by Lee Child
Reacher nodded.
“It’s a thing of beauty,” he said. “There’s no way in.”
“So how do we do it?”
“When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.”
“Where?”
“Hardware store.”
* * *
—
The nearest place was a national franchise, full of earnest slogans about doing things together and doing them now. Moscow would have approved. It was large enough to have what they wanted, but not large enough to offer a choice. Which hustled things along. A linoleum knife was a linoleum knife. A crosscut saw was a crosscut saw. And so on, and so forth. They bought a tool bag each. The store’s name was on them, but they looked professional. The hospitalized Gezim Hoxha paid for everything, via his potato-shaped wallet.
They packed their bags carefully, and slung them over their shoulders. Then they set out walking, back the way they had come, but this time not stopping at the coffee shop. This time heading straight on, the extra half block, to the office tower’s street-level door.
Chapter 48
Like Barton had reported, the front wall of the lobby was all glass. Which meant the guys at the door saw them early. From maybe thirty feet away. Which at their current rate of speed was several seconds still to go. All of which Reacher hoped would be filled by spikes of mild confusion. Just enough to keep them guessing. Five people hustling were automatically suspect. Five people with tool bags, maybe not. Maybe plumbers on an urgent call-out, to fix a leak. Or electricians. Except one was a woman. But that was OK. Wasn’t it? This was America. Except one had a face like the guy from Kiev. Gregory had texted a picture, before he went quiet. Was the guy from Kiev a plumber? Just tiny stop-start, this-way, that-way flickers in the brain, enough to slow them down, enough to make their eventual reactions a fatal beat late.
Because by then the revolving door was already spinning fast, disgorging first Reacher, then Hogan, then Vantresca, then Barton, then Abby, all of them bringing guns up out of their tool bags, fanning out, Hogan and Vantresca sprinting ahead, Abby sprinting after them, Reacher and Barton jamming up the guys at the door, guns under chins, pushing them backward, Hogan and Vantresca and Abby hurdling the turnstiles, the guys slamming into the men in the suits, taking them down, Abby skidding to a halt in front of the elevator control panel.
Ready for her close up. She stood still for a second. The light from the street was behind her. Petite and gamine, neat and slender, hipshot, dressed all in black, holding a Glock 17. Performance art. A figure from a nightmare.
Then she leaned forward and sprayed the little glass pip with a hiss of rattle-can paint. Flat black, from the hardware store. By which time Barton was already starting the same thing on the front wall of glass, but with white, for an effect like the vacant retail unit. The four men in suits were huddled together, with Reacher and Vantresca pointing guns at them, and Hogan preparing to make them secure, with long cable ties, from the hardware store.
The rent-a-cop at the security desk was looking on nervously.
Reacher called out to him, “Do you work for these people?”
The guy called back, “No sir, I most definitely do not.”
“But nevertheless you hold a position. You have responsibilities, at least toward the owner of this building. Perhaps you swore an oath. If we let you go, you’re pretty much obliged to call the cops. You look like a man of principle. Therefore best if we tie you up, too. Maybe even a blindfold. We’ll leave you on the floor behind your desk. You can deny everything afterward. Would that be agreeable?”
“Probably best,” the guy said.
“First come lock the door for us.”
The guy stood up.
Which was when the plan went wrong. When the so-far easy execution ran off the rails. Although, afterward, in periods of honest reflection, Reacher found he thought of it as the moment when the plan went right. He wanted it. Secretly he had hoped for it. Hence the crosscut saws.
Something completely unhinged.
Hogan bent down to zip-tie the first guy’s ankle. Either the guy straight-up panicked, or he got hit by some kind of last-chance desperation, or both, or maybe he was hoping to start up some kind of insurrection, but for whatever reason, suddenly he bolted forward, straight at Vantresca, wild emotions in his eyes, wild energy in his actions. He more or less ran himself onto the muzzle of Vantresca’s gun.
Vantresca did everything right. In the corner of his eye he saw that Hogan was rolling away, like a good Marine should, to avoid the charging guy’s feet, to avoid friendly fire. He saw that there was no one behind. No danger from a through-and-through. He knew they were in a concrete building. No danger of a through-the-wall random calamity. Not even much noise, given the proximity shot. The guy’s chest cavity would act as a giant suppressor.
Vantresca pulled the trigger.
There was no insurrection.
The other three guys stayed where they were.
The rent-a-cop said, “Oh, shit.”
“We’ll get to you in a minute,” Reacher said. “First lock the door.”
* * *
—
On the nineteenth floor, someone noticed the lobby screen was dark. No one knew how long it had been that way. At first it was taken to be a technical fault. But then someone else felt the blankness was not completely uniform. Not zero volts across the board. Something else. So they rolled back the hard drive and saw a young woman spraying an aerosol can. After first posing with a gun. After first rushing in through the revolving door, with four other figures. All in different street clothes, but all equipped with identical mission-specific satchels. A black-ops unit, led by a woman. This was America.
Of course the first thing they did was call down to the lobby. Just in case. Four separate cell numbers. Four no answers. As feared, because as expected. The same everywhere, the last two hours. They even tried the building’s rent-a-cop. They had the number. The landline, on his silly desk.
No answer.
Completely isolated. No information at all. Now not even from the lobby. No idea what was happening. Cut off from the world. Nothing on the news. Nothing on the rumor sites. No weird deployments. No press secretaries waiting on standby.
They tried all the numbers again.
No answer.
Then the elevator rumbled. The center shaft.
The car arrived, with a hiss of air.
The doors opened, smooth and swish.
On the back wall of the car someone had spray painted the Ukrainian word for loser. Under its dripping Cyrillic was one of their own guys, from the lobby, black suit and tie, sitting splayed out, arms and legs at an angle. He had been shot in the chest.
His head had been cut off.
His head was propped up between his legs.
The doors closed, smooth and swish.
The elevator rumbled.
The car went back down.
Completely isolated. No contact. Everyone without a specific task to attend to gathered in the elevator lobby. Outside the cage. Close to the wire. Staring in. Positioning themselves as if laying bets. Some opposite the center elevator. As if expecting it to return, with its gruesome tableau. Others chose the first elevator, or the third. Some outliers watched the fire stairs. There were all kinds of theories.
They waited.
Nothing happened.
People changed places at the wire. As if the delay was subtly altering the odds. As if it was making one scenario slightly more likely than another. Or less unlikely.
They waited.
They tried three sample numbers. One more time. First Gregory’s, then Danilo’s, then the watch leader’s, down in the lobby. With no real hope.
With no answer.
They waited. They changed position at the wire.
They liste
ned.
The elevator rumbled. This time the left-hand shaft.
The car arrived, with a hiss of air.
The doors opened, smooth and swish.
On the floor of the car was another of their guys. From the lobby. Black suit and tie. Lying on his side. Hogtied, with his wrists and his ankles zipped together behind him. Gagged with a black rag wound around his head. Squirming, thrashing, appealing with his eyes, desperately, mouthing the gag, as if screaming, please come get me, please come get me, and then nodding urgently, as if beckoning, as if to say, yes, yes, it’s safe, please come get me, and then flopping his body, desperately, as if trying to reach the threshold.
The doors closed on him, smooth and swish.
The car went down again.
At first no one spoke.
Then someone said, “We should have saved him.”
Someone else said, “How could we?”
“We should have been quicker. Somehow he escaped down there. We should have helped him.”
“There was no time.”
The guy who had spoken first looked all around. First from where he was to the gate, and then at the keypad, and then from the gate to the left-hand elevator, on the inside. He timed it out in his mind. The doors open. The doors close. No. Not enough time. Especially with a what-the-hell split second of freeze at the very beginning.
Just not possible.
“Pity,” he said. “He escaped and we sent him back down.”
“Escaped how?”
“Maybe they trussed him up ready to cut his head off, but somehow he rolled away into the elevator, and he came up here, and he wanted us to save him. He was six feet away.”
No one spoke.
The guy said, “Listen.”
The elevator rumbled.
The left-hand shaft again.
Coming back up.
The guy said, “Open the gate.”
“Not allowed.”
“We got to get there this time. Open the gate.”
No one spoke.
The elevator rumbled.
Someone else said, “Yeah, open the damn gate. We can’t send the poor bastard down again a second time.”
Completely isolated. No orders, no leadership.
A third voice said, “Open the gate.”
The guy at the gate punched in the numbers. After its programmed delay, the lock clicked open. The panel swung back. Four guys stepped through. Guns out, cautious, up on their toes. The others stayed out, watching through the wire.
The elevator rumbled.
The car arrived, with a hiss of air.
The doors opened, smooth and swish.
Same guy on the floor. Black suit and tie. Hogtied the same, gagged the same, squirming, thrashing, pleading with his eyes, nodding desperately, beckoning, flopping around.
The four guys inside rushed forward, ready to lend a hand.
But it wasn’t the same guy. It was Vantresca. Average build. He fit the suit. He wasn’t hogtied. He was holding his hands behind his back, hiding two Glock 17s. Which he brought out and fired, four times, fast, aimed, deliberate.
At which point the right-hand elevator opened up, and Reacher stepped out, with Hogan, and Barton, and Abby. Four handguns. Hogan fired first. Must-win targets are any opponents within command and control distance of the gate had been Reacher’s briefing. Three rounds did the job. Meanwhile Reacher himself was clearing the fence, firing into the backs or half-backs of all those standing mesmerized by the sight of Vantresca shooting their buddies from the floor of his elevator car. Barton was covering one end of the lobby, and Abby was covering the other.
It was over fast. Hard not to be. As an exercise it was easy. The attackers had surprise on their side, and after that commanded a dense concentration of fire from the narrow corner of a rectangular battle space. The only friendly within the field of fire was inside a bulletproof concrete shaft all his own, and from there was able to provide effective enfilade fire. All of which made the victory routine. The prize was the gate. It was still standing open. Some kind of complicated lock, not currently engaged. Maybe electronic. There was a keypad on the post.
Reacher stepped through the gate, into the secret space beyond, followed by Hogan, and Abby, and Barton, with Vantresca bringing up the rear, in the borrowed suit, dusting it off after his showmanship on the elevator floor.
Chapter 49
The back part of Reacher’s brain was clattering away on some kind of a complicated computation, which involved dividing the total square footage of the nineteenth floor by the total number of KIA in its elevator lobby, which surely meant, after realistically allowing for officer-class accommodations for the important nerds, and densely-packed barracks-class accommodations for the enlisted ranks, that the herd was already substantially thinned. Had to be. There couldn’t be many more guys available. Not unless they had been sleeping three to a bed, or stacked on the floor. Simple math.
The front part of Reacher’s brain said nevermind. If I fail today, it’s my own fault. He pressed up face-first against a corridor wall, and peered one-eyed around a corner. He saw another corridor. Same width. Doors left and right. Offices, maybe. Or bedrooms. Bathrooms across the hall. Or storerooms. Or laboratories, or nerve centers, or hives or nests or burrows.
He moved on. Hogan followed. Then Abby. Then Barton and Vantresca. The first room on the left was some kind of a security post. Empty. Abandoned. A desk and a chair, unoccupied. Two flat screen televisions on the desk, one labeled Lobby, which was blacked out with paint, and one marked 19th Floor, which showed the view from a camera evidently mounted high on the wall opposite the elevator bank. The angle was downward. The view was of a lot of dead bodies on the floor. More than a dozen.
Told you so, said the back part of his brain.
He moved on. The first room on the right was also empty. It had a floor to ceiling window, facing north. The city lay spread out below. In the room were four armchairs, a buzzing refrigerator, and a coffee machine on a table. A ready room. Or a crew room. Convenient. Close to the elevators.
They moved on. They saw nothing. No people. No kind of technical equipment. Reacher had no real idea what it would look like. He was hung up on Abby’s original description. Like in the movies. The mad scientist in his lab, full of lit-up machines and crackling energy. To him a server was someone playing tennis, or bringing a drink. Vantresca figured the whole installation might be nothing more than half a dozen laptops. Cloud based, he called it. Hogan predicted a low room full of white laminate and chilly air.
They crept onward.
Saw nothing.
“Wait,” Reacher whispered. “We’re wasting time. This is not business as usual. I think they’ve gone straight to the endgame. I think the headless horseman brought every spare guy to the elevator cage. Only people working that exact minute stayed behind and survived. So now they’re hunkered down. It’s Custer’s Last Stand for them.”
“How many?” Hogan asked.
“I don’t care,” Reacher said. “As long as Trulenko is one of them.”
Abby said, “If it’s six laptops, it could be just a couple of guys.”
“Plus guards,” Reacher said. “As many as Moscow decreed should be in the room at all times. Or at least those of them who maintained discipline. Which might be a different number.”
Vantresca said, “Moscow would decree an entire Guards regiment, if it could.”
“I guess it depends how big the room is.”
Hogan said, “If it’s six laptops, it could be a broom closet. Could be anywhere. Could be a secret door in back of a broom closet.”
“No, Trulenko wants windows,” Abby said. “Especially these windows. I bet he loves the view. I bet he loves standing there, looking out through the glass, lording it over the earthlings below. Even though
he’s actually a failure and practically a prisoner. I bet it makes him feel better.”
“Wait,” Reacher said again. He looked at Barton. “You said on the fourth floor you could walk all around the building’s core. It was blank on three sides. But on the fifth floor you couldn’t get all the way around. Because of bigger suites in back. Inside of which the long blank face of the core would become a wall inside a room.”
“Yes,” Barton said.
“It’s a pretty good wall to have,” Reacher said. “Isn’t it? It’s as close as you can get to all the risers and the services running up and down behind the elevators.” He looked at Vantresca. “Back in the day, if you had to lay wired communications, how long would you want your wires to be?”
“As short as humanly possible,” Vantresca said.
“Because?”
“Wires are vulnerable.”
Reacher nodded.
“Not mechanically robust,” he said. “Plus that wall gets first call on the power and the water, and whatever the generator kicks out in an emergency. I bet that’s the wall Moscow wanted.” He said the word. A hive or a nest or a burrow, full of something that hummed or buzzed or thrashed around. He said, “They built it out from the back of the elevator core, all the way to the windows opposite. Because Moscow wanted the wall, and guys like Trulenko wanted the view. What else could they do?”
Vantresca said, “That’s a big room.”
Reacher nodded.
“Same size and shape as the lobby downstairs,” he said. “Same space exactly, except flipped around 180.”
“Big enough for a Guards regiment.”
“Couple of rifle companies at the most.”
“Maybe nobody,” Abby said. “Because of human nature. These guys are from Ukraine. Moscow is like a patronizing big brother. They’ll make up their own rules. What does it matter if they’re actually in the room? They have the cage. Everywhere is equally safe. Maybe Trulenko doesn’t even want them in the room anyway, watching over his shoulder. That’s human nature, too.”
