Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “Serial number,” he said. “We checked with Glock in Austria. By computer. We have access to that kind of thing. This particular gun was sold to the United States government about a year ago. Part of a big order for the law enforcement agencies, 17s for the male agents and 19s for the women. So that’s how we know she was federal.”

  I stared at the serial number. “Did she deny it?”

  He nodded. “Of course she did. She said she just found it. Gave us a big song and dance. She blamed you, actually. Said it was your stuff. But then, they always deny it, don’t they? They’re trained to, I guess.”

  I looked away. Stared through the window at the sea. Why had she picked it all up? Why hadn’t she just left it there? Was it some kind of a housekeeping instinct? She didn’t want it to get wet? Or what?

  “You look upset,” Beck said.

  And how did she even find it? Why would she even be looking?

  “You look upset,” he said again.

  I was beyond upset. She had died in agony. And I had done it to her. She probably thought she was doing me a favor. By keeping my stuff dry. By keeping it from rusting. She was just a dumb naive kid from Ireland, trying to help me out. And I had killed her, as surely as if I had stood there and butchered her myself.

  “I’m responsible for security,” I said. “I should have suspected her.”

  “You’re responsible only since last night,” Beck said. “So don’t beat yourself up over it. You haven’t even got your feet under the table yet. It was Duke who should have made her.”

  “But I never would have suspected her,” I said. “I thought she was just the maid.”

  “Hey, me too,” he said. “Duke, also.”

  I looked away again. Stared at the sea. It was gray and heaving. I didn’t really understand. She found it. But why would she hide it so well?

  “This is the clincher,” Beck said.

  I looked back in time to see him lifting a pair of shoes out of the bag. They were big square clunky items, black, the shoes she had been wearing every single time I had seen her.

  “Look at this,” he said.

  He turned the right shoe over and pulled a pin out of the heel with his fingernails. Then he swiveled the heel rubber like a little door and turned the shoe the right way up. He shook it. A small black plastic rectangle clattered out on the table. It landed facedown. He turned it over.

  It was a wireless e-mail device, exactly identical to my own.

  He passed me the shoe. I took it. Stared at it, blankly. It was a woman’s size six. Made for a small foot. But it had a wide bulbous toe, and therefore a wide thick heel to balance it visually. Some kind of a clumsy fashion statement. The heel had a rectangular cavity carved out of it. Identical to mine. It had been done neatly. It had been done with patience. But not by a machine. It showed the same faint tool marks that mine did. I pictured some guy in a lab somewhere, a line of shoes on a bench in front of him, the smell of new leather, a small arc of woodcarving tools laid out in front of him, curls and slivers of rubber accumulating on the floor around him as he labored. Most government work is surprisingly low-tech. It’s not all exploding ballpoint pens and cameras built into watches. A trip to the mall to buy a commercial e-mail device and a pair of plain shoes is about as cutting-edge as most of it gets.

  “What are you thinking?” Beck asked.

  I was thinking about how I was feeling. I was on a roller-coaster. She was still dead, but I hadn’t killed her anymore. The government computers had killed her again. So I was relieved, personally. But I was more than a little angry, too. Like, what the hell was Duffy doing? What the hell was she playing at? It was an absolute rule of procedure that you never put two or more people undercover in the same location unless they’re aware of each other. That was absolutely basic. She had told me about Teresa Daniel. So why the hell hadn’t she told me about this other woman?

  “Unbelievable,” I said.

  “The battery is dead,” he said. He was holding the device in both hands. Using both thumbs on it, like a video game. “It doesn’t work, anyway.”

  He passed it to me. I put the shoe down and took it from him. Pressed the familiar power button. But the screen stayed dead.

  “How long was she here?” I asked.

  “Eight weeks,” Beck said. “It’s hard for us to keep domestic staff. It’s lonely here. And there’s Paulie, you know. And Duke wasn’t a very hospitable guy, either.”

  “I guess eight weeks would be a long time for a battery to last.”

  “What would be their procedure now?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was never federal.”

  “In general,” he said. “You must have seen stuff like this.”

  I shrugged.

  “I guess they’d have expected it,” I said. “Communications are always the first things to get screwed up. She drops off the radar, they wouldn’t worry right away. They’d have no choice but to leave her in the field. I mean, they can’t contact her to order her home, can they? So I guess they would trust her to get the battery charged up again, as soon as she could.” I turned the unit on its edge and pointed to the little socket on the bottom. “Looks like it needs a cell phone charger, something like that.”

  “Would they send people after her?”

  “Eventually,” I said. “I guess.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. Not yet, anyway.”

  “We plan to deny she was ever here. Deny we ever saw her. There’s no evidence she was ever here.”

  “You better clean her room real good,” I said. “There’ll be fingerprints and hair and DNA all over the place.”

  “She was recommended to us,” he said. “We don’t advertise in the paper or anything. Some guys we know in Boston put her in touch.”

  He glanced at me. I thought: Some guys in Boston begging for a plea bargain, helping the government any which way they could. I nodded.

  “Tricky,” I said. “Because what does that say about them?”

  He nodded back sourly. He agreed with me. He knew what I was saying. He picked up the big bunch of keys from where they were lying next to the chisel.

  “I think these are Angel Doll’s,” he said.

  I said nothing.

  “So it’s a three-way nightmare,” he said. “We can tie Doll to the Hartford crew, and we can tie our Boston friends to the feds. Now we can tie Doll to the feds, too. Because he gave his keys to the undercover bitch. Which means the Hartford crew must be in bed with the feds as well. Doll’s dead, thanks to Duke, but I’ve still got Hartford, Boston, and the government on my back. I’m going to need you, Reacher.”

  I glanced at Harley. He was looking out the window at the rain.

  “Was it just Doll?” I asked.

  Beck nodded. “I’ve been through all of that. I’m satisfied. It was just Doll. The rest are solid. They’re still with me. They were very apologetic about Doll.”

  “OK,” I said.

  There was silence for a long moment. Then Beck rewrapped my stash in its rag and dumped it back in his bag. He threw the dead e-mail device in after it and piled the maid’s shoes on top. They looked sad and empty and forlorn.

  “I’ve learned one thing,” he said. “I’m going to start searching people’s shoes, that’s for damn sure. You can bet your life on that.”

  I bet my life on it right there and then. I kept my own shoes on. I got back up to Duke’s room and checked his closet. There were four pairs in there. Nothing I would have picked out for myself in a store, but they looked reasonable and they were close to the right size. But I left them there. To show up so soon in different shoes would raise a red flag. And if I was going to ditch mine, I was going to ditch them properly. No point leaving them in my room for casual inspection. I would have to get them out of the house. And there was no easy way of doing that right then. Not after the scene in the kitchen. I couldn’t just walk downstairs with them in my hands. What was I supposed to say? What
, these? Oh, they’re the shoes I was wearing when I arrived. I’m just going out to throw them in the ocean. Like I was suddenly bored with them? So I kept them on.

  And I still needed them, anyway. I was tempted, but I wasn’t ready to cut Duffy out. Not just yet. I locked myself in Duke’s bathroom and took the e-mail device out. It was an eerie feeling. I hit power and the screen came up with a message: We need to meet. I hit reply and sent: You bet your ass we do. Then I turned the unit off and nailed it back into my heel and went down to the kitchen again.

  “Go with Harley,” Beck told me. “You need to bring the Saab back.”

  The cook wasn’t there. The counters were neat and clean. They had been scrubbed. The stove was cold. It felt like there should be a Closed sign hanging on the door.

  “What about lunch?” I said.

  “You hungry?”

  I thought back to the way the sea had swelled the bag and claimed the body. Saw the hair under the water, fluid and infinitely fine. Saw the blood rinsing away, pink and diluted. I wasn’t hungry.

  “Starving,” I said.

  Beck smiled sheepishly. “You’re one cold son of a bitch, Reacher.”

  “I’ve seen dead people before. I expect to see them again.”

  He nodded. “The cook is off duty. Eat out, OK?”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  He put his hand in his pants pocket and came out with a wad of bills. Started to count them out and then just shrugged and gave it up and handed the whole lot to me. It must have been close to a thousand dollars.

  “Walking-around money,” he said. “We’ll do the salary thing later.”

  I put the cash in my pocket.

  “Harley is waiting in the car,” he said.

  I went outside and pulled my coat collar up. The wind was easing. The rain was reverting to vertical. The Lincoln was still there at the corner of the house. The trunk lid was closed. Harley was drumming his thumbs on the wheel. I slid into the passenger seat and buzzed it backward to get some legroom. He fired up the engine and set the wipers going and took off. We had to wait while Paulie unchained the gate. Harley fiddled with the heater and set it on high. Our clothes were wet and the windows were steaming up. Paulie was slow. Harley started drumming again.

  “You two work for the same guy?” I asked him.

  “Me and Paulie?” he said. “Sure.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Beck didn’t tell you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then I won’t either, I guess.”

  “Hard for me to do my job without information,” I said.

  “That’s your problem,” he said. “Not mine.”

  He gave me his yellow gappy smile again. I figured if I hit him hard enough my fist would take out all the little stumps and end up somewhere in the back of his scrawny throat. But I didn’t hit him. Paulie got the chain loose and swung the gate back. Harley took off immediately and squeezed through with about an inch of clearance on each side. I settled back in my seat. Harley clicked the headlights on and accelerated hard and rooster tails of spray kicked up behind us. We drove west, because there was no choice for the first twelve miles. Then we turned north on Route One, away from where Elizabeth Beck had taken me, away from Old Orchard Beach and Saco, toward Portland. I had no view of anything because the weather was so dismal. I could barely see the tail lights on the traffic ahead of us. Harley didn’t speak. Just rocked back and forth in the driver’s seat and drummed his thumbs on the wheel and drove. He wasn’t a smooth driver. He was always either on the gas or the brake. We sped up, slowed down, sped up, slowed down. It was a long twenty miles.

  Then the road swerved hard to the west and I saw I-295 close by on our left. There was a narrow tongue of gray seawater beyond it and beyond that was the Portland airport. There was a plane taking off in a huge cloud of spray. It roared low over our heads and swung south over the Atlantic. Then there was a strip mall on our left with a long narrow parking lot out front. The mall had the sort of stores you expect to find in a low-rent place trapped between two roads near an airport. The parking lot held maybe twenty cars in a line, all of them head-in and square-on to the curb. The old Saab was fifth from the left. Harley pulled the Lincoln in and stopped directly behind it. Drummed his thumbs on the wheel.

  “All yours,” he said. “Key is in the door pocket.”

  I got out in the rain and he drove off as soon as I shut my door. But he didn’t get back on Route One. At the end of the lot he made a left. Then an immediate right. I saw him ease the big car through an improvised exit made of lumpy poured concrete that led into the adjoining lot. I pulled my collar up again and watched as he drove slowly through it and then disappeared behind a set of brand-new buildings. They were long low sheds made of bright corrugated metal. Some kind of a business park. There was a network of narrow blacktop roads. They were wet and shiny with rain. They had high concrete curbs, smooth and new. I saw the Lincoln again, through a gap between buildings. It was moving slow and lazy, like it was looking to park somewhere. Then it slid behind another building and I didn’t see it again.

  I turned around. The Saab was nose-in to a discount liquor store. Next to the liquor store on one side was a place that sold car stereos and on the other side was a place with a window full of fake crystal chandeliers. I doubted if the maid had been sent out to buy a new ceiling fixture. Or to get a CD player installed in the Saab. So she must have been sent to the liquor store. And then she must have found a whole bunch of people waiting there for her. Four of them, maybe five. At least. After the first moment of surprise she would have changed from a bewildered maid to a trained agent fighting for her life. They would have anticipated that. They would have come mob-handed. I looked up and down the sidewalk. Then I looked at the liquor store. It had a window full of boxes. There was no real view out. But I went in anyway.

  The store was full of boxes but empty of people. It felt like it spent most of its time that way. It was cold and dusty. The clerk behind the counter was a gray guy of about fifty. Gray hair, gray shirt, gray skin. He looked like he hadn’t been outside in a decade. He had nothing I wanted to buy as an ice-breaker. So I just went right ahead and asked him my question.

  “See that Saab out there?” I said.

  He made a big show of lining up his view out front.

  “I see it,” he said.

  “You see what happened to the driver?”

  “No,” he said.

  People who say no right away are usually lying. A truthful person is perfectly capable of saying no, but generally they stop and think about it first. And they add sorry or something like that. Maybe they come out with some questions of their own. It’s human nature. They say Sorry, no, why, what happened? I put my hand in my pocket and peeled off a bill from Beck’s wad purely by feel. Took it out. It was a hundred. I folded it in half and held it up between my finger and my thumb.

  “Now did you see?” I said.

  He glanced to his left. My right. Toward the business park beyond his walls. Just a fast glance, furtive, out and back.

  “No,” he said again.

  “Black Town Car?” I said. “Drove off that way?”

  “I didn’t see,” he said. “I was busy.”

  I nodded. “You’re practically rushed off your feet in here. I can see that. It’s a miracle one man can handle the pressure.”

  “I was in the back. On the phone, I guess.”

  I kept the hundred up there in my hand for another long moment. I guessed a hundred tax-free dollars would represent a healthy slice of his week’s net take. But he looked away from it. That told me plenty, too.

  “OK,” I said. I put the money back in my pocket and walked out.

  I drove the Saab two hundred yards south on Route One and stopped at the first gas station I saw. Went in and bought a bottle of spring water and two candy bars. I paid four times more for the water than I would have for gasoline, if you calculated it by the gallon. Then I came out an
d sheltered near the door and peeled a candy bar and started eating it. Used the time to look around. No surveillance. So I stepped over to the pay phones and used my change to call Duffy. I had memorized her motel number. I crouched under the plastic bubble and tried to stay dry. She answered on the second ring.

  “Drive north to Saco,” I said. “Right now. Meet me in the big brick mall on the river island in a coffee shop called Café Café. Last one there buys.”

  I finished my candy bar as I drove south. The Saab rode hard and it was noisy compared to Beck’s Cadillac or Harley’s Lincoln. It was old and worn. The carpets were thin and loose. It had six figures on the clock. But it got the job done. It had decent tires and the wipers worked. It made it through the rain OK. And it had nice big mirrors. I watched them all the way. Nobody came after me. I got to the coffee shop first. Ordered a tall espresso to wash the taste of chocolate out of my mouth.

  Duffy showed up six minutes later. She paused in the doorway and looked around and then headed over toward me and smiled. She was in fresh jeans and another cotton shirt, but it was blue, not white. Over that was her leather jacket and over that was a battered old raincoat that was way too big for her. Maybe it was the old guy’s. Maybe she had borrowed it from him. It wasn’t Eliot’s. That was clear. He was smaller than she was. She must have come north not expecting bad weather.

  “Is this place safe?” she said.

  I didn’t answer.

  “What?” she said.

  “You’re buying,” I said. “You got here second. I’ll have another espresso. And you owe me for the first one.”

  She looked at me blankly and then went to the counter and came back with an espresso for me and a cappuccino for herself. Her hair was a little wet. She had combed it with her fingers. She must have parked her car on the street and walked in through the rain and checked her reflection in a store window. She counted her change in silence and dealt me bills and coins equal to the price of my first cup. Coffee was another thing way more expensive than gasoline, up here in Maine. But I guessed it was the same everywhere.