Ли Чайлд - Persuader

“It won’t be here,” I said. “They’d need a chisel to get close to the metal.”

Eliot found it inside the cab about fifteen seconds after he started looking. It was stuck to the foam on the bottom of the passenger’s seat with a little dot of hook-and-loop fastener. It was a tiny bare metal can a little bigger than a quarter and about half an inch thick. It trailed a thin eight-inch wire that was presumably the transmitting antenna. Eliot closed the whole thing into his fist and backed out of the cab fast and stared at the mouth of the ramp.

“What?” Duffy asked.

“This is weird,” he said. “Thing like this has a hearing-aid battery, nothing more. Low power, short range. Can’t be picked up beyond about two miles. So where’s the guy tracking it?”

The mouth of the ramp was empty. I had been the last guy up it. We stood there with our eyes watering in the cold wind, staring at nothing. Traffic hissed by behind the trees, but nothing came up the ramp.

“How long have you been here now?” Eliot asked.

“About four minutes,” I said. “Maybe five.”

“Makes no sense,” he said. “That puts the guy maybe four or five miles behind you. And he can’t hear this thing from four or five miles.”

“Maybe there’s no guy,” I said. “Maybe they trust me.”

“So why put this thing in there?”

“Maybe they didn’t. Maybe it’s been in there for years. Maybe they forgot all about it.”

“Too many maybes,” he said.

Duffy spun right and stared at the trees.

“They could have stopped on the highway shoulder,” she said. “You know, exactly level with where we are now.”

Eliot and I spun to our right and stared, too. It made good sense. It was no kind of clever surveillance technique to pull into a rest stop and park right next to your target.

“Let’s take a look,” I said.

There was a narrow strip of neat grass and then an equally narrow area where the highway people had tamed the edge of the woods with planted shrubs and bark chips. Then there were just trees. The highway had mown them down to the east and the rest area had leveled them to the west but in between was a forty-foot thicket that could have been growing there since the dawn of time. It was hard work getting through it. There were vines and scratchy brambles and low branches. But it was April. Getting through in July or August might have been impossible.

We stopped just before the trees petered out into lower growth. Beyond that was the flat grassy highway shoulder. We eased forward as far as we dared and craned left and right. There was nobody parked there. The shoulder was clear as far as we could see in both directions. Traffic was very light. Whole five-second intervals went by with no vehicles in view at all. Eliot shrugged like he didn’t understand it and we turned around and forced our way back.

“Makes no sense,” he said again.

“They’re short of manpower,” I said.

“No, they’re on Route One,” Duffy said. “They must be. It runs parallel with I-95 the whole way down the coast. From Portland, way down south. It’s probably less than two miles away most of the time.”

We turned east again, like we could see through the trees and spot a car idling on the shoulder of a distant parallel road.

“It’s how I’d do it,” Duffy said.

I nodded. It was a very plausible scenario. There would be technical disadvantages. With up to two miles of lateral displacement any slight fore-aft discrepancy due to traffic would make the signal drift in and out of range. But then, all they wanted to know was my general direction.

“It’s possible,” I said.

“No, it’s likely,” Eliot said. “Duffy’s right. It’s pure common sense. They want to stay out of your mirrors as long as they can.”

“Either way, we have to assume they’re there. How far does Route One stay close to I-95?”

“Forever,” Duffy said. “Way farther than New London, Connecticut. They split around Boston, but they come back together.”

“OK,” I said. Checked my watch. “I’ve been here about nine minutes now. Long enough for the bathroom and a cup of coffee. Time to put the electronics back on the road.”

I told Eliot to put the transmitter in his pocket and drive Duffy’s Taurus south at a steady fifty miles an hour. I told him I would catch him in the truck somewhere before New London. I figured I would worry about how to get the transmitter back in the right place later. Eliot took off and I was left alone with Duffy. We watched her car disappear south and then swiveled around north and watched the incoming ramp. I had an hour and one minute and I needed the soldering iron. Time ticking away.

“How is it up there?” Duffy asked.

“A nightmare,” I said. I told her about the eight-foot granite wall and the razor wire and the gate and the metal detectors on the doors and the room with no inside keyhole. I told her about Paulie.

“Any sign of my agent?” she asked.

“I only just got there,” I said.

“She’s in that house,” she said. “I have to believe that.”

I said nothing.

“You need to make some progress,” she said. “Every hour you spend there puts you deeper in trouble. And her.”

“I know that,” I said.

“What’s Beck like?” she asked.

“Bent,” I said. I told her about the fingerprints on the glass and the way the Maxima had disappeared. Then I told her about the Russian roulette.

“You played?”

“Six times,” I said, and stared at the ramp.

She stared at me. “You’re crazy. Six to one, you should be dead.”

I smiled. “You ever played?”

“I wouldn’t. I don’t like those odds.”

“You’re like most people. Beck was the same. He thought the odds were six to one. But they’re nearer six hundred to one. Or six thousand. You put a single heavy bullet in a well-made well-maintained gun like that Anaconda and it would be a miracle if the cylinder came to rest with the bullet near the top. The momentum of the spin always carries it to the bottom. Precision mechanism, a little oil, gravity helps you out. I’m not an idiot. Russian roulette is a lot safer than people think. And it was worth the risk to get hired.”

She was quiet for a spell.

“You got a feeling?” she asked.

“He looks like a rug importer,” I said. “There are rugs all over the damn place.”

“But?”

“But he isn’t,” I said. “I’d bet my pension on it. I asked him about the rugs and he didn’t say much. Like he wasn’t very interested in them. Most people like to talk about their businesses. Most people, you can’t shut them up.”

“You get a pension?”

“No,” I said.

Right then a gray Taurus identical to Duffy’s except for the color burst up over the rise of the ramp. It slowed momentarily while the driver scanned around and then accelerated hard straight toward us. It was the old guy at the wheel, the one I had left in the gutter near the college gate. He slammed to a stop next to my blue truck and opened his door and heaved himself up and out in exactly the same way he had gotten out of the borrowed police Caprice. He had a big black-and-red Radio Shack bag in his hand. It was bulky with boxes. He held it up and smiled and stepped forward to shake my hand. He had a fresh shirt on, but his suit was the same. I could see blotches where he had tried to sponge the fake blood out. I could picture him, standing at his motel room sink, getting busy with the hand towel. He hadn’t been very successful. It looked like he had been careless with the ketchup at dinner.

“They got you running errands already?” he asked.

“I don’t know what they got me doing,” I said. “We got a lead seal problem.”