Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “Get the job done,” he said.

  “You waiting here?”

  He nodded. I broke the gun down and checked it. Put it back together and jacked a round into the chamber and clicked the safety on. Then I put the spare mags in my pockets very carefully so they wouldn’t rattle against the Glock and the PSM. Eased myself out of the car. Stood and breathed the cold night air. It was a relief. It woke me up. I could smell a lake nearby, and trees, and leaf mold on the ground. I could hear a small waterfall in the distance, and the mufflers on the cars ticking gently as they cooled. There was a gentle breeze in the trees. Other than that there was nothing to hear. Just absolute silence.

  Duke was waiting for me. I could see tension and impatience in the way he was holding himself. He had done this stuff before. That was clear. He looked exactly like a veteran cop before a major bust. Some degree of routine familiarity, mixed in with an acute awareness that no two situations are ever quite alike. He had his Steyr in his hand, with the long thirty-round magazine in it. It protruded way down out of the grip. Made the gun look bigger and uglier than ever.

  “Let’s go, asshole,” he whispered.

  I stayed five feet behind him and walked on the opposite side of the driveway, like an infantryman would. I had to be convincing, like I was worried about presenting a grouped target. I knew the place was going to be empty, but he didn’t.

  We walked on around a bend and saw the house in front of us. There was a light burning in a window. On a security timer, probably. Duke slowed and stopped.

  “See a door?” he whispered.

  I peered into the gloom. Saw a small porch. Pointed at it.

  “You wait at the entrance,” I whispered back. “I’ll check the lighted window.”

  He was happy enough to agree to that. We made it to the porch. He stopped there and waited and I peeled off and looped around toward the window. Dropped to the ground and crawled the last ten feet in the dirt. Raised my head at the sill and peered inside. There was a low-wattage bulb burning in a table lamp with a yellow plastic shade. There were battered sofas and armchairs. Cold ash from an old fire in the hearth. Pine paneling on the walls. No people.

  I crawled backward until the light spill let Duke see me and held two forked fingers below my eyes. Standard sniper-spotter visual code for I see. Then I held my hand palm out, all my fingers extended. I see five people. Then I went into a complicated series of gestures that might have indicated their disposition and their weaponry. I knew Duke wouldn’t understand them. I didn’t understand them either. As far as I knew they were entirely meaningless. I had never been a sniper-spotter. But the whole thing looked real good. It looked professional and clandestine and urgent.

  I crawled back ten more feet and then stood up and walked quietly back to join him at the door.

  “They’re out of it,” I whispered. “Drunk or stoned. We get a good jump, we’ll be home and dry.”

  “Weapons?”

  “Plenty, but nothing within reach.” I pointed at the porch. “Looks like there’s going to be a short hallway on the other side. Outer door, inner door, then the hallway. You take left, I’ll take right. We’ll wait there in the hallway. Take them down when they come out of the room to see what the noise is all about.”

  “You giving the orders now?”

  “I did the recon.”

  “Just don’t screw up, asshole.”

  “You either.”

  “I never do,” he said.

  “OK,” I said.

  “I mean it,” he said. “You get in my way, I’ll be more than happy to put you down with the rest of them, no hesitation.”

  “We’re on the same side here.”

  “Are we?” he said. “I think we’re about to find out.”

  “Relax,” I said.

  He paused. Tensed. Nodded in the dark. “I’ll hit the outer door, you hit the inner. Like leapfrog.”

  “OK,” I said again. I turned away and smiled. Just like a veteran cop. If I hit the inner door, he would leapfrog through it first and I would go second, and the second guy is the guy who usually gets shot, given normal reaction times from the enemy.

  “Safeties off,” I whispered.

  I clicked the H&K to single-round fire and he clicked the catch on his Steyr to the right. I nodded and he nodded and kicked in the outer door. I was right there on his shoulder and slid past him and kicked in the inner door without breaking stride. He slid past me and jumped left and I followed him and went right. He was good enough. We made a pretty good team. We were crouched in perfect position even before the shattered doors had stopped swinging on their hinges. He was staring ahead at the entry to the room in front of us. He had the Steyr in a fixed two-handed grip, arms straight out, eyes wide open. He was breathing hard. Almost panting. Getting himself through a long moment of danger, the best way he could. I pulled Angel Doll’s PSM out of my pocket. Held it left-handed and snicked the safety off and scrambled across the floor and jammed it in his ear.

  “Keep very quiet,” I said to him. “And make a choice. I’m going to ask you one question. Just one. If you lie, or if you refuse to answer, I’m going to shoot you in the head. You understand?”

  He held perfectly still, five seconds, six, eight, ten. Stared desperately at the door in front of him.

  “Don’t worry, asshole,” I said. “There’s nobody here. They were all arrested last week. By the government.”

  He was motionless.

  “You understand what I said before? About the question?”

  He nodded, hesitantly, awkwardly, with the gun still jammed hard in his ear.

  “You answer it, or I shoot you in the head. Got it?”

  He nodded again.

  “OK, here it comes,” I said. “You ready?”

  He nodded, just once.

  “Where is Teresa Daniel?” I asked.

  There was a long pause. He turned half toward me. I tracked my hand around to keep the PSM’s muzzle in place. Realization dawned slowly in his eyes.

  “In your dreams,” he said.

  I shot him in the head. Just jerked the muzzle out of his ear and fired once left-handed into his right temple. The sound was shattering in the dark. Blood and brain and bone chips hit the far wall. The muzzle flash burned his hair. Then I fired a double-tap from the H&K right-handed into the ceiling and fired another from the PSM left-handed into the floor. Switched the H&K to automatic fire and stood up and emptied it point-blank into his body. Picked up his Steyr from where it had fallen and blasted the ceiling with it, again and again, fifteen fast shots, bam bam bam bam, half the magazine. The hallway was instantly full of bitter smoke and chips of wood and plaster were flying everywhere. I switched magazines on the H&K and sprayed the walls, all around. The noise was deafening. Spent shell cases were spitting out and bouncing around and raining down everywhere. The H&K clicked empty and I fired the rest of the PSM’s ammo into the hallway wall and kicked open the door to the lighted room and blew up the table lamp with the Steyr. I found a side table and tossed it through the window and used up the second spare magazine for the H&K by spraying the trees in the distance while I fired the Steyr left-handed into the floor until it clicked empty. Then I piled the Steyr and the H&K and the PSM together in my arms and ran for it with my head ringing like a bell. I had fired a hundred and twenty-eight rounds in about fifteen seconds. They had deafened me. They must have sounded like World War Three to Beck.

  I ran straight down the driveway. I was coughing and trailing gunsmoke like a cloud. I headed for the cars. Beck had already scrambled across into the Cadillac’s driver’s seat. He saw me coming and opened his door an inch. Faster than using the window.

  “Ambush,” I said. I was out of breath and I could hear my own voice loud inside my head. “There were at least eight of them.”

  “Where’s Duke?”

  “Dead. We got to go. Right now, Beck.”

  He froze for a second. Then he moved.

  “Take his car,” he s
aid.

  He already had the Cadillac rolling. He jammed his foot down and slammed his door and reversed down the driveway and out of sight. I jumped into the Lincoln. Fired it up. Stuck the selector in Reverse and got one elbow up on the back of the seat and stared through the rear window and hit the gas. We shot out backward onto the road one after the other and slewed around and took off again north, side by side like a stoplight drag race. We howled around the curves and fought the camber and stayed up around seventy miles an hour. Didn’t slow until we reached the turn that would take us back toward Hartford. Beck edged ahead of me and I fell in behind him and followed. He drove five fast miles and turned in at a closed package store and parked at the back of the lot. I parked ten feet from him and just lay back in the seat and let him come to me. I was too tired to get out. He ran around the Cadillac’s hood and pulled my door open.

  “It was an ambush?” he said.

  I nodded. “They were waiting for us. Eight of them. Maybe more. It was a massacre.”

  He said nothing. There was nothing for him to say. I picked up Duke’s Steyr from the seat beside me and handed it over.

  “I recovered it,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I thought you might want me to. I thought it might be traceable.”

  He nodded. “It isn’t. But that was good thinking.”

  I gave him the H&K, too. He stepped back to the Cadillac and I watched him zip both pieces into his bag. Then he turned around. Clenched both hands and looked up at the black sky. Then at me.

  “See any faces?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Too dark. But we hit one of them. He dropped this.”

  I handed him the PSM. It was like punching him in the gut. He turned pale and put out a hand and steadied himself against the Lincoln’s roof.

  “What?” I said.

  He looked away. “I don’t believe it.”

  “What?”

  “You hit somebody and he dropped this?”

  “I think Duke hit him.”

  “You saw it happen?”

  “Just shapes,” I said. “It was dark. Lots of muzzle flashes. Duke was firing and he hit a shape and this was on the floor when I came out.”

  “This is Angel Doll’s gun.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Million to one it isn’t. You know what it is?”

  “Never saw one like it.”

  “It’s a special KGB pistol,” he said. “From the old Soviet Union. Very rare in this country.”

  Then he stepped away into the darkness of the lot. I closed my eyes. I wanted to sleep. Even five seconds would have made a difference.

  “Reacher,” he called. “What evidence did you leave?”

  I opened my eyes.

  “Duke’s body,” I said.

  “That won’t lead anybody anywhere. Ballistics?”

  I smiled in the dark. Imagined Hartford PD forensic scientists trying to make sense of the trajectories. Walls, floors, ceilings. They would conclude the hallway had been full of heavily-armed disco dancers.

  “A lot of bullets and shell cases,” I said.

  “Untraceable,” he said.

  He moved deeper into the dark. I closed my eyes again. I had left no fingerprints. No part of me had touched any part of the house except for the soles of my shoes. And I hadn’t fired Duffy’s Glock. I had heard something about a central registry somewhere that stored data on rifling marks. Maybe her Glock was a part of it. But I hadn’t used it.

  “Reacher,” Beck called. “Drive me home.”

  I opened my eyes.

  “What about this car?” I called back.

  “Abandon it here.”

  I yawned and forced myself to move and used the tail of my coat to wipe the wheel and all the controls I had touched. The unused Glock nearly fell out of my pocket. Beck didn’t notice. He was so preoccupied I could have taken it out and twirled it around my finger like the Sundance Kid and he wouldn’t have noticed. I wiped the door handle and then leaned in and pulled the keys and wiped them and tossed them into the scrub at the edge of the lot.

  “Let’s go,” Beck said.

  He was silent until we were thirty miles north and east of Hartford. Then he started talking. He had spent the time getting it all worked out in his mind.

  “The phone call yesterday,” he said. “They were laying their plans. Doll was working with them all along.”

  “From when?”

  “From the start.”

  “Doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Duke went south and got the Toyota’s plate number for you. Then you gave it to Doll and told him to trace it. But why would Doll tell you the truth about the trace? If they were his buddies, he’d have dead-ended it, surely. Led you away from them. Left you in the dark.”

  Beck smiled a superior smile.

  “No,” he said. “They were setting up the ambush. That was the point of the phone call. It was good improvisation on their part. The kidnap gambit failed, so they switched tactics. They let Doll point us in the right direction. So that what happened tonight could happen.”

  I nodded slowly, like I was deferring to his point of view. The best way to clinch a pending promotion is to let them think you’re just a little dumber than they are. It had worked for me before, three straight times, in the military.

  “Did Doll actually know what you were planning for tonight?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “We were all discussing it, yesterday. In detail. When you saw us talking, in the office.”

  “So he set you up.”

  “Yes,” he said again. “He locked up last night and then left Portland and drove all the way down to wait with them. Told them all who was coming, and when, and why.”

  I said nothing. Just thought about Doll’s car. It was about a mile away from Beck’s office. I began to wish I had hidden it better.

  “But there’s one big question,” Beck said. “Was it just Doll?”

  “Or?”

  He went quiet. Then he shrugged.

  “Or any of the others that work with him,” he said.

  The ones you don’t control, I thought. Quinn’s people.

  “Or all of them together,” he said.

  He started thinking again, another thirty, forty miles. He didn’t speak another word until we were back on I-95, heading north around Boston.

  “Duke is dead,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Here it comes, I thought.

  “I knew him a long time,” he said.

  I said nothing.

  “You’re going to have to take over,” he said. “I need somebody right now. Somebody I can trust. And you’ve done well for me so far.”

  “Promotion?” I said.

  “You’re qualified.”

  “Head of security?”

  “At least temporarily,” he said. “Permanently, if you’d like.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Just remember what I know,” he said. “I own you.”

  I was quiet for a mile. “You going to pay me anytime soon?”

  “You’ll get your five grand plus what Duke got on top.”

  “I’ll need some background,” I said. “I can’t help you without it.”

  He nodded.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  Then he went quiet again. Next time I looked, he was fast asleep beside me. Some kind of a shock reaction. He thought his world was falling apart. I fought to stay awake and keep the car on the road. And I thought back to texts I had read from the British Army in India, during the Raj, at the height of their empire. Young subalterns trapped in junior ranks had their own mess. They would dine together in splendid dress uniforms and talk about their chances of promotion. But they had none, unless a superior officer died. Dead men’s shoes was the rule. So they would raise their crystal glasses of fine French wine and toast bloody wars and dread diseases, because a casualty further up the chain of command was their
only way to get ahead. Brutal, but that’s how it’s always been, in the military.

  I made it back to the Maine coast purely on autopilot. I couldn’t recall a single mile of the drive. I was numb with exhaustion. Every part of me ached. Paulie was slow about opening the gate. I guess we got him out of bed. He made a big point about staring in at me. I dropped Beck at the front door and put the car in the garage. Stashed the Glock and the spare magazines just for safety’s sake and went in through the back door. The metal detector beeped at the car keys. I dropped them on the kitchen table. I was hungry, but I was too tired to eat. I climbed all the stairs and fell down on my bed and went to sleep, fully dressed, overcoat and shoes and all.

  The weather woke me six hours later. Horizontal rain was battering my window. It sounded like gravel on the glass. I rolled off the bed and checked the view. The sky was iron gray and thick with cloud and the sea was raging. It was laced with angry foam a half-mile out. The waves were swamping the rocks. No birds. It was nine in the morning. Day fourteen, a Friday. I lay down on the bed again and stared at the ceiling and tracked back seventy-two hours to the morning of day eleven, when Duffy gave me her seven-point plan. One, two, and three, take a lot of care. I was doing OK under that heading. I was still alive, anyway. Four, find Teresa Daniel. No real progress there. Five, nail down some evidence against Beck. I didn’t have any. Not a thing. I hadn’t even seen him do anything wrong, except maybe operate a vehicle with phony license plates and carry a bag full of submachine guns that were probably illegal in all four states he’d been in. Six, find Quinn. No progress there, either. Seven, get the hell out. That item was going to have to wait. Then Duffy had kissed me on the cheek. Left doughnut sugar on my face.