by Lee Child
Plus three guys standing next to it. Sixty yards away. Tiny in the distance. Up close, maybe not so much. Every single passerby was smaller. They were wearing some kind of one-piece jump suits. Hard to make out. He needed binoculars. Like the guy in the committee meeting. The jump suits looked tight. Short in the arms. Did HVAC guys need to be big? Probably not. Probably better to be small, for attics and crawl spaces.
They looked impatient.
Reacher crossed to the left-hand window.
Trees, bushes, a quiet street beyond.
With a cop on the sidewalk, just shy of the four-way.
The cop was alone and on foot. He was crouching. In a particular way. He was in the unmistakable stance of an armed man holding himself back from a corner. Until ordered to advance. Which implied a degree of coordination. With who?
He crossed to the right-hand window.
A mirror image. Trees, flowers, a quiet street, and a cop holding ready to roll his shoulder around the corner and take aim.
He went back to the center window with the view of the truck. There were streets beyond it, left and right, radiating away. Plenty of parked cars. Some base models. Cheapskate buyers, or police unmarked. The three guys were probably surrounded. But not by an overwhelming force. Solo guys on the left and right flanks implied no more than two more anyplace. Four people, max. A very light force.
He crossed back to the left-hand window. The cop was inching toward the corner. No doubt his earpiece was counting him down. He crossed to the right-hand window. Same story. Still a mirror image. Synchronized. Seconds to go. It was a very bad plan. No way could Amos have been involved. Or Shaw either. He had looked smart enough. This was some uniform captain’s mistake.
On the right the cop rolled around the corner.
Reacher hustled across the hall.
Same thing on the left.
A very bad plan.
He crossed back to the center window just in time to see the air conditioning guys do the one and only thing they needed to do. They clambered through a flower bed and stepped into the library gardens. They turned the physical situation inside out. Like peeling off a T-shirt. Now everyone else was behind them. In front of them and all around them was a risk of collateral damage so great it was prohibitive. Like a smart move in chess. Mate in two.
They kept on walking. Slow. Always aware of the geometry around them. Not their first rodeo. Behind them the police response was halfway competent. The cops on foot sprinted back the way they had come, down the quiet side streets, to retake the flanks. Way back two more cops were running up. Then fanning out. Not entering the gardens. Staying on the street. Establishing a cordon. One cop per side of the square. Because common sense said the three guys would have to come out sometime.
But for the moment they kept on walking straight. By then they were about halfway to the library. Going slow. Just strolling. Which made sense. Because their next obvious move was to reverse direction at high speed and turn the situation inside out all over again. If they did it soon, they could make it back to their van more or less completely unopposed. The cops weren’t ready yet. Then they could get the hell out of Dodge. Could three squad cars stop them? Probably not.
But they didn’t reverse direction. They kept on coming. They kept on strolling. Now they were three-quarters of the way to the library. Reacher hustled from window to window. The cops were now in position, one per side, weapons drawn, each one near a gate. But each one also looking mindful of the fact that the three guys hadn’t needed a gate to get in. Any low-enough flower bed would do. They knew. They were keeping their eyes open. Not the worst Reacher had ever seen.
The three guys kept on strolling. Did they have alternative transportation up ahead? Three guys could have driven in with three different vehicles. They could have parked them in strategic locations. Or was the black Chrysler their back-up? It had three empty seats, after all. There was no sign of it. Not in the first window, or the second, or the third, or the fourth.
The three guys kept on strolling. Now they were very close to the library. Maybe they were interested in architecture. Or Romanesque coloration. Red New Hampshire granite, white Maine granite, in intricate striped patterns. Like something in Rome or Florence.
Reacher craned his neck and watched them come up the steps to the door, right below him. He backed away to the top of the stairs and watched them enter the lobby. They were obvious phonies. Their jump suits were way too tight. Borrowed, for the occasion. Along with the van. No doubt someone owed someone else a favor.
They were each about six-two, and broad, with big hands and big feet, and wide necks, and hard faces as clenched as fists. They might have been in their early forties. Not their first rodeo. Two had black hair and one was gray. They came in and kept on strolling. Maybe they planned to walk straight through and out the other side. Which made sense geometrically. It was the most direct line between the top end of the gardens and the bottom.
They didn’t walk through.
They stopped dead in the center of the lobby.
Maybe they wanted to borrow a book. Maybe they had seen a review. Or maybe not. Maybe finally the black Chrysler had been pulled over. For an infraction during a lapse in concentration. Or on an old Massachusetts warrant. While Reacher had been in the basement, reading about the rough-legged hawk. Possibly Chief Shaw had been burning up the phone lines again. He had already established a relationship.
Protocol dictated the decoy in the Chrysler would have gotten off a last-minute warning he was about to be shut down. In which case the three guys would assume he would rat them out. That would be the commonsense operational baseline. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Not just Reacher’s strategy. Now they would make their own arrangements. A crowded public building was a good first step. It would give them breathing space. Because the cops would be cautious.
But worst case, it was also a good second step. And third, and fourth. It could withstand a siege. It held a plentiful supply of hostages. Maybe they would choose the city employees first. For extra leverage. A long, tense standoff. TV cameras in the streets. Negotiators on the phone. Pizza sent in, and the oldest librarian sent out in return.
How likely was that?
Not very.
But, plan for the worst.
We don’t want trouble here .
Better to nip it in the bud.
Reacher came three steps down. Loud on the stone. A certain tempo. The three guys looked up. At first out of habit and instinct, and then surprise, and then wary recognition.
Reacher held up his right hand. Knuckles out. Which seemed to mean nothing to them. Maybe they hadn’t drawn the same conclusion as Amos and Shaw. Maybe they hadn’t gone as far in their reasoning. It seemed they preferred to rely on basic biometric data, including height and weight, and eyes and hair, and last seen wearing. Which in Reacher’s case was a combination unlikely to recur frequently in nature.
Hence the recognition. It was wary because they were out on a limb. Their mission had already failed. It could only get worse. But they were trained not to quit. That kind of guy. Some kind of ancient competitive instinct. Which is why Reacher stayed on the stairs. They had to look up. And he was bigger than them anyway. Let their ancient competitive instincts deal with that.
All around them people melted away, instantly, like oil and water. A different kind of ancient instinct. Reacher had seen it a hundred times. On sidewalks outside bars. On dance floors. There would be a crackle of aggression, and suddenly a vast hole would open up. Suddenly there would be a wide perimeter. Which is exactly what happened. Suddenly the lobby was empty. No one was there. Except the four interested parties. Three downstairs, and one halfway up.
They had left their guns in the truck, Reacher thought. When they abandoned ship. Their overalls were tight. Made for much smaller men. The fabric was stretched. Any heavy metal objects would stand out in their pockets. Clear as day. Like an X-ray. They had nothing. Up close it was obvious.
/> They took another step. Reacher saw sudden inspiration in their eyes. Sudden delight. He knew why. For them he was two birds with one stone. He was a civilian hostage, to guarantee their passage out of town, and he was also the prize their bosses had demanded in the first place. He was good news on both ends of the deal.
But then they hesitated. Again Reacher knew why. They had left their guns in the truck. They had to execute an unarmed capture. An uphill three-on-one assault. No great tactical difficulty. The problem lay in the casualty estimate. Which was likely to run around 33 percent. Which was easy to write down in a war plans memo, calmly, dispassionately, in bureaucratic language. But which was hard to contemplate up close and personal. When the war plan was you. The nearest guy would get kicked in the face. No doubt about that. They knew. Not their first rodeo. Missing teeth, a busted jaw. Who wanted to be the nearest guy?
They waited.
Reacher helped them out. He came down one more step. A subtle difference. Still higher, still bigger, but closer. Maybe close enough to swarm. All three together, all at once. So much press and crowding there wouldn’t really be a nearest guy. Or a farthest guy, or a guy in the middle. They would all be one single unit, like a new species of animal, huge, weighing six hundred pounds, with six hands and six feet.
Which all might have worked, if Reacher had stayed down a step. But he didn’t. They charged and he stepped back up to where he was before, and he kicked the nearest guy in the face. And then he twisted and hit the left-hand guy with his elbow, and twisted again and hit the right-hand guy with the same elbow coming back. Gravity and New Hampshire granite finished the job. All three guys went down backward in a slack tangle and rattled their bones and cracked their heads. Afterward the last one looked best off. He was still moving. So Reacher stepped down and kicked him in the head. Just once. The irreducible number. But hard. To discourage further participation.
Then the lobby door opened and Brenda Amos walked in.
Chapter 27
Amos was in plain clothes, obviously, being a detective, but more than that she was acting a part. She wasn’t a cop, creeping in slow, forewarned and forearmed. She was a regular person, breezing in fast, without a care in the world. She was coming in undercover. No doubt she had volunteered. Or even insisted. Why not? Someone had to clean up someone else’s mess. She had been an MP. What else was she good for? She was carrying a purse. It looked expensive. Probably a knockoff seized from a market. In it would be her badge and her gun. Maybe a spare magazine. But on the outside there was no suggestion. She was just a lady who lunched, come in to borrow a book. She was bright, and vague, and cheerful.
Then she wasn’t.
She stopped.
Reacher said, “I guess this seems like a coincidence.”
She looked at the guys on the floor.
Then at him.
She didn’t speak. He knew why. She didn’t know which feeling was uppermost. Was she mad or glad? Both, of course. She was mad at him, for sure, one hundred percent, but also her problems were solved now, because under the new relative circumstances her inadequate four-man crew was suddenly as good as an armored division. All they had to do was put cuffs on three groaning and dizzy men. Which made her glad. With exactly equal intensity. A full-on hundred percent. Which made her mad all over again, this time at herself, for being glad about such a terrible thing.
“I apologize,” Reacher said. “I needed to find out about a bird. I’m going now.”
“You need to,” she said.
“Apologize?”
“To go now,” she said. “This was nice, but dangerous. They’ll react.”
“Because they have a code?”
“Next time they’ll send someone better.”
“I would hope.”
“I’m serious,” she said. “Not good for you, not good for me.”
“I got what I need,” he said. “I’m out of here.”
“How?”
“In the Subaru. It’s waiting for me. At least it was five minutes ago. You might have scared it away. Like last time.”
Amos took a radio from her bag and called in the question. A second later a voice that could have been Davison’s cut in on a blast of static and said, yes, the Subaru was still at the curb, engine off, driver behind the wheel. She thanked him and clicked off. She looked at the guys on the floor again.
She said, “Why did they come in here?”
“I’m hoping it was to find a bathroom where they could strip off their jump suits. Then they could have scattered three different directions, looking normal in civilian clothes. They might have sown some confusion. That was the percentage play. But in case they had something worse in mind, I figured it would be safer all around if I got my retaliation in first.”
Amos said nothing. He knew why. Mad or glad, still not sure. Then she got back on the radio and ordered all four of the street cops to head for the library. As fast as possible. Repeat, abandon current positions, hustle straight inside the building.
Then to Reacher she said, “And you go get in the Subaru, right now this minute.”
“And get out of town?”
“By the fastest possible route.”
“And never come back?”
She paused.
“Not soon,” she said.
He stepped over an arm and a leg and went out the door he had come in through. He walked the same paved path, past people strolling, and sitting on benches, and lying flat on the grass. He went out the gate and crossed the sidewalk to the Subaru. He tapped on the glass, politely, and then he opened the door and got in.
Burke asked, “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“It was a rough-legged hawk,” Reacher said.
“I’m glad you know now.”
“Thank you.”
“I saw cops in the gardens. Just now. First time ever. Guys running in from all sides. Just when I told you it never happens.”
“Maybe there was a big emergency. Maybe there was an unpaid fine.”
“I’ll drive you to the highway now, if you like.”
“No,” Reacher said. “I’m going back to Ryantown. One last look. You shouldn’t come with me. You can let me out at the end of the road. You shouldn’t be involved.”
“Neither should you. Not there, of all places. They’ll be waiting.”
“I would hope,” Reacher said again. “I more or less promised I would come. I like to be taken as a man of his word.”
“The highway would be better.”
“I’m guessing you didn’t always think so. A couple times, at least. Maybe more. At various points in your life. Starting maybe forty years ago.”
Burke didn’t answer. He started the car and pulled out in the traffic. He made a turn that Reacher thought was right for Ryantown. He settled in. He felt the snap of new paper in his back pants pocket. The note from the librarian. The ornithologist. His name and number. From the university, down in Durham.
He fished around and pulled it out.
He said, “Do you have a cell phone?”
“It’s an old one,” Burke said.
“Does it work?”
“Most of the time.”
“May I borrow it?”
Burke found it in his pocket, and handed it over, blind, his eyes on the road. Reacher took it. It was an old one for sure. Not like a tiny flat screen TV. It had real buttons. It was shaped like a miniature coffin, and it was as thick as a candy bar. He got it working. The signal was good. They were still in town. He dialed the ornithologist’s number. Down in Durham. It rang and rang, and then an assistant answered. The guy was in a meeting. Couldn’t be disturbed. Reacher left a message. Ryantown, the hawk, the rat poison theory, and how the S. of S. and W. Reacher was his father. He said the number he was on might be good for another hour or two. After that, maybe they could catch up some other time.
He clicked off, and gave the phone back to Burke.
Who said, “It might have been tin causing th
e problem, you know, not rat poison.”
“The birds came back at the height of production. During the war. When the mill was running full blast night and day.”
“Exactly. When the government was the customer. Quality was carefully monitored. Impurities were not allowed. The process was cleaned up considerably. And efficiency was encouraged, too. There was much less waste.”
“I think it was the rat poison.”
“Because your dad wrote it.”
“Because it makes sense.”
“Why would the government take all the rat poison in the first place?”
“I know the end of the movie,” Reacher said. “The military foresaw sooner or later it would require immense storage facilities, literally hundreds of square miles in hundreds of countries, full of food and bales of clothing, all the things that rodents like, so someone ordered ahead, plus hundreds of thousands of other weird items they thought they could or might possibly, conceivably one day need. That’s what the military does. That’s what it’s good at. Some of that stuff is still there today, all around the world.”
They drove on, out of the woods, past the first of the horse fields.
—
The fourth arrival was as complex as the second. Once again it involved private air transportation. Which at a certain level was still as anonymous as hailing a cab. Ironically not at the top, with the glossy Gulfstreams and Learjets and executive airports, but down on the grimy bottom rung, with grass fields and short-hop prop-driven puddle-jumpers, as battered as city taxis, resprayed just as many times, but which flew below a certain altitude, literally, where there were no logs or reports or flight plans or manifests. Everything was visual. No reason to talk to a tower. No requirement to have a radio, even.
