Persuader (4 page)

I nodded. Let go of her hand. It fell back to her side. There was a short awkward silence.

“I’m Elizabeth Beck,” she said.

“Jack Reacher,” I said.

“My son explained your predicament,” she said.

It was a nice neutral word. I said nothing in reply.

“My husband will be home tonight,” she said. “He’ll know what to do.”

I nodded. There was another awkward pause. I waited.

“Would you like to come in?” she asked.

She turned and walked back into the hallway. I followed her. I passed through the door and it beeped. I looked again and saw that a metal detector had been installed tight against the inside jamb.

“Would you mind?” Elizabeth Beck asked. She made a sort of sheepish apologetic gesture toward me and then toward the big ugly guy in the suit. He stepped up and made ready to pat me down.

“Two guns,” I said. “Empty. In my coat pockets.”

He pulled them out with the kind of easy practiced moves that suggested he had patted plenty of people down before. He laid them on a side table and squatted and ran his hands up my legs, and then stood and went over my arms, my waist, my chest, my back. He was very thorough, and not very gentle.

“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth Beck said.

The guy in the suit stood back and there was another awkward silence.

“Do you need anything?” Elizabeth Beck asked.

I could think of a lot of things I needed. But I just shook my head.

“I’m kind of tired,” I said. “Long day. I really need a nap.”

She smiled briefly, like she was pleased, like having her own personal cop-killer asleep somewhere would relieve her of a social pressure.

“Of course,” she said. “Duke will show you to a room.”

She looked at me for a second longer. Underneath the strain and the pallor she was a handsome woman. She had fine bones and good skin. Thirty years ago she must have been fighting them off with a stick. She turned away and disappeared into the depths of the house. I turned to the guy in the suit. I assumed he was Duke.

“When do I get the guns back?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. Just pointed me to the staircase and followed me up. Pointed to the next staircase and we came out on the third floor. He led me to a door and pushed it open.

I went in and found a plain square room paneled with oak. There was heavy old furniture in it. A bed, an armoire, a table, a chair. There was an Oriental carpet on the floor. It looked thin and threadbare. Maybe it was a priceless old item. Duke pushed past me and walked across it and showed me where the bathroom was. He was acting like a bellboy in a hotel. He pushed past me again and headed back to the door.

“Dinner’s at eight,” he said. Nothing more.

He stepped out and closed the door. I didn’t hear a sound but when I checked I found it was locked from the outside. There was no keyhole on the inside. I stepped to the window and looked out at the view. I was at the back of the house and all I could see was ocean. I was facing due east and there was nothing between me and Europe. I looked down. Fifty feet below were rocks with waves foaming all around them. The tide looked like it was coming in.

I stepped back to the door and put my ear against it and listened hard. Heard nothing. I scanned the ceiling and the cornices and the furniture, very carefully, inch by inch.

Nothing there. No cameras. I didn’t care about microphones. I wasn’t going to make any noise. I sat on the bed and took my right shoe off. Flipped it over and used my fingernails to pull a pin out of the heel. Swiveled the heel rubber like a little door and turned the shoe the right way up and shook it. A small black plastic rectangle fell out on the bed and bounced once. It was a wireless e-mail device. Nothing fancy. It was just a commercial product, but it had been reprogrammed to send only to one address. It was about the size of a large pager. It had a small cramped keyboard with tiny keys. I switched the power on and typed a short message. Then I pressed send now.

The message said: I’m in.

CHAPTER 2

Truth is by that point I had been in for eleven whole days, since a damp shiny Saturday night in the city of Boston when I saw a dead man walk across a sidewalk and get into a car. It wasn’t a delusion. It wasn’t an uncanny resemblance. It wasn’t a double or a twin or a brother or a cousin. It was a man who had died a decade ago. There was no doubt about it. No trick of the light. He looked older by the appropriate number of years and was carrying the scars of the wounds that had killed him.

I was walking on Huntington Avenue with a mile to go to a bar I had heard about. It was late. Symphony Hall was just letting out. I was too stubborn to cross the street and avoid the crowd. I just threaded my way through it. There was a mass of well-dressed fragrant people, most of them old. There were double-parked cars and taxis at the curb. Their engines were running and their windshield wipers were thumping back and forth at irregular intervals. I saw the guy step out of the foyer doors on my left. He was wearing a heavy cashmere overcoat and carrying gloves and a scarf. He was bareheaded. He was about fifty. We almost collided. I stopped. He stopped. He looked right at me. We got into one of those crowded-sidewalk things where we both hesitated and then both started moving and then both stopped again. At first I thought he didn’t recognize me. Then there was a shadow in his face. Nothing definitive. I held back and he walked across in front of me and climbed into the rear seat of a black Cadillac DeVille waiting at the curb.

I stood there and watched as the driver eased out into the traffic and pulled away. I heard the hiss of the tires on the wet pavement.

I got the plate number. I wasn’t panicking. I wasn’t questioning anything. I was ready to believe the evidence of my own eyes. Ten years of history was overturned in a second.

The guy was alive. Which gave me a huge problem.

That was day one. I forgot all about the bar. I went straight back to my hotel and started calling half-forgotten numbers from my Military Police days. I needed somebody I knew and trusted, but I had been out for six years by then and it was late on a Saturday night so the odds were against me. In the end I settled for somebody who claimed he had heard of me, which might or might not have made a difference to the eventual outcome. He was a warrant officer named Powell.

“I need you to trace a civilian plate,” I told him. “Purely as a favor.”

He knew who I was, so he didn’t give me any grief about not being able to do it for me. I gave him the details. Told him I was pretty sure it was a private registration, not a livery car. He took my number and promised to call me back in the morning, which would be day two.

He didn’t call me back. He sold me out instead. I think in the circumstances anybody would have. Day two was a Sunday and I was up early. I had room service for breakfast and sat waiting for the call. I got a knock on the door instead. Just after ten o’clock. I put my eye to the peephole and saw two people standing close together so they would show up well in the lens. One man, one woman. Dark jackets. No overcoats. The man was carrying a briefcase. They both had some kind of official IDs held up high and tilted so they would catch the hallway light.

“Federal agents,” the man called, just loud enough for me to hear him through the door.

In a situation like that it doesn’t work to pretend you’re not in. I’d been the guys in the hallway often enough. One of them stays right there and the other goes down to get a manager with a passkey. So I just opened up and stood back to let them in.

They were wary for a moment. They relaxed as soon as they saw I wasn’t armed and didn’t look like a maniac. They handed over their IDs and shuffled around politely while I deciphered them. At the top they said: United States Department of Justice. At the bottom they said: Drug Enforcement Administration. In the middle were all kinds of seals and signatures and watermarks. There were photographs and typed names. The man was listed as Steven Eliot, one l like the old poet. April is the cruelest month. That was for damn sure. The photograph was a pretty good likeness. Steven Eliot looked somewhere between thirty and forty and was thickset and dark and a little bald and had a smile that looked friendly in the picture and even better in person. The woman was listed as Susan Duffy. Susan Duffy was a little younger than Steven Eliot. She was a little taller than him, too. She was pale and slender and attractive and had changed her hair since her photograph was taken.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Search the room. It’s a long time since I had anything worth hiding from you guys.”

I handed back their IDs and they put them away in their inside pockets and made sure they moved their jackets enough to let me see their weapons. They had them in neat shoulder rigs. I recognized the ribbed grip of a Glock 17 under Eliot’s armpit. Duffy had a 19, which is the same thing only a little smaller. It was snug against her right breast.

She must have been left-handed.

“We don’t want to search the room,” she said.

“We want to talk about a license plate,” Eliot said.

“I don’t own a car,” I said.

We were all still standing in a neat little triangle just inside the door. Eliot still had the briefcase in his hand. I was trying to figure out who was the boss. Maybe neither one of them. Maybe they were equals. And fairly senior. They were well dressed but looked tired. Maybe they had worked most of the night and flown in from somewhere. From Washington D.C., maybe.

“Can we sit down?” Duffy asked.

“Sure,” I said. But a cheap hotel room made that awkward. There was only one chair. It was shoved under a small desk crammed between a wall and the cabinet that held the television set. Duffy pulled it out and turned it around so it faced the bed. I sat on the bed, up near the pillows. Eliot perched on the foot of the bed and laid his briefcase down on it.

He was still giving me the friendly smile and I couldn’t find anything phony about it.

Duffy looked great on the chair. The seat height was exactly right for her. Her skirt was short and she was wearing dark nylons that went light where her knees bent.

“You’re Reacher, right?” Eliot asked.

I took my eyes off Duffy’s legs and nodded. I felt I could count on them to know that much.

“This room is registered to somebody called Calhoun,” Eliot said. “Paid for with cash, one night only.”

“Habit,” I said.

“You leaving today?”

“I take it one day at a time.”

“Who’s Calhoun?”

“John Quincy Adams’s vice president,” I said. “It seemed appropriate for this location. I used up the presidents long ago. Now I’m doing vice presidents. Calhoun was unusual.

He resigned to run for the Senate.”

“Did he get in?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why the phony name?”

“Habit,” I said again.

Susan Duffy was looking straight at me. Not like I was nuts. Like she was interested in me. She probably found it to be a valuable interrogation technique. Back when I interrogated people I did the same thing. Ninety percent of asking questions is about listening to answers.

“We spoke to a military cop called Powell,” she said. “You asked him to trace a plate.”

Her voice was low and warm and a little husky. I said nothing.

“We have traps and flags in the computers against that plate,” she said. “Soon as Powell’s inquiry hit the wires we knew all about it. We called him and asked him what his interest was. He told us the interest came from you.”

“Reluctantly, I hope,” I said.

She smiled. “He recovered fast enough to give us a phony phone number for you. So you needn’t worry about old unit loyalties.”

“But in the end he gave you the right number.”

“We threatened him,” she said.

“Then MPs have changed since my day,” I said.

“It’s important to us,” Eliot said. “He saw that.”

“So now you’re important to us,” Duffy said.

I looked away. I’ve been around the block more times than I care to count but the sound of her voice saying that still gave me a little thrill. I began to think maybe she was the boss. And a hell of an interrogator.

“A member of the public calls in a plate,” Eliot said. “Why would he do that? Maybe he got in a fender bender with the car the plate was on. Maybe it was a hit-and-run. But wouldn’t he go to the cops for that? And you just told us you don’t have a car anyway.”

“So maybe you saw somebody in the car,” Duffy said.

She let the rest of it hang. It was a neat Catch-22. If the person in the car was my friend, then I was probably her enemy. If the person in the car was my enemy, then she was ready to be my friend.

“You guys had breakfast?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“So have I,” I said.

“We know,” she said. “Room service, a short stack of pancakes with an egg on top, over easy. Plus a large pot of coffee, black. It was ordered for seven forty-five and delivered at seven forty-four and you paid cash and tipped the waiter three bucks.”

“Did I enjoy it?”

“You ate it.”

Eliot snapped the locks on his briefcase and lifted the lid. Pulled out a stack of paper secured with a rubber band. The paper looked new but the writing on it was blurred.

Photocopies of faxes, probably made during the night.

“Your service record,” he said.

I could see photographs in his briefcase. Glossy black-and-white eight-by-tens. Some kind of a surveillance situation.

“You were a military cop for thirteen years,” Eliot said. “Fast-track promotion all the way from second lieutenant to major. Citations and medals. They liked you. You were good.

Very good.”

“Thank you.”

“More than very good, actually. You were their special go-to guy on numerous occasions.”

“I guess I was.”

“But they let you go.”

“I was riffed,” I said.

“Riffed?” Duffy repeated.

“RIF, reduction in force. They love to make acronyms out of things. The Cold War ended, military spending got cut, the army got smaller. So they didn’t need so many special go-to guys.”

“The army still exists,” Eliot said. “They didn’t chop everybody.”

“No.”

“So why you in particular?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

He didn’t challenge me.

“You can help us,” Duffy said. “Who did you see in the car?”

I didn’t answer.

“Were there drugs in the army?” Eliot asked.

I smiled.

“Armies love drugs,” I said. “They always have. Morphine, Benzedrine. The German Army invented Ecstasy. It was an appetite suppressant. CIA invented LSD, tested it on the U.S. Army. Armies march on their veins.”

“Recreational?”

“Average age of a recruit is eighteen. What do you think?”

“Was it a problem?”

“We didn’t make it much of a problem. Some grunt goes on furlough, smokes a couple of joints in his girlfriend’s bedroom, we didn’t care. We figured we’d rather see them with a couple of blunts than a couple of six-packs. Outside of our care we liked them docile rather than aggressive.”

Duffy glanced at Eliot and Eliot used his fingernails to scrape the photographs up out of his case. He handed them to me. There were four of them. All four were grainy and a little blurred. All four showed the same Cadillac DeVille I had seen the night before. I recognized it by the plate number. It was in some kind of a parking garage. There were two guys standing next to the trunk. In two of the pictures the trunk lid was down. In two of them it was up. The two guys were looking down at something inside the trunk. No way of telling what it was. One of the guys was a Hispanic gangbanger. The other was an older man in a suit. I didn’t know him.

Duffy must have been watching my face.

“Not the man you saw?” she said.

“I didn’t say I saw anybody.”

“The Hispanic guy is a major dealer,” Eliot said. “Actually he’s the major dealer for most of Los Angeles County. Not provable, of course, but we know all about him. His profits must run to millions of dollars a week. He lives like an emperor. But he came all the way to Portland, Maine, to meet with this other guy.”