The Essential Jack Reacher 12-Book Bundle

by Lee Child

  Kohl came in wearing shorts and a tank top shirt. She still wasn’t sweating. Her skin was still dusty. She was carrying her file, which was then about eight times as thick as when I had first given it to her.

  “The sabot has got to be metal,” she said. “That’s their final conclusion.”

  “Is it?” I said.

  “They’d have preferred plastic, but I think that’s just showboating.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “I’m trying to tell you they’ve finished with the sabot design. They’re ready to move on with the important stuff now.”

  “You still feel all warm and fuzzy about this Gorowski guy?”

  She nodded. “It would be a tragedy to bust him. He’s a nice guy and an innocent victim. And the bottom line is he’s good at his job and useful to the army.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “It’s tricky,” she said. “I guess what I want to do is bring him on board and get him to feed phony stuff to whoever it is who’s got the hook in. That way we keep the investigation going without risking putting anything real out there.”

  “But?”

  “The real thing looks phony in itself. It’s a very weird device. It’s like a big lawn dart. It has no explosive in it.”

  “So how does it work?”

  “Kinetic energy, dense metals, depleted uranium, heat, all that kind of stuff. Were you a physics postgrad?”

  “No.”

  “Then you won’t understand it. But my feeling is if we screw with the designs the bad guy is going to know. It’ll put Gorowski at risk. Or his baby girls, or whatever.”

  “So you want to let the real blueprints out there?”

  “I think we have to.”

  “Big risk,” I said.

  “Your call,” she said. “That’s why you get the big bucks.”

  “I’m a captain,” I said. “I’d be on food stamps if I ever got time to eat.”

  “Decision?”

  “Got a line on the bad guy yet?”

  “No.”

  “Feel confident you won’t let it get away?”

  “Totally,” she said.

  I smiled. Right then she looked like the most self-possessed human being I had ever seen. Shining eyes, serious expression, hair hooked behind her ears, short khaki shorts, tiny khaki shirt, socks and parachute boots, dark dusty skin everywhere.

  “So go for it,” I said.

  “I never dance,” she said.

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t just you,” she said. “In fact, I’d have liked to. I appreciated the invitation. But I never dance with anybody.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just a thing,” she said. “I feel self-conscious. I’m not very coordinated.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “Maybe we should practice in private,” she said.

  “Separately?”

  “One-on-one mentoring helps,” she said. “Like with alcoholism.”

  Then she winked and walked out and left a very faint trace of her perfume behind her in the hot heavy air.

  Duffy and I finished our coffee in silence. Mine tasted thin and cold and bitter. I had no stomach for it. My right shoe pinched. It wasn’t a perfect fit. And it was starting to feel like a ball and chain. It had felt ingenious at first. Smart, and cool, and clever. I remembered the first time I opened the heel, three days ago, soon after I first arrived at the house, soon after Duke locked the door to my room. I’m in. I had felt like a guy in a movie. Then I remembered the last time I opened it. Up in Duke’s bathroom, an hour and a half ago. I had fired up the unit and Duffy’s message had been waiting there for me: We need to meet.

  “Why did you want to meet?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter now. I’m revising the mission. I’m scrapping all our objectives except getting Teresa back. Just find her and get her out of there, OK?”

  “What about Beck?”

  “We’re not going to get Beck. I screwed up again. This maid person was a legitimate agent and Teresa wasn’t. Nor were you. And the maid died, so they’re going to fire me for going off the books with Teresa and you, and they’re going to abandon the case against Beck because I compromised procedure so badly they could never make it stand up in court anymore. So just get Teresa the hell out and we’ll all go home.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “You’ll have to forget about Quinn,” she said. “Just let it go.”

  I said nothing.

  “We failed anyway,” she said. “You haven’t found anything useful. Not a thing. No evidence at all. It’s been a complete waste of time, beginning to end.”

  I said nothing.

  “Like my career,” she said.

  “When are you going to tell the Justice Department?”

  “About the maid?”

  I nodded.

  “Right away,” she said. “Immediately. I’ll have to. No choice. But I’ll search the files first and find out who put her in there. Because I’d prefer to break the news face-to-face, I guess, at my own level. It’ll give me a chance to apologize. Any other way all hell will break loose before I get the opportunity. All my access codes will be canceled and I’ll be handed a cardboard box and told to clear my desk within thirty minutes.”

  “How long have you been there?”

  “A long time. I thought I was going to be the first woman director.”

  I said nothing.

  “I would have told you,” she said. “I promise, if I’d had another agent in there I would have told you.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry for jumping to conclusions.”

  “It’s the stress,” she said. “Undercover is tough.”

  I nodded. “It’s like a hall of mirrors up there. One damn thing after another. Everything feels unreal.”

  We left our half-finished cups on the table and headed out, into the mall’s interior sidewalks, and then outside into the rain. We had parked near each other. She kissed me on the cheek. Then she got into her Taurus and headed south and I got into the Saab and headed north.

  Paulie took his own sweet time about opening the gate for me. He made me wait a couple of minutes before he even came lumbering out of his house. He still had his slicker on. Then he stood and stared for a minute before he went near the latch. But I didn’t care. I was busy thinking. I was hearing Duffy’s voice in my head: I’m revising the mission. Most of my military career a guy named Leon Garber was either directly or indirectly my boss. He explained everything to himself by making up little phrases or sayings. He had one for every occasion. He used to say: Revising objectives is smart because it stops you throwing good money after bad. He didn’t mean money in any literal sense. He meant manpower, resources, time, will, effort, energy. He used to contradict himself, too. Just as often he would say: Never ever get distracted from the exact job in hand. Of course, proverbs are like that generally. Too many cooks spoil the broth, many hands make light work, great minds think alike, fools never differ. But overall, after you canceled out a few layers of contradiction, Leon approved of revision. He approved of it big time. Mainly because revision was about thinking, and he figured thinking never hurt anybody. So I was thinking, and thinking hard, because I was aware that something was slowly and imperceptibly creeping up on me, just outside of my conscious grasp. Something connected to something Duffy had said to me: You haven’t found anything useful. Not a thing. No evidence at all.

  I heard the gate swing back. Looked up to see Paulie waiting for me to drive through. The rain was beating on his slicker. He still had no hat. I exacted some petty revenge by waiting a minute myself. Duffy’s revision suited me well enough. I didn’t care much about Beck. I really didn’t, either way. But I wanted Teresa. And I would get her. I wanted Quinn, too. And I would get him too, whatever Duffy said. The revision was only going to go so far.

  I checked on Paulie again. He was still waiting. He was an idiot. He was out in the rain, I was in a car. I
took my foot off the brake and rolled slowly through the gate. Then I accelerated hard and headed down to the house.

  I put the Saab away in the slot I had once seen it in and walked out into the courtyard. The mechanic was still in the third garage. The empty one. I couldn’t see what he was doing. Maybe he was just sheltering from the rain. I ran back to the house. Beck heard the metal detector announce my arrival and came into the kitchen to meet me. He pointed at his sports bag. It was still there on the table, right in the center.

  “Get rid of this shit,” he said. “Throw it in the ocean, OK?”

  “OK,” I said. He went back out to the hallway and I picked up the bag and turned around. Headed outside again and slipped down the ocean side of the garage block wall. I put my bundle right back in its hidden dip. Waste not, want not. And I wanted to be able to return Duffy’s Glock to her. She was already in enough trouble without having to add the loss of her service piece to the list. Most agencies take that kind of a thing very seriously.

  Then I walked on to the edge of the granite tables and swung the bag and hurled it far out to sea. It pinwheeled end over end in the air and the shoes and the e-mail unit were thrown clear. I saw the e-mail thing hit the water. It sank immediately. The left shoe hit toe-first and followed it. The bag parachuted a little and landed gently facedown and filled with water and turned over and slipped under. The right shoe floated for a moment, like a tiny black boat. It pitched and yawed and bobbed urgently like it was trying to escape to the east. It rode up over a peak and rode down on the far side of the crest. Then it started to list sideways. It floated maybe ten more seconds and then it filled with water and sank without a trace.

  There was no activity in the house. The cook wasn’t around. Richard was in the family dining room eating a sandwich he must have made for himself and staring out at the rain. Elizabeth was still in her parlor, still working on Doctor Zhivago. By a process of elimination I figured Beck must be in his den, maybe sitting in his red leather chair and looking at his machine gun collection. There was quiet everywhere. I didn’t understand it. Duffy had said they had five containers in and Beck had said he had a big weekend coming up, but nobody was doing anything.

  I went up to Duke’s room. I didn’t think of it as my room. I hoped I never would. I lay down on the bed and started thinking again. Tried to chase whatever it was hovering way in the back of my mind. It’s easy, Leon Garber would have said. Work the clues. Go through everything you’ve seen, everything you’ve heard. So I went through it. But I kept coming back to Dominique Kohl. The fifth time I ever saw her, she drove me to Aberdeen, Maryland, in an olive-green Chevrolet. I was having second thoughts about letting genuine blueprints out into the world. It was a big risk. Not usually something I would worry about, but I needed more progress than we were making. Kohl had identified the dead-drop site, and the drop technique, and where and when and how Gorowski was letting his contact know that the delivery had been made. But she still hadn’t seen the contact make the pickup. Still didn’t know who he was.

  Aberdeen was a small place twenty-some miles north and east of Baltimore. Gorowski’s method was to drive down to the big city on a Sunday and make the drop in the Inner Harbor area. Back then the renovations were in full swing and it was a nice bright place to be but the public hadn’t caught on all the way yet and it stayed pretty empty most of the time. Gorowski had a POV. It was a two-year-old Mazda Miata, bright red. It was a plausible car, all things considered. Not new, but not cheap either, because it was a popular model back then and nobody could get a discount off sticker, so used values held up well. And it was a two-seater, which was no good for his baby girls. So he had to have another car, too. We knew his wife wasn’t rich. It might have worried me in someone else, but the guy was an engineer. It was a characteristic choice. He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink. Entirely plausible that he would hoard his spare dollars and spring for something with a sweet manual change and rear-wheel drive.

  The Sunday we followed him he parked in a lot near one of the Baltimore marinas and went to sit on a bench. He was a squat hairy guy. Wide, but not tall. He had the Sunday newspaper with him. He spent some time gazing out at the sailboats. Then he closed his eyes and turned his face up to the sky. The weather was still wonderful. He spent maybe five minutes just soaking up the sun like a lizard. Then he opened his eyes and opened his paper and started to read it.

  “This is his fifth time,” Kohl whispered to me. “Third trip since they finished with the sabot stuff.”

  “Standard procedure so far?” I asked.

  “Identical,” she said.

  He kept busy with the paper for about twenty minutes. I could tell he was actually reading it. He paid attention to all the sections, except for sports, which I thought was a little odd for a Yankees fan. But then, I guessed a Yankees fan wouldn’t like the Orioles stuffed down his throat all the time.

  “Here we go,” Kohl whispered.

  He glanced up and slipped a buff army envelope out of the newspaper. Snapped his left hand up and out to take a kink out of the section he was reading. And to distract, because at the exact same time his right hand dropped the envelope into the garbage can beside him at the end of the bench.

  “Neat,” I said.

  “You bet,” she said. “This boy is no dummy.”

  I nodded. He was pretty good. He didn’t get up right away. He sat there for maybe ten more minutes, reading. Then he folded the paper slowly and carefully and stood up and walked to the edge of the water and looked out at the boats some more. Then he turned around and walked back toward his car, with the newspaper tucked up under his left arm.

  “Now watch,” Kohl said.

  I saw him take a nub of chalk out of his pants pocket with his right hand. He scuffed against an iron lamp post and left a tick of chalk on it. It was the fifth mark on the post. Five weeks, five marks. The first four were fading away with age, in sequence. I stared at them through my field glasses while he walked on into the parking lot and got into his roadster and drove slowly away. I turned back and focused on the garbage can.

  “Now what happens?” I said.

  “Absolutely nothing,” Kohl said. “I’ve done this twice before. Two whole Sundays. Nobody’s going to come. Not today, not tonight.”

  “When is the trash emptied?”

  “Tomorrow morning, first thing.”

  “Maybe the garbage man is a go-between.”

  She shook her head. “I checked. The truck compacts everything into a solid mass as it’s loaded and then it goes straight into the incinerator.”

  “So our secret blueprints are getting burned up in a municipal incinerator?”

  “That’s safe enough.”

  “Maybe one of these sailboat guys is sneaking out in the middle of the night.”

  “Not unless the Invisible Man bought a sailboat.”

  “So maybe there’s no guy,” I said. “Maybe the whole thing was set up way in advance and then the guy got arrested for something else. Or he got cold feet and left town. Or he got sick and died. Maybe it’s a defunct scheme.”

  “You think?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Are you going to pull the plug?” she said.

  “I have to. I might be an idiot, but I’m not completely stupid. This is way out of hand now.”

  “Can I go to plan B?”

  “Haul Gorowski in and threaten him with a firing squad. Then tell him if he plays ball and delivers phony plans we’ll be nice to him.”

  “Tough to make them convincing.”

  “Tell him to draw them himself,” I said. “It’s his ass on the line.”

  “Or his children’s.”

  “All part of being a parent,” I said. “It’ll concentrate his mind.”

  She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “You want to go dancing?”

  “Here?”

  “We’re a long way from home. Nobody knows us.”

  “OK,” I said.

  T
hen we figured it was too early for dancing, so we had a couple of beers and waited for evening. The bar we were in was small and dark. There was wood and brick. It was a nice place. It had a jukebox. We spent a long time leaning on it, side by side, trying to choose our debut number. We debated it with intensity. It began to assume enormous significance. I tried to interpret her suggestions by analyzing the tempos. Were we going to be holding on to each other? That sort of dancing? Or was it going to be the usual sort of separate-but-equal leaping about? In the end we would have needed a United Nations resolution, so we just put our quarter in the machine and closed our eyes and hit buttons at random. We got “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones. It was a great number. It always has been. She was actually a pretty good dancer. But I was terrible.

  Afterward we were out of breath, so we sat down and ordered more beers. And I suddenly figured out what Gorowski had been up to.

  “It’s not the envelope,” I said. “The envelope is empty. It’s the newspaper. The blueprints are in the newspaper. In the sports section. He should have checked the box scores. The envelope is a diversion, in case of surveillance. He’s been well rehearsed. He dumps the newspaper in another garbage can, later. After making his chalk mark. Probably on his way out of the lot.”

  “Shit,” Kohl said. “I wasted five weeks.”

  “And somebody got three real blueprints.”

  “One of us,” she said. “Military, or CIA, or FBI. A professional, to be that cute.”

  The newspaper, not the envelope. Ten years later I was lying on a bed in Maine thinking about Dominique Kohl dancing and a guy called Gorowski folding his newspaper, slowly and carefully, and staring out at a hundred sailboat masts on the water. The newspaper, not the envelope. It seemed to be still relevant, somehow. This, not that. Then I thought about the maid hiding my stash under the floor of the Saab’s trunk. She couldn’t have hidden anything else there, or Beck would have found it and added it to the prosecution exhibits on his kitchen table. But the Saab’s carpets were old and loose. If I was the sort of person who hid a gun under a spare tire I might hide papers under a car’s carpets. And I might be the sort of person who made notes and kept records.