by Lee Child
The trunk lid raised up.
Two dead guys. Same suits, same ties. Limp, bloody, stinking.
The guy looked away.
Reacher said to him, “That’s you, a minute from now. Unless you answer my questions.”
The guy said nothing. He couldn’t speak. His collar was twisted too tight.
Reacher asked, “Where does Maxim Trulenko work?”
He slackened his grip half an inch. The guy panted a couple of breaths. He glanced left, glanced right, glanced up to the sky, as if he was considering his options. As if he had options to consider. Then he looked down. At the dead guys in the trunk.
Then he stared.
He said, “That’s my cousin.”
“Which one?” Reacher asked. “The one I shot in the head, or the one I shot in the throat?”
“We came here together. From Odessa. We arrived in New Jersey.”
“You must be confusing me with someone who gives a shit. I asked you a question. Where does Maxim Trulenko work?”
The guy said the word they had seen in the text message. Biologically inexact. Either a hive or a nest or a burrow. For something that hummed or buzzed or thrashed around.
“Where is it?” Reacher said.
“I don’t know,” the guy said. “It’s a secret operation.”
“How big is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who else works there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do Danilo and Gregory work there?”
“No.”
“Where do they work?”
“In the office.”
“Is that separate?”
“From what?”
“The word you used. The hive.”
“Of course it is.”
“Where is the office?”
The guy named a street, and a cross street. He said, “Behind the taxi company, across from the pawn shop, next to the bail bonds.”
“We were right there,” Abby said.
Reacher nodded. He slid his hand around under the guy’s collar, from the back, to the side. He dug down with his fingers until he felt the inside face of the guy’s necktie centered in the meat of his palm. He felt it through the cotton of the collar. A silk necktie, at that point about an inch and a half wide. More tensile strength than steel. Silk shimmered because its fibers were triangular, like elongated prisms, which did nice things with light, but which also locked together so tight it was virtually impossible to pull them apart end to end. A steel cable would give way sooner.
Reacher bunched his fist. Took up what slack there was. At first his hand was square on. All his knuckles were lined up parallel with the crushed rim of the collar. Like he was hanging one-handed from a rung on a ladder. Then he rotated his thumb toward him, and his pinkie knuckle away from him. As if he was trying to spin the ladder, like an airplane propeller. Or like a tweak on a rein, turning a horse. All of which drove his pinkie knuckle into the side of the guy’s neck. Which in turn tightened the stronger-than-steel strap against the other side of his neck. Reacher held it like that for a spell, and then he turned his hand another small angle. And then another. The doorman was calm. The pressure was all side to side, not front to back. He wasn’t choking for lack of air. Not thrashing around in desperate panic. Instead the arteries in his neck were closed off and no blood was reaching his brain. Relaxed. Peaceful. Like a narcotic. Warm and comfortable.
Sleepy.
Almost there.
Almost done.
Reacher held it a whole extra minute, just to be sure, and then he tipped the guy in the trunk with his cousin, and he slammed the lid. Abby looked at him. As if to ask, are we going to kill them all? But not disapproving. Not accusatory. Merely a request for information. He thought to himself, I hope so.
Out loud he said, “I should try The Washington Post again.”
She passed him the dead guy’s phone. There was a brand new text on the screen. As yet unread. It had Reacher’s own picture in a fat green bubble. The surprise portrait from the moneylending bar. The pale guy, raising his phone. Below the photo was a block of Cyrillic writing. Some long screed about something or other.
“What the hell is their problem now?” he said.
“Vantresca will tell us,” she said.
He dialed The Washington Post from memory, having done it not long before. Once again the phone rang. Once again the call was answered.
Once again he said, “Ms. Buckley?”
“Yes?” a voice said.
“Barbara Buckley?”
“What do you want?”
“I have two things for you,” Reacher said. “Some good news, and a story.”
Chapter 41
In the background on the line Reacher heard all kinds of hustle and bustle. A big open space. Maybe a low hard ceiling. The clatter of keyboards. A dozen conversations. He said, “I’m guessing you’re at a desk in a newsroom.”
Barbara Buckley said, “No shit, Sherlock.”
“I’m guessing you’ve got tickers and cable news on screens all around you.”
“Hundreds of them.”
“Maybe right now one of them is showing regional coverage of a fire in a lumber yard in a city you know.”
No answer.
Reacher said, “The good news is the lumber yard was the Albanian gang’s HQ. It’s burning to the ground. Most of them are dead inside. The rest have fled. They’re history. The things they said to you don’t apply anymore. From when you had that meeting, a couple months ago. In the back room of the restaurant. Those threats are now gone forever. As of today. We believe it was important you should know as soon as possible. It’s a part of our victims’ rights protocol.”
“Is this the police department?”
“Strictly speaking, no.”
“But you are law enforcement?”
“Which has many levels.”
“Which level are you?”
“Ma’am, with the greatest possible respect, you’re a journalist. There are some things better not said out loud.”
“You mean, you could tell me, but then you would have to kill me?”
“Ma’am, we don’t really say that.”
“Are you speaking from there?”
“I would prefer not to discuss specific locations. But I will say it’s very warm here.”
“Wait,” she said. “How did you even find me? I didn’t report the threats to anyone.”
Reacher took a breath, ready to launch into the second part of his script, but she beat him to it, like the investigative reporter he guessed she was, with a rapid-fire chain of fast connections and assumptions and wild-ass guesses, all of which ended up pretty much where he would have wanted to anyway. She said, “Wait, the only person who could have known anything about this was the guy who drove me to the airport afterward, who was the local help I hired, who was ex-military, a fairly senior rank, which I know for sure because obviously I checked him out, so it must have been him who reported it, presumably to a friend or an associate with a particular interest, possibly in the Pentagon, which is probably where you come from. Some secret three-letter agency no one has ever heard of.”
Reacher said, “Ma’am, I would very much prefer not to confirm or deny.”
“Whatever,” she said. Then she took a breath and her voice changed a little. She said, “I appreciate the call. Thank you. Your protocol works well.”
“Feel better?”
“You said you had a story for me. Is that it? The Albanians are gone?”
“No,” Reacher said. “Something different. Involving you.”
“I won’t go public. I dropped the story. Not what a fearless reporter is supposed to do.”
“This is the other side of the coin,” Reacher said. “Thi
s is where the fearless reporter breaks the case wide open. Because of the research you did. You came here for a reason. Which wasn’t the Albanians. You gave the impression you were much more interested in the Ukrainians. It would help us to know the basis for that interest.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What did you think the Ukrainians were doing?”
“I understood the question. What I didn’t understand was why you were asking it. You’re a secret three-letter agency. Surely you know why you’re there. Or is this what you do now? You outsource the actual investigative part of the investigation to newspapers?”
Reacher took a breath, and launched the third part of his script. He said, “Clearly you derived information from somewhere. As did we, of course. But your somewhere was not the same place as our somewhere. I can pretty much guarantee that. Therefore if we make you the star of the show, we keep ourselves in the shadows. We throw suspicion in the wrong direction. We protect our sources. They live to fight another day. Which might be important. But the rules of engagement require that we hear a credible accusation from a credible person before we can proceed. We can’t just make it up. It’s subject to review.”
“Are you recording this?”
“I would need your permission.”
“You would admit I broke the case?”
“I think we would be obliged to spin it that way. Best all around. No one would look at our guys. Plus we don’t care anyway. I don’t want to go on TV.”
“I’m a journalist,” Buckley said. “No one would call me credible.”
“These are just boxes to check. We would take a tarot card reader.”
“It started with a rumor I heard from a friend of a friend. The story was, whatever was claimed politically, the intelligence professionals had in fact traced the fake news on the internet all the way back to the Russian government in Moscow, and they had also gotten pretty good at blocking it, except suddenly they had a sudden setback. The rumor was somehow the Russians had gotten inside. They were operating inside the United States, and the blocking didn’t work anymore.”
“OK,” Reacher said.
“But I got to thinking. Obviously there was nothing coming out of their embassy, because we would have known. We’re all over that place, electronically. And they didn’t move the whole project here, because it’s not just us they’re messing with. They’re hacking the world. So obviously they outsourced the American part of the project to someone who was already here. Like a straightforward business deal. Like a franchise. But who? The Russian mob in the U.S. isn’t good enough, and anyway, no way would the Russian government want to be in business with them. I tried to figure it out. I had some information. The geeks at the paper follow this stuff. They have league tables, like the NFL. All those old Soviet states are pretty good at technology. Estonia, for instance. And Ukraine, they figured. But Moscow and Kiev can’t talk. They’re at permanent loggerheads. But Moscow can talk to the Ukrainian mob in the U.S. Same people, same talent, but a different place. And it would be perfect cover. It’s a very unlikely link. And the geeks said the Ukrainians were just about good enough to do it, in a technology sense. So I figured that was what had happened. An annual contract, between the Russian government and Ukrainian organized crime in America, probably worth at least tens of millions of dollars. I have no proof, but I bet I’m right. Call it a journalist’s guess.”
“OK,” Reacher said again.
“But then a couple months ago they suddenly got much better at doing it. They went way beyond just good enough. It happened more or less overnight. Suddenly they were doing really smart stuff. The geeks said they must have brought in new talent. No other way of doing it. Maybe a consultant from Moscow. So I went there to check. Naively I thought I might see a Russian walking around town, looking lost.”
“So you already aimed to break the story.”
“But I didn’t.”
“Where would you have looked?”
“I had no idea. That was going to be my next step. But I never got that far.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “Thank you.”
“Is that enough?”
“Credible person, credible reason. The boxes are checked.”
“Thank you again, for the first part of the call. I do feel better.”
“It’s a great feeling,” Reacher said. “Isn’t it? You’re alive, and they ain’t.”
* * *
—
At the end of their hour Barton and Hogan came up to the street, damp with exertion, loaded with gear. Vantresca was helping them. He read the new text. The photograph, in the fat green bubble. He said, “This is absurd.”
Reacher said, “He took me by surprise.”
“Not the photograph. The message is from Gregory himself. He says you’re the vanguard of an attack from a direction he can no longer reliably discern. It is even possible you are an agent of the Kiev government. You must therefore be captured at all costs. You must be brought to him alive.”
“Better than the alternative, I suppose.”
“Did the doorman tell you anything?”
“Plenty,” Reacher said. “But the journalist told me more.”
“She talked to you?”
“It’s about fake news on the internet. It was coming in from Russia. Now it’s inside the United States. We can’t block it anymore. She figured Moscow hired the Ukrainians as a proxy. Then about two months ago the standard went way up. She said the geeks at the paper figured the Ukrainians must have brought in new talent. No other way to explain it.”
“Trulenko went into hiding about two months ago.”
“Exactly,” Reacher said. “He’s smart with computers. He’s managing the contract. The Russian government is paying Gregory, and Gregory is paying Trulenko. After taking a healthy percentage for himself, I’m sure. Must feel like Christmas morning. The journalist said the contract could be worth tens of millions of dollars.”
“What did the doorman tell you?”
“It’s a secret satellite operation physically separate from the main office. He didn’t know where it is, or how big it is, or who works there, or how many.”
“You call that telling you plenty?”
“If we put the two things together, we can start to work out what they need. Security, accommodations, reliable power, reliable internet speed, isolated, but close enough for easy supply and resupply.”
“Could be any basement in town. They could have run new wires and put in a couple of cots.”
“More than cots,” Reacher said. “This is an annual contract. No doubt renewable. Could be a long-term project.”
“OK, as well as the wires, they also brought in wallboard and paint and put carpet on the floor. Maybe king-size beds.”
“We better start looking,” Abby said.
“Something else first,” Reacher said. “That awful photograph reminded me. I want to go pay that guy a visit. It’s after twelve o’clock. I bet he’s holding a bunch of repayments. The Shevicks need money today. We’re still a grand short.”
* * *
—
This time Abby drove. Reacher could feel the weight in the back. The rear end of the car squatted and dragged. There were more than six hundred pounds in the trunk. Maybe never taken into account, during Lincoln’s design process.
They stopped short of the bar, in a side street. Did Situation C call for extra guards everywhere? Reacher guessed not everywhere. Insufficient manpower. They would consolidate their resources only where they mattered most. Their high-value targets. Did the moneylending operation qualify? He wasn’t sure. He got out and peered around the corner, one-eyed around the brick.
The street was empty. There was nothing parked outside the bar. There were no guys in suits, leaning on walls.
He got back in and they drove on, across the
street with the bar, and around to the alley behind. It was the old part of town, built around the time Alexander Graham Bell was inventing the telephone, so anything newer was grafted on, as an afterthought. There were leaning poles carrying sagging thickets of wires and cables, looping here, looping there. There were water meters and gas meters and electricity meters, screwed randomly to the walls. There were head-high garbage receptacles.
There was a black Lincoln parked behind the bar. Empty. The pale guy’s ride, no doubt. Ready for the journey home, at the end of the day. Abby stopped behind it.
“Can I help?” she asked.
“You want to?” he asked back.
“Yes,” she said.
“Walk around to the front. Come in the door like a regular person. Pause for a second. The guy sits in the rear right-hand corner. Walk toward the rear wall.”
“Why?”
“I want the guy distracted. He’ll watch you all the way. Partly because maybe you’re a new customer, but mostly because you’re the best-looking thing he’s seen all day. Maybe all his life. Ignore the barman, whatever he says. He’s an asshole.”
“Got it,” she said.
“You want a gun?”
“Should I?”
“Can’t hurt,” he said.
“OK,” she said.
He gave her the lounge doorman’s H&K. It looked dainty in his hand and huge in hers. She hefted it a couple of times, and stuck it in her pocket. She headed off down the alley. Reacher found the bar’s back door. It was a plain steel panel, dull and old, scarred and dented low down, by hand trucks wheeling kegs and crates. He tried the handle. It was unlocked. No doubt a city regulation. It was a fire exit, too.
Reacher slipped inside. He was at the far end of a short corridor. Restrooms to the left and right. Then a door for employees only. An office, or a storeroom. Or both. Then the end of the corridor, and the room itself, seen in reverse. The square bar now in the near right corner, the worn central track leading away, between the long rows of four-top tables. The same as before. The light was still dim and the air still smelled of spilled beer and disinfectant. This time there were five customers, once again each of them alone at separate tables, defending their drinks, looking miserable. Behind the bar was the same fat guy, now with a six-day beard, but a fresh towel thrown over his shoulder.
