Persuader (14 page)

“Where’s the next truck?” Duffy asked.

“In a lot in New London,” I said.

“Keys?”

“In it.”

“So there will be people there, too. Nobody leaves a truck alone with the keys in it.

They’ll be waiting for you. We don’t know what they’ve been told to do. We should consider termination.”

“I won’t walk into a trap,” I said. “Not my style. And the next truck might have something better in it.”

“OK,” she said. “We’ll check it in New Hampshire. If you get that far.”

“You could lend me your Glock.”

I saw her reach up and touch it under her arm. “How long for?”

“As long as I need it.”

“What happened to the Colts?”

“They took them.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t give up my service weapon.”

“You’re already way off the books.”

She paused.

“Shit,” she said. She took the Glock out of her holster and passed it to me. It was warm from the heat of her body. I held it in my palm and savored the feeling. She dug in her purse and came out with two spare magazines. I put them in one pocket and the gun in the other.

“Thanks,” I said.

“See you in New Hampshire,” she said. “We’ll check the truck. And then we’ll decide.”

“OK,” I said, although I had already decided. Eliot walked over and took the transmitter out of his pocket. Duffy got out of his way and he stuck it back under her seat. Then they went off together, back to the government Taurus. I waited a plausible amount of time and got back on the road.

I found New London without any problem. It was a messy old place. I had never been there before. Never had a reason to go. It’s a Navy town. I think they build submarines there. Or somewhere nearby. Groton, maybe. The directions Beck had given me brought me off the highway early and threaded me through failing industrial areas. There was plenty of old brick, damp and smoke-stained and rotten. I pulled into the side of the road about a mile short of where I guessed the lot would be. Then I made a right and a left and tried to circle around it. I parked at a busted meter and checked Duffy’s gun. It was a Glock 19. It was maybe a year old. It was fully loaded. The spare magazines were full, too. I got out of the truck. I heard booming foghorns way out in the Sound. A ferry was heading in. The wind was scraping trash along the street. A hooker stepped out of a doorway and smiled at me. It’s a Navy town. She couldn’t smell an army MP the way her sisters could elsewhere.

I turned a corner and got a pretty good partial view of the lot I was headed for. The land sloped down toward the sea and I had some elevation. I could see the truck waiting for me. It was the twin of the one I was in. Same age, same type. Same color. It was sitting there all alone. It was in the exact center of the lot, which was just an empty square made of crushed brick and weeds. Some old building had been bulldozed two decades ago and nothing had been built to replace it.

I couldn’t see anybody waiting for me, although there were a thousand dirty windows within range and theoretically all of them could have been full of watchers. But I didn’t feel anything. Feeling is a lot worse than knowing, but sometimes it’s all you’ve got. I stood still until I got cold and then I walked back to the truck. Drove it around the block and into the lot. Parked it nose to nose with its twin. Pulled the key and dropped it in the door pocket. Glanced around one last time and got out. I put my hand in my pocket and closed it around Duffy’s gun. Listened hard. Nothing but grit blowing and the far-off sounds of a run-down city struggling through the day. I was OK, unless somebody was planning to drop me with a long-range rifle shot. And clutching a Glock 19 in my pocket wasn’t going to defend against that.

The new truck was cold and still. The door was unlocked and the key was right there in the pocket. I racked the seat and fixed the mirrors. Dropped the key on the floor like I was clumsy and checked under the seats. No transmitter. Just a few gum wrappers and dust bunnies. I started the engine. Backed away from the truck I had just gotten out of and swooped the new one around the lot and aimed it back toward the highway. I didn’t see anybody. Nobody came after me.

The new truck drove a little better than the old one had. It was a little quieter and a little faster. Maybe it had been around the clock only twice. It reeled in the miles, taking me back north. I stared ahead through the windshield and felt like I could see the lonely house on the rock finger getting bigger and bigger with every minute. It was drawing me in and repelling me simultaneously with equal force. So I just sat there immobile with one hand on the wheel and my eyelids locked open. Rhode Island was quiet. Nobody followed me through it. Massachusetts was mostly a long loop around Boston and then a sprint through the northeastern bump with the dumps like Lowell on my left and the cute places like Newburyport and Cape Ann and Gloucester far away on my right. No tail.

Then came New Hampshire. I-95 sees about twenty miles of it with Portsmouth as the last stop. I passed it by and watched for rest area signs. I found one just inside the Maine state line. It told me that Duffy and Eliot and the old guy with the stained suit would be waiting for me eight miles ahead.

It wasn’t just Duffy and Eliot and the old guy. They had a DEA canine unit with them. I guess if you give government types enough time to think they’ll come up with something you don’t expect. I pulled into an area pretty much identical to the Kennebunk one and saw their two Tauruses parked on the end of the row next to a plain van with a spinning ventilator on the roof. I parked four slots away from them and went through the cautious routine of waiting and watching, but nobody pulled in after me. I didn’t worry about the highway shoulder. The trees made me invisible from the highway. There were trees everywhere. Maine has got a whole lot of trees, that was for damn sure.

I got out of the truck and the old guy pulled his car close and went straight into his thing with the soldering iron. Duffy pulled me out of his way by the elbow.

“I made some calls,” she said. She held up her Nokia like she was proving it to me.

“Good news and bad news.”

“Good news first,” I said. “Cheer me up.”

“I think the Toyota thing might be OK.”

“Might be?”

“It’s complicated. We got Beck’s shipping schedule from U.S. Customs. All his stuff comes out of Odessa. It’s in the Ukraine, on the Black Sea.”

“I know where it is.”

“Plausible point of origin for rugs. They come north through Turkey from all over. But Odessa is a heroin port, from our point of view. Everything that doesn’t come here direct from Colombia feeds through Afghanistan and Turkmenistan and across the Caspian and the Caucasus. So if Beck’s using Odessa it means he’s a heroin guy, and if he’s a heroin guy it means he doesn’t know any Ecstasy dealers from Adam. Not in Connecticut, not anywhere. There can’t be a relationship. No way. How could there be? It’s a completely different part of the business. So he’s starting from scratch as far as finding anything out goes. I mean, the Toyota plate will give him a name and an address, sure, but that information won’t mean anything to him. It’s going to be a few days before he can find out who they are and pick up their trail.”

“That’s the good news?”

“It’s good enough. Trust me, they’re in separate worlds. And a few days is all you’ve got anyway. We can’t hold those bodyguards forever.”

“What’s the bad news?”

She paused a beat. “It’s actually not impossible that someone could have gotten a peek at the Lincoln.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing specific. Just that security at the garage maybe wasn’t as good as it might have been.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we can’t say for sure that something bad didn’t happen.”

We heard the truck’s roller door rattle upward. It banged against its stop and a second later we heard Eliot calling us urgently. We stepped over there expecting to find something good. We found another transmitter instead. It was the same tiny metal can with the same eight-inch filament antenna. It was glued to the inside of the sheetmetal, near the loading door, about head height.

“Great,” Duffy said.

The load space was packed with rugs, exactly the same as we had seen before. It could have been the same van. They were rolled tight and tied with rough string and stacked on their ends in descending order of height.

“Do we check them?” the old guy asked.

“No time,” I said. “If somebody’s on the other end of that transmitter they’ll figure I’m entitled to maybe ten minutes here, nothing more.”

“Put the dog in,” Duffy said.

A guy I hadn’t met opened up the rear of the DEA van and came out with a beagle on a leash. It was a little fat low-slung thing wearing a working-dog harness. It had long ears and an eager expression. I like dogs. Sometimes I think about getting one. It could keep me company. This one ignored me completely. It just let its handler lead it over to the blue truck and then it waited to be told what to do. The guy lifted it up into the load space and put it down on the staircase of rugs. He clicked his fingers and spoke some kind of a command and took the leash off. The dog scampered up and down and side to side. Its legs were short and it had a problem making it up and down between the different levels.

But it covered every inch and then came back to where it had started and stood there with its eyes bright and its tail wagging and its mouth open in an absurd wet smile like it was saying so where’s the action? “Nothing,” its handler said.

“Legit load,” Eliot said.

Duffy nodded. “But why is it coming back north? Nobody exports rugs back to Odessa.

Why would they?”

“It was a test,” I said. “For me. They figured maybe I’d look, maybe I wouldn’t.”

“Fix the seal,” Duffy said.

The new guy hauled his beagle out and Eliot stretched up tall and pulled the door down.

The old guy picked up his soldering iron and Duffy pulled me away again.

“Decision?” she said.

“What would you do?”

“Abort,” she said. “The Lincoln is the wild card. It could kill you.”

I looked over her shoulder and watched the old guy at work. He was already thinning the solder join.

“They bought the story,” I said. “Impossible not to. It was a great story.”

“They might have looked at the Lincoln.”

“I can’t see why they would have wanted to.”

The old guy was finishing up. He was bending down, ready to blow on the join, ready to turn the wire dull gray. Duffy put her hand on my arm.

“Why was Beck talking about the Uzis?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“All done,” the old guy called.

“Decision?” Duffy said.

I thought about Quinn. Thought about the way his gaze had traveled across my face, not fast, not slow. Thought about the.22 scars, like two extra eyes up there on the left of his forehead.

“I’m going back,” I said. “I think it’s safe enough. They’d have gone for me this morning if they had any doubts.”

Duffy said nothing. She didn’t argue. She just took her hand off my arm and let me go.

CHAPTER 5

She let me go, but she didn’t ask for her gun back. Maybe it was subconscious. Maybe she wanted me to have it. I put it in the back of my waistband. It felt better there than the big Colt had. I hid the spare magazines in my socks. Then I hit the road and was back in the lot near the Portland docks exactly ten hours after I left it. There was nobody waiting there to meet me. No black Cadillac. I drove right in and parked. Dropped the key in the door pocket and slid out. I was tired and slightly deaf after five hundred highway miles.

It was six o’clock in the evening and the sun was way down behind the city on my left.

The air was cold and dampness was blowing in from the sea. I buttoned my coat and stood still for a minute in case I was being watched. Then I wandered off. I tried to look aimless. But I headed generally north and took a good look at the buildings ahead of me.

The lot was bordered by low offices. They looked like trailers without the wheels. They had been cheaply built and badly maintained. They had small untidy parking lots. The lots were full of mid-range cars. The whole place looked busy and down-to-earth. Realworld commerce happened there. That was clear. No fancy headquarters, no marble, no sculpture, just a bunch of ordinary people working hard for their money behind unwashed windows lined with broken venetian blinds.

Some of the offices were bumped-out additions built onto the sides of small warehouses.

The warehouses were modern prefabricated metal structures. They had concrete loading platforms built up to waist height. They had narrow lots defined by thick concrete posts.

The posts had every shade of automotive paint known to man scraped on them.

I found Beck’s black Cadillac after about five minutes. It was parked on a rectangle of cracked blacktop at an angle against the side of a warehouse, near an office door. The door looked like it belonged on a house in the suburbs. It was a colonial design made from hardwood. It had never been painted and it was gray and grainy from the salt air. It had a faded sign screwed to it: Bizarre Bazaar. The script was handpainted and looked like something from Haight-Ashbury in the sixties. Like it should have been promoting a concert at the Fillmore West, like Bizarre Bazaar was a one-hit wonder opening for Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead.

I heard a car approaching and backed off behind the adjacent building and waited. It was a big car, coming slowly. I could hear fat soft tires dropping into wet potholes. It was a Lincoln Town Car, shiny black, identical to the one we had trashed outside the college gate. The two of them had probably come off the line together, nose to tail. It drove slowly past Beck’s Cadillac and rounded the corner and parked in back of the warehouse.

A guy I hadn’t seen before got out of the driver’s seat. He stretched and yawned like maybe he had just driven five hundred highway miles, too. He was medium height and heavy with close-cropped black hair. Lean face, bad skin. He was scowling, like he was frustrated. He looked dangerous. But junior, somehow. Like he was low down on the totem pole. And like he might be all the more dangerous because of it. He leaned back into the car and came out again carrying a portable radio scanner. It had a long chrome antenna and a mesh-covered speaker that would whine and squawk whenever an appropriate transmitter was within a mile or two of it.

He walked around the corner and pushed in through the unpainted door. I stayed where I was. Reviewed the whole of the last ten hours in my head. As far as radio surveillance went I had stopped three times. Each stop had been short enough to be plausible. Visual surveillance would be a different matter entirely. But I was pretty sure there had been no black Lincoln in my line of sight at any point. I tended to agree with Duffy. The guy and his scanner had been on Route One.

I stood still for a minute. Then I came out into plain sight and walked to the door. Pushed it open. There was an immediate right-angle turn to the left. It led to a small open area filled with desks and file cabinets. There were no people in it. None of the desks was occupied. But they had been until very recently. That was clear. They were part of a working office. There were three of them and they were covered with the kind of stuff people leave behind at the end of the day. Half-finished paperwork, rinsed coffee cups, notes to themselves, souvenir mugs filled with pencils, packs of tissues. There were electric heaters on the walls and the air was very warm and it smelled faintly of perfume.

At the back of the open area was a closed door with low voices behind it. I recognized Beck’s, and Duke’s. They were talking with a third man, who I guessed was the guy with the tracking equipment. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Couldn’t make out the tone. There was some urgency there. Some debate. No raised voices, but they weren’t discussing the company picnic.

I looked at the stuff on the desks and the walls. There were two maps pinned up on boards. One showed the whole world. The Black Sea was more or less in the exact center.

Odessa was nestling there to the left of the Crimean Peninsula. There was nothing marked on the paper but I could trace the route a little tramp steamer would take, through the Bosphorus, through the Aegean Sea, through the Mediterranean, out past Gibraltar, and then full steam across the Atlantic to Portland, Maine. A two-week voyage, probably.

Maybe three. Most ships are pretty slow.

The other map showed the United States. Portland itself was obliterated by a worn and greasy stain. I guessed people had put their fingertips on it to span their hands and calculate time and distance. A small person’s hand fully extended might represent a day’s driving. In which case Portland wasn’t the best location for a distribution center. It was a long way from everywhere else.

The papers on the desks were incomprehensible to me. At best I could just about interpret details about dates and loads. I saw some prices listed. Some were high, some were low.

Opposite the prices were codes for something. They could have been for rugs. They could have been for something else. But on the surface the whole place looked exactly like an innocent shipping office. I wondered if Teresa Daniel had worked in it.

I listened to the voices some more. Now I was hearing anger and worry. I backed out to the corridor. Took the Glock out of my waistband and put it in my pocket with my finger inside the trigger guard. A Glock doesn’t have a safety catch. It has a sort of trigger on the trigger. It’s a tiny bar that latches back as you squeeze. I put a little pressure on it. Felt it give. I wanted to be ready. I figured I would shoot Duke first. Then the guy with the radio. Then Beck. Beck was probably the slowest and you always leave the slowest for last.

I put my other hand in my pocket, too. A guy with one hand in his pocket looks armed and dangerous. A guy with both hands in his pockets looks relaxed and lazy. No threat. I took a breath and walked back into the room, noisily.

“Hello?” I called.

The back office door opened up fast. The three of them crowded together to look out.

Beck, Duke, the new guy. No guns.

“How did you get in here?” Duke asked. He looked tired.

“Door was open,” I said.

“How did you know which door?” Beck asked.

I kept my hands in my pockets. I couldn’t say I had seen the painted sign, because it was Duffy who had told me the name of his operation, not him.

“Your car’s parked outside,” I said.

He nodded.

“OK,” he said.

He didn’t ask about my day. The new guy with the scanner must have described it already. Now he was just standing there, looking straight at me. He was younger than Beck. Younger than Duke. Younger than me. He was maybe thirty-five. He still looked dangerous. He had flat cheekbones and dull eyes. He was like a hundred bad guys I had busted in the army.

“Enjoy the drive?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer.

“I saw you bring the scanner in,” I said. “I found the first bug. Under the seat.”

“Why did you look?” he asked.

“Habit,” I said. “Where was the second?”

“In the back,” he said. “You didn’t stop for lunch.”

“No money,” I said. “Nobody gave me any yet.”

The guy didn’t smile.

“Welcome to Maine,” he said. “Nobody gives you money here. You earn it.”

“OK,” I said.

“I’m Angel Doll,” he said, like he was expecting his name to impress me. But it didn’t.

“I’m Jack Reacher,” I said.

“The cop-killer,” he said, with something in his voice.

He looked at me for a long moment and then looked away. I couldn’t figure out where he fit in. Beck was the boss and Duke was his head of security but this junior guy seemed very relaxed about talking right over their heads.

“We’re in a meeting,” Beck said. “You can wait out by the car.”

He ushered the other two back inside the room and shut the door on me. That in itself told me there was nothing worth hunting for in the secretarial area. So I wandered outside and took a good look at the security system on my way. It was fairly rudimentary, but effective. There were contact pads on the door and all the windows. They were small rectangular things. They had wires the size and color of spaghetti tacked all along the baseboards. The wires came together in a metal box mounted on the wall next to a crowded notice board. The notice board was full of yellowed paper. There was all kinds of stuff about employee insurance and fire extinguishers and evacuation points. The alarm box had a keypad and two small lights. There was a red one labeled armed and a green one labeled unarmed. There were no separate zones. No motion sensors. It was crude perimeter defense only.

I didn’t wait by the car. I walked around a little, until I had gotten a feel for the place.

The whole area was a warren of similar operations. There was a convoluted access road for trucks. I guessed it would operate as a one-way system. Containers would be hauled down from the piers to the north and unloaded into the warehouses. Then delivery trucks would be loaded in turn and take off south. Beck’s warehouse itself wasn’t very private.

It was right in the middle of a row of five. But it didn’t have an outside loading dock. No waist-high platform. It had a roller door instead. It was temporarily blocked by Angel Doll’s Lincoln, but it was big enough to drive a truck through. Secrecy could be achieved.

There was no overall external security. It wasn’t like a naval dockyard. There was no wire fencing. No gate, no barriers, no guards in booths. It was just a big messy hundredacre area full of random buildings and puddles and dark corners. I guessed there would be some kind of activity all around the clock. How much, I didn’t know. But probably enough to mask some clandestine comings and goings.

I was back at the Cadillac and leaning on the fender when the three of them came out.

Beck and Duke came first and Doll hung back in the doorway. I still had my hands in my pockets. I was still ready to go for Duke first. But there was no overt aggression in the way anybody was moving. No wariness. Beck and Duke just walked over toward the car.

They looked tired and preoccupied. Doll stayed where he was in the doorway, like he owned the place.

“Let’s go,” Beck said.

“No, wait,” Doll called. “I need to talk to Reacher first.”

Beck stopped walking. Didn’t turn around.

“Five minutes,” Doll said. “That’s all. Then I’ll lock up for you.”

Beck didn’t say anything. Neither did Duke. They looked irritated, but they weren’t going to object. I kept my hands in my pockets and walked back. Doll turned and led me through the secretarial pen and into the back office. Through another door and into a glass-walled cubicle inside the warehouse itself. I could see a forklift on the warehouse floor and steel racks loaded with rugs. The racks were easily twenty feet high and the rugs were all tightly rolled and tied with string. The cubicle had a personnel door to the outside and a metal desk with a computer on it. The desk chair was worn out. Dirty yellow foam showed through at every seam. Doll sat down on it and looked up at me and moved his mouth into the approximate shape of a smile. I stood sideways at the end of the desk and looked down on him.

“What?” I said.

“See this computer?” he said. “It’s got taps into every Department of Motor Vehicles in the country.”

“So?”

“So I can check license plates.”

I said nothing. He took a handgun out of his pocket. A neat move, fast and fluid. But then, it was a good pocket gun. It was a Soviet-era PSM, which is a small automatic pistol built as smooth and slim as possible, so it won’t snag on clothing. It uses weird Russian ammunition, which is hard to get. It has a safety catch at the rear of the slide.