FaceOff

by Lee Child

  “Come out now, or I kill him,” the leader shouted.

  From the edge of the deadfall, another pair of gunmen appeared.

  Only then did Pierce realize his mistake.

  Your man.

  Prodded at gunpoint, a second prisoner was thrust into view, gagged, his face bloody.

  Malone.

  MALONE KEPT HIS FINGERS FOLDED atop his head. He’d been ambushed shortly after parting company with Pierce. A shadow had loomed behind him clamping a hand over his mouth, an arm around his throat. Then a second figure slammed the butt of a rifle into his gut, dropping him to the ground. Dazed, he’d been gagged with one of their face scarves and thrust forward at gunpoint. He now stared out at the dark forest, willing Pierce not to show himself.

  Unfortunately his silent plea was not answered.

  Twenty yards away Pierce appeared, rifle high over his head, surrendering.

  One of his captors shoved Malone forward.

  Pierce caught his gaze as he staggered near and mouthed, “Be ready to run.”

  PIERCE STEPPED PAST MALONE AND shouted, “I surrender,” which gained the guerrilla leader’s full attention.

  He tossed the assault rifle away. As expected, all eyes followed the weapon’s trajectory across the deadfall. He quickly dropped an arm to his waist, yanked out his Sig Sauer, and shot from the hip, taking out the two closest gunmen.

  Now for the real prize.

  He aimed at the leader and fired.

  Instead of a clean kill, though, the round found the man’s outstretched hand, smacking into the steel case, then penetrating the chest. A yellowish mist burst instantly outward, swamping those nearby. He remembered Malone’s relating the botanist’s warning. If even a single vial breaks, it’ll kill anything within a hundred yards.

  The danger spread.

  Screaming began.

  He backpedaled as the breeze caught the cloud and blew it toward him. Malone, still gagged, didn’t have to be told twice and bolted for the trailhead. Pierce turned to follow—only to see a figure emerge from the toxic cloud.

  Trask.

  His face appeared parboiled, eyes weeping and blind. Another few steps and a convulsion jackknifed through every muscle, throwing the body off balance and to the ground.

  Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

  Pierce turned and sprinted after Malone. The windblown danger rolled after him. He glanced back at the spreading devastation. Monkeys fell from tree limbs. Birds took flight only to cartwheel to the ground. Anything that crawled, slithered, or flew seemed to instantly succumb. He caught up with Malone and together they fled down the last of the trail and burst into the village clearing.

  Which unfortunately wasn’t empty.

  The locals were still there, having not yet evacuated. Children darted behind mothers’ legs, frightened by their sudden reappearance, thinking perhaps the guerrillas had returned. Matters weren’t helped by the fact that Malone was bloody and gagged. Pierce drew to a halt and swung around to face the trail. Above the canopy, a flurry of bats spun and darted, beginning their nightly forage for insects. Then they began to drop from the sky—at first farther out, then closer in.

  Death swept toward them, carried by the wind.

  He turned to the villagers and saw frightened faces. None of them, himself included, would ever be able to run fast enough to escape the cloud.

  His errant shot had doomed them all.

  MALONE SEARCHED FOR THEIR ONLY hope, again skidding to his knees and snatching up the RPG launcher.

  A quick check confirmed the weapon was loaded.

  Thank God.

  “What are you doing?” Pierce yelled.

  No time to explain.

  He hoisted the tube to his shoulder, aimed for the trailhead, and fired. The weapon jolted against his face, spitting out smoke behind him. A grenade whistled in a tight arc then blasted down the throat of the trail.

  A fiery explosion lit the night.

  Trees erupted in a smoldering rain of limbs and leaves.

  Heat washed over him. Was it enough?

  Trask’s words echoed in his head. There’s no stopping it, short of incineration.

  He tugged the gag free.

  Fire spread outward from the blast site. Flames danced high into the night. Smoke billowed upward, masking the stars, consuming all of the air around it, which hopefully included the toxin. He held his breath, not that it would save him if the cloud reached here. Then, from the edge of the forest, a dark shape burst into view, a shred of a living shadow.

  A panther.

  Yellowed claws dug deep into the dirt. Dark eyes reflected the campfire’s glow. The big cat hissed, showing fangs—then burst to the side, diving back into the dark bower.

  Alive.

  A good omen.

  He waited another minute. Then another.

  Death never came.

  Pierce joined him, patting his shoulder. “Nice tag team on that one. And damn quick thinking, old man.”

  He lowered the weapon.

  “Who you callin’ old?”

  LEE CHILD

  VS. JOSEPH FINDER

  When Joseph Finder decided to try a series character, he took many cues from Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. Joe named his hero Nick Heller and made him not a private eye, but a private spy. Nick works for politicians and governments and corporations, sometimes digging up secrets they’d rather keep buried. Like Jack Reacher, though, Nick’s sense of justice drives him. He’s a mix of blue collar and white collar, the son of a notorious Wall Street criminal, raised in immense wealth that evaporated when his father went to prison. He spent his formative years in a split-level ranch house in a working-class suburb of Boston.

  By nature, Nick’s a chameleon. He can blend in among the corporate elite as easily as he does among the jarheads.

  And, of course, he roots for the Boston Red Sox.

  Jack Reacher, on the other hand, is a Yankees fan. His background is vastly different from Nick’s, but equally scattered. Reacher is an army brat, raised on military bases around the world: a man without a country, but still an American. He’s a loner who avoids attachments, yet he’s absolutely loyal. He suffers no fools.

  Nick Heller and Jack Reacher. Chalk and cheese, as the Brits say. Couldn’t be more different, yet so much the same.

  Which can also be said for the two writers.

  Lee and Joe are good friends. They share a love of writing, baseball, and the quest for America’s best hamburger. Not a gourmet burger. Just the best plain, honest, normal burger. Lee tells the story of some years ago when they were trying a contender in a Spanish restaurant (yeah, go figure) on Twenty-second Street in New York. The talk turned to upcoming projects and Joe started riffing, thinking out loud about maybe starting a series character. He gave Lee a lengthy and penetrating analysis that covered every cost and benefit, every desirable and undesirable characteristic, every strength and weakness.

  “I wish I’d had a voice recorder running. I could have sold the transcript to Writer’s Digest. It would have become the Rosetta Stone for all such decisions,” Lee recalls.

  Eventually, Joe followed through on his analysis with the first Nick Heller story, Vanished (2009), written with his trademark blend of freewheeling imagination mixed with iron self-discipline.

  Lee is not a planner. He does not outline stories. They just emerge naturally. For Joe, that’s like walking on a wire without a net. So Lee came up with the premise of two guys in a bar in Boston. Reacher would be the out-of-towner, like always. Heller would be home, in the city he loves. Lee was taken by the notion of a mirror at the back of a bar—the way you can look at the reflection of the person next to you and talk with both intimacy and distance. Heller and Reacher would both end up talking to and about and around someone who’s in trouble. Eventually, they’d help the guy out, because that’s what they do. But that help would come in vastly different ways.

  The story was written long distance. Lee sent the first chunk
by e-mail and Joe immediately asked, “What do you see happening next?”

  In typical Lee Child fashion he answered, “No idea. Until you’ve written it.”

  Joe coped with such improvisation just fine.

  Actually, their biggest problem was who would win the Yankees-Sox game that kicks the whole thing off.

  Good and Valuable Consideration

  THE BAR WAS A HUNDRED years old, built for an ink-stained subset of the working class. Clerks, scriveners, printers, and other office-bound wretches of every kind, who had once filled the narrow streets as they quit at the ends of long days in poor conditions, seeking solace wherever they could find it. Now it was just another Boston curiosity, full of dim light and glazed oatmeal-colored tile, and brass, and mahogany, most notably on the bar itself, where a length of tight-grained wood from a massive old tree had been polished to an impossible shine by a million sleeves. The only discordant decorative note was high on the bar back itself, but it was also the only reason Reacher was there: a big flat-screen television, tuned to a live broadcast of the Yankees at Fenway Park.

  Reacher paused inside the door and tried to pick his spot. His eyesight was pretty good, so he didn’t need to be close, but in his experience flat-screens weren’t great when viewed at an angle, so he wanted to be central. Which gave him just one practical choice, a lone unoccupied stool among five in the middle section of the bar, which was more or less directly face-on to the screen. If it had been a theater seat, it would have been expensive. Front row, center. There was a dark-haired woman on its left, her back to the room, and a fat guy on its right, and then came a lean guy with short hair and muscles in his neck and his back, and on the right-hand end of the section was another woman, a blonde, with her high heels hooked over the rail of her stool. The lizard part of Reacher’s brain told him immediately the only one to either worry about or rely on was the guy with the short hair and the muscles. Not that Reacher was expecting trouble, even though he was in Boston, rooting for the Yankees.

  The bar back was mirrored behind a thicket of bottles, and Reacher saw the short-haired guy spot him, just a blink of roving vigilance, automatic, which reinforced the message his lizard brain had sent. Not a cop, he thought, but some kind of a lone-wolf tough guy, very relaxed, very sure of himself. Ex-military, possibly, from the kind of shadowy unit that taught you to glance in mirrors from time to time, or suffer the consequences.

  Then the fat guy on the right of the empty stool looked in the mirror, too, much more obviously. He was not relaxed. He was not sure of himself. He kept his eyes on Reacher’s reflected image, all the way through the trip from the door to the empty stool. Reacher slid in beside him and rocked from side to side, to claim his space, and he put his elbows on the mahogany, and the fat guy half turned, with a hesitant but expectant look, as if unsure whether to speak or wait to be spoken to. Reacher said nothing. He rarely offered greetings to strangers. He liked to keep to himself.

  Eventually the guy turned away again, but he kept his gaze on the mirror, not the screen. He had a prominent lower lip, sticking out like a pout, and then a great wattle of flesh fell away in a perfect parabola to his shirt collar, uninterrupted by any kind of bony structure. The pneumatic impression continued all the way to his dainty feet. The guy was like a balloon made of flesh-colored silk. He looked like he would be soft and dry to the touch. He had a wedding band on his left hand, deep in the fat, like a sausage with a tourniquet. He was wearing a suit made of the same material as chino pants. The waistband could have been sixty inches.

  Reacher looked up at the game. The top of the first was over, no hits, no runs, one man left on base. The commercials were starting, first up being a leasing offer on a brand of automobile Reacher had never heard of. The barman finished up elsewhere and scooted over sideways and Reacher asked for a full-fat Bud in a bottle, which he got seconds later, ice cold and foaming.

  The fat guy said, “I’m Jerry DeLong.”

  At first Reacher wasn’t sure who he had been addressing, but by a process of elimination he figured it was him. He said, “Are you?”

  The guy with the short hair and the muscles was watching the exchange in the mirror. Reacher glanced at his reflection, and then the fat guy’s, who looked straight at him via the glass. Barroom intimacy. Eye contact, but indirect.

  Reacher said, “I’m here to watch the game.”

  Which seemed to satisfy the guy. He looked away, as if an issue had been settled. His gaze returned to the mirror. The various angles of incidence and reflection were hard to calculate, but Reacher figured the guy was watching the door behind him. He was giving off a low-level buzz of anxiety. His eyes were pale and watery. But the rest of him was composed. His huge, pale face was immobile, and his body was still.

  The commercials ended, and the broadcast returned to Fenway. The little green bandbox looked luscious under the lights. The Yankees were in the field, in road gray. Their pitcher was throwing the last of his warm-ups. He didn’t look very good.

  NICK HELLER HAD ENTERED THE bar three minutes earlier, and had immediately picked up on the after-work vibe, the frenzied high spirits, the smell of sweat and cologne and beer and unwinding anxiety. It was like walking into a party at its very peak: the disorienting cacophony of chatter, the nearly deafening babble, the whooping laughter.

  It was one of Heller’s favorite hometown bars because it was the real thing. You’d never find raspberry wheat craft beer here. They had Narragansett beer on tap, a beer that Bostonians were loyal to even if it was watery swill.

  There were a couple of available seats at the bar, on either side of a great fat man. Interesting. Heller wondered whether the fat guy was saving them for friends. He couldn’t be from the neighborhood. No one who came here did things like saving seats.

  Heller sidled through the crowd toward the bar counter. One of the things he liked about this place was the mirror behind the serried ranks of bottles. A mirror like this, you could see the faces of those sitting at the bar as you approached. Or you could sit at the bar, back to the room, and see who was coming up from behind. You could talk to the guy or the woman next to you and be looking him or her in the face. In the mirror. Directly, but at the same time indirectly. Heller liked being able to relax when he went for a drink, and you never knew who might turn up.

  As he neared the bar, he noticed one face in the mirror looking at him. The fat guy. He had an odd face, a receding chin with a cowl-like wattle that tucked under his collar like an apron. He reminded Heller of a trout. He was watching Heller intently. Like he’d been waiting for him. Heller had never seen the guy before, but still the fat man studied him. As if . . . well, as if he were expecting someone but didn’t know what that person might look like.

  As if Heller might be that guy. Strange. Heller didn’t know him.

  Heller sat on the stool and nodded at the man.

  “Howyadoin?” the guy said.

  “Hey,” Heller said, neither friendly nor rude.

  A pause. “Jerry DeLong,” the man said, sticking out his hand.

  Heller didn’t feel like making friends. He didn’t want to chat. The Red Sox were playing the Yankees at Fenway Park. This was a major moment in Boston sports, a rite, like the gladiator games at the Roman Coliseum back in the day. And there was no better place to watch an important game like this than here.

  After a brief pause, Heller shook his hand. “Nick,” he said. No last name. Heller didn’t like to give out his name. He immediately turned to the huge, flat TV screen, set to the Sox. Of course it was. The owner of the bar, a buddy of Nick’s, was an ardent Sox fan. So was Sully, the bartender. Some nights, though, there was discord in the bar when the Sox were playing opposite the Bruins. Bostonians also loved their hockey. You even had nights when all four Boston teams—the Sox, the Bruins, the Celtics, and the Patriots—were playing on four different channels. You didn’t want to be in this particular bar on a night like that. It got ugly.

  “Nick,” the bartender
said, pulling him a Budweiser without asking.

  “Sully,” Heller said.

  “Big night, huh?”

  “Romp to victory.”

  “Absolutely,” said Sully, setting the glass of beer in front of him, a foamy white head like a layer of cotton batting. He wagged his head as if to say, From your mouth to God’s ear.

  Then Heller sensed in his peripheral field the fat guy staring at him again.

  In a neutral voice Heller said, “Do I know you?”

  The guy sipped a gin and tonic. “Uh, you here to meet someone?” he said.

  “I’m here to watch the Sox win,” Heller said. A degree friendlier this time, but still no-nonsense.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s cool,” Heller relented.

  In the bar-back mirror he noticed a large man approaching the empty seat on DeLong’s left. Heller knew at once this was someone to keep a wary eye on. He was huge, way taller than most—easily six-foot-five—and at least two hundred fifty pounds. Unusually broad-shouldered. A tank. He was all muscle and had that ex-military look you couldn’t miss. The thrift-shop clothes and brutalist haircut made him look a little like a drifter, or at least not someone who paid more than ten bucks at the barber shop.

  But there was also a canny intelligence in the eyes, and a wariness. He had the confident look of someone who wasn’t challenged physically very often and, when he was, usually won. He intimidated people and didn’t mind it.

  So this was who Jerry DeLong was meeting. That was a relief. Heller wasn’t going to have to fend off some blab-o-maniac during the ball game.

  Then he overheard Jerry DeLong introduce himself to the big guy and meet with the same puzzled reaction he’d got from Nick.

  Heller put his elbow on the mahogany bar next to an ugly cigarette burn from the good old days when you could smoke in bars, and took a sip of the beer. It was crisp and cold. He never understood why the Brits liked beer at room temperature.