by Child, Lee
Reacher watched him.
He said, ‘Do you see his gun somewhere?’
The guy wasn’t moving.
Abby said, ‘I see it.’
‘Pick it up. Finger and thumb, butt or barrel.’
‘I know how.’
‘Just checking. Always safer that way.’
She darted in, knelt, picked up the Glock, and darted back.
The guy still wasn’t moving.
She said, ‘What should we do about him?’
Reacher said, ‘We should leave him right where he is.’
‘And then what?’
‘We should steal his car.’
‘Why?’
‘His boss is coming. We need to leave the right kind of message.’
‘You can’t declare war on them.’
‘They already did. On me. For no apparent reason. So now I’m offering a robust initial response. I’m saying their policy should be reconsidered. It’s a standard diplomatic move. Like playing chess. It gives them a chance to parley, no harm, no foul. I hope they see that.’
Abby said, ‘This is the Albanian mob we’re talking about. You’re one guy. Frank is right. This is crazy.’
‘But it’s happening,’ Reacher said. ‘We can’t roll the clock back. We can’t wish it away. We just have to deal with it the best we can. So we can’t leave the car here. Too meek and mild. Like we’re saying, oops, sorry. Like we didn’t really mean it. We got to make a point. We got to say, don’t mess with us, or you get a kick in the head and your car stolen. That way they’ll take it seriously. They’ll act with an element of tactical caution. They’ll assemble larger forces.’
‘That’s a bad thing.’
‘Only if they find us. Assuming they don’t, all they’re doing by bunching up is leaving bigger gaps elsewhere, for us to walk through.’
‘Walk through where?’
‘I guess the ultimate goal would be a face to face meeting with the big boss. Gregory’s equivalent.’
‘Dino,’ Abby said. ‘That’s crazy.’
‘He’s one guy. Same as me. We could have an exchange of views. I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding.’
‘I have to work in this town. One side of Center or the other.’
‘I apologize,’ Reacher said.
‘You should.’
‘But that’s why we need to do this right. We need to play to win.’
‘OK, we’ll steal the car.’
‘Or we could set it on fire.’
‘Stealing is better,’ she said. ‘I want to get out of here as fast as I can.’
They drove the car four blocks into a tangle of blank urban streets, and they left it on a corner, keys in, all four doors standing open, plus the hood, plus the trunk. Somehow symbolic. Then they walked back to Barton’s place, via a long circuitous route, and they checked all four sides of his block before they stepped to his door. He was up, waiting, with Hogan.
Plus a third guy, who Reacher had never seen before.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The third guy in Barton’s hallway had the kind of hair and skin that made a person look ten years younger than he really was, which therefore in reality made him about Reacher’s own generation. He was smaller and neater. He had sharp watchful eyes set deep either side of a blade of a nose. He had a long unruly lock of hair that fell across his forehead. He was dressed with a modicum of style, in good shoes and corduroy pants and a shirt and a jacket.
Joe Hogan said, ‘This is who I was telling you about. The dogface who knows all the old Commie languages. His name is Guy Vantresca.’
Reacher stuck out his hand.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said.
‘Likewise,’ Vantresca said, and he shook hands, and then he did so all over again, with Abby.
Reacher said, ‘You got here fast.’
‘I was still awake,’ Vantresca said. ‘I live close by.’
‘Thanks for helping out.’
‘Actually that’s not why I’m here. I came to warn you off. You can’t mess with these people. Too many, too nasty, too protected. That would be my assessment.’
‘Were you Military Intelligence?’
Vantresca shook his head.
‘Armour,’ he said.
A company commander late on in the Cold War, Hogan had called him.
‘Tanks?’ Reacher asked.
‘Fourteen of them,’ Vantresca said. ‘All mine. All facing east. Happy days.’
‘Why did you learn the languages?’
‘I thought we were going to win. I thought I might be ruling a civilian district. Or at least ordering a bottle of wine in a restaurant. Or meeting girls. It was a long time ago. Plus Uncle Sam paid for it. Back then the army liked education. Everyone was getting postgraduate degrees.’
Reacher said, ‘Too many and too nasty are subjective judgements. We can talk about that kind of stuff later. But too protected is different. What do you know about that?’
‘I do some corporate consulting. Mostly physical security of buildings. But I hear things, and I get asked things. Last year a federal project ran a set of integrated numbers from all across the nation, and it turned out the two most law-abiding populations in America were the Ukrainian and Albanian communities right here in town. They don’t even get parking tickets. That suggests a very close relationship with all levels of law enforcement.’
‘But there must be a red line somewhere. I suggested to one of them that gunfire on the city streets at night would get a reaction, and the guy didn’t argue. In fact I guess he agreed with me, because he didn’t pull the trigger.’
‘Plus we’re getting a new police commissioner. They’re nervous. But there’s still plenty of boring invisible stuff their side of the line. Generally speaking this type of thing isn’t about bullets in the street. It’s about someone having a cosy chat with a potential witness, out of sight, out of earshot, probably in the witness’s own home, probably in a meaningful location, like an infant daughter’s bedroom, about what a weird thing memory is, how it comes and goes, how it fades in and out, how it plays tricks, and about how it’s no shame at all to say, look, man, I just can’t recall. People I know say that kind of case is very hard to investigate and very easy to bury.’
‘How many of them are there?’
‘Too many. Like I said. Too many, too nasty, too protected. You should forget it.’
‘Where was your company in the order of battle?’
‘Pretty near the tip of the spear,’ Vantresca said.
‘In other words hopelessly outnumbered, from day one and possibly for ever.’
‘I get the point you’re trying to make. But I had fourteen Abrams tanks. They were the finest fighting vehicles in the world. They were like something out of a science fiction book. I wasn’t walking through the Fulda Gap in a pair of pants and a jacket.’
‘As always with armoured people, you over-fetishize the machine. That said, clearly you felt you were more lethal than them. Outnumbered, but nastier. But in turn they were certainly protected, by a whole giant nation. One out of three in your favour. Two out of three against. But even so, you would have started your engines, if they had told you to.’
‘I get the point,’ Vantresca said again.
‘And you expected to win,’ Reacher said. ‘Which is why you learned the languages. Which are all I really need right now. I’m taking this one step at a time. First I need to understand what they’re saying in the texts, and then I need to use what I learn, in order to figure out what to do next. No combat readiness yet. No warnings necessary.’
‘Suppose what you learn is that it’s hopeless?’
‘Not an acceptable outcome. Can only be a failure of planning. Surely they taught you that in Germany.’
‘OK,’ Vantresca said. ‘One step at a time.’
They worked in the kitchen and started with the Ukrainian language. Vantresca admired Abby’s video capture. Smart, to the point, and efficient. He tapped his finger on
the screen, in a slow, syncopated rhythm, play, pause, play, pause, and he read aloud from the freeze-framed screen, at first slow and halting, and then sometimes stopping altogether.
Because linguistically he was in trouble from the start. These were text messages, full of unknown slang, and single-letter abbreviations, and in-group acronyms, and also full of what could only be misspellings, unless in fact they were deliberate simplifications, perhaps following a convention developed especially for the medium. No one knew. Vantresca said the task could take him some time. He said it would be like translating a difficult foreign language while simultaneously breaking an espionage code. Or maybe two codes, given the oblique allusions and elisions any self-respecting gangster could be expected to use.
Abby got her laptop and worked with him side by side, tackling individual words with online dictionaries, or searching the single-letter abbreviations, or the acronyms, on language blogs, and word-nerd sites. She made notes on scraps of paper. A couple of things fell into place, but even so the work was slow. Never had so much come from so little. She had made the video as fast as she dared, five, ten, twenty seconds, scrolling at speed, pumping on and on. Now that vivid blur was giving up thousands and thousands of words, each one a challenge and a puzzle, most of them with two or three plausible solutions.
Reacher let them work. He hung out in the front parlour, with Barton and Hogan, in the spaces between the drums and the speaker cabinets. One cabinet was grey and about the size of a refrigerator. It had eight dirty circles on its grille. Reacher sat on the floor and leaned his back against it and it didn’t move at all. Barton hauled his battered Fender up into his lap, and played it unplugged, barely audible, with up and down runs of soft buzzy notes.
Hogan said, ‘Do you think we would have won? Do you think Vantresca would have wound up using his languages?’
‘On balance I think we would have prevailed,’ Reacher said. ‘As a technical matter I think we would have shut them down before they shut us down. Hard to call it winning, given the mess it would have made. But whatever, the tip of the spear would have been vaporized long ago. I’m afraid your friend wasted his time in school.’
Barton played a descending arpeggio, some kind of diminished minor chord, and ended with a bang on the open bottom string. Plugged in, it would have demolished the house. Unplugged, the string rattled and clattered against the frets, and gave out no fundamental at all. Barton looked at Reacher and said, ‘Now you’re the tip of the spear.’
‘I’m not looking to start a war,’ Reacher said. ‘All I want is the Shevicks’ money. If I can get it some kind of easy way, I absolutely will, believe me. I don’t feel the need to meet any of them face to face on the field of battle. In fact I would be happier not to.’
‘You won’t get the option. They must have Trulenko buttoned up pretty tight. Layers and layers. I’ve seen them do it, when a name comes to one of their clubs. They have a man on the corner, and a man on the door, and a man on the next door along, plus a couple of extra guys just roaming around.’
‘What do you remember about Trulenko?’
‘He was a nerd, like all those guys. I remember thinking it shouldn’t turn out that way. I was cool in high school. Now the nerds are billionaires and I’m scraping a living. I guess I should have learned software, not music.’
‘If he was working, what would he be doing?’
‘Is he working?’
‘Someone used that word.’
‘Then computers, I’m sure. That’s what he was good at. He was one of the top boys. His app was something to do with doctors, but basically all that stuff is computer software, isn’t it?’
Abby stuck her head in the door.
‘We figured it out,’ she said. ‘We’re ready to go with the Ukrainian. They mention Trulenko twice.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
Vantresca reset the video so it would play from the beginning, but before he ran it he said, ‘Overall there’s some weird shit going down. Apart from anything else they’re in an uproar because they’re losing people. Two guys got in a wreck up at the Ford dealer. Then two bagmen got taken off a block in the gourmet quarter. Then two more guys got taken out of a massage parlour. Then two more guys went missing outside of Abby’s house. Total of eight so far.’
‘It’s carnage out there,’ Reacher said.
‘What’s interesting is they blamed the Albanians for the first six. But the language changed for the last two. Now they’re blaming you. They think you’re on some secret New York or Chicago payroll, covertly employed to stir things up down here. There’s an all-points bulletin out on you. Under the name of Shevick. Which in the end could prove to be a bigger problem.’
Vantresca clicked Abby’s phone and started the video. At first he let it spool at the same speed she had recorded it. On the screen the shadow of her fingertip was visible on the right side of the image, scooting up, up, up. Then Vantresca paused and restarted and paused again, until he found the bubble he wanted. It contained a photograph above the text. Aaron and Maria Shevick, and Abigail Gibson, in the hallway of the Shevicks’ home, looking startled and a little uneasy. Reacher remembered the sound he heard from behind the kitchen door. The quiet, scratchy click. The cell phone, imitating a camera.
Vantresca said, ‘The text below the image says the people in the picture are Jack, Joanna, and Abigail Reacher.’
He played and paused, played and paused, through four more bubbles. He stopped on a fifth. He said, ‘Right here they’ve already figured out it’s Abby Gibson, not Abigail Reacher. Next message down, they’re sending a guy to her place of work, to get her home address.’
He moved the video on.
‘And here they have her home address, and now they’re sending a car to her house, with orders to bring her in if they find her.’
‘All’s well that ends well,’ Reacher said.
‘It gets worse,’ Vantresca said. He moved the video on again, to a fat green bubble from later in the day, which had the same photograph in it again, above a dense block of Cyrillic writing. Vantresca read out loud, ‘It has been reported that the old woman named Joanna Reacher in the picture above was in our pawn shop where she signed her name Maria Shevick.’
‘Shit,’ Reacher said. ‘That was their shop?’
‘She should have expected it. Most everything is theirs, on the west side. Problem is, she gave them her real name. Which makes it at least somewhat likely she gave them her real address and her real Social Security number, too. Which puts them one step away from finding out she’s Aaron Shevick’s legal wife. From that point on it’s not going to be rocket science to figure out who’s really who. Whereupon they can act as fast as they like. They’re already waiting outside the house.’
‘They’ll be plunged into an existential crisis. Do they want Aaron Shevick the name, or Aaron Shevick the physical human being who borrowed their money and is apparently covertly stirring them up? What, after all, is the nature of identity? It’s a question they’ll have to wrestle with.’
‘Are you a West Pointer?’
‘How could you tell?’
‘The level of bullshit. This could get very serious. Obviously they want the right physical human being, but however they set about getting him, you got to figure a little china will get broken along the way. Starting right inside that house.’
Reacher nodded.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Believe me. It’s already very serious. They’re seventy years old. But I don’t see what I can do about their physical safety. Not around the clock. The only rational response would be evacuate them to a safe location. But where? I don’t have the resources.’ He paused a beat. Then he said, ‘Normally with this kind of thing, I would say, go stay with your daughter. I’m sure they would love to.’
Vantresca moved the video to a fat bubble from late the night before. He said, ‘This is where you say the name Trulenko to the doorman where Abby worked. From here the conversation spins off in two different directions.
First, about you. They can’t understand why a downmarket applicant for credit would ask that question. Two different worlds. From there they develop the theory you’re a provocateur paid by an outside organization.’
‘And the second direction is about Trulenko himself,’ Abby said. ‘There are two separate mentions. First a status check and a threat assessment. Which comes back negative. All secure. But an hour later, they start to worry.’
‘Because I got away,’ Reacher said. ‘When you hauled me in your door. They knew I was still on the loose.’
Vantresca said, ‘They pulled four crews off their regular assignments and told them to report for extra guard duty. They told the existing guards to fall back and form up again as Trulenko’s personal detail. They call it Situation B, which we think is a kind of Defcon level. It’s clearly pre-planned, probably rehearsed, maybe even used before.’
‘OK,’ Reacher said. ‘A crew is what, two guys in a car?’
‘You would know.’
‘Therefore eight guys in total. Reinforcing how many to start with? How many do they deploy on an everyday zero-threat basis? Not more than four, probably, if they can also seamlessly change into a personal detail afterwards. So four fall back and eight take over the perimeter.’
‘You against twelve guys.’
‘Not if I pick the right spot on the perimeter. I could sneak in a gap.’
‘Best case, four guys.’
‘Moot point, unless the phone tells the eight guys exactly where to report, for their extra guard duty. A street address would be helpful.’
Vantresca didn’t answer.
Reacher looked at Abby.
She said, ‘It does say exactly where.’
‘But?’
‘It’s an incredibly difficult word. I looked it up all over the place. Originally it seemed to mean either a hive or a nest or a burrow. Or all three. Or somewhere in between. For something that might have hummed or buzzed or thrashed around. Like a lot of ancient words it was biologically inexact. Now it seems to be used exclusively as a metaphor. Like in the movies, when you see the mad scientist in his lab, full of lit-up machines and crackling energy. That’s how the word is used now.’
