Ли Чайлд - Persuader

“I’m going to need a partner,” she said to me. I felt a little guilty. Her third day, and I hadn’t even partnered her up. I wondered whether I’d given her a desk. Or a locker, or a room to sleep in.

“You met a guy called Frasconi yet?” I said.

“Tony? I met him yesterday. But he’s a lieutenant.”

I shrugged. “I don’t mind commissioned and noncommissioned working together. There’s no regulation against it. If there was, I’d ignore it anyway. You got a problem with it?”

She shook her head. “But maybe he does.”

“Frasconi? He won’t have a problem.”

“So will you tell him?”

“Sure,” I said. I made a note for myself, on a slip of blank paper, Frasconi, Kohl, partners. I underlined it twice, so I would remember. Then I pointed at the file she was carrying. “What have you got?”

“Good news and bad news,” she said. “Bad news is their system for signing out eyes-only paper is all shot to hell. Could be routine inefficiency, but more likely it’s been deliberately compromised to conceal stuff that shouldn’t be happening.”

“Who’s the guy in question?”

“A pointy-head called Gorowski. Uncle Sam recruited him right out of MIT. A nice guy, by all accounts. Supposed to be very smart.”

“Is he Russian?”

She shook her head. “Polish, from a million years ago. No hint of any ideology.”

“Was he a Red Sox fan up at MIT?”

“Why?”

“They’re all weird,” I said. “Check it.”

“It’s probably blackmail,” she said.

“So what’s the good news?”

She opened her file. “This thing they’re working on is a kind of small missile, basically.”

“Who are they working with?”

“Honeywell and the General Defense Corporation.”

“And?”

“This missile needs to be slim. So it’s going to be subcaliber. The tanks use hundred and twenty millimeter cannons, but the thing is going to be smaller than that.”

“By how much?”

“Nobody knows yet. But they’re working on the sabot design right now. The sabot is a kind of sleeve that surrounds the thing to make it up to the right diameter.”

“I know what a sabot is,” I said.

She ignored me. “It’s going to be a discarding sabot, which means it comes apart and falls away immediately after the thing leaves the gun muzzle. They’re trying to figure whether it has to be a metal sabot, or whether it could be plastic. Sabot means boot. From the French. It’s like the missile starts out wearing a little boot.”

“I know that,” I said. “I speak French. My mother was French.”

“Like sabotage,” she said. “From old French labor disputes. Originally it meant to smash new industrial equipment by kicking it.”

“With your boots,” I said.

She nodded. “Right.”

“So what’s the good news again?”

“The sabot design isn’t going to tell anybody anything,” she said. “Nothing important, anyway. It’s just a sabot. So we’ve got plenty of time.”

“OK,” I said. “But make it a priority. With Frasconi. You’ll like him.”

“You want to get a beer later?”

“Me?”

She looked right at me. “If all ranks can work together, they should be able to have a beer together, right?”

“OK,” I said.

Dominique Kohl looked nothing at all like the photographs I had seen of Teresa Daniel, but it was a blend of both their faces I saw in my head. I left Elizabeth Beck with her book and headed up to my original room. I felt more isolated up there. Safer. I locked myself in the bathroom and took my shoe off. Opened the heel and fired up the e-mail device. There was a message from Duffy waiting: No activity at warehouse. What are they doing?

I ignored it and hit new message and typed: We lost Teresa Daniel.

Four words, eighteen letters, three spaces. I stared at them for a long time. Put my finger on the send button. But I didn’t press it. I went to backspace instead and erased the message. It disappeared from right to left. The little cursor ate it up. I figured I would send it only when I had to. When I knew for sure.

I sent: Possibility your computer is penetrated.

There was a long delay. Much longer than the usual ninety seconds. I thought she wasn’t going to answer. I thought she must be ripping her wires out of the wall. But maybe she was just getting out of the shower or something because about four minutes later she came back with a simple: Why?

I sent: Talk of a hacker with partial access to government systems.

She sent: Mainframes or LANs?

I had no idea what she meant. I sent: Don’t know.

She asked: Details?

I sent: Just talk. Are you keeping a log on your laptop?

She sent: Hell no!

I sent: Anywhere?

She sent: Hell no!!

I sent: Eliot?

There was another four-minute delay. Then she came back with: Don’t think so .

I asked: Think or know?

She sent: Think.

I stared at the tiled wall in front of me. Breathed out. Eliot had killed Teresa Daniel . It was the only explanation. Then I breathed in. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he hadn’t. I sent: Are these e-mails vulnerable?

We had been e-mailing back and forth furiously for more than sixty hours. She had asked for news of her agent. I had asked for her agent’s real name. And I had asked in a way that definitely wasn’t gender-neutral. Maybe I had killed Teresa Daniel.

I held my breath until Duffy came back with: Our e-mail is encrypted. Technically might be visible as code but no way is it readable.

I breathed out and sent: Sure?

She sent: Totally.

I sent: Coded how?

She sent: NSA billion-dollar project.

That cheered me up, but only a little. Some of NSA’s billion-dollar projects are in the Washington Post before they’re even finished. And communications snafus screw more things up than any other reason in the world.

I sent: Check with Eliot immediately about computer logs.

She sent: Will do. Progress?

I typed: None.

Then I deleted it and sent: Soon. I thought it might make her feel better.

I went all the way down to the ground-floor hallway. The door to Elizabeth’s parlor was standing open. She was still in the armchair. Doctor Zhivago was facedown in her lap and she was staring out the window at the rain. I opened the front door and stepped outside. The metal detector squawked at the Beretta in my pocket. I closed the door behind me and headed straight across the carriage circle and down the driveway. The rain was hard on my back. It ran down my neck. But the wind helped me. It blew me west, straight toward the gatehouse. I felt light on my feet. Coming back again was going to be harder. I would be walking directly into the wind. Assuming I was still walking at all.

Paulie saw me coming. He must have spent his whole time crouched inside the tiny building, prowling from the front windows to the back windows, watching, like a restless animal in its lair. He came out, in his slicker. He had to duck his head and turn sideways to get through the door. He stood with his back against the wall of his house, where the eaves were low. But the eaves didn’t help him. The rain drove horizontally under them. I could hear it lashing against the slicker, hard and loud and brittle. It drove against his face and ran down it like torrents of sweat. He had no hat. His hair was plastered against his forehead. It was dark with water.

I had both hands in my pockets with my shoulders hunched forward and my face ducked into my collar. My right hand was tight around the Beretta. The safety was off. But I didn’t want to use it. Using it would require complicated explanations. And he would only be replaced. I didn’t want to have him replaced until I was ready to have him replaced. So I didn’t want to use the Beretta. But I was prepared to.