Persuader (Jack Reacher #7)

Persuader (Jack Reacher #7) Page 10

Time. Distance divided by speed adjusted for direction equals time. Either I had enough, or I had none at all. I didn't know which it would be. The bodyguards had been held in the Massachusetts motel where we planned the original eight-second sting. Which was less than two hundred miles south. That much, I knew for sure. Those were facts. The rest was pure speculation. But I could put together some kind of a likely scenario. They had broken out of the motel and stolen a government Taurus. Then they had driven like hell for maybe an hour, breathless with panic. They had wanted to get well clear before they did another thing. They might have even gotten a little lost, way out there in the wilds. Then they had gotten their bearings and hit the highway. Accelerated north. Then they had calmed down, checked the view behind, slowed up, stayed legal, and started looking for a phone. But by then Duffy had already killed the lines. She had acted fast. So their first stop represented a waste of time. Ten minutes, maybe, to allow for slowing down, parking, calling the house, calling the cell, starting up again, rejoining the highway traffic. Then they would have done it all again a second time at the next rest area. They would have blamed the first failure on a random technical hitch. Another ten minutes. After that, either they would have seen the pattern, or they would have figured they were getting close enough just to press on regardless. Or both.

Beginning to end, a total of four hours, maybe. But when did those four hours start? I had no idea. That was clear. Obviously somewhere between four hours ago and, say, thirty minutes ago. So either I had enough time or no time at all.

I came out of the bathroom fast and checked the window. The rain had stopped. It was night outside. The lights along the wall were on. They were haloed with mist. Beyond them was absolute darkness. No headlights in the distance. I headed downstairs. Found Beck in the hallway. He was still prodding at his Nokia, trying to get it to work.

"I'm going out," I said. "Up the road a little."

"Why?"

"I don't like this thing with the phones. Could be nothing, could be something."

"Something like what?"

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe somebody's coming. You just got through telling me how many people you got on your back."

"We've got a wall and a gate."

"You got a boat?"

"No," he said. "Why?"

"If they get as far as the gate, you're going to need a boat. They could sit there and starve you out."

He said nothing.

"I'll take the Saab," I said.

"Why?"

Because it's lighter than the Cadillac.

"Because I want to leave the Cadillac for you," I said. "It's bigger."

"What are you going to do?"

"Whatever I need to," I said. "I'm your head of security now. Maybe nothing's happening, but if it is, then I'm going to try to take care of it for you."

"What do I do?"

"You keep a window open and listen," I said. "At night with all this water around, you'll hear me from a couple miles away if I'm shooting. If you do, put everybody in the Cadillac and get the hell out. Drive fast. Don't stop. I'll hold them off long enough for you to get past. Have you got someplace else to go?"

He nodded. Didn't tell me where.

"So go there," I said. "If I make it, I'll get to the office. I'll wait there, in the car. You can check there later."

"OK," he said.

"Now call Paulie on the internal phone and tell him to stand by to let me through the gate."

"OK," he said again.

I left him there in the hallway. Walked out into the night. I detoured around the courtyard wall and retrieved my bundle from its hole. Carried it back to the Saab and put it on the rear seat. Then I slid into the front and fired up the engine and backed out. Drove slow around the carriage circle and accelerated down the drive. The lights on the wall were bright in the distance. I could see Paulie at the gate. I slowed a little and timed it so I didn't have to stop. I went straight through. Drove west, staring through the windshield, looking for headlight beams coming toward me.

I drove four miles, and then I saw a government Taurus. It was parked on the shoulder. Facing toward me. No lights. The old guy was sitting behind the wheel. I killed my lights and slowed and stopped window to window with him. Wound down my glass. He did the same. Aimed a flashlight and a gun at my face until he saw who I was. Then he put them both away.

"The bodyguards are out," he said.

I nodded. "I figured. When?"

"Close to four hours ago."

I glanced ahead, involuntarily. No time.

"We got two men down," he said.

"Killed?"

He nodded. Said nothing.

"Did Duffy report it?"

"She can't," he said. "Not yet. We're off the books. This whole situation isn't even happening."

"She'll have to report it," I said. "It's two guys."

"She will," he said. "Later. After you deliver. Because the objectives are right back in place again. She needs Beck for justification, now more than ever."

"How did it go down?"

He shrugged. "They bided their time. Two of them, four of us. Should have been easy. But our boys got sloppy, I guess. It's tough, locking people down in a motel."

"Which two got it?"

"The kids who were in the Toyota."

I said nothing. It had lasted roughly eighty-four hours. Three and a half days. Actually a little better than I had expected, at the start.

"Where is Duffy now?" I asked.

"We're all fanned out," he said. "She's up in Portland with Eliot."

"She did good with the phones."

He nodded. "Real good. She cares about you."

"How long are they off?"

"Four hours. That's all she could get. So they'll be back on soon."

"I think they'll come straight here."

"Me too," he said. "That's why I came straight here."

"Close to four hours, they'll be off the highway by now. So I guess the phones don't matter anymore."

"That's how I figure it."

"Got a plan?" I said.

"I was waiting for you. We figured you'd make the connection."

"Did they get guns?"

"Two Glocks," he said. "Full mags."

Then he paused a beat. Looked away.

"Less four shots fired at the scene," he said. "That's how it was described to us. Four shots, two guys. They were all head shots."

"Won't be easy."

"It never is," he said.

"We need to find a place."

I told him to leave his car where it was and get in with me. He came around and slid into the passenger seat. He was wearing the same raincoat Duffy had been wearing in the coffee shop. He had reclaimed it. We drove another mile, and then I started looking for a place. I found one where the road narrowed sharply and went into a long gentle curve. The blacktop was built up a little, like a shallow causeway. The shoulders were less than a foot wide and fell away fast into rocky ground. I stopped the car and then turned it sharply and backed it up and pulled forward again until it was square across the road. We got out and checked. It was a good roadblock. There was no room to get around it. But it was a very obvious roadblock, like I knew it would be. The two guys would come tearing around the curve and jam on the brakes and then start backing up and shooting.

"We need to roll it over," I said. "Like a bad accident."

I took my bundle out of the back seat. Put it down on the shoulder, just in case. Then I made the old guy put his coat down on the road. I emptied my pockets and put mine beyond his. I wanted to roll the Saab onto the coats. I needed to bring it back relatively undamaged. Then we stood shoulder to shoulder with our backs to the car and started rocking it. It's easy enough to turn a car over. I've seen it done all over the world. You let the tires and the suspension help you. You rock it, and then you bounce it, and then you keep it going until it's coming right up in the air, and then you time it just right and flip it all the way over. The old guy was strong. He did his part. We got it bouncing through about forty-five degrees and then we spun around together and hooked our hands under the sill and heaved it all the way onto its side. Then we kept the momentum going and tipped it right onto its roof.

The coats meant it slid around easily enough without scratching, so we positioned it just right. Then I opened the upside-down driver's door and told the old guy to get in and play dead for the second time in three days. He threaded his way inside and lay down on his front, half-in and half-out, with his arms thrown up above his head. In the dark, he looked pretty convincing. In the harsh shadows of bright headlights he would look no worse. The coats weren't visible, unless you really looked for them. I moved away and retrieved my bundle and climbed down the rocks beyond the shoulder and crouched low.

Then we waited.

It seemed like a long wait. Five minutes, six, seven. I collected rocks, three of them, each a little larger than my palm. I watched the horizon to the west. The sky was still full of low clouds and I figured headlight beams would reflect off them as they bounced and dipped. But the horizon stayed black. And quiet. I could hear nothing at all except the distant surf and the old guy breathing.

"They got to be coming," he called.

"They'll come," I said.

We waited. The night stayed dark and quiet.

"What's your name?" I called.

"Why?" he called back.

"I just want to know," I said. "Doesn't seem right that I've killed you twice and I don't even know your name."

"Terry Villanueva," he called.

"Is that Spanish?"

"Sure is."

"You don't look Spanish."

"I know," he said. "My mom was Irish, my dad was Spanish. But my brother and I took after our mom. My brother changed his name to Newton. Like the old scientist, or the suburb. Because that's what Villanueva means, new town. But I stuck with the Spanish. Out of respect for the old guy."

"Where was this?"

"South Boston," he said. "Wasn't easy, years ago, a mixed marriage and all."

We went quiet again. I watched and listened. Nothing. Villanueva shifted his position. He didn't look comfortable.

"You're a trooper, Terry," I called.

"Old school," he called back.

Then I heard a car.

And Villanueva's cell phone rang.

The car was maybe a mile away. I could hear the faint feathery sound of a faraway V-6 motor revving fast. I could see the distant glow of headlights trapped between the road and the clouds. Villanueva's phone was set to ring with an insane speeded-up version of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D. He stopped playing dead and scrambled halfway up to knees and dragged it out of his pocket. Thumbed a button and killed the music and answered it. It was a tiny thing, lost in his hand. He held it to his ear. He listened for a second. I heard him say, "OK." Then, "We're doing it right now." Then, "OK." Then he said "OK" again and clicked the phone off and lay back down. His cheek was on the blacktop. The phone was half-in and half-out of his hand.

"Service was just restored," he called to me.

And a new clock started ticking. I glanced to my right into the east. Beck would keep trying the lines. I guessed as soon as he got a dial tone he would come out to find me and tell me the panic was over. I glanced to my left into the west. I could hear the car, loud and clear. The headlight beams bounced and swung, bright in the darkness.

"Thirty seconds," I called.

The sound got louder. I could hear the tires and the automatic gearbox and the engine all as separate noises. I ducked lower. Ten seconds, eight, five. The car raced around the corner and its lights whipped across my hunched back. Then I heard the thump of hydraulics and the squeal of brake rotors and the howl of locked rubber grinding on the blacktop and the car came to a complete stop, slightly off line, twenty feet from the Saab.

I looked up. It was a Taurus, plain blue paint, gray in the cloudy moonlight. A cone of white light ahead of it. Brake lights flaring red behind. Two guys in it. Their faces were lit by their lights bouncing back off the Saab. They held still for a second. Stared forward. They recognized the Saab. They must have seen it a hundred times. I saw the driver move. Heard him shove the gearshift forward into Park. The brake lights died. The engine idled. I could smell exhaust fumes and the heat from under the hood.

The two guys opened their doors in unison. Got out and stood up, behind the doors. They had the Glocks in their hands. They waited. They came out from behind the doors. Walked forward, slowly, with the guns held low. The headlight beams lit them brightly from the waist down. Their upper bodies were harder to see. But I could make out their features. Their shapes. They were the bodyguards. No doubt about it. They were young and heavy, tense and wary. They were dressed in dark suits, creased and crumpled and stained. They had no ties. Their shirts had turned from white to gray.

They squatted next to Villanueva. He was in their shadow. They moved a little and turned his face into the light. I knew they had seen him before. Just a brief glimpse as they passed him, outside the college gate, eighty-four hours ago. I didn't expect them to remember him. And I don't think they did. But they had been fooled once, and they didn't want to get fooled again. They were very cautious. They didn't start in with immediate first aid. They just squatted there and did nothing. Then the one nearest me stood up.

By then I was five feet from him. I had my right hand cupped around a rock. It was a little bigger than a softball. I swung my arm, wide and flat and fast, like I was going to slap him in the face. The momentum would have taken my arm off at the shoulder if I had missed. But I didn't miss. The rock hit him square on the temple and he went straight down like a weight had fallen on him from above. The other guy was faster. He scrambled away and twisted to his feet. Villanueva flailed at his legs and missed them. The guy danced away and whipped around. His Glock came up toward me. All I wanted to do was stop him firing it so I hurled the rock straight at his head. He spun away again and took it square in the back of his neck, right where his cranium curved in to meet his spine. It was like a ferocious punch. It pitched him straight forward. He dropped the Glock and went down on his face like a tree and lay still.

I stood there and watched the darkness in the east. Saw nothing. No lights. Heard nothing, except the distant sea. Villanueva crawled out of the upside-down car on his hands and knees and crouched over the first guy.

"This one's dead," he said.

I checked, and he was. Hard to survive a ten-pound rock sideways into the temple. His skull was neatly caved in and his eyes were wide open and there was nothing much happening behind them. I checked the pulses in his neck and his wrist and went to look at the second guy. Crouched down over him. He was dead, too. His neck was broken, but good. I wasn't very surprised. The rock weighed ten pounds and I had pitched it like Nolan Ryan.

"Two birds, one stone," Villanueva said.

I said nothing.

"What?" he said. "You wanted to take them back into custody? After what they did to us? This was suicide by cop, plain and simple."

I said nothing.

"You got a problem?" Villanueva said.

I wasn't us. I wasn't DEA, and I wasn't a cop. But I thought about Powell's private signal to me: My eyes only, 10-2, 10-28. These guys need to be dead, make no mistake about it. And I was prepared to take Powell's word for it. That's what unit loyalties are for. Villanueva had his, and I had mine.

"No problem," I said.

I found the rock where it had come to rest and rolled it back to the shoulder. Then I got to my feet and walked away and leaned in and killed the Taurus's lights. Waved Villanueva over toward me.

"We need to be real quick now," I said. "Use your phone and get Duffy to bring Eliot down here. We need him to take this car back."

Villanueva used a speed dial and started talking and I found the two Glocks on the road and stuffed them back into the dead guys' pockets, one each. Then I stepped over to the Saab. Getting it the right way up again was going to be a whole lot harder than turning it over. For a second I worried that it was going to be impossible. The coats killed any friction against the road. If we shoved it, it was just going to slide on its roof. I closed the upside-down driver's door and waited.

"They're coming," Villanueva called.

"Help me with this," I called back.

We manhandled the Saab on the coats back toward the house as far as we could get it. It slid off Villanueva's coat onto mine. Slid to the far edge of mine and then stopped dead when the metal caught against the road.

"It's going to get scratched," Villanueva said.

I nodded.

"It's a risk," I said. "Now get in their Taurus and bump it."

He drove their Taurus forward until its front bumper touched the Saab. It connected just above the waistline, against the B-pillar between the doors. I signaled him for more gas and the Saab jerked sideways and the roof ground against the blacktop. I climbed up on the Taurus's hood and pushed hard against the Saab's sill. Villanueva kept the Taurus coming, slow and steady. The Saab jacked up on its side, forty degrees, fifty, sixty. I braced my feet against the base of the Taurus's windshield and walked my hands down the Saab's flank and then put them flat on its roof. Villanueva hit the gas and my spine compressed about an inch and the Saab rolled all the way over and landed on its wheels with a thump. It bounced once and Villanueva braked hard and I fell forward off the hood and banged my head on the Saab's door. Ended up flat on the road under the Taurus's front fender. Villanueva backed it away and stopped and hauled himself out.

"You OK?" he said.

I just lay there. My head hurt. I had hit it hard.

"How's the car?" I said.

"Good news or bad news?"

"Good first," I said.

"The side mirrors are OK," he said. "They'll spring back."

"But?"

"Big gouges in the paint," he said. "Small dent in the door. I think you did it with your head. The roof is a little caved-in, too."

"I'll say I hit a deer."

"I'm not sure they have deer out here."

"A bear, then," I said. "Or whatever. A beached whale. A sea monster. A giant squid. A huge woolly mammoth recently released from a melting glacier."

"You OK?" he said again.

"I'll live," I said.

I rolled over and got up on all fours. Pushed myself upright, slow and easy.

"Can you take the bodies?" he said. "Because we can't."

"Then I guess I'll have to," I said.

We opened the Saab's rear hatch with difficulty. It was a little misaligned because the roof was a little distorted. We carried the dead guys one at a time and folded them into the load space. They almost filled it. I went back to the shoulder and retrieved my bundle and carried it over and put it in on top of them. There was a parcel shelf that would hide everything from view. It took both of us to close the hatch. We had to take a side each and lean down hard. Then we picked up our coats off the road and shook them out and put them on. They were damp and crushed and a little torn up in places.

"You OK?" he asked again.

"Get in the car," I said.

We sprung the door mirrors back into place and climbed in together. I turned the key. It wouldn't start. I tried again. No luck. In between the two tries I heard the fuel pump whining.

"Leave the ignition on for a moment," Villanueva said. "The gasoline drained out of the engine. When it was upside down. Wait a moment, let it pump back in."

I waited and it started on the third attempt. So I put it in gear and got it straight on the road and drove the mile back to where we had left the other Taurus. The one that Villanueva had arrived in. It was waiting right there for us on the shoulder, gray and ghostly in the moonlight.

"Now go back and wait for Duffy and Eliot," I said. "Then I suggest you get the hell out of here. I'll see you all later."

He shook my hand.

"Old school," he said.

"Ten-eighteen," I said. 10-18 was MP radio code for assignment completed. But I guess he didn't know that, because he just looked at me.

"Stay safe," I said.

He shook his head.

"Voice mail," he said.

"What about it?"

"When a cell phone is out of service you usually get routed to voice mail."

"The whole tower was down."

"But the cell network didn't know that. Far as the machinery knew, Beck just had his individual phone switched off. So they'll have gotten his voice mail. In a central server somewhere. They might have left him a message."

"What would have been the point?"

Villanueva shrugged. "They might have told him they were on their way back. You know, maybe they expected him to check his messages right away. They might have left him the whole story. Or maybe they weren't really thinking straight, and they figured it was like a regular answering machine, and they were saying, Hey, Mr. Beck, pick up, will you?"

I said nothing.

"They might have left their voices on there," he said. "Today. That's the bottom line."

"OK," I said.

"What are you going to do?"

"Start shooting," I said. "Shoes, voice mail, he's one step away now."

Villanueva shook his head.

"You can't," he said. "Duffy needs to bring him in. It's the only way she can save her own ass now."

I looked away. "Tell her I'll do my best. But if it's him or me, he goes down."

Villanueva said nothing.

"What?" I said. "Now I'm a human sacrifice?"

"Just do your best," he said. "Duffy's a good kid."

"I know she is," I said.

He hauled himself out of the Saab, one hand on the door frame, the other on the seat back. He stepped across and got into his own car and drove away, slow and quiet, no lights. I saw him wave. I watched until he was lost to sight and then I backed up and turned and got the Saab straddling the middle of the road, facing west. I figured when Beck came out to find me he would think I was doing a good defensive job.

But either Beck wasn't trying the phones very often or he wasn't thinking very much about me because I sat there for ten minutes with no sign of him. I spent part of the time testing my earlier hypothesis that a person who hides a gun under the spare wheel might also hide notes under the carpets. The carpets were already loose and they hadn't been helped by being turned upside down. But there was nothing at all under them, except for rust stains and a damp layer of acoustical padding that looked like it had been made out of old red and gray sweaters. No notes. Bad hypothesis. I put the carpets back in place as well as I could and kicked them around until they were reasonably flat.

Then I got out and checked the exterior damage. Nothing I could do about the scratches in the paint. They were bad, but not disastrous. Nothing I could do about the dent in the door either, unless I wanted to take it apart and press the panel out. The roof was a little caved in. I remembered it as having a definite dome shape. Now it was fairly flat. But I figured I could maybe do something about that from the inside. I climbed into the back seat and put both palms up flat on the headliner and pushed hard. I was rewarded by two sounds. One of them was the pop of sheet metal springing back into shape. The other was the crackle of paper.

It wasn't a new car, so the headliner wasn't the one-piece molded mouse-fur thing that everybody uses now. It was the old-fashioned cream vinyl thing with the side-to-side wire ribs that pleated it into three accordion sections. The edges were trapped under a black rubber gasket that ran all around the roof. The vinyl was a little puckered in the front corner, over the driver's seat. The gasket looked a little loose there. I guessed a person could stress the vinyl by pushing up on it and then peel it out from under the gasket. Then tug on it until it pulled away all along its length. That would give sideways access into any one of the three pleated sections the person chose to use. Then it would take time and fingernails to get the vinyl back under the gasket. A little care would make the intrusion hard to see, in a car as worn as that one.

I leaned forward and checked the section that ran above the front seats. I stabbed the vinyl upward until I felt the underside of the roof, all the way across the width of the car. Nothing there. Nothing in the next section, either. But the section above the rear seats had paper hidden in it. I could even judge the size and weight. Legal-size paper, maybe eight or ten stacked sheets.

I got out of the back and slid into the driver's seat and looked at the gasket. Put some tension into the vinyl and picked at the edge. I got a fingernail under the rubber and eased it down into a little mouth a half-inch long. Scraped my other hand sideways across the roof and the vinyl obediently pulled out from under the gasket and gave me enough of a hole to get my thumb into.

I worked my thumb backward and I had gotten about nine inches unzipped when I was suddenly lit up from behind. Bright light, harsh shadows. The road came in over my right shoulder so I glanced across at the passenger-door mirror. The glass was cracked. It was filled with multiple sets of bright headlights. I saw the etched warning: OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. I twisted around in the seat and saw a single set of high beams sweeping urgently left and right through the curves. A quarter-mile back. Coming on fast. I dropped my window an inch and heard the distant hiss of fat tires and the growl of a quiet V-8 kicked down into second gear. The Cadillac, in a hurry. I stabbed the vinyl back into place. No time to secure it under the gasket. I just shoved it upward and hoped it would stay there.

The Cadillac came right up behind me and stopped hard. The headlights stayed on. I watched in the mirror and saw the door open and Beck step out. I put my hand in my pocket and clicked the Beretta to fire. Duffy or no Duffy, I wasn't interested in a long discussion about voice mail. But Beck had nothing in his hands. No gun, no Nokia. He stepped forward and I slid out and met him level with the Saab's rear bumper. I wanted to keep him away from the dents and the scratches. It put him about eighteen inches from the guys he had sent down to pick up his son.

"Phones are back on," he said.

"The cell too?" I said.

He nodded.

"But look at this," he said.

He took the little silver phone out of his pocket. I kept my hand around the Beretta, out of sight. It would blow a hole in my coat, but it would blow a bigger hole in his coat. He passed me the phone. I took it, left-handed. Held it low, in the spread of the Cadillac's headlights. Looked at the screen. I didn't know what I was looking for. Some cell phones I had seen signaled a voice mail message with a little pictogram of an envelope. Some used a little symbol made up of two small circles joined together by a bar at the bottom, like a reel-to-reel tape, which I thought was weird, because I guessed most cell phone users had never seen a reel-to-reel tape in their lives. And I was pretty sure that the cell phone companies didn't record the messages themselves on reel-to-reel tape. I guessed they did it digitally, inert inside some kind of a solid-state circuit. But then, the signs at railroad crossings still show the sort of locomotive that Casey Jones would have been proud of.

"See that?" Beck said.

I saw nothing. No envelopes, no reel-to-reel tapes. Just the signal strength bar, and the battery bar, and the menu thing, and the names thing.

"What?" I said.

"The signal strength," he said. "It's only showing three out of five. Normally I get four."

"Maybe the tower was down," I said. "Maybe it powers up again slowly. Some kind of electrical reason."

"You think?"

"There are microwaves involved," I said. "It's probably complicated. You should look again later. Maybe it'll come back up."

I handed the phone back to him, left-handed. He took it and put it away in his pocket, still fretting about it.

"All quiet here?" he said.

"As the grave," I said.

"So it was nothing," he said. "Not something."

"I guess," I said. "I'm sorry."

"No, I appreciate your caution. Really."

"Just doing my job," I said.

"Let's go get dinner," he said.

He went back to the Cadillac and got in. I clicked the Beretta back to safe and slid into the Saab. He backed up and turned in the road and waited for me. I guessed he wanted to go in through the gate together, so Paulie would only have to open and close it once. We drove back in convoy, four short miles. The Saab rode badly and the headlights pointed way up at an angle and the steering felt light. There were four hundred pounds of weight in the trunk. And the corner of the headliner fell down when I hit the first bump in the road and flapped in my face the whole way back.

We put the cars in the garages and Beck waited for me in the courtyard. The tide was coming in. I could hear the waves behind the walls. They were dumping huge volumes of water on the rocks. I could feel its impact through the ground. It was a definite physical sensation. Not just sound. I joined Beck and we walked back together and used the front door. The metal detector beeped twice, once for him, once for me. He handed me a set of house keys. I accepted them, like a badge of office. Then he told me dinner would be served in thirty minutes and he invited me to eat it with the family.

I went up to Duke's room and stood at the high window. Five miles to the west, I thought I saw red taillights moving away into the distance. Three pairs of lights. Villanueva and Eliot and Duffy, I hoped, in the government Tauruses. 10-18, assignment completed. But it was hard to be sure if they were real because of the glare from the lights on the wall. They might have been spots in my vision, from fatigue, or from the bang on the head.

I took a fast shower and stole another set of Duke's clothes. Kept my own shoes and jacket on, left my ruined coat in the closet. I didn't check for e-mail. Duffy had been too busy for messages. And at that point we were on the same page, anyway. There was nothing more she could tell me. Pretty soon I would be telling her something, just as soon as I got a chance to rip the headliner out of the Saab.

I wasted the balance of the thirty-minute lull and then walked downstairs. Found the family dining room. It was huge. There was a long rectangular table in it. It was oak, heavy, solid, not stylish. It would have seated twenty people. Beck was at the head. Elizabeth was all the way at the other end. Richard was alone on the far side. The place set for me put me directly opposite him, with my back to the door. I thought about asking him to swap with me. I don't like sitting with my back to a door. But I decided against it and just sat down.

Paulie wasn't there. Clearly he hadn't been invited. The maid wasn't there either, of course. The cook was having to do all the scut work, and she didn't look very pleased about it. But she had done a good job with the food. We started with French onion soup. It was pretty authentic. My mother wouldn't have approved, but there are always twenty million individual Frenchwomen who think they alone possess the perfect recipe.

"Tell us about your service career," Beck said to me, like he wanted to make conversation. He wasn't going to talk about business. That was clear. Not in front of the family. I guessed maybe Elizabeth knew more than was good for her, but Richard seemed fairly oblivious. Or maybe he was just blocking it out. What had he said? Bad things don't happen unless you choose to recall them?

"Nothing much to tell," I said. I didn't want to talk about it. Bad things had happened, and I didn't choose to recall them.

"There must be something," Elizabeth said.

They were all three looking at me, so I shrugged and gave them a story about checking a Pentagon budget and seeing eight-thousand-dollar charges for maintenance tools called RTAFAs. I told them I was bored enough to be curious and had made a couple of calls and been told the acronym stood for rotational torque-adjustable fastener applicators. I told them I had tracked one down and found a three-dollar screwdriver. That had led to three-thousand-dollar hammers, thousand-dollar toilet seats, the whole nine yards. It's a good story. It's the sort of thing that suits any audience. Most people respond to the audacity and anti-government types get to seethe. But it isn't true. It happened, I guess, but not to me. It was a different department entirely.

"Have you killed people?" Richard asked.

Four in the last three days, I thought.

"Don't ask questions like that," Elizabeth said.

"The soup is good," Beck said. "Maybe not enough cheese."

"Dad," Richard said.

"What?"

"You need to think about your arteries. They're going to get all clogged up."

"They're my arteries."

"And you're my dad."

They glanced at each other. They both smiled shy smiles. Father and son, best buddies. Ambivalence. It was all set to be a long meal. Elizabeth changed the subject away from cholesterol. She started talking about the Portland Museum of Art instead. She said it had an I. M. Pei building and a collection of American and Impressionist masters. I couldn't tell if she was trying to educate me or to tempt Richard to get out of the house and do something. I tuned her out. I wanted to get to the Saab. But I couldn't, right then. So I tried to predict exactly what I would find there. Like a game. I heard Leon Garber in my head: Think about everything you've seen and everything you've heard. Work the clues. I hadn't heard much. But I had seen a lot of things. I guessed they were all clues, of a sort. The dining table, for instance. The whole house, and everything in it. The cars. The Saab was a piece of junk. The Cadillac and the Lincolns were nice automobiles, but they weren't Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. The furniture was all old and dull and solid. Not cheap, but then, it didn't represent current expenditure anyway. It was all paid for long ago. What had Eliot said in Boston? About the LA gangbanger? His profits must run to millions of dollars a week. He lives like an emperor. Beck was supposed to be a couple of rungs up the ladder. But Beck didn't live like an emperor. Why not? Because he was a cautious Yankee, unimpressed by consumer baubles?

"Look," he said.

I surfaced and saw him holding his cell phone out to me. I took it from him and looked at the screen. The signal strength was back up to four bars.

"Microwaves," I said. "Maybe they ramp up slowly."

Then I looked again. No envelopes, no reel-to-reel tapes. No voice-mail messages. But it was a tiny phone and I have big thumbs and I accidentally touched the up-down arrow key underneath the screen. The display instantly changed to a list of names. His virtual phone book, I guessed. The screen was so small it could show only three contacts at a time. At the top was house. Then came gate. Third on the list was Xavier. I stared at it so hard the room went silent around me and blood roared in my ears.

"The soup was very good," Richard said.

I handed the phone back to Beck. The cook reached across in front of me and took my bowl away.

The first time I ever heard the name Xavier was the sixth time I ever saw Dominique Kohl. It was seventeen days after we danced in the Baltimore bar. The weather had broken. The temperature had plummeted and the skies were gray and miserable. She was in full dress uniform. For a moment I thought I must have scheduled a performance review and forgotten all about it. But then, I had a company clerk to remind me about stuff like that, and he hadn't mentioned anything.

"You're going to hate this," Kohl said.

"Why? You got promoted and you're shipping out?"

She smiled at that. I realized it had come out as more of a personal compliment than I should have risked.

"I found the bad guy," she said.

"How?"

"Exemplary application of relevant skills," she said.

I looked at her. "Did we schedule a performance review?"

"No, but I think we should."

"Why?"

"Because I found the bad guy. And I think performance reviews always go better just after a big break in a case."

"You're still working with Frasconi, right?"

"We're partners," she said, which wasn't strictly an answer to the question.

"Is he helping?"

She made a face. "Permission to speak freely?"

I nodded.

"He's a waste of good food," she said.

I nodded again. That was my impression, too. Lieutenant Anthony Frasconi was solid, but he wasn't the crispest shirt in the closet.

"He's a nice man," she said. "I mean, don't get me wrong."

"But you're doing all the work," I said.

She nodded. She was holding the original file, the one that I had given her just after I found out she wasn't a big ugly guy from Texas or Minnesota. It was bulging with her notes.

"You helped, though," she said. "You were right. The document in question is in the newspaper. Gorowski dumps the whole newspaper in a trash can at the parking lot exit. Same can, two Sundays in a row."

"And?"

"And two Sundays in a row the same guy fishes it out again."

I paused. It was a smart plan, except that the idea of fishing around in a garbage can gave it a certain vulnerability. A certain lack of plausibility. The garbage can thing is hard to do, unless you're willing to go the whole way and dress up like a homeless person. And that's hard to do in itself, if you want to be really convincing. Homeless people walk miles, spend all day, check every can along their route. To imitate their behavior plausibly takes infinite time and care.

"What kind of a guy?" I said.

"I know what you're thinking," she said. "Who roots around in trash cans except street people, right?"

"So who does?"

"Imagine a typical Sunday," she said. "A lazy day, you're strolling, maybe the person you're meeting is a little late, maybe the impulse to go out for a walk has turned out to be a little boring. But the sun is shining, and there's a bench to sit on, and you know the Sunday papers are always fat and interesting. But you don't happen to have one with you."

"OK," I said. "I'm imagining."

"Have you noticed how a used newspaper kind of becomes community property? Seen what they do on a train, for instance? Or a subway? A guy reads his paper, leaves it on the seat when he gets out, another guy picks it up right away? He'd rather die than pick up half a candy bar, but he'll pick up a used newspaper with no problem at all?"

"OK," I said.

"Our guy is about forty," she said. "Tall, maybe six-one, trim, maybe one-ninety, short black hair going gray, fairly upmarket. He wears good clothes, chinos, golf shirts, and he kind of saunters through the lot to the can."

"Saunters?"

"It's a word," she said. "Like he's strolling, lost in thought, not a care in the world. Like maybe he's coming back from Sunday brunch. Then he notices the newspaper sitting in the top of the can, and he picks it up and checks the headlines for a moment, and he kind of tilts his head a little and he puts the paper under his arm like he'll read some more of it later and he strolls on."

"Saunters on," I said.

"It's incredibly natural," she said. "I was right there watching it happen and I almost discounted it. It's almost subliminal."

I thought about it. She was right. She was a good student of human behavior. Which made her a good cop. If I ever did actually get around to a performance review, she was going to score off the charts.

"Something else you speculated about," she said. "He saunters on out to the marina and gets on a boat."

"He lives on it?"

"I don't think so," she said. "I mean, it's got bunks and all, but I think it's a hobby boat."

"How do you know it's got bunks?"

"I've been aboard," she said.

"When?"

"The second Sunday," she said. "Don't forget, all I'd seen up to that point was the business with the newspaper. I still hadn't positively identified the document. But he went out on another boat with some other guys, so I checked it out."

"How?"

"Exemplary application of relevant skills," she said. "I wore a bikini."

"Wearing a bikini is a skill?" I said. Then I looked away. In her case, it would be more like world-class performance art.

"It was still hot then," she said. "I blended in with the other yacht bunnies. I strolled out, walked up his little gangplank. Nobody noticed. I picked the lock on the hatch and searched for an hour."

I had to ask.

"How did you conceal lock picks in a bikini?" I said.

"I was wearing shoes," she said.

"Did you find the blueprint?"

"I found all of them."

"Did the boat have a name?"

She nodded. "I traced it. There's a yacht registry for all that stuff."

"So who's the guy?"

"This is the part you're going to hate," she said. "He's a senior Military Intelligence officer. A lieutenant colonel, a Middle East specialist. They just gave him a medal for something he did in the Gulf."

"Shit," I said. "But there might be an innocent explanation."

"There might," she said. "But I doubt it. I just met with Gorowski an hour ago."

"OK," I said. That explained the dress greens. Much more intimidating than wearing a bikini, I guessed. "And?"

"And I made him explain his end of the deal. His little girls are twelve months and two. The two-year-old disappeared for a day, two months ago. She won't talk about what happened to her while she was gone. She just cries a lot. A week later our friend from Military Intelligence showed up. Suggested that the kid's absence could last a lot longer than a day, if daddy didn't play ball. I don't see any innocent explanation for that kind of stuff."

"No," I said. "Nor do I. Who is the guy?"

"His name is Francis Xavier Quinn," she said.

The cook brought the next course, which was some kind of a rib roast, but I didn't really notice it because I was still thinking about Francis Xavier Quinn. Clearly he had come out of the California hospital and left the Quinn part of his name behind him in the trash with his used gowns and his surgical dressings and his John Doe wrist bands. He had just walked away and stepped straight into a new identity, ready made. An identity that he felt comfortable with, one that he would always remember deep down at the primeval level he knew hidden people had to operate on. No longer United States Army Lieutenant Colonel Quinn, F.X., Military Intelligence. From that point on, he was just plain Frank Xavier, anonymous citizen.

"Rare or well?" Beck asked me.

He was carving the roast with one of the black-handled knives from the kitchen. They had been stored in a knife block and I had thought about using one of them to kill him with. The one he was using right then would have been a good choice. It was about ten inches long, and it was razor sharp, judging by how well the meat was slicing. Unless the meat happened to be unbelievably tender.

"Rare," I said. "Thank you."

He carved me two slices and I regretted it instantly. My mind flashed back seven hours to the body bag. I had pulled the zipper down and seen another knife's work. The image was so vivid I could still feel the cold metal tag between my fingers. Then I flashed back ten whole years, right back to the beginning with Quinn, and the loop was complete.

"Horseradish?" Elizabeth said.

I paused. Then I took a spoonful. The old army rule was Eat every time you can, sleep every time you can, because you didn't know when you were going to get another chance to do either. So I shut Quinn out of my mind and helped myself to vegetables and started eating. Restarted thinking. Everything I'd heard, everything I'd seen. I kept coming back to the Baltimore marina in the bright sunlight, and to the envelope and the newspaper. Not this, but that. And to the thing Duffy had said to me: You haven't found anything useful. Not a thing. No evidence at all.

"Have you read Pasternak?" Elizabeth asked me.

"What do you think of Edward Hopper?" Richard asked.

"You think the M16 should be replaced?" Beck said.

I surfaced again. They were all looking at me. It was like they were starved for conversation. Like they were all lonely. I listened to the waves crashing around three sides of the house and understood how they could feel that way. They were very isolated. But that was their choice. I like isolation. I can go three weeks without saying a word.

"I saw Doctor Zhivago at the movies," I said. "I like the Hopper painting with the people in the diner at night."

"Nighthawks," Richard said.

I nodded. "I like the guy on the left, all alone."

"Remember the name of the diner?"

"Phillies," I said. "And I think the M16 is a fine assault rifle."

"Really?" Beck said.

"It does what an assault rifle is supposed to do," I said. "You can't ask for much more than that."

"Hopper was a genius," Richard said.

"Pasternak was a genius," Elizabeth said. "Unfortunately the movie trivialized him. And he hasn't been well translated. Solzhenitsyn is overrated by comparison."

"I guess the M16 is an improved rifle," Beck said.

"Edward Hopper is like Raymond Chandler," Richard said. "He captured a particular time and place. Of course, Chandler was a genius, too. Way better than Hammett."

"Like Pasternak is better than Solzhenitsyn?" his mother said.

They went on like that for a good long time. Day fourteen, a Friday, nearly over, eating a beef dinner with three doomed people, talking about books and pictures and rifles. Not this, but that. I tuned them out again and trawled back ten years and listened to Sergeant First Class Dominique Kohl instead.

"He's a real Pentagon insider," she said to me, the seventh time we met. "Lives close by in Virginia. That's why he keeps his boat up in Baltimore, I guess."

"How old is he?" I asked.

"Forty," she said.

"Have you seen his full record?"

She shook her head. "Most of it is classified."

I nodded. Tried to put the chronology together. A forty-year-old would have been eligible for the last two years of the Vietnam draft, at the age of eighteen or nineteen. But a guy who wound up as an intel light colonel before the age of forty had almost certainly been a college graduate, maybe even a Ph.D., which would have gotten him a deferment. So he probably didn't go to Indochina, which in the normal way of things would have slowed his promotion. No bloody wars, no dread diseases. But his promotion hadn't been slow, because he was a light colonel before the age of forty.

"I know what you're thinking," Kohl said. "How come he's already two whole pay grades above you?"

"Actually I was thinking about you in a bikini."

She shook her head. "No you weren't."

"He's older than me."

"He went up like a bottle rocket."

"Maybe he's smarter than me," I said.

"Almost certainly," she said. "But even so, he's gone real far, real fast."

I nodded.

"Great," I said. "So now we're messing with a big star from the intel community."

"He's got lots of contact with foreigners," she said. "I've seen him with all kinds of people. Israelis, Lebanese, Iraqis, Syrians."

"He's supposed to," I said. "He's a Middle East specialist."

"He comes from California," she said. "His dad was a railroad worker. His mom stayed at home. They lived in a small house in the north of the state. He inherited it, and it's his only asset. And we can assume he's been on military pay since college."

"OK," I said.

"He's a poor boy, Reacher," she said. "So how come he rents a big house in MacLean, Virginia? How come he owns a yacht?"

"Is it a yacht?"

"It's a big sailboat with bedrooms. That's a yacht, right?"

"POV?"

"A brand-new Lexus."

I said nothing.

"Why don't his own people ask these kind of questions?" she said.

"They never do," I said. "Haven't you noticed that? Something can be plain as day and it passes them by."

"I really don't understand how that happens," she said.

I shrugged.

"They're human," I said. "We should cut them some slack. Preconceptions get in the way. They ask themselves how good he is, not how bad he is."

She nodded. "Like I spent two days watching the envelope, not the newspaper. Preconceptions."

"But they should know better."

"I guess."

"Military Intelligence," I said.

"The world's biggest oxymoron," she replied, in the familiar old ritual. "Like safe danger."

"Like dry water," I said.

"Did you enjoy it?" Elizabeth Beck asked me, ten years later.

I didn't answer. Preconceptions get in the way.

"Did you enjoy it?" she asked again.

I looked straight at her. Preconceptions.

"Sorry?" I said. Everything I had heard.

"Dinner," she said. "Did you enjoy it?"

I looked down. My plate was completely empty.

"It was fabulous," I said. Everything I had seen.

"Really?"

"No question," I said. You haven't found anything useful.

"I'm glad," she said.

"Forget Hopper and Pasternak," I said. "And Raymond Chandler. Your cook is a genius."

"You feeling OK?" Beck said. He had left half his meat on his plate.

"Terrific," I said. Not a thing.

"You sure?"

I paused. No evidence at all.

"Yes, I really mean it," I said.

And I really did mean it. Because I knew what was in the Saab. I knew for sure. No doubt about it. So I felt terrific. But I felt a little ashamed, too. Because I had been very, very slow. Painfully slow. Disgracefully slow. It had taken me eighty-six hours. More than three and a half days. I had been every bit as dumb as Quinn's old unit. Something can be plain as day and it passes them by. I turned my head and looked straight at Beck like I was seeing him for the very first time.