Duffy brought me a pair of shoes. They were my size. The right one had a cavity carved into the heel. She gave me a wireless e-mail device that fit snugly into the space.
“That’s why I’m glad you’ve got big feet,” she said. “Made it easier to fit.”
“Is it reliable?”
“It better be. It’s new government issue. All departments are doing their concealed communications with it now.”
“Great,” I said. In my career more foul-ups had been caused by faulty technology than any other single cause.
“It’s the best we can do,” she said. “They’d find anything else. They’re bound to search you. And the theory is if they’re scanning for radio transmissions all they’ll hear is a brief burst of modem screech. They’ll probably think it’s static.”
They had three blood effects from a New York theatrical costumier. They were big and bulky. Each was a foot-wide square of Kevlar that was to be taped to the victim’s chest. They had rubber gore reservoirs and radio receivers and firing charges and batteries.
“Wear loose shirts, guys,” Eliot said.
The radio triggers were separate buttons I would have to tape to my right forearm. They were wired to batteries I would have to carry in my inside pocket. The buttons were big enough to feel through my coat and my jacket and my shirt, and I figured I would look OK supporting the Colt’s weight with my left hand. We rehearsed the sequence. First, the pickup driver. That button would be nearest my wrist. I would trigger it with my index finger. Second, the pickup passenger. That button would be in the middle. Middle finger. Third, the old guy playing the cop. That button would be nearest my elbow, ring finger.
“You’ll have to lose them afterward,” Eliot said. “They’ll search you for sure at Beck’s house. You’ll have to stop at a men’s room or something and get rid of them.”
We rehearsed endlessly in the motel lot. We laid out the road in miniature. By midnight we were as solid as we were ever going to get. We figured we would need all of eight seconds, beginning to end.
“You have the critical decision,” Duffy said to me. “It’s your call. If there’s anything wrong when the Toyota is coming at you, anything at all, then you abort and you watch it go on by. We’ll clean it up somehow. But you’ll be firing three live rounds in a public place and I don’t want any stray pedestrians getting hit, or cyclists, or joggers. You’ll have less than a second to decide.”
“Understood,” I said, although I really didn’t see any easy way of cleaning it up if it had already gotten that far. Then Eliot took a last couple of phone calls and confirmed they had a college security cruiser on loan and were putting a plausible old Nissan Maxima behind the mall’s flagship department store. The Maxima had been impounded from a small-time marijuana grower in New York State. They still had tough drug laws down there. They were putting phony Massachusetts plates on it and filling it with the kind of junk a department store sales lady might be expected to haul around with her.
“Bed now,” Duffy called. “Big day tomorrow.”
That was the end of day ten.
Duffy brought doughnuts and coffee to my room for breakfast on day eleven, early. Her and me, alone. We went through the whole thing, one last time. She showed me photographs of the agent she had inserted fifty-nine days ago. She was a blonde thirty-year-old who had gotten a clerk’s job with Bizarre Bazaar using the name Teresa Daniel. Teresa Daniel was petite and looked resourceful. I looked hard at the pictures and memorized her features, but it was another woman’s face I was seeing in my mind.
“I’m assuming she’s still alive,” Duffy said. “I have to.”
I said nothing.
“Try hard to get hired,” she said. “We checked your recent history, the same way Beck might. You come out pretty vague. Plenty missing that would worry me, but I don’t think it would worry him.”
I gave the photographs back to her.
“I’m a shoo-in,” I said. “The illusion reinforces itself. He’s left shorthanded and he’s under attack, all at the same time. But I’m not going to try too hard. In fact I’m going to come across a little reluctant. I think anything else would seem phony.”
“OK,” she said. “You’ve got seven objectives, of which numbers one, two, and three are, take a lot of care. We can assume these are extremely dangerous people.”
I nodded. “We can do more than assume it. If Quinn’s involved, we can absolutely guarantee it.”
“So act accordingly,” she said. “Gloves off, from the start.”
“Yes,” I said. I put my arm across my chest and started massaging my left shoulder with my right hand. Then I stopped myself, surprised. An army psychiatrist once told me that type of unconscious gesture represents feelings of vulnerability. It’s defensive. It’s about covering up and hiding. It’s the first step toward curling yourself into a ball on the floor. Duffy must have read the same books, because she picked up on it and looked straight at me.
“You’re scared of Quinn, aren’t you?” she said.
“I’m not scared of anybody,” I said. “But certainly I preferred it when he was dead.”
“We can cancel,” she said.
I shook my head. “I’d like the chance to find him, believe me.”
“What went wrong with the arrest?”
I shook my head again.
“I won’t talk about that,” I said.
She was quiet for a beat. But she didn’t push it. Just looked away and paused and looked back and started up with the briefing again. Quiet voice, efficient diction.
“Objective number four is find my agent,” she said. “And bring her back to me.”
I nodded.
“Five, bring me solid evidence I can use to nail Beck.”
“OK,” I said.
She paused again. Just a beat. “Six, find Quinn and do whatever you need to do with him. And then seven, get the hell out of there.”
I nodded. Said nothing.
“We won’t tail you,” she said. “The kid might spot us. He’ll be pretty paranoid by then. And we won’t put a homing device on the Nissan, because they’d probably find it later. You’ll have to e-mail us your location, soon as you know it.”
“OK,” I said.
“Weaknesses?” she asked.
I forced my mind away from Quinn.
“Three weaknesses that I can see,” I said. “Two minor and one major. First minor one is that I’m going to blow the back window out of the van but the kid will have about ten minutes to realize the broken glass is in the wrong place and there isn’t a corresponding hole in the windshield.”
“So don’t do it.”
“I think I really need to. I think we need to keep the panic level high.”
“OK, we’ll put a bunch of boxes back there. You should have boxes anyway, if you’re a delivery man. They might obscure his view. If they don’t, just hope he doesn’t put two and two together inside ten minutes.”
I nodded. “And second, old man Beck is going to call the cops down here, sometime, somehow. Maybe the newspapers, too. He’s going to be looking for corroborating information.”
“We’ll give the cops a script to follow. And they’ll give the press something. They’ll play ball for as long as they need to. What’s the major weakness?”
“The bodyguards,” I said. “How long can you hold them? You can’t let them get near a phone, or they’ll call Beck. So you can’t formally arrest them. You can’t put them in the system. You’ll have to hold them incommunicado, completely illegally. How long can you keep that going?”
She shrugged. “Four or five days, tops. We can’t protect you any longer than that. So be real fast.”
“I plan to be,” I said. “How long will the battery last on my e-mail thing?”
“About five days,” she said. “You’ll be out by then. We can’t give you a charger. It would be too suspicious. But you can use a cell phone charger, if you can find one.”
“OK,” I said.
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She just looked at me. There was nothing more to say. Then she moved close and kissed me on the cheek. It was sudden. Her lips were soft. They left a dusting of doughnut sugar on my skin.
“Good luck,” she said. “I don’t think we’ve missed anything.”
But we had missed a lot of things. They were glaring errors in our thinking and they all came back to haunt me.
CHAPTER 3
Duke the bodyguard came back to my room five minutes before seven in the evening, which was way too early for dinner. I heard his footsteps outside and a quiet click as the lock turned. I was sitting on the bed. The e-mail device was back in my shoe and my shoe was back on my foot.
“Get a nap, asshole?” he asked.
“Why am I locked up?” I asked back.
“Because you’re a cop-killer,” he said.
I looked away. Maybe he had been a cop himself, before he went private. Lots of ex-cops wind up in the security business, as consultants or private eyes or bodyguards. Certainly he had some kind of an agenda, which could be a problem for me. But it meant he was buying Richard Beck’s story without question, which was the upside. He looked at me for a second with nothing much in his face. Then he led me out of the room and down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor and through dark passageways toward the side of the house that faced north. I could smell salt air and damp carpet. There were rugs everywhere. Some places they were laid two-deep on the floor. They glowed with muted colors. He stopped in front of a door and pushed it open and stepped back so I was channeled into a room. It was large and square and paneled with dark oak. Rugs all over the floor. There were small windows in deep recesses. Darkness and rock and gray ocean outside. There was an oak table. My two Colt Anacondas were lying on it, unloaded. Their cylinders were open. There was a man at the head of the table. He was sitting in an oak chair with arms and a tall back. He was the guy from Susan Duffy’s surveillance photographs.
In the flesh he was mostly unremarkable. Not big, not small. Maybe six feet, maybe two hundred pounds. Gray hair, not thin, not thick, not short, not long. He was about fifty. He was wearing a gray suit made out of expensive cloth cut without any attempt at style. His shirt was white and his tie was no color at all, like gasoline. His hands and face were pale, like his natural habitat was underground parking garages at night, hawking samples of something from his Cadillac’s trunk.
“Sit down,” he said. His voice was quiet and strained, like it was all high up in his throat. I sat opposite him at the far end of the table.
“I’m Zachary Beck,” he said.
“Jack Reacher,” I said.
Duke closed the door gently and leaned his bulk against it from the inside. The room went quiet. I could hear the ocean. It wasn’t a rhythmic wave sound like you hear at the beach. It was a continuous random crashing and sucking of surf on the rocks. I could hear pools draining and gravel rattling and breakers coming in like explosions. I tried to count them. People say every seventh wave is a big one.
“So,” Beck said. He had a drink on the table in front of him. Some kind of amber liquid in a short heavy glass. Oily, like scotch or bourbon. He nodded to Duke. Duke picked up a second glass. It had been waiting there for me on a side table. It had the same oily amber liquid in it. He carried it awkwardly with his finger and thumb right down at the base. He walked across the room and bent a little to place it carefully in front of me. I smiled. I knew what it was for.
“So,” Beck said again.
I waited.
“My son explained your predicament,” he said. It was the same phrase his wife had used.
“The law of unintended consequences,” I said.
“It presents me with difficulties,” he said. “I’m just an ordinary businessman, trying to work out where my responsibilities lie.”
I waited.
“We’re grateful, naturally,” he said. “Please don’t misunderstand that.”
“But?”
“There are legal issues, aren’t there?” He said it with a little annoyance in his voice, like he was being victimized by complexities beyond his control.
“It’s not rocket science,” I said. “I need you to turn a blind eye. At least temporarily. Like one good turn deserves another. If your conscience can accommodate that kind of a thing.”
The room went quiet again. I listened to the ocean. I could hear a full spectrum of sounds out there. I could hear brittle seaweed dragging on granite and a drawn-out undertow sucking backward toward the east. Zachary Beck’s gaze was moving all over the place. He was looking at the table, then at the floor, then into space. His face was narrow. Not much of a jaw. His eyes were set fairly close together. His brow was lined with concentration. His lips were thin and his mouth was pursed. His head was moving a little. The whole thing was a reasonable facsimile of an ordinary businessman struggling with weighty issues.
“Was it a mistake?” he asked.
“The cop?” I said. “In retrospect, obviously. At the time, I was just trying to get the job done.”
He spent a little more time thinking, and then he nodded.
“OK,” he said. “In the circumstances, we might be willing to help you out. If we can. You did a great service for the family.”
“I need money,” I said.
“Why?”
“I’m going to need to travel.”
“When?”
“Right now.”
“Is that wise?”
“Not really. I’d prefer to wait here a couple of days until the initial panic is over. But I don’t want to push my luck with you.”
“How much money?”
“Five thousand dollars might do it.”
He said nothing to that. Just started up with the gazing thing again. This time, there was a little more focus in his eyes.
“I’ve got some questions for you,” he said. “Before you leave us. If you leave us. Two issues are paramount. First, who were they?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I have many rivals and enemies.”
“That would go this far?”
“I’m a rug importer,” he said. “I didn’t intend to be, but that’s the way things worked out. Possibly you think I just deal with department stores and interior decorators, but the reality is I deal with all kinds of unsavory characters in various foreign hellholes where enslaved children are forced to work eighteen-hour days until their fingers bleed. Their owners are all convinced I’m ripping them off and raping their cultures, and the truth is I probably am, although no more than they are. They aren’t fun companions. I need a certain toughness to prosper. And the point is, so do my competitors. This is a tough business all around. So between my suppliers and my competitors I can think of half a dozen separate people who would kidnap my son to get at me. After all, one of them did, five years ago, as I’m sure my son told you.”
I said nothing.
“I need to know who they were,” he said, like he really meant it. So I paused a beat and recounted the whole event for him, second by second, yard by yard, mile by mile. I described the two tall fair-haired DEA guys in the Toyota accurately and in great detail.
“They mean nothing to me,” he said.
I didn’t answer.
“Did you get the Toyota’s license plate?” he asked.
I thought back and told him the truth.
“I only saw the front,” I said. “There was no plate.”
“OK,” he said. “So they were from a state that doesn’t require a front license plate. That narrows it down a little, I guess.”
I said nothing. A long moment later he shook his head.
“Information is in very short supply,” he said. “An associate of mine contacted the police department down there, in a roundabout way. One town cop is dead, one college cop is dead, two unexplained strangers in a Lincoln Town Car are dead, and two unexplained strangers in a Toyota pickup truck are dead. The only surviving eyewitness is a second college cop, and he’s still un
conscious after a car wreck nearly five miles away. So right now nobody knows what happened. Nobody knows why it happened. Nobody has made a connection to an attempted kidnap. All anybody knows is there was a bloodbath down there for no apparent reason. They’re speculating about gang warfare.”
“What happens when they run the Lincoln’s plate?” I asked.
He hesitated.
“It’s a corporate registration,” he said. “It doesn’t lead directly here.”
I nodded. “OK, but I want to be on the West Coast before that other college cop wakes up. He got a good look at me.”
“And I want to know who stepped out of line here.”
I glanced at the Anacondas on the table. They had been cleaned and lightly oiled. I was suddenly very glad I had ditched the spent shells. I picked up my glass. Wrapped my thumb and all four fingers around it and sniffed the contents. I had no idea what they were. I would have preferred a cup of coffee. I put the glass back on the table.
“Is Richard OK?” I asked.
“He’ll live,” Beck said. “I’d like to know who exactly is attacking me.”
“I told you what I saw,” I said. “They didn’t show me ID. They weren’t known to me personally. I just happened to be there. What’s your second paramount issue?”
There was another pause. The surf crashed and boomed outside the windows.
“I’m a cautious man,” Beck said. “And I don’t want to offend you.”
“But?”
“But I’m wondering who you are, exactly.”
“I’m the guy who saved your boy’s other ear,” I said.
Beck glanced at Duke, who stepped forward smartly and took my glass away. He used the same awkward pincer movement with his thumb and his index finger, right down at the base.
“And now you’ve got my fingerprints,” I said. “Nice and clear.”
Beck nodded again, like a guy making a judicious decision. He pointed at the guns, where they lay on the table.
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