by Lee Child
He came out into the eighty-eighth-floor corridor. It was equally quiet. Identical narrow width, identical lighting, same layout, same doors. He ran the wrong way and came around to CCT last. It had a light oak door, with a brass plate next to it, and a brass push button for the buzzer. He pulled the door, gently. It was locked tight. He stooped and looked in through the wired-glass porthole. He saw a reception area. Bright lights. Brass-and-oak decor. A counter to his right. Another door, straight ahead. That door was shut, and the reception area was deserted. He stood and stared through at the closed inner door and felt panic rising in his throat.
She was in there. She was in the inner office. He could feel it. She was in there, alone, a prisoner, and she needed him. She was in there and he should be in there with her. He should have gone with her. He stooped down and put his forehead against the cold glass and stared through at the office door. Then he heard Leon in his head, starting up with another of his golden rules. Don’t worry about why it went wrong. Just damn well put it right.
He stepped back and glanced left and right along the corridor. Put himself underneath the light nearest the door. Reached up and unscrewed the bulb until it went out. The hot glass burned his fingers. He winced and stepped back to the door and checked again, a yard from the porthole, well out in the corridor. The reception area was brightly lit and the corridor was now dark. He could see in, but nobody would see out. You can see from a dark place into a light place, but you can’t see from a light place into a dark place. A crucial difference. He stood and waited.
The inner door opened and a thickset guy stepped out of the office into reception. Closed the door gently behind him. A thickset guy in a dark suit. The guy he’d pushed down the stairs in the Key West bar. The guy who had fired the Beretta up in Garrison. The guy who had clung to the Bravada’s door handle. He walked through reception and disappeared from view. Reacher stepped forward again and studied the inner door through the glass. It stayed closed. He knocked gently on the outer door. The guy came to the porthole and peered through. Reacher stood up straight and turned his shoulder so his brown jacket filled the view.
“UPS,” he said softly.
It was an office building and it was dark and it was a brown jacket, and the guy opened the door. Reacher stepped around the arc of its swing and shot his hand in and caught the guy by the throat. Do it fast enough and hard enough and you numb the guy’s voice box before he can get going with any sounds. Then you dig your fingers in and keep him from falling over. The guy went heavy against his grip and Reacher ran him all the way along the corridor to the fire door and threw him backward into the stairwell. The guy bounced off the far wall and went down on the concrete, with a cracked rasping sound coming from his throat.
“Time to choose,” Reacher whispered. “You help me, or you die.”
A choice like that, there’s only one sensible thing to do, but the guy didn’t do it. He struggled up to his knees and made like he was going to fight it out. Reacher tapped him on the top of the head, just enough to send some shock down through his neck bones, and then stepped back and asked him again.
“Help me out,” he said. “Or I’ll kill you.”
The guy shook his head to clear it and launched himself across the floor. Reacher heard Leon say ask once, ask twice if you must, but for God’s sake don’t ask three times. He kicked the guy in the chest and spun him around backward and wedged his forearm across the top of his shoulders and put a hand under his chin and wrenched once and broke his neck.
One down, but he was down without releasing any information, and in combat information is king. His gut still told him this was a small operation, but two guys or three or five could equally be called small, and there was a hell of a big difference between going in blind against two or three or five opponents. He paused in the stairwell and glanced at the fire ax in the red cabinet. Next best thing to solid information is some kind of an arresting diversion. Something to make them worried and unsettled. Something to make them pause.
He did it as quietly as he could and checked the corridor was truly empty before dragging the body back. He swung the door open soundlessly and got the guy arranged in the middle of the lobby floor. Then he closed the door again and dodged down behind the reception counter. It was chest-high, and more than ten feet long. He lay on the floor behind it and eased the silenced Steyr out of his jacket and settled down to wait.
It felt like a long wait. He was pressed to the thin office carpet, and he could feel the unyielding concrete under it, alive with the tiny vibrations of a giant building at work. He could feel the faint bass shudder of the elevators stopping and starting. He could feel the tingle of the tension in their cables. He could feel the hum of air-conditioning and the tremor of the wind. He hooked his toes back against the resistance of the nylon pile and bunched his legs against them, ready for action.
He felt the fall of footsteps a second before he heard the click of the latch. He knew the inner door had opened because he heard the change in the acoustic. The reception area was suddenly open to a larger space. He heard four feet on the carpet and he heard them stop, like he knew they would. He waited. Present somebody with an astonishing sight, and it takes about three seconds for the maximum effect to develop. That was Reacher’s experience. They look at it, they see it, their brain rejects it, their eyes bounce it back again, and it sinks in. Three whole seconds, beginning to end. He counted silently one, two, three, and pushed out at the base of the counter, pressed to the floor, leading with the long black silencer on the end of the Steyr. He got his arms out, then his shoulders, then his eyes.
What he saw was a disaster. The guy with the hook and the burned face was dropping a weapon and gasping and clutching at the doorframe, but he was on the wrong side of Jodie. The far side. He was on Jodie’s right and the reception counter was on her left. She was a foot nearer than he was. She was much shorter, but Reacher was down on the floor looking up at an angle that put her head directly in front of his head, her body directly in front of his body. There was no clear shot. No clear shot anywhere. Jodie was in the way.
The guy with the hook and the face was making sounds in his throat and Jodie was staring down at the floor. Then there was a second guy behind them in the open doorway. The Suburban driver. He stopped behind Jodie’s shoulder and stared. He was carrying a Beretta in his right hand. He stared forward and down at the floor and then he stepped alongside Jodie and pushed his way past her. He stepped a yard into the room. He stepped into clear air.
Reacher squeezed the trigger, fourteen whole pounds of pressure, and the silencer banged loud and the guy’s face blew apart. It took the nine-millimeter bullet in the exact center and exploded. Blood and bone hit the ceiling and sprayed the far wall behind him.
Jodie froze in direct line with the guy with the hook. And the guy with the hook was very fast. Faster than he should have been for a crippled fifty-year-old. He went one way with his left arm and scooped the shotgun off the floor. He went the other way with his right arm and folded it around Jodie’s waist. The steel hook was bright against her suit. He was moving her before the other guy had even hit the floor. He clamped his right arm hard around her and lifted her off her feet and dragged her backward. The crash of the shot from the Steyr was still rumbling.
“How many?” Reacher screamed.
She was as fast as Leon ever was.
“Two down, one up,” she screamed back.
So the guy with the hook was the only one, but he was already swinging the shotgun around. It arced up through the air and he used the momentum to crunch the pump. Reacher was caught half-exposed, low down, scrambling out from behind the counter. It was only a tiny fractional opportunity, but the guy went right ahead and took it. He fired low and the gun flashed and boomed and the reception counter splintered into ten thousand pieces. Reacher ducked his head but sharp needles of wood and metal and hot stray pellets smashed him in the side of the face like a blow from a sledgehammer, all the way from
his cheek to his forehead. He felt the dull crump and the sharp agonizing sting of serious injury. It was like falling from a window and hitting the ground headfirst. He rolled up dazed and the guy was hauling Jodie backward through the doorway, crunching the pump once more against the shotgun’s weight as it moved. Reacher was dull and motionless against the back wall and the muzzle was coming up on him. His forehead was numb and icy. There was terrible pain there.
He raised the Steyr. The silencer pointed straight at Jodie. He jerked it a fraction left and right. It still pointed at Jodie. The guy was making himself small behind her. He was craning around with his left hand, leveling the shotgun. His finger was tightening on the trigger. Reacher was immobile against the wall. He stared at Jodie, fixing her face in his mind before he died. Then a fair-haired woman was suddenly behind her, shouldering desperately into the guy’s back, pushing him off-balance. He staggered and whirled and clubbed at her with the shotgun barrel. Reacher caught a glimpse of a pink dress as she went down.
Then the shotgun was swinging back toward him. But Jodie was bouncing and wrestling against the guy’s arm. She was stamping and kicking. The guy was staggering around against her energy. He blundered with her all the way back out into the reception area and tripped against the Suburban driver’s legs. He fell with Jodie and the shotgun fired against the corpse. There was deafening sound and smoke and the obscene bloom and spray of dead blood and tissue. The guy came up on his knees and Reacher tracked him all the way with the Steyr. The guy dropped the shotgun and went for his pocket and came back with a shiny short-barrel revolver. He thumbed the hammer. The click was loud. Jodie was heaving left and right against his arm tight around her waist. Left and right, left and right, furiously, randomly. Reacher had no clear shot. Blood was pouring into his left eye. His forehead was pounding and bleeding. He closed the useless eye against the wetness and squinted with the right. The shiny revolver came all the way up and jammed hard into Jodie’s side. She gasped and stopped moving and the guy’s face came out from behind her head, smiling savagely.
“Drop the gun, asshole,” he panted.
Reacher kept the Steyr exactly where it was. One eye open, one eye closed, jagged bolts of pain hammering in his head, the length of the silencer trained on the guy’s distorted grin.
“I’ll shoot her,” the guy snarled.
“Then I’ll shoot you,” Reacher said. “She dies, you die.”
The guy stared. Then he nodded.
“Impasse,” he said.
Reacher nodded back. It looked that way. He shook his head to clear it. It just made the pain worse. Stalemate. Even if he could fire first, the guy might still get a shot off. With his finger tense on the trigger like that and the gun hard in her side, the pulse of death would probably be enough to do it. It was too much to risk. He kept the Steyr where it was and stood up slowly and pulled his shirttail out and wiped his face with it, all the time squinting one-eyed down the barrel. The guy took a breath and stood up, too, hauling Jodie with him. She tried to ease away from the pressure of the gun, but he kept her pulled in tight with his right arm. He turned his elbow outward and the hook pivoted and the point dug in against her waist.
“So we need to deal,” he said.
Reacher stood and mopped his eye and said nothing. His head was buzzing with pain. Buzzing and screaming. He was beginning to understand and he was in serious trouble.
“We need to deal,” the guy said again.
“No deal,” Reacher replied.
The guy twisted the hook a little more and jammed the revolver in a little harder. Jodie gasped. It was a Smith and Wesson Model 60. Two-inch barrel, stainless steel, .38 caliber, five shots in the cylinder. The sort of thing a woman carries in her purse or a man conceals on his body. The barrel was so short and the guy was digging it in so hard his knuckles were hard up against Jodie’s side. She was hanging forward against the pressure of his arm. Her hair was falling over her face. Her eyes were looking up straight at Reacher, and they were the loveliest eyes he had ever seen.
“Nobody says no deal to Victor Hobie,” the guy snarled.
Reacher fought the pain and kept the Steyr steady and level on the guy’s forehead, right where the pink scars met the gray skin.
“You’re not Victor Hobie,” he said. “You’re Carl Allen, and you’re a piece of shit.”
There was silence. Pain was hammering in his head. Jodie was staring harder at him, questions in her eyes.
“You’re not Victor Hobie,” he said again. “You’re Carl Allen.”
The name hung in the air and the guy seemed to recoil away from it. He dragged Jodie backward, stepping over the corpse of the thickset guy, turning her to keep her body between himself and Reacher, walking slowly backward into the dark office. Reacher followed unsteadily with the Steyr held high and level. There were people in the office. Reacher saw dimmed windows and living-room furniture and three people milling around, the fair-haired woman in the silk dress and two men in suits. They were all staring at him. Staring at his gun, and the silencer, and his forehead, and the blood pouring down onto his shirt. Then they were regrouping themselves like automatons and moving toward a tight square group of sofas. They threaded their separate ways inside and sat down and placed their hands on the glass coffee table which was filling the space. Six hands on the table, three faces turned toward him, expressions of hope and fear and astonishment visible on each of them.
“You’re wrong,” the guy with the hook said.
He backed away with Jodie in a wide circle until he was behind the farthest sofa. Reacher moved with them all the way and stopped opposite. His Steyr was leveled right over the heads of the three cowering people leaning on the coffee table. His blood was dripping off his chin onto the back of the sofa below him.
“No, I’m right,” he said. “You’re Carl Allen. Born April eighteenth, 1949, south of Boston, some leafy suburb. Normal little family, going nowhere. You got drafted in the summer of 1968. Private soldier, capabilities rated below average in every category. Sent to Vietnam as an infantryman. A grunt, a humble foot soldier. War changes people, and when you got there you turned into a real bad guy. You started scamming. Buying and selling, trading drugs and girls and whatever else you could get your filthy hands on. Then you started lending money. You turned really vicious. You bought and sold favors. You lived like a king for a long time. Then somebody got wise. Pulled you out of your cozy little situation and put you in-country. The jungle. The real war. A tough unit, with a tough officer riding you. It pissed you off. First chance you got, you fragged the officer. And then his sergeant. But the unit turned you in. Very unusual. They didn’t like you, did they? Probably owed you money. They called it in and two cops called Gunston and Zabrinski came out to pick you up. You want to deny anything yet?”
The guy said nothing. Reacher swallowed. His head was hurting badly. There was real pain digging in deep behind the cuts. Real serious pain.
“They came in a Huey,” he said. “A decent young kid called Kaplan was flying it. Next day he came back, flying copilot for an ace named Victor Hobie. Gunston and Zabrinski had you ready and waiting on the ground. But Hobie’s Huey was hit on takeoff. It went down again, four miles away. He was killed, along with Kaplan and Gunston and Zabrinski and three other crew called Bamford and Tardelli and Soper. But you survived. You were burned and you lost your hand, but you were alive. And your evil little brain was still ticking over. You swapped dog tags with the first guy you got to. Happened to be Victor Hobie. You crawled away with his tags around your neck. Left yours on his body. Right then and there Carl Allen and his criminal past ceased to exist. You made it to a field hospital, and they thought they were treating Hobie. They wrote his name down in their records. Then you killed an orderly and got away. You said I’m not going back, because you knew as soon as you arrived anywhere somebody would realize you weren’t Hobie. They’d find out who you were, and you’d be back in the shit. So you just disappeared. A new life, a new nam
e. A clean slate. You want to deny anything yet?”
Allen tightened his grip on Jodie.
“It’s all bullshit,” he said.
Reacher shook his head. Pain flashed in his eye like a camera.
“No, it’s all true,” he said. “Nash Newman just identified Victor Hobie’s skeleton. It’s lying in a casket in Hawaii with your dog tags around its neck.”
“Bullshit,” Allen said again.
“It was the teeth,” Reacher said. “Mr. and Mrs. Hobie sent their boy to the dentist thirty-five times, to give him perfect teeth. Newman says they’re definitive. He spent an hour with the X rays, programming the computer. Then he recognized the exact same skull when he walked back past the casket. Definitive match.”
Allen said nothing.
“It worked for thirty years,” Reacher said. “Until those two old people finally made enough noise and somebody poked around. And now it’s not going to work any longer, because you’ve got me to answer to.”
Allen sneered. It made the unmarked side of his face as ugly as the burns.
“Why the hell should I answer to you?”
Reacher blinked the blood out of his eye over the unwavering Steyr.
“A lot of reasons,” he said quietly. “I’m a representative. I’m here to represent a lot of people. Like Victor Truman Hobie. He was a hero, but because of you he was written off as a deserter and a murderer. His folks have been in agony, thirty long years. I represent them. And I represent Gunston and Zabrinski, too. They were both MP lieutenants, both twenty-four years old. I was an MP lieutenant when I was twenty-four. They were killed because of what you did wrong. That’s why you’re going to answer to me, Allen. Because I’m them. Scum like you gets people like me killed.”
