Ли Чайлд - Persuader

I went up to Duke’s room. I didn’t think of it as my room. I hoped I never would. I lay down on the bed and started thinking again. Tried to chase whatever it was hovering way in the back of my mind. It’s easy, Leon Garber would have said. Work the clues. Go through everything you’ve seen, everything you’ve heard. So I went through it. But I kept coming back to Dominique Kohl. The fifth time I ever saw her, she drove me to Aberdeen, Maryland, in an olive-green Chevrolet. I was having second thoughts about letting genuine blueprints out into the world. It was a big risk. Not usually something I would worry about, but I needed more progress than we were making. Kohl had identified the dead-drop site, and the drop technique, and where and when and how Gorowski was letting his contact know that the delivery had been made. But she still hadn’t seen the contact make the pickup. Still didn’t know who he was.

Aberdeen was a small place twenty-some miles north and east of Baltimore. Gorowski’s method was to drive down to the big city on a Sunday and make the drop in the Inner Harbor area. Back then the renovations were in full swing and it was a nice bright place to be but the public hadn’t caught on all the way yet and it stayed pretty empty most of the time. Gorowski had a POV. It was a two-year-old Mazda Miata, bright red. It was a plausible car, all things considered. Not new, but not cheap either, because it was a popular model back then and nobody could get a discount off sticker, so used values held up well. And it was a two-seater, which was no good for his baby girls. So he had to have another car, too. We knew his wife wasn’t rich. It might have worried me in someone else, but the guy was an engineer. It was a characteristic choice. He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink. Entirely plausible that he would hoard his spare dollars and spring for something with a sweet manual change and rear-wheel drive.

The Sunday we followed him he parked in a lot near one of the Baltimore marinas and went to sit on a bench. He was a squat hairy guy. Wide, but not tall. He had the Sunday newspaper with him. He spent some time gazing out at the sailboats. Then he closed his eyes and turned his face up to the sky. The weather was still wonderful. He spent maybe five minutes just soaking up the sun like a lizard. Then he opened his eyes and opened his paper and started to read it.

“This is his fifth time,” Kohl whispered to me. “Third trip since they finished with the sabot stuff.”

“Standard procedure so far?” I asked.

“Identical,” she said.

He kept busy with the paper for about twenty minutes. I could tell he was actually reading it. He paid attention to all the sections, except for sports, which I thought was a little odd for a Yankees fan. But then, I guessed a Yankees fan wouldn’t like the Orioles stuffed down his throat all the time.

“Here we go,” Kohl whispered.

He glanced up and slipped a buff army envelope out of the newspaper. Snapped his left hand up and out to take a kink out of the section he was reading. And to distract, because at the exact same time his right hand dropped the envelope into the garbage can beside him at the end of the bench.

“Neat,” I said.

“You bet,” she said. “This boy is no dummy.”

I nodded. He was pretty good. He didn’t get up right away. He sat there for maybe ten more minutes, reading. Then he folded the paper slowly and carefully and stood up and walked to the edge of the water and looked out at the boats some more. Then he turned around and walked back toward his car, with the newspaper tucked up under his left arm.

“Now watch,” Kohl said.

I saw him take a nub of chalk out of his pants pocket with his right hand. He scuffed against an iron lamp post and left a tick of chalk on it. It was the fifth mark on the post. Five weeks, five marks. The first four were fading away with age, in sequence. I stared at them through my field glasses while he walked on into the parking lot and got into his roadster and drove slowly away. I turned back and focused on the garbage can.

“Now what happens?” I said.

“Absolutely nothing,” Kohl said. “I’ve done this twice before. Two whole Sundays. Nobody’s going to come. Not today, not tonight.”

“When is the trash emptied?”

“Tomorrow morning, first thing.”

“Maybe the garbage man is a go-between.”

She shook her head. “I checked. The truck compacts everything into a solid mass as it’s loaded and then it goes straight into the incinerator.”

“So our secret blueprints are getting burned up in a municipal incinerator?”

“That’s safe enough.”

“Maybe one of these sailboat guys is sneaking out in the middle of the night.”

“Not unless the Invisible Man bought a sailboat.”

“So maybe there’s no guy,” I said. “Maybe the whole thing was set up way in advance and then the guy got arrested for something else. Or he got cold feet and left town. Or he got sick and died. Maybe it’s a defunct scheme.”

“You think?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Are you going to pull the plug?” she said.

“I have to. I might be an idiot, but I’m not completely stupid. This is way out of hand now.”

“Can I go to plan B?”

“Haul Gorowski in and threaten him with a firing squad. Then tell him if he plays ball and delivers phony plans we’ll be nice to him.”

“Tough to make them convincing.”

“Tell him to draw them himself,” I said. “It’s his ass on the line.”

“Or his children’s.”

“All part of being a parent,” I said. “It’ll concentrate his mind.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “You want to go dancing?”

“Here?”

“We’re a long way from home. Nobody knows us.”

“OK,” I said.

Then we figured it was too early for dancing, so we had a couple of beers and waited for evening. The bar we were in was small and dark. There was wood and brick. It was a nice place. It had a jukebox. We spent a long time leaning on it, side by side, trying to choose our debut number. We debated it with intensity. It began to assume enormous significance. I tried to interpret her suggestions by analyzing the tempos. Were we going to be holding on to each other? That sort of dancing? Or was it going to be the usual sort of separate-but-equal leaping about? In the end we would have needed a United Nations resolution, so we just put our quarter in the machine and closed our eyes and hit buttons at random. We got “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones. It was a great number. It always has been. She was actually a pretty good dancer. But I was terrible.

Afterward we were out of breath, so we sat down and ordered more beers. And I suddenly figured out what Gorowski had been up to.

“It’s not the envelope,” I said. “The envelope is empty. It’s the newspaper. The blueprints are in the newspaper. In the sports section. He should have checked the box scores. The envelope is a diversion, in case of surveillance. He’s been well rehearsed. He dumps the newspaper in another garbage can, later. After making his chalk mark. Probably on his way out of the lot.”

“Shit,” Kohl said. “I wasted five weeks.”

“And somebody got three real blueprints.”

“One of us,” she said. “Military, or CIA, or FBI. A professional, to be that cute.”

The newspaper, not the envelope. Ten years later I was lying on a bed in Maine thinking about Dominique Kohl dancing and a guy called Gorowski folding his newspaper, slowly and carefully, and staring out at a hundred sailboat masts on the water. The newspaper, not the envelope. It seemed to be still relevant, somehow. This, not that. Then I thought about the maid hiding my stash under the floor of the Saab’s trunk. She couldn’t have hidden anything else there, or Beck would have found it and added it to the prosecution exhibits on his kitchen table. But the Saab’s carpets were old and loose. If I was the sort of person who hid a gun under a spare tire I might hide papers under a car’s carpets. And I might be the sort of person who made notes and kept records.