Boots the Chemist?’

  ‘Their pharmacy chain. Like CVS. John Boot set it up, in the middle of the nineteenth century. He probably looked just like the guy who built the wall around Wallace Court. It started out as a herbal medicine store, in a place called Nottingham, which is way north of here.’

  ‘MI5 could track the phone to a physical location.’

  ‘Only if it’s switched on. Which it won’t be much longer. They’ll trash it as soon as they hear the news from Wormwood Scrubs. They’ll know their number was captured.’

  ‘They probably already heard.’

  I took the phone back from her.

  I said, ‘Let’s find out.’

  I peered at the buttons and found one marked redial. I pressed it with my thumbnail, and I watched the number spool across the screen, and I pressed the green call button, and I raised the phone to my ear.

  I got a ring tone. The classic British two-beat purr. More urgent than the languorous American sound. I waited. Three rings, four, five, six.

  Then the call was answered. By someone who had spent the six-ring delay checking his own screen and identifying the incoming number, clearly, because he had his first question all set and ready to go. A deep London voice asked, ‘What the hell is going on there? About a hundred filth have come past us already.’

  Filth meant cops. London slang. I said, ‘Where?’

  The voice said, ‘We’re parked three streets away.’

  I said, ‘Little Joey?’

  He said, ‘Who is this?’

  ‘I’m the guy who offed your guy. Last night, in the van. I saw your little tantrum.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Right behind you.’

  I heard him move.

  ‘Kidding,’ I said.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’d call myself a challenger, Joey, but I’d be selling myself short.’