by Lee Child
Vantresca said, “What next?”
“We need to find the Ukrainian nerve center.”
“Sure, but how?”
“I guess we need to know exactly what it does. That might tell us what to look for. To some extent form follows function. For instance, if it was a drug lab, it would need exhaust fans, and gas and water, and so on and so forth.”
“I don’t know what it does,” Vantresca said.
“Call the journalist,” Reacher said. “The woman you helped. She might know. At least she might know what they’re into. If necessary we could work it out backward, about what kind of place they would need.”
“She won’t talk to me. She was terrified.”
“Give me her number,” Reacher said. “I’ll call her.”
“Why would she talk to you?”
“I have a nicer personality. People talk to me all the time. Sometimes I can’t stop them.”
“I would have to go to my office.”
“Go to the Shevicks’ first,” Reacher said. “I have something for them. Right now they need reassurance.”
Chapter 37
Gregory pieced the story together from early word he got three separate ways, from a cop on his payroll, and a guy in the fire department who owed him money, and a secret snitch he had behind a bar on the east side. Right away he called a meeting of his inner council. They gathered together, in the office in back of the taxi dispatcher.
“Dino is dead,” Gregory said. “Jetmir is dead. Their entire inner council is dead. Their top twenty are gone, just like that. Maybe more. They are no longer an effective force. Nor will they ever be, ever again. They have no leadership prospects. Their most senior survivor is an old bruiser named Hoxha. And he was spared only because he was in the hospital. Because he can’t talk. Some leader he would make.”
Someone asked, “How did it happen?”
“The Russians, obviously,” Gregory said. “Shock and awe east of Center, clearing half the field, preempting a possible defensive alliance, before turning their full might on us alone.”
“Good strategy.”
“But badly executed,” Gregory said. “They were clumsy at the lumber yard. Every cop and every firefighter in the city is over there. The east side will be no use to anyone for months to come. Too much scrutiny. Bribes only go so far. Some things can’t be ignored. I bet the whole thing is already on the television. In the spotlight, literally. Where no one wants to be. Which makes the west side the whole enchilada now. Now they’ll want it more than ever.”
“When will they come for us?”
“I don’t know,” Gregory said. “But we’ll be ready. Starting right now, we’ll go to Situation C. Tighten the guard. Take up defensive positions. Let no one through.”
“We can’t sustain Situation C indefinitely. We need to know when they’re coming.”
Gregory nodded.
“Aaron Shevick must know,” he said. “We should ask him.”
“We can’t find him.”
“Do we still have people at the old woman’s house?”
“Yes, but Shevick never shows up there anymore. Probably the old woman tipped him off. Obviously she’s his mother or his aunt or something.”
Gregory nodded again.
“OK,” he said. “There’s your answer. Call our boys and tell them to bring her in. She can get him on the phone, while we’re working on her. He’ll come running, the first time he hears her scream.”
* * *
—
Vantresca had picked them up a mile from the lumber yard, which meant the Shevicks’ house was another mile further on, to the southwest, like two sides of a triangle. The black Jaguar rumbled through the streets. By then it was mid-morning. The sun was high. The neighborhood was harsh with light and shadows. Reacher asked Vantresca to pull over at the gas station with the deli counter. They parked in the back, next to the car wash tunnel. A white sedan was inching its way through, under the thrashing brushes. There was blue foam and white bubbles everywhere.
Reacher said, “I guess now we can put the Shevicks in an east side hotel. No need to hide anymore. There’s no one left to care if we’re seen walking in with them.”
“They can’t afford it,” Abby said.
Reacher checked Gezim Hoxha’s potato-shaped wallet.
He said, “They don’t need to.”
“I’m sure they would prefer it all spent on Meg.”
“It’s a drop in the ocean. And this ain’t a democracy. They can’t stay in their house anymore.”
“Why not?”
“We need to get this thing rolling. I want their capo unsettled. Gregory, right? I want him to hear us knocking at the door. Might as well start right here, with the guys outside the house. They’ve been cluttering up the place long enough. But there might be a response. So the Shevicks need to move out. Just for the time being.”
“There’s no room in the car,” Barton said.
“We’ll take their Lincoln,” Reacher said. “We’ll drive the Shevicks to a fancy hotel in the back of a Town Car. They might like that.”
“They live on a cul-de-sac,” Vantresca said. “We’ll be approaching head on. No element of surprise.”
“For you, maybe,” Reacher said. “I’ll go in the back again, and come out through the house. Behind them. While they’re trying to figure out who the hell you guys are. That should be a surprise.”
The Jaguar rolled back out to the main drag, and took the early right, and the left, and stopped in the same spot Reacher and Abby had parked the Chrysler, before dawn, outside the Shevicks’ back-to-back neighbor. Outside the informer’s house, whose calls would henceforth go unanswered, because the instrument on the other end of the line had long ago melted. Like the Chrysler had been, the Jaguar was lined up exactly parallel with the Lincoln, nose to nose and tail to tail, about two hundred feet apart, the depth of two small residential lots, with two buildings in the way. But only for a moment. Reacher got out, and it rolled onward.
Reacher walked through the neighbor’s front yard and wrenched open the fold-back section of fence. He walked through the neighbor’s back yard. To the rickety back fence. Which was either the neighbor’s, or the Shevicks’, or shared. He had no great desire to climb it again. So he kicked it down. If it was the Shevicks’, then Trulenko could buy them a new one. If it was the neighbor’s, then tough shit, for being an informer. If it was shared, then fifty-fifty on each of the above.
He walked through the Shevicks’ back yard, past the spot where the photographs had been taken, to their kitchen door. He knocked gently on the glass. No response. He knocked again, a little louder. Still no response.
He tried the handle. Locked, from the inside. He looked in through the window. Nothing to see. No people. Just the heart-monitor countertops and the atomic table and the vinyl chairs. He tracked along, past the photography spot, to the next window in line. Their bedroom. No one in it. Just a made bed and a closed closet door.
But an open room door. Beyond which he saw a moving shadow out in the hallway. A complicated two-headed, four-legged shape. One half tall, the other half short. Slight movement, like a halfhearted struggle and an easy restraint.
Reacher put his hand in his pocket. Chose a fresh Glock. Seventeen rounds, plus one in the chamber. He hustled back to the kitchen door. He took a breath, and another, and backhanded his elbow through the glass, and snaked his hand in and turned the lock, one smooth movement, and he stepped inside. Noisy, obviously, which meant right on time a head stuck in, around the door to the hallway, to find out what the hell was going on. A pale face, pale eyes, fair hair. Black suit coat, white shirt, black silk necktie. Reacher aimed an inch below the knot of the tie, but he was a fair man, so he didn’t fire until he saw a hand with a gun swing into clear air, on a fast arc a yard below the face, whereupon he pu
lled the trigger and blew a hole in the guy big enough to stick his thumb in. The round went through and through and punched into the far wall beyond. The guy went down vertically, like a cut puppet.
The roar of the shot died away.
Silence from the hallway.
Then a faint muffled whimper, like a weak old person trying to scream, with a strong man’s hand clamped over his mouth. Or her mouth. Then the scrape of a shoe, hopeless, going nowhere. Token resistance. The dead guy was leaking blood on the parquet. It was soaking into the seams. A mess. Reacher found himself figuring a couple of yards would need to be replaced. Trulenko could pay for it. Plus spackle, for the bullet hole in the wall. And paint. Plus new glass for the kitchen door. All good.
Silence from the hallway. Reacher backed away to the outside door. The obvious play was to split up, into two squads, and send one out a back entrance, and around the building. He stepped over the broken glass and out to the yard. He turned right, and right, and right again. He paused a beat at the front of the house. He saw the Lincoln, parked on the street, with no one in it. No sign of the Jaguar. Not yet. He traced its route in his head. North to the next major cross street, west to the main drag, south to their usual turn, and then into the development, with its narrow streets and its tight right-angle corners. Five minutes, maybe. Six maximum. They wouldn’t get lost. Abby knew the way.
He moved along the front of the house, on the grass a yard from the wall, because of the foundation plantings. He looked in the hallway window at a shallow angle. Saw a second guy with a pale face and a black suit. He had his meaty left palm clamped over Maria Shevick’s mouth. In his right hand he held a gun, with its muzzle jammed hard against the side of her head. Another H&K P7, steely and delicate. His finger was tight on the trigger. Aaron Shevick was standing a yard away, rigid, wide eyed, plainly terrified. His lips were clamped. Clearly he had been told to keep quiet. Clearly he wasn’t about to risk disobedience. Not with a gun to his wife’s head.
Reacher checked the end of the cul-de-sac again. Still no Jaguar. The guy holding Maria was staring inward at the kitchen door. Waiting for whoever was in there to come on out. Directly into a classic standoff. Drop the gun or I’ll shoot the old lady. Except the guy couldn’t shoot the old lady, because a split second after he pulled the trigger he would get his own head blown off. A classic standoff. A permanent triangle. The threat vectors would go around and around forever, like a feedback loop, howling and screaming.
Reacher worked out the angles. The guy was a head taller than Maria Shevick. In a literal sense. He was holding her against him, her back to his front, with the clamped left hand, and the top of her head fit neatly under his chin. Then came his own head. At that point Reacher was looking at it from the side. A slabby white cheek, a small pink ear, buzzed fair hair glittering over ridges of bone. He was over thirty, but maybe not yet forty. Was he senior enough to know where their nerve center was? That was Reacher’s main question.
And the answer was no, he thought. Like before. We’re guys who sit in cars and watch doors. You think they would tell folks like us where Trulenko is? The guy was no use.
Unfortunate.
Especially for him.
Reacher dropped to the ground and elbowed-and-toed his way to the narrow concrete path, and over it, and beyond it. The front door was standing open. The guy was still staring at the kitchen. Still waiting. Reacher squirmed around until his angle of view through the open door was a quarter circle different than his oblique glance in through the window. Now he was looking at the back of the guy’s head. A wide white neck, tight rolls of hard flesh, the glittering buzz cut over lumps of bone. He was looking at it all from a very low angle. He was prone on the ground, outside at grade level, below the step, below the threshold, below the hallway floor. He was aiming the Glock at a steep upward angle. At a point where the guy’s spine met his skull. Which was as high as he dared to go. He wanted the round to dig in, not crease off. Which happened, sometimes, with shallow angles. Some people had skulls like concrete.
He counted to three, and breathed out, long and slow.
He pulled the trigger. The guy’s head cracked open like a dropped watermelon and the bullet came out the top of his skull and lodged in the ceiling directly above him. The air was instantly full of pink and purple mist. Instant brain death. Messy, but necessary, with a finger hard on a trigger. The only safe way. Medically proven.
The guy fell away from behind Maria Shevick like she was shucking off a big winter coat and letting it float to the floor. She was left standing alone, a yard from her husband, both of them mute and rigid. The crash of the shot died away to silence. The pink mist drifted down, infinitely slow.
Then the Jaguar showed up.
* * *
—
Reacher’s plan had been to present the hotel idea as a fun adventure, and then to top it off by handing over the ten grand in hundreds, all crisp and new and sweet smelling. It didn’t work out that way. Maria Shevick had blood and bone fragments in her hair. Aaron was shaky. He was an inch away from losing it. Vantresca took them out and sat them in the back of his Jaguar. Abby packed a bag for them. She went from room to room, grabbing up what she thought they would need. Reacher and Hogan carried the bodies out and put them in the Lincoln’s trunk, less their money, their guns, and their phones. Familiar work, by that point. Reacher gave Vantresca cash from Gezim Hoxha’s potato-shaped wallet, to pay for the Shevicks’ hotel room. Vantresca said he would drive them there and check them in. He would ride upstairs with them and settle them down. Reacher said the other four would stay behind and deal with the Lincoln.
“What do we do with it?” Barton asked.
“Drive it,” Reacher said.
“Where?”
“You have a gig. We need to go get your van and load up your stuff.”
“With them in the trunk?”
“You ever been on a plane?”
“Sure.”
“There was probably a coffin in the baggage hold. Dead people are forever getting repatriated.”
“You know the gig is west of Center.”
Reacher nodded.
“In a lounge,” he said. “With a guy on the door.”
Chapter 38
Barton’s van was stored on a vacant lot behind a razor wire fence with a chained gate. He and Hogan got it out and Reacher and Abby followed them back to the house in the Lincoln. The van was a beat-up third-hand soccer mom vehicle, with the rear seats taken out and the windows covered over with black plastic. Reacher helped them load it. He had done many odd jobs since leaving the army, but he had never been a rock’n’roll roadie before. He carried Barton’s lethal Precision in a hard-shell case, plus a back-up instrument, plus an amplifier head the size of a rich man’s suitcase, and then finally the huge eight-speaker cabinet. He carried Hogan’s disassembled drum kit. He packed it all in.
Then he and Abby followed the van again, in the Lincoln, heading west toward Ukrainian territory. Noon was coming. The day was close to halfway over. Reacher drove. Abby counted the money they had taken from the guys in the trunk. Not much. A total of two hundred ten dollars. We’re guys who sit in cars. Clearly on a lower per diem than an old horse like Gezim Hoxha got. Their phones showed the same barrage of texts they had seen before, plus a whole string of new ones. All in Ukrainian. Abby recognized the shapes of some of the words, from her crash course the night before, with Vantresca.
“They’re changing the situation again,” she said.
“To what?” Reacher asked.
“I can’t read it. I don’t know which letter it is. Presumably either up to C, or back down to A.”
“Probably not back down,” Reacher said. “Under the circumstances.”
“I think they’re blaming the Russians. I think they’re calling Aaron Shevick a Russian.”
“Where are the texts c
oming from?”
“All the same number. Probably an automated distribution system.”
“Probably in a computer in the nerve center.”
“Probably.”
“Check the phone log.”
“What am I looking for?”
“The call that told them to go get Maria Shevick.”
Abby dabbed and scrolled her way to a list of recent calls.
“The last one incoming was about an hour ago,” she said. “Fifty-seven minutes, to be precise.”
Reacher timed his way through what had happened, but in reverse, like a stopwatch running backward. Following the van west, loading the van, getting the van, leaving the house, about four minutes and thirty seconds spent at the house, walking through the Shevicks’ yard, walking through the neighbor’s yard, getting out of the car. Out of the Jaguar, which was lined up parallel to the Lincoln, nose to nose and tail to tail, but about two hundred feet apart. Fifty-seven minutes. The two guys could have been getting out of their own car at the exact same moment.
He said, “Where did the call come from?”
She checked.
“A weird cell number,” she said. “Probably a disposable drugstore phone.”
“Probably a senior figure. Maybe even Gregory himself. It was a major strategic decision. They want to know when the Russians are coming. They think I can tell them. They wanted Maria as leverage. They must think we’re related.”
“What kind of leverage?”
“The wrong kind. Call the number back.”
“Really?”
“There are things that need to be said.”
Abby put the phone on speaker and chose an option from the call log menu. Dial tone filled the car. Then a voice answered, with a foreign word that could have been hello, or yes, or what, or shoot, or whatever else people say when they answer the phone.
Reacher said, “Speak English.”
The voice said, “Who are you?”
