One Shot (48 page)

'Out,' Reacher said.

'That's a nice coincidence,' Franklin said.

'I don't think it was,' Reacher said. 'I think they
arranged something to get him out of the way. He
remembers going out somewhere, previously. Then
being optimistic, like something good was about to
happen. I think they set him up with someone. I think
they engineered a chance meeting that led somewhere. I
think he had a date on Friday.'

'With who?'

'The redhead, maybe. They turned her loose on me.

Maybe they turned her loose on him, too. He dressed
well on Friday. The report shows his wallet was in a
decent pair of pants.'

'So who really did it?' Helen asked.

'Someone cold as ice,' Reacher said. 'Someone who
didn't even need to use the bathroom afterwards.'

'Charlie,' Rosemary said. 'Got to be. Has to be. He's
small. He's weird. He knew the house. He knew where
everything was. The dog knew him.'

'He was a terrible shooter too,' Reacher said. 'That's
the other reason why I went to Kentucky. I wanted to
test that theory.'

'So who was it?'

'Charlie,' Reacher said. 'His evidence was faked as
well. But in a different way. The holes in his targets were
all over the place. Except they weren't really all over the
place. The distribution wasn't entirely random. He was
trying to disguise how good he actually was. He was
aiming at arbitrary points on the paper, and he was
hitting those points, every time, dead on, believe me.

Once in a while he would get bored, and he'd put one
through the inner ring. Or he'd pick on a quadrant
outside the outer ring and put a round straight through
it. One time he drilled all four corners. The point is, it
doesn't really matter what you aim at, as long as you hit
it. It's only convention that makes us aim at the ten-ring.

It's just as good practice to aim at some other spot.

Even a spot off the paper, like a tree. That's what Charlie
was doing. He was a tremendous shot, training hard,
but trying to look like he was missing all the time. But
like I said, true randomness is impossible for a human to
achieve. There are always patterns.'

'Why would he do that?' Helen asked.

'For an alibi.'

'Making people think he couldn't shoot?'

Reacher nodded. 'He noticed that the range master
was saving the used targets.

He's an ice-cold pro who thinks about every wrinkle
ahead of time.'

'Who is he?' Franklin asked.

'His real name is Chenko and he hangs with a bunch
of Russians. He's probably a Red Army veteran.

Probably one of their snipers. And they're real good.

They always have been.'

'How do we get to him?'

'Through the victim.'

'Square one. The victims are all dead ends. You'll have
to come up with something better than that.'

'His boss calls himself the Zee'

"What kind of a name is that?'

'It's a word, not a name. Old-time Soviet slang. A zee
was a labour camp inmate. In the Gulag in Siberia.'

'Those camps are ancient history.'

'Which makes the Zee a very old man. But a very tough
old man. Probably way tougher than we can imagine.'

The Zee was tired after his stint with the backhoe. But
he was used to being tired. He had been tired for sixty-three years. He had been tired since the day the
recruiter came to his village, in the early fall of 1942. His
village was four thousand miles from anywhere, and the
recruiter was a type of Moscow Russian nobody had
ever seen before. He was brisk, and self-assured, and
confident. He permitted no argument. No discussion. All
males between the ages of sixteen and fifty were to
come with him.

The Zee was seventeen at that point. Initially he was
overlooked, because he was in prison. He had slept
with an older man's wife, and then beaten the guy badly
when he complained about it. The beaten guy claimed
exemption from the draft because of his physical
condition, and then he told the recruiter about his
assailant in prison. The recruiter was anxious to make
his numbers, so the Zee was hauled out of his cell and
told to line up with the others in the village square. He
did so quite happily. He assumed he was being given a
ride to freedom. He assumed there would be a hundred
opportunities just to walk away.

He was wrong.

The recruits were locked into a truck, and then a train,
for a journey that lasted five weeks. Formal induction
into the Red Army happened along the way.

Uniforms were issued, thick woollen garments, and a
coat, and a pair of felt-lined boots, and a pay book. But
no actual pay. No weapons. And no training, either,
beyond a brief stop in a snow-covered rail yard where a
commissar brayed over and over again at the locked
train through a huge metal megaphone. The guy
repeated a simple twenty-word speech, which the Zee
remembered ever after: The fate of the world is being
decided at Stalingrad, where you will fight to the last for
the Motherland.

The five-week journey ended on the eastern bank of
the Volga, where the recruits were unloaded like cattle
and forced to run straight for a small assemblage of old
river ferries and pleasure cruisers. Half a mile away on
the opposite bank was a vision from hell. A city, larger
than anything the Zee had ever seen before, was in
ruins, belching smoke and fire. The river was burning
and exploding with mortar shells. The sky was full of
planes which lined up and fell into dives, dropping
bombs, firing guns. There were corpses everywhere,
and body parts, and screaming wounded.

The Zee was forced onto a small boat that had a gaily
coloured striped sunshade. It was crammed tight with
soldiers. Nobody had room to move. Nobody had a
weapon. The boat lurched out into the freezing current
and aeroplanes fell on it like flies on shit. The crossing
lasted fifteen minutes and at the end of it the Zee was
slimy with his neighbours' blood.

He was forced off onto a narrow wooden pier and
made to line up single file and then made to run towards
the city, past a staging post where the second phase of
his military training took place: two quartermasters were
doling out loaded rifles and spare ammunition clips in
an endless alternate sequence and chanting what later
struck the Zee as a poem, or a song, or a hymn to
complete and utter insanity, over and over again without
pausing:

The one with the rifle shoots The one without follows
him When the one with the rifle is killed The one who is
following picks up the rifle and shoots.

The Zee was handed an ammunition clip. No rifle. He
was shoved forward, and blindly followed the back of
the man ahead. He turned a corner. Passed in front of a
Red Army machine gun nest. At first he thought the front
line must therefore be very close. But then a commissar
with a flag and another huge megaphone roared at him:
No retreat! If you turn back even one step we will shoot
you down! So the Zee ran helplessly onward and turned
another corner and stepped into a hail of German
bullets. He stopped, half turned, and was hit three times
in the arms and legs. He was bowled over and came to
rest lying on the shattered remains of a brick wall and
within minutes was buried under a mounting pile of
corpses.

He came to forty-eight hours later in an improvised
hospital and made his first acquaintance with Soviet
military justice: harsh, ponderous, ideological, but
running strictly in accordance with its own arcane rules.

The matter at issue was caused by his having half
turned: were his wounds inflicted by the Motherland's
enemy, or had he been retreating towards his own
side's guns? Because of the physical ambiguity he was
spared execution and sentenced to a penal battalion
instead. Thus began a process of survival that had so
far lasted sixty three years.

A process he intended to continue.

He dialled Grigor Linsky's number.

'We can assume the soldier is talking,' he said.

'Whatever he knows, they all know now. Therefore it's
time to get ourselves an insurance policy.'

Franklin said, 'We're really no further ahead. Are we?

No way is Emerson going to accept a damn thing
unless we give him more than we've got right now.'

'So work the victim list,' Reacher said.

'That could take for ever. Five lives, five life histories.'

'So let's focus.'

'Great. Terrific. Just tell me which one you want me to
focus on.'

Reacher nodded. Recalled Helen Rodin's description
of what she had heard. The first shot, and then a tiny
pause, and then the next two. Then another pause, a
little longer, but really only a split second, and then the
last three. He closed his eyes. In his mind he pictured
Bellantonio's audio graph from the cell phone voice
mail. Pictured his own mute simulation, in the gloom of
the new parking garage, his right arm extended like a
rifle: click, click-click, click-click-click.

'Not the first one,' he said. 'Not the first cold shot. No
guarantee of hitting anything with that. Therefore the
first victim was meaningless. Part of the window
dressing. Not the last three, either. That was bang-bang-bang.

The deliberate miss, and more window dressing. The
job was already done by then.'

'So, the second or the third. Or both of them.'

Click, click-click.

Reacher opened his eyes.

'The third,' he said. 'There's a rhythm there. The first
cold shot, then a lead-in, and then the money shot. The
target. Then a break. His eye is lagging in the scope.

He's making sure the target is down. It is. So then the
last three.' "Who was the third?' Helen asked.

'The woman,' Franklin said.

Linsky called Chenko, and then Vladimir, and then
Sokolov. He explained the mission and pulled them all in
tighter. Franklin's office had no back entrance. There
was just the exposed staircase. The target's car was
right there on the apron. Easy.

Reacher said, 'Tell me about the woman.'

Franklin shuffled his notes. Put them in a new order of
priority.

'Her name was Oline Archer,' he said. 'Caucasian
female, married, no children, thirty-seven years old, lived
west of here in the outer suburbs.'

'Employed in the DMV building,' Reacher said. 'If she
was the specific target, Charlie had to know where she
was and when she would be coming out.'

Franklin nodded. 'Employed by the DMV itself. Been
there a year and a half.'

'Doing what exactly?'

'Clerical supervisor. Doing whatever they do in there.'

'So was it work-related?' Ann Yanni asked.

'Too long of a counter delay?' Franklin said. 'A bad
photo on a driver's licence? I doubt it. I checked the
national databases. DMV clerks don't get killed by
customers. That just doesn't happen.' 'So what about
her personal life?' Helen Rodin asked.

'Nothing jumped out at me,' Franklin said. 'She was
just an ordinary woman.

But I'll keep digging. I'll go down a few levels. Got to be
something there.'

'Do it fast,' Rosemary Barr said. 'For my brother's sake.