Ли Чайлд - Persuader

“Understood,” I said, although I really didn’t see any easy way of cleaning it up if it had already gotten that far. Then Eliot took a last couple of phone calls and confirmed they had a college security cruiser on loan and were putting a plausible old Nissan Maxima behind the mall’s flagship department store. The Maxima had been impounded from a small-time marijuana grower in New York State. They still had tough drug laws down there. They were putting phony Massachusetts plates on it and filling it with the kind of junk a department store sales lady might be expected to haul around with her.

“Bed now,” Duffy called. “Big day tomorrow.”

That was the end of day ten.

Duffy brought doughnuts and coffee to my room for breakfast on day eleven, early. Her and me, alone. We went through the whole thing, one last time. She showed me photographs of the agent she had inserted fifty-nine days ago. She was a blonde thirty-year-old who had gotten a clerk’s job with Bizarre Bazaar using the name Teresa Daniel. Teresa Daniel was petite and looked resourceful. I looked hard at the pictures and memorized her features, but it was another woman’s face I was seeing in my mind.

“I’m assuming she’s still alive,” Duffy said. “I have to.”

I said nothing.

“Try hard to get hired,” she said. “We checked your recent history, the same way Beck might. You come out pretty vague. Plenty missing that would worry me, but I don’t think it would worry him.”

I gave the photographs back to her.

“I’m a shoo-in,” I said. “The illusion reinforces itself. He’s left shorthanded and he’s under attack, all at the same time. But I’m not going to try too hard. In fact I’m going to come across a little reluctant. I think anything else would seem phony.”

“OK,” she said. “You’ve got seven objectives, of which numbers one, two, and three are, take a lot of care. We can assume these are extremely dangerous people.”

I nodded. “We can do more than assume it. If Quinn’s involved, we can absolutely guarantee it.”

“So act accordingly,” she said. “Gloves off, from the start.”

“Yes,” I said. I put my arm across my chest and started massaging my left shoulder with my right hand. Then I stopped myself, surprised. An army psychiatrist once told me that type of unconscious gesture represents feelings of vulnerability. It’s defensive. It’s about covering up and hiding. It’s the first step toward curling yourself into a ball on the floor. Duffy must have read the same books, because she picked up on it and looked straight at me.

“You’re scared of Quinn, aren’t you?” she said.

“I’m not scared of anybody,” I said. “But certainly I preferred it when he was dead.”

“We can cancel,” she said.

I shook my head. “I’d like the chance to find him, believe me.”

“What went wrong with the arrest?”

I shook my head again.

“I won’t talk about that,” I said.

She was quiet for a beat. But she didn’t push it. Just looked away and paused and looked back and started up with the briefing again. Quiet voice, efficient diction.

“Objective number four is find my agent,” she said. “And bring her back to me.”

I nodded.

“Five, bring me solid evidence I can use to nail Beck.”

“OK,” I said.

She paused again. Just a beat. “Six, find Quinn and do whatever you need to do with him. And then seven, get the hell out of there.”

I nodded. Said nothing.

“We won’t tail you,” she said. “The kid might spot us. He’ll be pretty paranoid by then. And we won’t put a homing device on the Nissan, because they’d probably find it later. You’ll have to e-mail us your location, soon as you know it.”

“OK,” I said.

“Weaknesses?” she asked.

I forced my mind away from Quinn.

“Three weaknesses that I can see,” I said. “Two minor and one major. First minor one is that I’m going to blow the back window out of the van but the kid will have about ten minutes to realize the broken glass is in the wrong place and there isn’t a corresponding hole in the windshield.”

“So don’t do it.”

“I think I really need to. I think we need to keep the panic level high.”

“OK, we’ll put a bunch of boxes back there. You should have boxes anyway, if you’re a delivery man. They might obscure his view. If they don’t, just hope he doesn’t put two and two together inside ten minutes.”

I nodded. “And second, old man Beck is going to call the cops down here, sometime, somehow. Maybe the newspapers, too. He’s going to be looking for corroborating information.”

“We’ll give the cops a script to follow. And they’ll give the press something. They’ll play ball for as long as they need to. What’s the major weakness?”

“The bodyguards,” I said. “How long can you hold them? You can’t let them get near a phone, or they’ll call Beck. So you can’t formally arrest them. You can’t put them in the system. You’ll have to hold them incommunicado, completely illegally. How long can you keep that going?”

She shrugged. “Four or five days, tops. We can’t protect you any longer than that. So be real fast.”

“I plan to be,” I said. “How long will the battery last on my e-mail thing?”

“About five days,” she said. “You’ll be out by then. We can’t give you a charger. It would be too suspicious. But you can use a cell phone charger, if you can find one.”

“OK,” I said.

She just looked at me. There was nothing more to say. Then she moved close and kissed me on the cheek. It was sudden. Her lips were soft. They left a dusting of doughnut sugar on my skin.

“Good luck,” she said. “I don’t think we’ve missed anything.”

But we had missed a lot of things. They were glaring errors in our thinking and they all came back to haunt me.

Duke the bodyguard came back to my room five minutes before seven in the evening, which was way too early for dinner. I heard his footsteps outside and a quiet click as the lock turned. I was sitting on the bed. The e-mail device was back in my shoe and my shoe was back on my foot.

“Get a nap, asshole?” he asked.

“Why am I locked up?” I asked back.

“Because you’re a cop-killer,” he said.

I looked away. Maybe he had been a cop himself, before he went private. Lots of ex-cops wind up in the security business, as consultants or private eyes or bodyguards. Certainly he had some kind of an agenda, which could be a problem for me. But it meant he was buying Richard Beck’s story without question, which was the upside. He looked at me for a second with nothing much in his face. Then he led me out of the room and down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor and through dark passageways toward the side of the house that faced north. I could smell salt air and damp carpet. There were rugs everywhere. Some places they were laid two-deep on the floor. They glowed with muted colors. He stopped in front of a door and pushed it open and stepped back so I was channeled into a room. It was large and square and paneled with dark oak. Rugs all over the floor. There were small windows in deep recesses. Darkness and rock and gray ocean outside. There was an oak table. My two Colt Anacondas were lying on it, unloaded. Their cylinders were open. There was a man at the head of the table. He was sitting in an oak chair with arms and a tall back. He was the guy from Susan Duffy’s surveillance photographs.

In the flesh he was mostly unremarkable. Not big, not small. Maybe six feet, maybe two hundred pounds. Gray hair, not thin, not thick, not short, not long. He was about fifty. He was wearing a gray suit made out of expensive cloth cut without any attempt at style. His shirt was white and his tie was no color at all, like gasoline. His hands and face were pale, like his natural habitat was underground parking garages at night, hawking samples of something from his Cadillac’s trunk.