by Lee Child
Jodie drove right past the building, not fast, not slow, just plausible city-street speed over the potholed road. Reacher craned his head around, getting a feel for the place. Jodie made a left and came back around the block. Reacher glimpsed a service alley running behind the row, with rusted fire escapes hanging above piles of garbage.
“So how do we do this?” Jodie asked him.
“We walk right in,” he said. “First thing we do is we watch his reaction. If he knows who we are, we’ll play it one way. If he doesn’t, we’ll play it another.”
She parked two spaces south of the storefront, in the shadow of a blackened brick warehouse. She locked the car and they walked north together. From the sidewalk they could make out what was behind the dirty window. There was a lame display of Army-surplus equipment, dusty old camouflage jackets and water canteens and boots. There were field radios and MRE rations and infantry helmets. Some of the stuff was already obsolete before Reacher graduated from West Point.
The door was stiff and it worked a bell when it opened. It was a crude mechanical system whereby the moving door flicked a spring that flicked the bell and made the sound. The store was deserted. There was a counter on the right with a door behind it to the garage. There was a display of clothing on a circular chrome rack and more random junk piled high on a single shelf. There was a rear door out to the alley, locked shut and alarmed. In a line next to the rear door were five padded vinyl chairs. Scattered all around the chairs were cigarette butts and empty beer bottles. The lighting was dim, but the dust of years was visible everywhere.
Reacher walked ahead of Jodie. The floor creaked under him. Two paces inside, he could see a trapdoor open beyond the counter. It was a sturdy door, made from old pine boards, hinged with brass and rubbed to a greasy shine where generations of hands had folded it back. Floor joists were visible inside the hole, and a narrow staircase built from the same old wood was leading down toward hot electric light. He could hear feet scraping on a cement cellar floor below him.
“I’ll be right there, whoever the hell you are,” a voice called up from the hole.
It was a man’s voice, middle-aged, suspended somewhere between surprise and bad temper. The voice of a man not expecting callers. Jodie looked at Reacher and Reacher closed his hand around the butt of the Steyr in his pocket.
A man’s head appeared at floor level, then his shoulders, then his torso, as he came on up the ladder. He was a bulky figure and had difficulty climbing out of the hole. He was dressed in faded olive fatigues. He had greasy gray hair, a ragged gray beard, a fleshy face, small eyes. He came out on hands and knees and stood up.
“Help you?” he said.
Then another head and shoulders appeared behind him. And another. And another. And another. Four men stamped up the ladder from the cellar. Each one straightened and paused and looked hard at Reacher and Jodie and then stepped away to the line of chairs. They were big men, fleshy, tattooed, dressed in similar old fatigues. They sat with big arms crossed against big stomachs.
“Help you?” the first guy said again.
“Are you Rutter?” Reacher asked.
The guy nodded. There was no recognition in his eyes. Reacher glanced at the line of men on their chairs. They represented a complication he had not anticipated.
“What do you want?” Rutter asked.
Reacher changed his plan. Took a guess about the true nature of the store’s transactions and what was stacked up down in the cellar.
“I want a silencer,” he said. “For a Steyr GB.”
Rutter smiled, real amusement in the set of his jaw and the light in his eyes.
“Against the law for me to sell you one, against the law for you to own one.”
The singsong way he said it was an outright confession that he had them and sold them. There was a patronizing undercurrent in the tone that said I’ve got something you want, and that makes me better than you. There was no caution in his voice. No suspicion that Reacher was a cop trying to set him up. Nobody ever thought Reacher was a cop. He was too big and too rough. He didn’t have the precinct pallor or the urban furtiveness people subconsciously associate with cops. Rutter was not worried about him. He was worried about Jodie. He didn’t know what she was. He had spoken to Reacher but looked at her. She was looking back at him, steadily.
“Against whose law?” she asked dismissively.
Rutter scratched at his beard. “Makes them expensive.”
“Compared to what?” she asked.
Reacher smiled to himself. Rutter wasn’t sure about her, and with two answers, just six words, she had him adrift, thinking she could be anything from a Manhattan socialite worried about a kidnap threat against her kids, to a billionaire’s wife intending to inherit early, to a Rotary wife aiming to survive a messy love triangle. She was looking at him like she was a woman used to getting her own way without opposition from anybody. Certainly not from the law, and certainly not from some squalid little Bronx trader.
“Steyr GB?” Rutter asked. “You want the proper Austrian piece?”
Reacher nodded, like he was the guy who dealt with the trivial details. Rutter clicked his fingers and one of the heavy men peeled off from the line of chairs and dropped down the hole. He came back up a long moment later with a black cylinder wrapped in paper that gun oil had turned transparent.
“Two thousand bucks,” Rutter said.
Reacher nodded. The price was almost fair. The pistol was no longer manufactured, but he figured it probably last retailed around eight or nine hundred bucks. Final factory price for the suppressor was probably more than two hundred. Two grand for illegal supply ten years later and four thousand miles from the factory gate was almost reasonable.
“Let me see it,” he said.
Rutter wiped the tube on his pants. Handed it over. Reacher came out with the gun and clicked the tube in place. Not like in the movies. You don’t hold it up to your eyes and screw it on, slowly and thoughtfully and lovingly. You use light, fast pressure and a half-turn and it clicks on like a lens fits a camera.
It improved the weapon. Improved its balance. Ninety-nine times in a hundred, a handgun gets fired high because the recoil flips the muzzle upward. The weight of the silencer was going to counteract that likelihood. And a silencer works by dispersing the blast of gas relatively slowly, which weakens the recoil in the first place.
“Does it work real good?” Reacher asked.
“Sure it does,” Rutter said. “It’s the genuine factory piece.”
The guy who had brought it upstairs was back on his chair. Four guys, five chairs. The way to take out a gang is to hit the leader first. It’s a universal truth. Reacher had learned it at the age of four. Figure out who the leader is, and put him down first, and put him down hard. This situation was going to be different. Rutter was the leader, but he had to stay in one piece for the time being, because Reacher had other plans for him.
“Two thousand bucks,” Rutter said again.
“Field test,” Reacher said.
There is no safety catch on a Steyr GB. The first pull needs a pressure of fourteen pounds on the trigger, which is judged to be enough to avoid an accidental discharge if the gun is dropped, because fourteen pounds is a very deliberate pull. So there is no separate safety mechanism. Reacher flicked his hand left and pulled the fourteen pounds. The gun fired and the empty chair blew apart. The sound was loud. Not like in the movies. It’s not a little cough. Not a polite little spit. It’s like taking the Manhattan phone book and raising it way over your head and smashing it facedown on a desk with all your strength. Not a quiet sound. But quieter than it could be.
The four guys were frozen with shock. Shredded vinyl and dirty horsehair stuffing were floating in the air. Rutter was staring, motionless. Reacher hit him hard, left-handed in the stomach, and kicked his feet away and dumped him on the floor. Then he lined up the Steyr on the guy next to the shattered chair.
“Downstairs,” he said. “All of you. Rig
ht now, OK?”
Nobody moved. So Reacher counted out loud one, two, and on three he fired again. The same loud blast. The floorboards splintered at the first guy’s feet. One, two, and Reacher fired again. And again, one, two, and fire. Dust and wood splinters were bursting upward. The noise of the repeated shots was crushing. There was the strong stink of burned powder and hot steel wool inside the suppressor. The men moved all at once after the third bullet. They fought and crowded to the hatch. Crashed and tumbled through. Reacher dropped the door closed on them and dragged the counter over the top of it. Rutter was up on his hands and knees. Reacher kicked him over on his back and kept on kicking him until he had scrambled all the way backward and his head was jammed up hard against the displaced counter.
Jodie had the faked photograph in her hand. She crouched and held it out to him. He blinked and focused on it. His mouth was working, just a ragged hole in his beard. Reacher ducked down and caught his left wrist. Dragged his hand up and took hold of the little finger.
“Questions,” he said. “And I’ll break a finger every time you lie to me.”
Rutter started struggling, using all his strength to twist up and away. Reacher hit him again, a solid blow to the gut, and he went back down.
“You know who we are?”
“No,” Rutter gasped.
“Where was this picture taken?”
“Secret camps,” Rutter gasped. “Vietnam.”
Reacher broke his little finger. He just wrenched it sideways and snapped the knuckle. Sideways is easier than bending it all the way back. Rutter shrieked in pain. Reacher took hold of the next finger. There was a gold ring on it.
“Where?”
“Bronx Zoo,” Rutter gasped.
“Who’s the boy?”
“Just some kid.”
“Who’s the man?”
“Friend,” Rutter gasped.
“How many times have you done it?”
“Fifteen, maybe,” Rutter said.
Reacher bent the ring finger sideways.
“That’s the truth,” Rutter screamed. “No more than fifteen, I promise. And I never did anything to you. I don’t even know you.”
“You know the Hobies?” Reacher asked. “Up in Brighton?”
He saw Rutter searching through a mental list, dazed. Then he saw him remember. Then he saw him struggling to comprehend how those pathetic old suckers could possibly have brought all this down on his head.
“You’re a disgusting piece of shit, right?”
Rutter was rolling his head from side to side in panic.
“Say it, Rutter,” Reacher yelled.
“I’m a piece of shit,” Rutter whimpered.
“Where’s your bank?”
“My bank?” Rutter repeated blankly.
“Your bank,” Reacher said.
Rutter hesitated. Reacher put some weight back on the ring finger.
“Ten blocks,” Rutter shrieked.
“Title deed for your truck?”
“In the drawer.”
Reacher nodded to Jodie. She stood up and went around behind the counter. Rattled open the drawers and came out with a sheaf of paperwork. She flicked through and nodded. “Registered in his name. Cost forty thousand bucks.”
Reacher switched his grip and caught Rutter by the neck. Bunched his shoulder and pushed hard until the web of his hand was forcing up under Rutter’s jaw.
“I’ll buy your truck for a dollar,” he said. “Just shake your head if you’ve got a problem with that, OK?”
Rutter was totally still. His eyes were popping under the force of Reacher’s grip on his throat.
“And then I’ll drive you to your bank,” he said. “In my new truck. You’ll take out eighteen thousand dollars in cash and I’ll give it back to the Hobies.”
“No,” Jodie called. “Nineteen-six-fifty. It was in a safe mutual. Call it six percent, for a year and a half compounded.”
“OK,” Reacher said. He increased the pressure. “Nineteen-six-fifty for the Hobies, and nineteen-six-fifty for us.”
Rutter’s eyes were searching Reacher’s face. Pleading. Not understanding.
“You cheated them,” Reacher said. “You told them you’d find out what happened to their boy. You didn’t do that. So now we’ll have to do it for them. So we need expense money.”
Rutter was turning blue in the face. His hands were clamped hard on Reacher’s wrist, desperately trying to ease the pressure.
“OK,” Reacher asked. “So that’s what we’re going to do. Just shake your head if you’ve got any kind of a problem with any part of it.”
Rutter was dragging hard on Reacher’s wrist, but his head stayed still.
“Think of it like a tax,” Reacher said. “A tax on cheating little pieces of shit.”
He jerked his hand away and stood up. Fifteen minutes later, he was in Rutter’s bank. Rutter was nursing his left hand in his pocket and signing a check with his right. Five minutes after that, Reacher had $39,300 cash zipped into the sports bag. Fifteen minutes after that, he left Rutter in the alley behind his store, with two dollar bills stuffed in his mouth, one for the silencer, and one for the truck. Five minutes after that, he was following Jodie’s Taurus up to the Hertz return at LaGuardia. Fifteen minutes after that, they were in the new Lincoln together, heading back to Manhattan.
11
EVENING FALLS IN Hanoi a full twelve hours earlier than in New York, so the sun which was still high as Reacher and Jodie left the Bronx had already slipped behind the highlands of northern Laos, two hundred miles away to the west of Noi Bai Airport. The sky was glowing orange and the long shadows of late afternoon were replaced by the sudden dull gloom of tropical dusk. The smells of the city and the jungle were masked under the reek of kerosene, and the noises of car horns and nighttime insects were blown away by the steady whine of jet engines idling.
A giant U.S. Air Force C-141 Starlifter transport was standing on the apron, a mile from the crowded passenger terminals, next to an unmarked hangar. The plane’s rear ramp was down, and its engines were running fast enough to power the interior lighting. Inside the unmarked hangar, too, lights were on. There were a hundred arc lights, slung high up under the corrugated metal roof, washing the cavernous space with their bright yellow glow.
The hangar was as large as a stadium, but it held nothing except seven caskets. Each one of them was six and a half feet long, made from ribbed aluminum polished to a high shine and shaped roughly like a coffin, which is exactly what each one of them was. They were standing in a neat row, on trestles, each one draped with an American flag. The flags were newly laundered and crisply pressed, and the center stripe of each flag was precisely aligned with the center rib of each casket.
There were nine men and two women in the hangar, standing next to the seven aluminum caskets. Six of the men were there as the honor guard. They were regular soldiers of the United States Army, newly showered, newly shaved, dressed in immaculate ceremonial uniforms, holding themselves at rigid attention, away from the other five people. Three of those were Vietnamese, two men and a woman, short, dark, impassive. They were dressed in uniform, too, but theirs were everyday uniforms, not ceremonial. Dark olive cloth, worn and creased, badged here and there with the unfamiliar insignia of their rank.
The last two people were Americans, dressed in civilian clothes, but the sort of civilian clothes that indicate military status as clearly as any uniform. The woman was young, with a mid-length canvas skirt and a long-sleeved khaki blouse, with heavy brown shoes on her feet. The man was tall, silver-haired, maybe fifty-five years old, dressed in tropical khakis under a lightweight belted raincoat. He was carrying a battered brown leather briefcase in his hand, and there was a garment bag of similar vintage on the ground at his feet.
The tall silver-haired man nodded to the honor guard, a tiny signal, almost imperceptible. The senior soldier spoke a muted command and the six men formed up in two lines of three. They slow-marched forward, and right-t
urned, and slow-marched again until they were lined up precisely, three each side of the first casket. They paused a beat and stooped and lifted the casket to their shoulders in a single fluid movement. The senior man spoke again, and they slow-marched forward toward the hangar door, the casket supported exactly level on their linked arms, the only sounds the crunch of their boots on the concrete and the whine of the waiting engines.
On the apron, they turned right and wheeled a wide, slow semicircle through the hot jet wash until they were lined up with the Starlifter’s ramp. They slow-marched forward, up the exact center of the ramp, feeling carefully with their feet for the metal ribs bolted there to help them, and on into the belly of the plane. The pilot was waiting for them. She was a U.S. Air Force captain, trim in a tropical-issue flight suit. Her crew was standing at attention with her, a copilot, a flight engineer, a navigator, a radio operator. Opposite them were the loadmaster and his crew, silent in green fatigues. They stood face-to-face in two still lines, and the honor guard filed slowly between them, all the way up to the forward loading bay. There they bent their knees and gently lowered the casket onto a shelf built along the fuselage wall. Four of the men stood back, heads bowed. The forward man and the rear man worked together to slide the casket into place. The loadmaster stepped forward and secured it with rubber straps. Then he stepped back and joined the honor guard and held a long silent salute.
It took an hour to load all seven caskets. The people inside the hangar stood silent throughout, and then they followed the seventh casket onto the apron. They matched their walk to the honor guard’s slow pace, and waited at the bottom of the Starlifter’s ramp in the hot, noisy damp of the evening. The honor guard came out, duty done. The tall silver-haired American saluted them and shook hands with the three Vietnamese officers and nodded to the American woman. No words were exchanged. He shouldered his garment bag and ran lightly up the ramp into the plane. A slow, powerful motor whirred and the ramp closed shut behind him. The engines ran up to speed and the giant plane came off its brakes and started to taxi. It wheeled a wide cumbersome left and disappeared behind the hangar. Its noise grew faint. Then it grew loud again in the distance and the watchers saw it come back along the runway, engines screaming, accelerating hard, lifting off. It yawed right, climbing fast, turning, dipping a wing, and then it was gone, just a triangle of winking lights tiny in the distance and a vague smudge of black kerosene smoke tracing its curved path into the night air.
