by Lee Child
After that we sat in silence for what felt like a long time, and then Sansom’s desk phone rang. It was his receptionist on the line. I could hear her voice through the earpiece, and through the door. She rattled off a list of things that needed urgent attention. Sansom hung up and said, “I have to go. I’ll call a page to see you out.” He stood up and came around the desk and walked out of the room. Just like an innocent man with nothing to hide. He left me all alone, sitting in my chair, with the door open. Springfield had gone, too. I could see no one in the outer office except the woman at the desk. She smiled at me. I smiled at her. No page showed up.
We were always behind the curve, Sansom had said. I waited a long minute and then started squirming around like I was restless. Then after a plausible interval I got out of my chair. I stumped around with my hands clasped behind my back, like an innocent man with nothing to hide, just waiting around on turf that was not his own. I headed over to the wall behind the desk, like it was a completely random destination. I studied the pictures. I counted faces I knew. My initial total came to twenty-four. Four presidents, nine other politicians, five athletes, two actors, Donald Rumsfeld, Saddam Hussein, Elspeth, and Springfield.
Plus someone else.
I knew a twenty-fifth face.
In all of the celebratory election-night victory pictures, right next to Sansom himself, was a guy smiling just as widely, as if he was basking in the glow of a job well done, as if he was not-very-modestly claiming his full share of the credit. A strategist. A tactician. A Svengali. A behind-the-scenes political fixer.
Sansom’s chief of staff, presumably.
He was about my age. In all of the pictures he was dusted with confetti or tangled with streamers or knee-deep in balloons and he was grinning like an idiot, but his eyes were cold. They had a canny, calculating shrewdness in them.
They reminded me of a ballplayer’s eyes.
I knew why the cafeteria charade had been staged.
I knew who had been sitting in Sansom’s visitor chair before me.
We were always behind the curve.
Liar.
I knew Sansom’s chief of staff.
I had seen him before.
I had seen him wearing chinos and a golf shirt, riding the 6 train late at night in New York City.
Chapter 40
I checked all the celebration pictures, very carefully. The guy from the subway was in all of them. Different angles, different years, different victories, but it was definitely the same guy, literally at Sansom’s right hand. Then a page bustled into the office and two minutes later I was back on the Independence Avenue sidewalk. Fourteen minutes after that I was back inside the railroad station, waiting for the next train back to New York. Fifty-eight minutes after that I was on it, sitting comfortably, leaving town, watching the dismal rail yards through the window. Far to my left a gang of men wearing hard hats and orange high-visibility vests was working on a section of track. Their vests glowed through the smog. The fabric must have had tiny beads of reflective glass mixed into the plastic weave. Safety, through chemistry. The vests were more than highly visible. They were attention-getting. They drew the eye. I watched the guys work until they were just tiny orange dots in the distance, and then until they were completely lost to sight, which was more than a mile later. And at that point I had everything I was ever going to get. I knew everything I was ever going to know. But I didn’t know that I knew. Not then.
The train rolled into Penn and I got a late dinner in a place directly across the street from where I had gotten breakfast. Then I walked up to the 14th Precinct on West 35th. The night watch had started. Theresa Lee and her partner Docherty were already in place. The squad room was quiet, like all the air had been sucked out of it. Like there had been bad news. But no one was rushing around. Therefore the bad news had happened somewhere else.
The receptionist at the bullpen gate had seen me before. She turned on her swivel chair and glanced at Lee, who made a face like it wouldn’t kill her one way or the other whether she ever spoke to me again, or not. So the receptionist turned back and made a face of her own, like the choice to stay or to go was entirely mine. I squeaked the hinge and threaded my way between desks to the back of the room. Docherty was on the phone, mostly listening. Lee was just sitting there, doing nothing. She looked up as I approached and she said, “I’m not in the mood.”
“For what?”
“Susan Mark,” she said.
“Any news?”
“None at all.”
“Nothing more on the boy?”
“You sure are worried about that boy.”
“And you’re not?”
“Not even a little bit.”
“Is the file still closed?”
“Tighter than a fish’s asshole.”
“OK,” I said.
She paused a beat and sighed and said, “What have you got?”
“I know who the fifth passenger was.”
“There were only four passengers.”
“And the earth is flat and the moon is made of cheese.”
“Did this alleged fifth passenger commit a crime somewhere between 30th Street and 45th?”
“No,” I said.
“Then the file stays closed.”
Docherty put his phone down and glanced at his partner with an eloquent look on his face. I knew what the look meant. I had been a cop of sorts for thirteen years and had seen that kind of look many times before. It meant that someone else had caught a big case, and that Docherty was basically glad that he wasn’t involved, but a little wistful too, because even if being at the heart of the action was a pain in the neck bureaucratically, it was maybe a whole lot better than watching from the sidelines.
I asked, “What happened?”
Lee said, “Multiple homicide over in the 17th. A nasty one. Four guys under the FDR Drive, beaten and killed.”
“With hammers,” Docherty said.
I said, “Hammers?”
“Carpentry tools. From the Home Depot on 23rd Street. Just purchased. They were found at the scene. The price tags are still on them, under the blood.”
I asked, “Who were the four guys?”
“No one knows,” Docherty said. “That seems to have been the point of the hammers. Their faces are pulped, their teeth are smashed out, and their fingertips are ruined.”
“Old, young, black, white?”
“White,” Docherty said. “Not old. In suits. Nothing to go on, except they had phony business cards in their pockets, with some corporate name that isn’t registered anywhere in New York State, and a phone number that is permanently disconnected because it belongs to a movie company.”
Chapter 41
Docherty’s desk phone rang and he picked it up and started listening again. A friend in the 17th, presumably, with more details to share. I looked at Lee and said, “Now you’re going to have to reopen the file.”
She asked, “Why?”
“Because those guys were the local crew that Lila Hoth hired.”
She looked at me and said, “What are you? Telepathic?”
“I met with them twice.”
“You met some crew twice. Nothing says these are the same guys.”
“They gave me one of those phony business cards.”
“All those crews use phony business cards.”
“With the same kind of phone number?”
“Movies and TV are the only places to get those numbers.”
“They were ex-cops. Doesn’t that matter to you?”
“I care about cops, not ex-cops.”
“They said Lila Hoth’s name.”
“No, some crew said her name. Doesn’t mean these dead guys did.”
“You think this is a coincidence?”
“They could be anybody’s crew.”
“Like who else’s?”
“Anybody in the whole wide world. This is New York. New York is full of private guys. They roam in packs. They all look the same and t
hey all do the same stuff.”
“They said John Sansom’s name, too.”
“No, some crew said his name.”
“In fact they were the first place I heard his name.”
“Then maybe they were his crew, not Lila’s. Would he have been worried enough to have his own people up here?”
“He had his chief of staff on the train. That’s who the fifth passenger was.”
“There you go, then.”
“You’re not going to do anything?”
“I’ll inform the 17th, for background.”
“You’re not going to reopen your file?”
“Not until I hear about a crime my side of Park Avenue.”
I said, “I’m going to the Four Seasons.”
It was late and I was pretty far west and I didn’t find a cab until I hit Sixth Avenue. After that it was a fast trip to the hotel. The lobby was quiet. I walked in like I had a right to be there and rode the elevator to Lila Hoth’s floor. Walked the silent corridor and paused outside her suite.
Her door was open an inch.
The tongue of the security deadbolt was out and the spring closer had trapped it against the jamb. I paused another second and knocked.
No response.
I pushed the door and felt the mechanism push back. I held it open forty-five degrees against my spread fingers and listened.
No sound inside.
I opened the door all the way and stepped in. Ahead of me the living room was dim. The lights were off but the drapes were open and there was enough of a glow from the city outside to show me that the room was empty. Empty, as in no people in it. Also empty as in checked-out-of and abandoned. No shopping bags in the corners, no personal items stowed either carefully or carelessly, no coats over chairs, no shoes on the floor. No signs of life at all.
The bedrooms were the same. The beds were still made, but they had suitcase-sized dents and rucks on them. The closets were empty. The bathrooms were strewn with used towels. The shower stalls were dry. I caught a faint trace of Lila Hoth’s perfume in the air, but that was all.
I walked through all three rooms one more time and then stepped back to the corridor. The door closed behind me. I heard the spring inside the hinge doing its work and I heard the deadbolt tongue settle against the jamb, metal on wood. I walked away to the elevator and hit the down button and the door slid back immediately. The car had waited for me. A nighttime protocol. No unnecessary elevator movement. No unnecessary noise. I rode back to the lobby and walked to the desk. There was a whole night staff on duty. Not as many people as during the day, but way too many for the fifty-dollar trick to have worked. The Four Seasons wasn’t that kind of a place. A guy looked up from a screen and asked how he could help me. I asked him when exactly the Hoths had checked out.
“The who, sir?” he asked back. He spoke in a quiet, measured, nighttime voice, like he was worried about waking the guests stacked high above him.
“Lila Hoth and Svetlana Hoth,” I said.
The guy got a look on his face like he didn’t know what I was talking about and refocused on his screen and hit a couple of keys on his keyboard. He scrolled up and down and hit a couple more keys and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t find a record of any guests under that name.”
I told him the suite number. He hit a couple more keys and his mouth turned down in puzzled surprise and he said, “That suite hasn’t been used at all this week. It’s very expensive and quite hard to rent.”
I double-checked the number in my head and I said, “I was in it last night. It was being used then. And I met the occupants again today, in the tea room. There’s a signature on a check.”
The guy tried again. He called up tea room checks that had been charged to guest accounts. He half-turned his screen so that I could see it too, in the sharing gesture that clerks use when they want to convince you of something. We had had tea for two plus a cup of coffee. There was no record of any such charge.
Then I heard small sounds behind me. The scuff of soles on carpet, the rattle of drawn breath, the sigh of fabric moving through the air. And the clink of metal. I turned around and found myself facing a perfect semicircle of seven men. Four of them were uniformed NYPD patrolmen. Three of them were the federal agents I had met before.
The cops had shotguns.
The feds had something else.
Chapter 42
Seven men. Seven weapons. The police shotguns were Franchi SPAS-12s. From Italy. Probably not standard NYPD issue. The SPAS-12 is a futuristic, fearsome-looking item, a semi-automatic 12-gauge smooth-bore weapon with a pistol grip and a folding stock. Advantages, many. Drawbacks, two. Cost was the first, but clearly some specialist division inside the police department had been happy to sign off on the purchase. Semi-automatic operation was the second drawback. It was held to be theoretically unreliable in a powerful shotgun. People who have to shoot or die worry about it. Mechanical failure happens. But I wasn’t about to bet on four mechanical failures happening all at once, for the same reason I don’t buy lottery tickets. Optimism is good. Blind faith is not.
Two of the feds had Glock 17s in their hands. Nine-millimeter automatic pistols from Austria, square, boxy, reliable, well proven through more than twenty years of useful service. I had retained a mild personal preference for the Beretta M9, like the Franchi also from Italy, but a million times out of a million-and-one the Glock would get the job done just as well as the Beretta.
Right then the job was to keep me standing still, ready for the main attraction.
The fed leader was in the exact center of the semicircle. Three men on his left, three on his right. He was holding a weapon I had seen before only on television. I remembered it well. A cable channel, in a motel room in Florence, Texas. Not the Military Channel. The National Geographic Channel. A program about Africa. Not civil wars and mayhem and disease and starvation. A wildlife documentary. Gorillas, not guerillas. A bunch of zoological researchers was tracking an adult male silverback. They wanted to put a radio tag in its ear. The creature weighed close to five hundred pounds. A quarter of a ton. They put it down with a dart gun loaded with primate tranquillizer.
That was what the fed leader was pointing at me.
A dart gun.
The National Geographic people had taken great pains to reassure their viewers that the procedure was humane. They had shown detailed diagrams and computer simulations. The dart was a tiny feathered cone, with a surgical steel shaft. The tip of the shaft was a sterile ceramic honeycomb laced with anesthetic. The dart fired at high velocity and the shaft buried itself a half-inch into the gorilla. And stopped. The tip wanted to keep on going. Momentum. Newton’s Law of Motion. The shock and the inertia exploded the ceramic matrix and the potion contained in the honeycomb flung itself onward, not quite droplets, not quite an aerosol. Like a heavy mist spreading under the skin, flooding tissue the way a paper towel soaks up a spilled drop of coffee. The gun itself was a one-shot deal. It had to be loaded with a single dart, and a single tiny bottle of compressed gas to power it. Nitrogen, as I recalled. Reloading was laborious. It was better to hit first time.
The researchers had hit first time in the documentary film. The gorilla had been groggy after eight seconds, and in a coma after twenty. Then it had woken up in perfect health ten hours later.
But it had weighed twice what I weigh.
Behind me was the hotel’s reception counter. I could feel it against my back. It had a ledge about fourteen inches wide set probably forty-two inches off the floor. Bar height. Convenient for a customer to spread his papers on. Convenient to sign things on. Behind that was a drop to a regular desk-height counter for the clerks. It was maybe thirty inches deep. Or more. I wasn’t sure. But the total obstacle was a high and wide hurdle impossible to clear from a standing start. Especially when facing the wrong way. And pointless, anyway. Clearing the counter would not put me in another room. I would still be right there, just behind the counter rather than in front of it
. No net gain, and maybe a big net loss if I landed awkwardly on a rolling chair or got tangled up in a telephone wire.
I turned my head and glanced behind me. No one there. The desk people had filed out, left and right. They had been coached. Maybe even rehearsed. The seven men in front of me had a clear field of fire.
No way forward, no way back.
I stood still.
The fed leader was sighting down the barrel of his dart gun and aiming directly at my left thigh. My left thigh made a moderately large target. No fat under the skin. Just hard flesh, full of capillaries and other aids to rapid and efficient blood circulation. Completely unprotected, except for my new blue pants, which were made of thin summer-weight cotton. Don’t come dressed like that, or you won’t get in. I tensed up, as if muscle tone would make the damn thing bounce off. Then I relaxed again. Muscle tone hadn’t helped the gorilla, and it wouldn’t help me. Way behind the seven men I could see a paramedic crew in a gloomy corner. Fire department uniforms. Three men, one woman. They were standing and waiting. They had a wheeled gurney ready.
When all else fails, start talking.
I said, “If you guys have more questions, I’m quite happy to sit down for a conversation. We could get some coffee, keep things civilized. Decaf, if you prefer. Since it’s late. They’ll make fresh, I’m sure. This is the Four Seasons, after all.”
The fed leader didn’t answer. He shot me instead. With the dart gun, from about eight feet, straight into the meat of my thigh. I heard a blast of compressed gas and felt pain in my leg. Not a sting. A dull, thumping blow, like a knife wound. Then a split second of nothing, like disbelief. Then a sharp, angry reaction. I thought if I was a gorilla I would want to tell the damn researchers to stay home and leave my ears alone.
The fed leader lowered the gun.
