Persuader (10 page)

“Bullet,” Duke said.

I turned back and passed it to him.

“Watch,” he said.

He loaded it into the Colt. Jerked his hand to snap the cylinder shut. Squinted in the moonlit grayness and clicked the cylinder around until the loaded chamber was at the ten o’clock position.

“Watch,” he said again.

He pointed the gun with his arm straight, aiming just below horizontal at the flat granite tables where they met the sea. He pulled the trigger. The cylinder turned and the hammer dropped and the gun kicked and flashed and roared. There was a simultaneous spark on the rocks and an unmistakable metallic whang of a ricochet. It feathered away to silence.

The bullet probably skipped a hundred yards out into the Atlantic. Maybe it killed a fish.

“It wasn’t a fake,” he said. “I’m fast enough.”

“OK,” I said.

He opened the cylinder and shook the empty shell case out. It clinked on the rocks by his feet.

“You’re an asshole,” he said. “An asshole cop-killer.”

“Were you a cop?”

He nodded. “Once upon a time.”

“Is Duke your first name or your last?”

“Last.”

“Why does a rug importer need armed security?”

“Like he told you, it’s a rough business. There’s a lot of money in it.”

“You really want me here?”

He shrugged. “I might. If somebody’s sniffing around, we might need some cannon fodder. Better you than me.”

“I saved the kid.”

“So what? Get in line. We’ve all saved the kid, one time or another. Or Mrs. Beck, or Mr.

Beck himself.”

“How many guys have you got?”

“Not enough,” he said. “Not if we’re under attack.”

“What is this, a war?”

He didn’t answer. Just walked past me toward the house. I turned my back on the restless ocean and followed him.

There was nothing doing in the kitchen. The mechanic had disappeared and the cook and the maid were stacking dishes into a machine large enough to do duty in a restaurant. The maid was all fingers and thumbs. She didn’t know what went where. I looked around for coffee. There still wasn’t any. Duke sat down again at the empty deal table. There was no activity. No urgency. I was aware of time slipping away. I didn’t trust Susan Duffy’s estimate of five days’ grace. Five days is a long time when you’re guarding two healthy individuals off the books. I would have been happier if she had said three days. I would have been more impressed by her sense of realism.

“Go to bed,” Duke said. “You’ll be on duty as of six-thirty in the morning.”

“Doing what?”

“Doing whatever I tell you.”

“Is my door going to be locked?”

“Count on it,” he said. “I’ll unlock it at six-fifteen. Be down here by six-thirty.”

I waited on my bed until I heard him come up after me and lock the door. Then I waited some more until I was sure he wasn’t coming back. Then I took my shoe off and checked for messages. The little device powered up and the tiny green screen was filled with a cheerful italic announcement: You’ve Got Mail! There was one item only. It was from Susan Duffy. It was a one-word question: Location? I hit reply and typed Abbot, Maine, coast, 20m S of Portland, lone house on long rock finger. That would have to do. I didn’t have a mailing address or exact GPS coordinates. But she should be able to pin it down if she spent some time with a large-scale map of the area. I hit send now.

Then I stared at the screen. I wasn’t entirely sure how e-mail worked. Was it instantaneous communication, like a phone call? Or would my reply wait somewhere in limbo before it got to her? I assumed she would be watching for it. I assumed she and Eliot would be spelling each other around the clock.

Ninety seconds later the screen announced You’ve Got Mail! again. I smiled. This might work. This time her message was longer. Only twenty-one words, but I had to scroll down the tiny screen to read it all. It said: We’ll work the maps, thanks. Prints show 2 bodyguards in our custody are ex-army. All under control here. You? Progress?

I hit reply and typed hired, probably. Then I thought for a second and pictured Quinn and Teresa Daniel in my mind and added otherwise no progress yet. Then I thought some more and typed re 2 bodyguards ask MP Powell quote 10-29, 10-30, 10-24, 10-36 unquote from me specifically. Then I hit send now. I watched the machine announce Your message has been sent and looked away at the darkness outside the window and hoped Powell’s generation still spoke the same language mine did. 10-29, 10-30, 10-24, and 1036 were four standard Military Police radio codes that meant nothing much in themselves. 10-29 stood for weak signal. It was a procedural complaint about failing equipment. 10-30 meant I am requesting nonemergency assistance. 10-24 meant suspicious person. 10-36 meant please forward my messages. The 10-30 nonemergency call meant the whole string would attract no attention from anybody. It would be recorded and filed somewhere and ignored for the rest of history. But taken together the string was a kind of underground jargon. At least it used to be, way back when I was in uniform. The weak signal part meant keep this quiet and under the radar. The request for nonemergency assistance backed it up: keep this away from the hot files. Suspicious person was self-explanatory. Please forward my messages meant put me in the loop. So if Powell was on the ball he would understand the whole thing to mean check these guys out on the quiet and give me the skinny. And I hoped he was on the ball, because he owed me. He owed me big time. He had sold me out. My guess was he would be looking for ways to make it up to me.

I looked back at the tiny screen: You’ve Got Mail! It was Duffy, saying OK, be fast. I replied trying and switched off and nailed the device back into the heel of my shoe. Then I checked the window.

It was a standard two-part sliding thing. The bottom casement would slide upward in front of the top casement. There was no insect screen. The paint on the inside was thin and neat. The paint on the outside was thick and sloppy from where it had been continually redone to beat the climate. There was a brass catch. It was an ancient thing.

There was no modern security. I slipped the catch and pushed the window up. It caught on the thick paint. But it moved. I got it open about five inches and cold sea air blew in on me. I bent down and looked for alarm pads. There weren’t any. I heaved it all the way up and examined the whole of the frame. There was no sign of any security system at all.

It was understandable. The window was fifty feet up above the rocks and the ocean. And the house itself was unreachable because of the high wall and the water.

I leaned out the window and looked down. I could see where I had been standing when Duke fired the bullet. I stayed half-in and half-out of the window for about five minutes, leaning on my elbows, staring at the black ocean, smelling the salt air, and thinking about the bullet. I had pulled the trigger six times. It would have made a hell of a mess. My head would have exploded. The rugs would have been ruined and the oak paneling would have splintered. I yawned. The thinking and the sea air were making me sleepy. I ducked back inside and slammed the casement down and went to bed.

I was already up and showered and dressed when I heard Duke unlock the door at sixfifteen the next morning, day twelve, Wednesday, Elizabeth Beck’s birthday. I had already checked my e-mail. There were no messages. None at all. I wasn’t worried. I spent ten quiet minutes at the window. The dawn was right there in front of me and the sea was gray and oily and subdued. The tide was out. Rocks were exposed. Pools had formed here and there. I could see birds on the shore. They were black guillemots. Their spring feathers were coming in. Gray was changing to black. They had bright red feet. I could see cormorants and black-backed gulls wheeling in the distance. Herring gulls swooping low, searching for breakfast.

I waited until Duke’s footsteps had receded and went downstairs and walked into the kitchen and met the giant from the gatehouse face-to-face. He was standing at the sink, drinking water from a glass. He had probably just swallowed his steroid pills. He was a very big guy. I stand six feet five inches tall and I have to center myself quite carefully to walk through a standard thirty-inch doorway. This guy was at least six inches taller than me and probably ten inches wider across the shoulders. He probably outweighed me by two hundred pounds. Maybe by more. I got that core shudder I get when I’m next to a guy big enough to make me feel small. The world seems to tilt a little.

“Duke is in the gym,” the guy said.

“There’s a gym?” I said.

“Downstairs,” he said. His voice was light and high-pitched. He must have been gobbling steroids like candy for years. His eyes were dull and his skin was bad. He was somewhere in his middle thirties, greasy blond, dressed in a muscle shirt and sweatpants. His arms were bigger than my legs. He looked like a cartoon.

“We work out before breakfast,” he said.

“Fine,” I said. “Go right ahead.”

“You too.”

“I never work out,” I said.

“Duke’s expecting you. You work here, you work out.”

I glanced at my watch. Six twenty-five in the morning. Time ticking away.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. Just looked at me like I was setting some kind of a trap for him. That’s another problem with steroids. Too many of them can rewire your head. And this guy’s head didn’t look like it had started from a very positive place to begin with. He looked mean and stupid. No better way to put it. And not a good combination. There was something in his face. I didn’t like him. I was oh-for-two, as far as liking my new colleagues went.

“It’s not a difficult question,” I said.

“Paulie,” he said.

I nodded. “Pleased to meet you, Paulie. I’m Reacher.”

“I know,” he said. “You were in the army.”

“You got a problem with that?”

“I don’t like officers.”

I nodded. They had checked. They knew what rank I had held. They had some kind of access.

“Why not?” I asked. “Did you fail the OCS exam?”

He didn’t answer.

“Let’s go find Duke,” I said.

He put his glass of water down and led me out to a back hallway and through a door to a set of wooden cellar stairs. There was a whole basement under the house. It must have been blasted out of solid rock. The walls were raw stone patched and smoothed with concrete. The air was a little damp and musty. There were naked lightbulbs hanging in wire cages close to the ceiling. There were numerous rooms. One was a good-sized space with white paint all over it. The floor was covered with white linoleum. There was a smell of old sweat. There was an exercise bicycle and a treadmill and a weights machine.

There was a heavy bag hanging from a ceiling joist. There was a speed bag near it.

Boxing gloves on a shelf. There were dumbbells stored in wall racks. There were free weights stacked loose on the floor next to a bench. Duke was standing right next to it. He was wearing his dark suit. He looked tired, like he had been up all night. He hadn’t showered. His hair was a mess and his suit was creased and wrinkled, especially low down on the back of the coat.

Paulie went straight into some kind of a complicated stretching routine. He was so muscle-bound that his legs and arms had limited articulation. He couldn’t touch his shoulders with his fingers. His biceps were too big. I looked at the weights machine. It had all kinds of handles and bars and grips. It had strong black cables that led through pulleys to a tall stack of lead plates. You would have to be able to lift about five hundred pounds to move them all.

“You working out?” I said to Duke.

“None of your business,” he replied.

“Me either,” I said.

Paulie turned his giant neck and glanced at me. Then he lay down on his back on the bench and shuffled around until his shoulders were positioned underneath a bar resting on a stand. The bar had a bunch of weights on either end. He grunted a bit and wrapped his hands around the bar and flicked his tongue in and out like he was preparing for a major effort. Then he pressed upward and lifted the bar off the stand. The bar bent and wobbled.

There was so much weight on it that it curved way down at the ends, like old film of Russian weight-lifters at the Olympics. He grunted again and heaved it up until his arms were locked straight. He held it like that for a second and then crashed it back into the stand. He turned his head and looked straight at me, like I was supposed to be impressed.