by Lee Child
Three guys in BDUs were talking to them.
They were Rangers, each one of them a decent size, and none of them a rookie. One of them was a sergeant, and two of them were specialists. Their uniforms had seen plenty of wear, and their boots were clean but creased. Their faces were tanned and lined and blank. They were professional soldiers, pure and simple. Which was a dumb expression, because professional soldiers were all kinds of things, none of which was pure, and none of which was simple. But ultimately it didn’t matter exactly what two of them were, because the sergeant was in charge. And I had never met a sergeant who was less than well aware that there were eighteen ranks above him in the hierarchy, all the way up to the commander-in-chief, and that they all made more money than he did, in exchange for making policy decisions.
In other words, whatever a sergeant did, there were eighteen groups of people ready, willing, and waiting to criticize him.
I eased back into the shadows and headed back to the diner.
There were three customers still in the place, including the old couple from Toussaint’s and the guy in the pale suit I had seen once before. Three was a good number, but not a great number. On the other hand the demographics were close to perfect. Local business people, solid citizens, mature, easily outraged. And the old couple at least were guaranteed to stay for hours, which was good, because I might need hours, depending on Neagley’s progress, or the lack of it.
I came in the door and stopped by the phone and the waitress shook her head at me, to tell me there had been no incoming calls. I used the phone book and found the number for Brannan’s bar, and then I put a quarter in the slot and dialed. One of the Brannan brothers answered and I said, “Let me speak to the sergeant.”
I heard a second of surprise and uncertainty, and then I heard the phone being reversed on the bar, and I heard the click of nails and the thump of palms as the receiver was passed from hand to hand, and then a voice said, “Who is this?”
I said, “This is the guy you’re looking for. I’m in the diner.”
No answer.
I said, “This is the part where you want to put your hand over the mouthpiece long enough to ask the barmen where the diner is, so you can send your guys to check while you keep me talking on the phone. But I’ll save you the trouble. The diner is about twenty yards west of you and about fifty yards north. Send one guy through the alley on your left and the other counterclockwise out of the lot and around the Sheriff’s Department building. You personally can come in through the kitchen door, which should be pretty close to where you parked your truck. That way you’ve got me covered in every direction. But don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll wait for you right here. You’ll find me at a table in back.”
Then I hung up and walked to the rearmost table for four.
Chapter
82
The sergeant was the first in. Shortest distance, biggest investment. He came through the kitchen door slowly and cautiously and let it swing shut behind him. I raised my hand in greeting. I was about seven feet away from him. Then one of the specialists came in the front. From the alley, I assumed. Second shortest distance. A minute later the third guy was there, a little out of breath. Longest distance, biggest hurry.
They stood there, filling the aisle, two to my right and one to my left.
“Sit down,” I said. “Please.”
The sergeant said, “Our orders are to take you to Kelham.”
I said, “That isn’t going to happen, sergeant.”
No answer.
The clock in my head showed a quarter to eight.
I said, “Here’s the thing, guys. To take me out of here against my will would involve a considerable amount of physical commotion. At a rough guess we would bust up at least three or four tables and chairs. There might be personal injuries too. And the waitress will assume we’re Bravo Company personnel. Because no one else from Kelham has leave right now. Believe me, she keeps track of stuff like that, because her income depends on it. And she knows Bravo’s company commander is expected right there in Brannan’s bar at any minute. So it would be entirely natural for her to head around there to complain. And to get that done she’d almost certainly have to interrupt a moment of intimacy between father and son. Which would be a big embarrassment for all concerned, especially you.”
No answer.
“Sit down, guys,” I said.
They sat down. But not where I wanted them to. They weren’t dumb. That was the problem with a volunteer army. There were selection criteria. I was in an aisle seat at my table for four, facing forward. If they had all joined me at the same table, I would have had freedom of movement. But they didn’t all join me at the same table. The sergeant sat down face to face with me, but the specialists sat across the aisle, one each side of a table for two. They pulled their chairs out at an angle, one of them ready to intervene if I made a break one way, and the other ready if I broke the other way.
“You should try the pie,” I said. “It’s really good.”
“No pie,” the sergeant said.
“You better order something. Or the waitress might throw you out for loitering. And if you refuse to go, she knows who to call.”
No answer.
I said, “There are members of the public here, too. You really can’t afford to attract attention.”
Stalemate.
Ten minutes to eight.
The phone by the door stayed silent.
The waitress came by and the sergeant shrugged and ordered three pies and three cups of coffee. Two more people came in the door, both of them civilians, one of them a young woman in a nice dress, the other a young man in jeans and a sport coat. They took a table for two, three along from the specialists and directly opposite the old couple from the hotel. They didn’t look much like the kind of folks who would get straight on the phone with their congressman because of a little public mayhem, but the more warm bodies in the room the better.
The sergeant said, “We’re happy to sit here all night, if that’s what it takes.”
“Good to know,” I said. “I’m going to sit here until the phone rings, and then I’m going to leave.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t let you communicate with anyone. Those are my orders.”
I said nothing.
“And I can’t let you leave. Unless you agree to go to Kelham.”
I said, “Didn’t we just have this discussion?”
No response.
The phone didn’t ring.
Five minutes to eight.
At eight o’clock the guy in the pale suit paid his check and left, and the old lady from the hotel turned a page in her book. Nothing else happened. The phone stayed quiet. At five past eight I began to hear noise outside, behind us, the sound of cars and crunching tires, and I sensed a change in the nighttime air, like pressure building, as Bravo Company started to arrive in town, first in ones and twos, then by the dozens. I assumed Reed Riley had led the parade in his borrowed staff car, with his father in the seat beside him. I assumed the old guy was at that moment stationed at Brannan’s door, greeting his son’s men, ushering them in, grinning like an idiot.
The three Rangers boxing me in had eaten their pies one at a time, with the other two always alert and watchful. They were pretty good. By no means the worst I had ever seen. The waitress collected their plates. She seemed to sense what was going on. Every time she passed by she gave me a concerned look. There was no doubt whose side she was on. She knew me, and she didn’t know them. I had tipped her many times, and they hadn’t, not even once.
The noise from outside continued to build.
The phone didn’t ring.
I spent the next few minutes thinking about their Humvee. I knew that like every other Humvee in the world it would have a big General Motors diesel in it, and I knew that like every other Humvee in the world it would have a three-speed automatic transmission in it, and I knew that like every other Humvee in the world it would weigh north o
f four tons, all of which I knew would make it good for about sixty miles an hour, tops. Which I knew wasn’t race-car fast, but which I knew was fifteen times faster than walking, which I knew was a good thing.
I waited.
Then, just after eight-thirty, three things happened. The first was unfortunate, and the second was unprecedented, and the third was therefore awkward.
First, the young couple left. The girl in the nice dress, and the boy in the sport coat. He laid money on the table, and they got up together and walked out holding hands, fast enough to suggest that an evening prayer meeting was not the next item on their agenda.
And second, the old couple left. She closed her book, he folded his paper, and they got up and shuffled out the door. Back to the hotel, presumably. Far earlier than ever before. No obvious reason, except possibly a sudden hopeless intuition that old man Riley would cancel the Lear and decide on an early night in town.
At that point the waitress was in the kitchen, which left just four people in the room, one of which was me, and three of which were my babysitters.
The sergeant smiled and said, “Just us now.”
I didn’t answer.
He said, “No members of the public.”
I didn’t answer.
He said, “And I don’t think the waitress is the complaining type. Not really. She knows this place could end up on the shit list easy as anything. For a month. Or two. Or for however long it takes to put her on welfare.”
He was leaning forward across the table. Closer to me than before. Looking straight at me. His two men were leaning forward across the aisle, elbows on knees, hands loose, feet planted, watching me.
Then the third thing happened.
The phone rang.
Chapter
83
The three Rangers were good. Very good. The phone was a traditional old item with a big metal bell inside, which rang for a whole lazy second before adding a reverberation tail that took another whole lazy second to die away, whereupon the sequence would repeat itself endlessly until either the call was answered or the caller gave up. An old-fashioned, comforting sound, familiar for a hundred years. But on this occasion before the first ring was halfway over all three Rangers were in motion. The guy directly to my left was instantly on his feet, lunging behind me, putting big hands on my shoulders, pressing me down into my seat, hauling me back past the vertical, keeping me in a weak and inefficient position. The sergeant opposite me was instantly leaning forward, grabbing my wrists, pressing them into the tabletop with the flat of his hands. The third guy came up out of his chair and balled his fists and blocked the aisle, ready to hit me anywhere he could if I moved.
A fine performance.
I offered no resistance.
I just sat there.
Everyone has a plan, me included.
The phone rang on.
Three rings later the waitress came out of the kitchen. She paused a beat and took one look and then pushed past the Ranger in the aisle and headed for the phone. She picked up and listened and glanced my way and started talking, looking at me the whole time, as if she was describing my current predicament to someone.
To Frances Neagley, I assumed.
Or I hoped.
The waitress listened again for a moment and then trapped the phone between her ear and her shoulder and took out her order pad and her pen. She started writing. And kept on writing. Practically an essay. She started a second page. The guy behind me kept the pressure on. The sergeant kept hold of my wrists. The third guy moved closer. The waitress made shapes with her mouth as she concentrated on spelling unfamiliar words. Then she stopped writing and checked back through what she had, and she swallowed once and blinked twice as if the next part of her task was going to be difficult.
She hung up the phone. She tore out her two written pages and held them as if they were hot. She took a step toward us. The guy behind me took his weight off my shoulders. The sergeant let go of my wrists. The third guy sat down again.
The waitress walked the length of the aisle, right into our little group, a fifth member, and she shuffled one written page on top of the other, and she checked the three guys’ collars, and she focused on the sergeant. The man in charge.
She said, “I have a two-part message for you, sir.”
The guy nodded at her and she started reading.
She said, “First, whoever you are, you should let this man go immediately, for both your own sake and the army’s, because second, whoever you are and whatever your orders and whatever you think on this occasion, he’s likely to be right and you’re likely to be wrong. This message comes from an NCO of equal rank, with nothing but the army’s and your best interests at heart.”
Silence.
The sergeant said, “Noted.”
Nothing more.
Neagley, I thought. Good try.
Then the waitress leaned forward and put her second handwritten page face down on the table and slid it toward me, fast and easy, the same way she had slid a million diner checks before. I trapped it under my left palm and kept my right hand ready.
No one moved.
The waitress stood still for a second, and then she walked back to the kitchen.
I used the ball of my left thumb and curled the top of the paper upward, like a guy playing poker, and I read the first two lines of my message. Seven words. The first of them was a Latin preposition. Typical Neagley. Per. Meaning in this context According to. The next six words were United States Marine Corps Personnel Command. Which meant that whatever information was contained in the rest of the note had come straight from the horse’s mouth. It would be reliable. It would be definitive. It would be solid gold.
It would be good enough for me.
I let the top of the paper slap back down against the tabletop. I spread my thumb and my first two fingers and pincered them together and folded the note one-handed, blank side out, message side in. I crisped the fold with my right thumbnail and jammed the note in my right top pocket, behind Munro’s little black book, below my name tape.
Ten minutes to nine in the evening.
I looked at the Ranger sergeant and said, “OK, you win. Let’s go to Kelham.”
Chapter
84
We went out through the kitchen, single file, and we used the diner’s rear door, because that was the fastest route back to their Humvee. The sergeant led the way. I was sandwiched between the two specialists. One of them kept his hand flat on my back, pushing, and the other had hold of the front of my jacket, pulling. The night air felt sharp, neither warm nor cold. The acre of bare ground was jammed with parked cars. There were people fifty yards to my right, all of them men, all of them in uniform, all of them quiet and on best behavior, all of them clustered in a rough semicircle around the front of Brannan’s bar, like a living halo behind the head of a saint, or an overspill crowd watching a prize fight. Most had bottles of beer in their hands, probably purchased elsewhere and carried back within sight of the main attraction. I guessed the senator was loving the attention, and I guessed his son was pretending not to.
The Humvee looked wide and massive in among the regular rides. Which it was. Parked next to it at a respectful interval was a plain sedan painted flat green. Reed Riley’s borrowed staff car, I assumed, second into the lot and put next to the truck for the sake of the tough-guy image. Instinctive, for a politician.
The sergeant slowed a step and the rest of us bunched up behind him, and then we struck off again on a new vector, straight toward the truck, not fast, not slow. No one paid us any attention. We were just four dark figures, and everyone else was facing in the other direction.
The Humvee was not locked. The sergeant opened the left rear door and the specialists crowded behind me and left me no option but to get in. The interior smelled of canvas and sweat. The sergeant waited until the specialists were on board, one of them in the front passenger seat, the other across the wide transmission tunnel next to me in the back, both o
f them turned watchfully toward me, and then he climbed into the driver’s seat and hit the button and started the engine. It idled for a second with a hammer-heavy diesel rattle, and he squirmed in his seat, and he got ready to move off. He turned the headlights on. He put the transmission in gear. He rolled forward, the ride lumpy, the steering vague, the speed low. He headed north across the rough ground, toward the Kelham road, past the ranks of parked cars, past the back of the Sheriff’s Department building. He checked his mirror out of sheer habit, and he glanced left, and he prepared to turn right thirty yards ahead.
I asked, “What are you guys trained for?”
He said, “Man-portable shoulder-launch surface-to-air defense.”
“Not police work?”
“No.”
“I could tell,” I said. “You didn’t search me. You should have.”
I came out with my Beretta in my right hand. I reached forward and bunched his collar in my left hand tight enough to choke him. I hauled him back hard against his seat. I jammed the muzzle of the gun hard into the back of his right shoulder, directly above his armpit. Humvees are built pretty solid, including the seat frames. I had the guy pulled and pushed rigid against an immovable object. He wasn’t going anywhere. He wasn’t even going to breathe, unless I let him.
I said, “Let’s all sit still and stay calm.”
They all did both things, because of where I had the gun. His ear or his neck would not have worked. They would not have believed I was prepared to shoot the guy dead. Not one soldier against another, however desperate I was supposed to be. But a non-fatal wound through the soft flesh just to the right of his shoulder blade was plausible. And terrible. It would have ended his career. It would have ended his life as he knew it, with nothing ahead of him but crippling pain and disability checks and left-handed household utensils.
