by Lee Child
‘No, I just made that up. I had nowhere to go. I came out of a bar and turned left and walked. I can’t explain it any better than that.’
Lee said nothing.
I said, ‘What else?’
Lee said, You have no bags. I never saw a homeless person with nothing. Most of them haul more stuff around than I own. They use shopping carts.’
‘I’m different,’ I said. ‘And I’m not a homeless person. Not like them.’
She said nothing.
I asked her, ‘Were you blindfolded when they brought you here?’
She looked at me for a long moment and then she shook her head and sighed. She said, ‘We’re in a closed firehouse in Greenwich Village. On West 3rd. Street level and above is disused. We’re in the basement.’
‘Do you know exactly who these guys are?’
She didn’t speak. Just glanced up at the camera. I said, ‘Same principle. They know who they are. At least I hope they do. Doesn’t hurt for them to know that we know, too.’
‘You think?’
‘That’s the point. They can’t stop us thinking. Do you know they are?’
‘They didn’t show ID. Not today, and not that first night either, when they came to talk to you at the precinct.’
‘But?’
‘Not showing ID can be the same thing as showing it, if you’re the only bunch that never does. We’ve heard some stories.’
‘So who are they?’
‘They work directly for the Secretary of Defense.’
‘That figures,’ I said. ‘The Secretary of Defense is usually the dumbest guy in the government.’
Lee glanced up at the camera again, as if I had insulted it. As if I had caused it to be insulted. I said, ‘Don’t worry. These guys look ex-military to me, in which case they already know how dumb the Secretary of Defense is. But even so, Defense is a Cabinet position, which means ultimately these guys an’ working for the White House.’
Lee paused a beat and asked, ‘Do you know what they want?’
‘Some of it.’
‘Don’t tell us.’
‘I won’t,’ I said.
‘But is it big enough for the White House?’
‘Potentially, I guess.’
‘Shit.’
‘When did they come for you?’
‘This afternoon. Two o’clock. I was still asleep.’
‘Did they have the NYPD with them?’
Lee nodded, and a little hurt showed in her eyes. I asked, ‘Did you know the patrolmen?’
She shook her head. ‘Hotshot counterterrorism guys. They write their own rules and keep themselves separate. They ride around in special cars all day long. Fake taxis, sometimes. One in the front, two in the back. Did you know that? Big circles, up on Tenth, down on Second. Like the B-52s used to patrol the skies.’
‘What time is it now? About six after six?’
She looked at her watch, and looked surprised.
‘Dead on,’ she said.
I turned the other way.
‘Jake?’ I said. ‘What about you?’
‘They came for me first. I’ve been here since noon. Watching you sleep.’
‘Any word from Peter?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You snore, you know that?’
‘I was full of gorilla tranquillizer. From a dart gun.’
‘You’re kidding.’
I showed him the bloodstain on my pants, and then the one on my shoulder.
‘That’s insane,’ he said.
‘Were you at work?’
He nodded. ‘The dispatcher called my car back to base, and they were waiting for me.’
‘Your department knows where you are?’
‘Not specifically,’ he said. ‘But they know who took me away.’
‘That’s something,’ I said.
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘The department won’t do anything for me. Guys like these come for you, suddenly you’re tainted, presumed guilty of something. People were already inching away from me.’
Lee said, ‘Like when Internal Affairs comes calling.’
I asked her, ‘Why isn’t Docherty here?’
‘He knows less than me. In fact he went out of his way to know less than me. Didn’t you notice that? He’s an old hand.’
‘He’s your partner.’
‘Today he is. By next week he’ll have forgotten he ever had a partner. You know how these things work.’
Jake said, ‘There are only three cells here. Maybe Docherty is where else.’
I asked, ‘Have these guys talked to you yet?’
Both of them shook their heads.
I asked, ‘Are you worried?’
Both of them nodded. Lee asked, ‘Are you?’
‘I’m sleeping well,’ I said. ‘But I think that’s mostly because of the tranquillizers.’
* * *
At six thirty they brought us food. Deli sandwiches, in plastic clamshell packs that were turned sideways and pushed through the bars. Plus bottles of water. I drank my water first and refilled the bottle from the tap. My sandwich was salami and cheese.
Finest meal I ever ate
At seven o’clock they took Jacob Mark away for questioning. No restraints. No chains. Theresa Lee and I sat on our cots, about eight feet apart, separated by bars. We didn’t talk much. Lee seemed depressed. At one point she said, ‘I lost some good friends when the towers came down. Not just cops. Firefighters, people that I had worked with. People that I had known for years.’ She said it as if she thought those truths should insulate her from the craziness that came afterwards. I didn’t answer her, Mostly I sat quiet and re-ran conversations in my head. All kinds of people had been talking at me. For hours. John Sansom, Lila Hoth, the guys in the next room. I was running through what they had all said, the same way a cabinet maker runs his palm over a length of planed wood, looking for the rough spots. There were a few. There were strange half-comments, odd nuances, little off-key implications. I didn’t know what any of them meant. Not then. But knowing that they were there was useful in itself.
At seven thirty they brought Jacob Mark back and took Theresa Lee away in his place. No restraints. No chains. Jake got on his cot and sat cross-legged with his back to the camera. I looked at him. An inquiry. He gave a millimetric shrug and rolled his eyes. Then he kept his hands in his lap, out of sight of the camera, and made a gun with his right thumb and forefinger. He tapped his thigh and looked at mine. I nodded. The dart gun. He put two fingers down between his knees and held a third in front and to the left. I nodded again. Two guys behind the table, and the third to the left with the gun. Probably in the doorway to the third room. On guard. Hence no restraints and no chains. I massaged my temples and while my hands were still up I mouthed, ‘When are our shoes?’ Jake mouthed back, ‘I don’t know.’
After that we sat in silence. I didn’t know what Jake was thinking about. His sister, probably. Or Peter. I was considering a binary choice. There are two ways to fight something. From the inside, or from the outside. I was an outside type of guy. Always had been.
At eight o’clock they brought Theresa Lee back and took me away again.
FORTY-FIVE
No restraints. No chains. Clearly they thought I was afraid of the dart gun. Which I was, to a degree. Not because I fear small puncture wounds. And not because I have anything against sleep, in and of itself. I like sleep as much as the next guy. But I didn’t want to waste any more time. I felt like I couldn’t afford another eight hours on my back.
The room was populated exactly as Jacob Mark had semaphored it. The main guy was already sitting in the centre chair. The guy who had fitted the chains that morning was the one who had brought me in, and he left me in the middle of the room and went to take his place at the table on the main guy’s right. The guy who had wielded the Franchi was standing off to the left with the dart gun in his hands. My possessions were still on the table. Or, they were back on the
table. I doubted that they had been there while Jake or Lee had been in the room. No point. No reason. No relevance. They had been laid out all over again, especially for me. Cash, passport, bank card, toothbrush, Metrocard, Lee’s business card, the phony business card, the memory stick, and the cell phone. Nine items. All present and correct. Which was good, because I needed to take at least seven of them with me.
The guy in the centre chair said, ‘Sit down, Mr Reacher.’
I moved towards my chair and I felt all three of them relax. They had been working all night and all day. Now they were into their third straight hour of interrogation. And interrogation is heavy work. It demands close attention and mental flexibility. It wears you out. So the three guys were tired. Tired enough to have lost their edge. As soon as I headed for my chair, they moved out of the present and into the future. They thought their troubles were over. They started thinking about their approach. Their first question. They assumed I would get to my chair and sit down and be ready to hear it. Be ready to answer it.
They were wrong.
Half a step short of my destination I raised my foot to the edge of the table and straightened my leg and shoved. Shoved, not kicked, because I had no shoes on. The table jerked back and the far edge hit the two seated guys in the stomach and pinned them against their chair backs. By that point I was already moving to my left. I came up from a crouch at the third guy and tore the dart gun up and out of his hands and while he was all straight and exposed I kneed him hard in the groin. He gave up on the gun and folded forward and I high-stepped and changed feet and kneed him in the face. Like a folk dance from Ireland. I spun away and levelled the gun and pulled the trigger and shot the main guy in the chest. Then I went over the table and battered the other guy in the head with the dart gun’s butt, once, twice three times, hard and vicious, until he went quiet and stopped moving.
Four noisy violent seconds, from beginning to end. Four discrete units of action and time, separately packaged, separately unleashed. The table, the dart gun, the main guy, the second guy. One, two, three, four. Smooth and easy. The two guys I had hit were unconscious and bleeding. The guy on the floor from a shattered nose, and the guy at the table from a gash to his scalp. Next to him the main guy was on his way under, chemically assisted, the same way I had been twice before. It was interesting to watch. There was some kind of muscle paralysis involved. The guy was sliding down in his chair, helpless, but his eyes were moving like he was still aware of things. I remembered the whirling shapes, and I wondered if he was seeing them too.
Then I turned and watched the door to the third room. There was still the medical technician unaccounted for. Maybe others. Maybe lots of others. But the door stayed closed. The third room stayed quiet. I knelt and checked under the third guy’s jacket.
No Glock. He had a shoulder holster but it was empty. Standard procedure, probably. No firearms in any closed room with a prisoner present. I checked the other two guys. Same result. Government-issue nylon shoulder rigs, both of them empty.
The third room stayed quiet.
I checked pockets. They were all empty. All sanitized. Nothing there at all, except neutral items like tissues and lonely dimes and pennies trapped down in the seams. No house keys, no car keys, no phones. Certainly no wallets, no badge holders, and no IDs.
I picked up the dart gun again and held it one-handed, out and ready. Moved to the third room’s door. Swung it open and raised the gun and pretended to aim. A gun is a gun, even if it’s empty and the wrong kind. It’s all about first impressions and subliminal reactions.
The third room was unoccupied.
No medical technician, no back-up agents, no support staff. Nobody at all. Nothing there, except grey office furniture and fluorescent light. The room itself was the same as the first two, an old brick basement chamber painted flat white. Same size, same proportions. It had another door, which I guessed led onward, either to a fourth room or a stairwell. I crossed to it and eased it open.
A stairwell. No paint, beyond an ancient peeling layer of institutional green. I closed the door again and checked the furniture. Three desks, five cabinets, four lockers, all grey, all plain and functional, all made of steel, all locked. With combination locks, like the cells, which made sense, because there had been no keys in the agents’ pockets. The desks held no piles of paper. Just three sleeping computers and three console telephones. I hit space bars and woke up each screen in turn. Each one asked for a password. I lifted receivers and hit redial buttons and got the operator every time. Extremely conscientious security. Painstaking, and consistent. Finish a call, dab the cradle, dial zero, hang up. The three guys weren’t perfect, but they weren’t idiots, either.
I stood still for a long moment. I was disappointed about the combination locks. I wanted to find their stores and reload the dart gun and shoot the other two agents with it. And I wanted my shoes.
I wasn’t going to get either satisfaction.
I padded my way back to the cells. Jacob Mark and Theresa Lee looked up, looked away, looked back. Classic double takes, because I was alone and I had the dart gun in my hands. I guessed they had heard the noises and assumed I was getting smacked around. I guessed they hadn’t expected me back so soon, or at all.
Lee asked, ‘What happened?’
I said, ‘They fell asleep.’
‘How?’
‘I guess my conversation bored them.’
‘So now you’re really in trouble.’
‘As opposed to what?’
‘You were innocent before.’
I said, ‘Grow up, Theresa.’
She didn’t answer. I checked the locks on the cell gates. They were fine items. They looked high quality and very precise. They had milled top-hat knobs graduated with neat engraving all around the edges, from the number one to the number thirty- six. The knobs turned both ways. I spun them and felt nothing at all in my fingers except the purr of slight and consistent mechanical resistance. The feel of great engineering. Certainly I didn’t feel any tumblers falling.
I asked, ‘Do you want me to get you out?’
Lee said, ‘You can’t.’
‘If I could, would you want me to?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘Because then you’d really be in trouble. If you stay, you’re living their game.’
She didn’t answer.
I said, ‘Jake? What about you?’
He asked, ‘Did you find our shoes?’
I shook my head. ‘But you could borrow theirs. They’re about your size.’
‘What about you?’
There are shoe stores on Eighth Street.’
‘You going to walk there barefoot?’
‘This is Greenwich Village. If I can’t walk around barefoot where can I?’
‘How can you get us out?’
‘Nineteenth-century problems and solutions, versus twenty-first-century expediency. But it will be difficult. So I need to know whether to start. And you need to make up your mind real quick. Because we don’t have much time.’
‘Before they wake up?’
‘Before the Home Depot closes.’
Jake said, ‘OK, I want out.’
I looked at Theresa Lee.
She said, ‘I don’t know. I didn’t do anything.’
‘Feel like sticking around and proving that? Because that’s hard to do. Proving a negative always is.’
She didn’t answer.
I said, ‘I was telling Sansom about how we studied the Red Army. You know what they were most afraid of? Not us. They were most afraid of their own people. Their worst torment was living their whole lives proving their own innocence, over and over again.’
Lee nodded.
‘I want out,’ she said.
‘OK,’ I said. I checked the things I needed to check. Estimated dimensions and weights by eye.
‘Sit tight,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back in less than an hour.’
* * *
First stop was the n
ext room. The three federal agents were still out cold. The main guy would stay that way for eight solid hours. Or maybe much longer, because his body mass was less than two-thirds of mine. For a bad second it struck me that I might have killed him. A dose calibrated for a man of my size might have been dangerous for a smaller person. But the guy was breathing steadily right then. And he had started it, so the risk was his.
The other two would be waking up much earlier. Maybe fairly soon. Concussion was unpredictable. So I ducked through to the anteroom and tore all of the computer cords out of the walls and carried them back and used them to truss the two guys up like chickens. Wrists, elbows, ankles, necks, all tight and interconnected. Multistrand copper cores, tough plastic sheathing, unbreakable. I peeled my socks off and tied them together in line and used them for a gag on the guy with the head wound. Unpleasant for him, but I figured he was getting a hazardous duty supplement in his pay, and he might as well earn it. I left the other guy’s mouth alone. His nose was smashed, and gagging him would have been the same thing as suffocating him. I hoped he would appreciate my benevolence in the fullness of time.
I checked my work and reloaded my pockets with my possessions from the table and then I left the building.
FORTY- SIX
The staircase led up to the first floor and came out at the back of what had once been the place where the fire trucks parked. There was a wide empty floor full of rat shit and the kind of mysterious random trash that accumulates in abandoned buildings. The big vehicle doors were locked shut with rusted iron bars and old padlocks. But there was a personnel door in the left hand wall. Getting to it wasn’t easy. There was a half-cleared path. The trash on the floor had been mostly kicked to the side by the passage of feet, but there was still enough debris left around to make barefoot walking difficult. I ended up sweeping stuff out of the way with the side of my foot and stepping into the spaces I had made, one pace at a time. Slow progress. But I got there in the end.
The personnel door was fitted with a new lock, but it was designed to keep people out, not in. On the inside was just a simple lever. On the outside was a combination dial. I found a navy brass hose coupler on the floor and used it to wedge the door open a crack. I left it that way for my return and stepped out to an alley and two careful paces later I was on the West 3rd Street sidewalk.
