by Lee Child
“Springfield told you about them?”
“He said his name was Browning. Our counterterrorism people went in two hours ago. The Hoths aren’t there.”
“I know.”
“They were, but they aren’t anymore.”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“They turned in Leonid and his buddy. Therefore they’ve moved somewhere Leonid and his buddy don’t know. Layers upon layers.”
“Why did they turn in Leonid and his buddy?”
“To encourage the other thirteen. And to feed the machine. We’ll rough them up a little, the Arab media will call it torture, they’ll get ten new recruits. Net gain of eight. And Leonid and his pal are no big loss, anyway. They were hopeless.”
“Will the other thirteen be better?”
“Law of averages says yes.”
“Thirteen is an insane number.”
“Fifteen, including the Hoths themselves.”
“You shouldn’t do it.”
“Especially unarmed.”
She glanced at the bag. Then she looked back at me. “Can you find them?”
“What are they doing for money?”
“We can’t trace them that way. They stopped using credit cards and ATMs six days ago.”
“Which makes sense.”
“Which makes them hard to find.”
I asked, “Is Jacob Mark safely back in Jersey?”
“You think he shouldn’t be involved?”
“No.”
“But I should?”
“You are,” I said. “You brought me the bag.”
“I’m guarding it.”
“What else are your counterterrorism people doing?”
“Searching,” she said. “With the FBI and the Department of Defense. There are six hundred people on the street right now.”
“Where are they looking?”
“Anywhere bought or rented inside the last three months. The city is cooperating. Plus they’re inspecting hotel registers and business apartment leases and warehouse operations, across all five boroughs.”
“OK.”
“Word on the street is it’s all about a Pentagon file on a USB memory stick.”
“Close enough.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“Close enough.”
“Where is it?”
“Nowhere between Ninth Avenue and Park and 30th Street and 45th.”
“I suppose I deserve that.”
“You’ll figure it out.”
“Do you really know? Docherty figures you don’t. He figures you’re trying to bluff your way out of trouble.”
“Docherty is clearly a very cynical man.”
“Cynical or right?”
“I know where it is.”
“So go get it. Leave the Hoths for someone else.”
I didn’t answer that. Instead I said, “Do you spend time in the gym?”
“Not much,” she said. “Why?”
“I’m wondering how hard it would be to overpower you.”
“Not very,” she said.
I didn’t answer.
She asked, “When are you planning on setting out?”
“Two hours,” I said. “Then another two hours to find them, and attack at four in the morning. My favorite time. Something we learned from the Soviets. They had doctors working on it. People hit a low at four in the morning. It’s a universal truth.”
“You’re making that up.”
“I’m not.”
“You won’t find them in two hours.”
“I think I will.”
“The missing file is about Sansom, right?”
“Partially.”
“Does he know you’ve got it?”
“I haven’t got it. But I know where it is.”
“Does he know that?”
I nodded.
Lee said, “So you made a bargain with him. Get me and Docherty and Jacob Mark out of trouble, and you’ll lead him to it.”
“The bargain was designed to get myself out of trouble, first and foremost.”
“Didn’t work for you. You’re still on the hook with the feds.”
“It worked for me as far as the NYPD is concerned.”
“And it worked for the rest of us all around. For which I thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
She asked, “How are the Hoths planning to get out of the country?”
“I don’t think they are. I think that option disappeared a few days ago. I think they expected things to go more smoothly than they have. Now it’s about finishing the job, do or die.”
“Like a suicide mission?”
“That’s what they’re good at.”
“Which makes it worse for you.”
“If they like suicide, I’m happy to help.”
Lee moved on the bed and the tail of her shirt got trapped underneath her and the silk pulled tight over the shape of the gun on her hip. A Glock 17, I figured, in a pancake holster.
I asked her, “Who knows you’re here?”
“Docherty,” she said.
“When is he expecting you back?”
“Tomorrow,” she said.
I said nothing.
She said, “What do you want to do right now?”
“Honest answer?”
“Please.”
“I want to unbutton your shirt.”
“You say that to a lot of police officers?”
“I used to. Police officers were all the people I knew.”
“Danger makes you horny?”
“Women make me horny.”
“All women?”
“No,” I said. “Not all women.”
She was quiet for a long moment and then she said, “Not a good idea.”
I said, “OK.”
“You’re taking no for an answer?”
“Aren’t I supposed to?”
She was quiet for another long moment and then she said, “I’ve changed my mind.”
“About what?”
“About it not being a good idea.”
“Excellent.”
“But I worked Vice for a year. Entrapment stings. We needed proof that that guy had a reasonable expectation of what he thought he was going to get. So we made him take his shirt off first. As proof of intent.”
“I could do that,” I said.
“I think you should.”
“You going to arrest me?”
“No.”
I peeled my new T-shirt off. Tossed it across the room. It landed on the table. Lee spent a moment staring at my scar, the same way Susan Mark had on the train. The awful raised tracery of stitches from the shrapnel from the truck bomb at the Beirut barracks. I let her look for a minute and then I said, “Your turn. With the shirt.”
She said, “I’m a traditional kind of girl.”
“What does that mean?”
“You would have to kiss me first.”
“I could do that,” I said. And I did. Slowly and gently and a little tentatively at first, in a way that felt exploratory, and in a way that gave me time to savor the new mouth, the new taste, the new teeth, the new tongue. It was all good. Then we passed some kind of a threshold and got into it harder. A short minute later we were completely out of control.
Afterward she showered, and then I showered. She dressed, and I dressed. She kissed me one more time, and told me to call her if I needed her, and wished me luck, and walked out through the door. She left the black bag on the floor near the bathroom.
Chapter 71
I hefted the bag over to the bed. About eight pounds, I figured. It hit the rucked sheet and made a satisfying metallic sound. I unzipped it and parted the flaps like a mouth and looked inside.
First thing I saw was a file folder.
It was legal-sized, and khaki in color, and made of thick paper or thin card, depending on your point of view. It held twenty-one printed-out sheets. Immigration records, for twenty-one sepa
rate people. Two women, nineteen men. Citizens of Turkmenistan. They had entered the United States from Tajikistan three months ago. Linked itineraries. There were digital photographs and digital fingerprints, from the immigration booths at JFK. The photographs had a slight fish-eye distortion. They were in color. I recognized Lila and Svetlana easily. And Leonid and his buddy. I didn’t know the other seventeen. Four of them already had exit notations. They were the four who had left. I dropped their sheets in the trash and laid out the unknown thirteen on the bed for a better look.
All thirteen faces looked bored and tired. Local flights, connections, a long transatlantic flight, jet lag, a long wait in JFK’s immigration hall. Sullen glances at the camera, faces held level, eyes swiveling up toward the lens. Which told me all thirteen were somewhat short in stature. I cross-checked with Leonid’s sheet. His gaze was just as bored and tired as the others, but it was level. He was the tallest of the party. I checked Svetlana Hoth’s sheet. She was the shortest. The others were all somewhere in between, small wiry Middle Eastern men worn down to bone and muscle and sinew by climate and diet and culture. I looked hard at them, one through thirteen, over and over again, until I had their expressions fixed firmly in my mind.
Then I turned back to the bag.
At the minimum I was hoping for a decent handgun. At best I was hoping for a short submachine gun. My point to Springfield about the baggy jacket was to make him see that I would have room to carry something under it, slung high on my chest on a shortened strap and then concealed by the excess fabric zipped over it. I had hoped he would get the message.
He had. He had gotten the message. He had come through in fine style.
Better than the minimum.
Better even than the best case.
He had given me a silenced short submachine gun. A Heckler & Koch MP5SD. The suppressed version of the classic MP5. No butt or stock. Just a pistol grip, a trigger, a housing for a curved thirty-round magazine, and then a six-inch barrel radically fattened by a double-layered silencer casing. Nine-millimeter, fast, accurate, and quiet. A fine weapon. It was fitted with a black nylon strap. The strap had already been tightened up and reduced in length to its practical minimum. As if Springfield was saying, I heard you, pal.
I laid the gun on the bed.
He had supplied ammunition, too. It was right there in the bag. A single curved magazine. Thirty rounds. Short and fat, shiny brass cases winking in the light, polished lead noses nearly as bright. Nine-millimeter Parabellums. From the Latin motto si vis pacem para bellum. If you wish for peace, prepare for war. A wise saying. But thirty rounds was not a lot. Not against fifteen people. But New York City is not easy. Not for me, not for Springfield.
I lined up the magazine next to the gun.
Checked the bag again, in case there was more.
There wasn’t.
But there was a bonus of a kind.
A knife.
A Benchmade 3300. A black machined handle. An auto-opening mechanism. Illegal in all fifty states unless you were active-service military or law enforcement, which I wasn’t. I thumbed the release and the blade snicked out, fast and hard. A double-edged dagger with a spear point. Four inches long. I am no kind of a knife fetishist. I don’t have favorites. I don’t really like any of them. But if you asked me to rely on one for combat, I would pick something close to what Springfield had supplied. The automatic mechanism, the point, the two-edged blade. Ambidextrous, good for stabbing, good for slashing either coming or going.
I closed it up and put it on the bed next to the H&K.
There were two final items in the bag. A single leather glove, black, sized and shaped for a large man’s left hand. And a roll of black duct tape. I put them on the bed, in line with the gun and the magazine and the knife.
Thirty minutes later I was all dressed up and locked and loaded and riding south on the R train.
Chapter 72
The R train uses older cars with some front- and rear-facing seats. But I was on a side bench, all alone. It was two o’clock in the morning. There were three other passengers. I had my elbows on my knees and I was staring at myself in the glass opposite.
I was counting bullet points.
Inappropriate clothing, check. The windbreaker was zipped to my chin and looked way too hot and way too big on me. Under it the MP5’s strap was looped around my neck and the gun itself was resting diagonally grip-high and barrel-low across my body and it didn’t show at all.
A robotic walk: not immediately applicable with a seated suspect on public transportation.
Points three through six: irritability, sweating, tics, and nervous behavior. I was sweating, for sure, maybe a little more than the temperature and the jacket called for. I was feeling irritable too, maybe even a little more than usual. But I looked at myself hard in the glass and saw no tics. My eyes were steady and my face was composed. I saw no nervous behavior, either. But behavior is about external display. I was a little nervous inside. That was for damn sure.
Point seven: breathing. I wasn’t panting. But I was prepared to accept that I was breathing a little harder and steadier than normal. Most of the time I am not aware of breathing at all. It just happens, automatically. An involuntary reflex, deep in the brain. But now I could feel a relentless in-through-the-nose, out-through-the-mouth rhythm. In, out, in, out. Like a machine. Like a man using equipment, underwater. I couldn’t slow it down. I wasn’t feeling much oxygen in the air. It was going in and coming out like an inert gas. Like argon or xenon. It wasn’t doing me any good at all.
Point eight: a rigid forward stare. Check, but I excused myself because I was using it to assess all the other points. Or because it was a symbol of pure focus. Or concentration. Normally I would be gazing around, and not rigidly.
Point nine: mumbled prayers. Not happening. I was still and silent. My mouth was closed and not moving at all. In fact my mouth was closed so hard my back teeth were hurting and the muscles in the corners of my jaw were standing out like golf balls.
Point ten: a large bag. Not present.
Point eleven: hands in the bag. Not relevant.
Point twelve: a fresh shave. Hadn’t happened. I hadn’t shaved for days.
So, six for twelve. I might or might not be a suicide bomber.
And I might or might not be a suicide. I stared at my reflection and thought back to my first sight of Susan Mark: a woman heading for the end of her life, as surely and certainly as the train was heading for the end of the line.
I took my elbows off my knees and sat back. I looked at my fellow passengers. Two men, one woman. Nothing special about any of them. The train rocked on south, with all its sounds. The rushing air, the clatter of expansion joints under the wheels, the scrape of the current collector, the whine of the motors, the squeals as the cars lurched one after the other through the long gentle curves. I looked back at myself in the dark window opposite and smiled.
Me against them.
Not the first time.
And not the last.
I got out at 34th Street and stayed in the station. Just sat in the heat on a wooden bench and walked myself through my theories one more time. I replayed Lila Hoth’s history lesson from the days of the British Empire: When contemplating an offensive, the very first thing you must plan is your inevitable retreat. Had her superiors back home followed that excellent advice? I was betting not. For two reasons. First, fanaticism. Ideological organizations can’t afford rational considerations. Start thinking rationally, and the whole thing falls apart. And ideological organizations like to force their foot soldiers into no-way-out operations. To encourage persistence. The same way explosive belts are sewn together in back, not zippered or snapped.
And second, a plan for retreat carried with it the seeds of its own destruction. Inevitably. A third or a fourth or a fifth bolt-hole bought or rented three months ago would show up in the city records. Just-in-case reservations at hotels would show up, too. Same-day reservations would show up. Six hun
dred agents were combing the streets. I guessed they would find nothing at all, because the planners back in the hills would have anticipated their moves. They would have known that all trails would be exhausted as soon as the scent was caught. They would have known that by definition the only safe destination is an unplanned destination.
So now the Hoths were out in the cold. With their whole crew. Two women, thirteen men. They had quit their place on 58th Street and they were scuffling, and improvising, and crawling below the radar.
Which was exactly where I lived. They were in my world.
It takes one to find one.
I came up from under the ground into Herald Square, which is where Sixth Avenue and Broadway and 34th Street all meet. By day it’s a zoo. Macy’s is there. At night it’s not deserted, but it’s quiet. I walked south on Sixth and west on 33rd and came up along the flank of the faded old pile where I had bought my only uninterrupted night of the week. The MP5 was hard and heavy against my chest. The Hoths had only two choices: sleep on the street, or pay off a night porter. Manhattan has hundreds of hotels, but they break down quite easily into separate categories. Most of them are mid-market or better, where staffs are large and scams don’t work. Most of the down-market dumps are small. And the Hoths had fifteen people to accommodate. Five rooms, minimum. To find five empty unobtrusive rooms called for a big place. With a bent night porter working alone. I know New York reasonably well. I can make sense of the city, especially from the kind of angles most normal people don’t consider. And I can count the number of big old Manhattan hotels with bent night porters working alone on my thumbs. One was way west on 23rd Street. Far from the action, which was an advantage, but also a disadvantage. More of a disadvantage than an advantage, overall.
Second choice, I figured.
I was standing right next to the only other option.
The clock in my head was ticking past two-thirty in the morning. I stood in the shadows and waited. I wanted to be neither early nor late. I wanted to time it right. Left and right I could see traffic heading up on Sixth and down on Seventh. Taxis, trucks, some civilians, some cop cars, some dark sedans. The cross-street itself was quiet.
