Page 13 of Persuader (Jack Reacher 7)
"But this was a how-dare-they kind of a question. There was attitude in it. Like somebody was out of line. It wasn't just an inquiry. It was an expression of annoyance at somebody. "
"What did you tell him?"
"I described the truck. I described your guys. "
She smiled. "Safe enough. "
I shook my head. "He's got a guy called Duke. First name unknown. Ex-cop. His head of security. I saw him this morning. He'd been up all night. He looked tired and he hadn't showered. His suit coat was all creased, low down at the back. "
"So?"
"Means he was driving all night. I think he went down there to get a look at the Toyota. To check the rear license plate. Where did you stash it?"
"We let the state cops take it. To keep the plausibility going. We couldn't take it back to the DEA garage. It'll be in a compound somewhere. "
"Where will the plate lead?"
" Hartford, Connecticut," she said. "We busted a small-time Ecstasy ring. "
"When?"
"Last week. "
I drove on. The highway was getting busier.
"Our first mistake," I said. "Beck's going to check it out. And then he's going to be wondering why some small-time Ecstasy dealers from Connecticut are trying to snatch his son. And then he's going to be wondering how some small-time Ecstasy dealers from Connecticut can be trying to snatch his son a week after they all got hauled off to jail. "
"Shit," Duffy said.
"It gets worse," I said. "I think Duke got a look at the Lincoln, too. It's got a caved-in front and no window glass left, but it hasn't got any bullet holes in it. And it doesn't look like a real grenade went off inside. That Lincoln is living proof this whole thing was phony baloney. "
"No," she said. "The Lincoln is hidden. It didn't go with the Toyota. "
"Are you sure? Because the first thing Beck asked me this morning was Chapter and verse about the Uzis. It was like he was asking me to damn myself right out of my own mouth. Two Uzi Micros, twenty-round mags, forty shots fired, and not a single mark on the car?"
"No," she said again. "No way. The Lincoln is hidden. "
"Where?"
"It's in Boston. It's in our garage, but as far as any paperwork goes it's in the county morgue building. It's supposed to be a crime scene. The bodyguards are supposed to be plastered all over the inside. We aimed for plausibility. We thought this thing through. "
"Except for the Toyota 's plate. "
She looked deflated. "But the Lincoln is OK. It's a hundred miles away from the Toyota. This guy Duke would have to drive all night. "
"I think he did drive all night. And why was Beck so uptight about the Uzis?"
She went still.
"We have to abort," she said. "Because of the Toyota. Not because of the Lincoln. The Lincoln 's OK. "
I checked my watch. Checked the road ahead. The van roared on. We would be coming up on Eliot sometime soon. I calculated time and distance.
"We have to abort," she said again.
"What about your agent?"
"Getting you killed won't help her. "
I thought about Quinn.
"We'll discuss it later," I said. "Right now we stay in business. "
We passed Eliot after eight more minutes. His Taurus was sitting rock-steady in the inside lane, holding a modest fifty. I pulled ahead of him and matched his spe
ed and he fell in behind. We skirted all the way around Boston and pulled into the first rest area we saw south of the city. The world was a lot busier down there. I sat still with Duffy at my side and watched the ramp for seventy-two seconds and saw four cars follow me in. None of their drivers paid me any attention. A couple of them had passengers. They all did normal rest-stop things like standing and yawning by their open doors and looking around and then heading over to the bathrooms and the fast food.
"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.
