Ли Чайлд - Persuader

“Rare or well?” Beck asked me.

He was carving the roast with one of the black-handled knives from the kitchen. They had been stored in a knife block and I had thought about using one of them to kill him with. The one he was using right then would have been a good choice. It was about ten inches long, and it was razor sharp, judging by how well the meat was slicing. Unless the meat happened to be unbelievably tender.

“Rare,” I said. “Thank you.”

He carved me two slices and I regretted it instantly. My mind flashed back seven hours to the body bag. I had pulled the zipper down and seen another knife’s work. The image was so vivid I could still feel the cold metal tag between my fingers. Then I flashed back ten whole years, right back to the beginning with Quinn, and the loop was complete.

“Horseradish?” Elizabeth said.

I paused. Then I took a spoonful. The old army rule was Eat every time you can, sleep every time you can, because you didn’t know when you were going to get another chance to do either. So I shut Quinn out of my mind and helped myself to vegetables and started eating. Restarted thinking. Everything I’d heard, everything I’d seen. I kept coming back to the Baltimore marina in the bright sunlight, and to the envelope and the newspaper. Not this, but that. And to the thing Duffy had said to me: You haven’t found anything useful. Not a thing. No evidence at all.

“Have you read Pasternak?” Elizabeth asked me.

“What do you think of Edward Hopper?” Richard asked.

“You think the M16 should be replaced?” Beck said.

I surfaced again. They were all looking at me. It was like they were starved for conversation. Like they were all lonely. I listened to the waves crashing around three sides of the house and understood how they could feel that way. They were very isolated. But that was their choice. I like isolation. I can go three weeks without saying a word.

“I saw Doctor Zhivago at the movies,” I said. “I like the Hopper painting with the people in the diner at night.”

“Nighthawks,” Richard said.

I nodded. “I like the guy on the left, all alone.”

“Remember the name of the diner?”

“Phillies,” I said. “And I think the M16 is a fine assault rifle.”

“Really?” Beck said.

“It does what an assault rifle is supposed to do,” I said. “You can’t ask for much more than that.”

“Hopper was a genius,” Richard said.

“Pasternak was a genius,” Elizabeth said. “Unfortunately the movie trivialized him. And he hasn’t been well translated. Solzhenitsyn is overrated by comparison.”

“I guess the M16 is an improved rifle,” Beck said.

“Edward Hopper is like Raymond Chandler,” Richard said. “He captured a particular time and place. Of course, Chandler was a genius, too. Way better than Hammett.”

“Like Pasternak is better than Solzhenitsyn?” his mother said.

They went on like that for a good long time. Day fourteen, a Friday, nearly over, eating a beef dinner with three doomed people, talking about books and pictures and rifles. Not this, but that. I tuned them out again and trawled back ten years and listened to Sergeant First Class Dominique Kohl instead.

“He’s a real Pentagon insider,” she said to me, the seventh time we met. “Lives close by in Virginia. That’s why he keeps his boat up in Baltimore, I guess.”

“How old is he?” I asked.

“Forty,” she said.

“Have you seen his full record?”

She shook her head. “Most of it is classified.”

I nodded. Tried to put the chronology together. A forty-year-old would have been eligible for the last two years of the Vietnam draft, at the age of eighteen or nineteen. But a guy who wound up as an intel light colonel before the age of forty had almost certainly been a college graduate, maybe even a Ph.D., which would have gotten him a deferment. So he probably didn’t go to Indochina, which in the normal way of things would have slowed his promotion. No bloody wars, no dread diseases. But his promotion hadn’t been slow, because he was a light colonel before the age of forty.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Kohl said. “How come he’s already two whole pay grades above you?”

“Actually I was thinking about you in a bikini.”

She shook her head. “No you weren’t.”

“He’s older than me.”

“He went up like a bottle rocket.”

“Maybe he’s smarter than me,” I said.

“Almost certainly,” she said. “But even so, he’s gone real far, real fast.”

I nodded.

“Great,” I said. “So now we’re messing with a big star from the intel community.”

“He’s got lots of contact with foreigners,” she said. “I’ve seen him with all kinds of people. Israelis, Lebanese, Iraqis, Syrians.”

“He’s supposed to,” I said. “He’s a Middle East specialist.”

“He comes from California,” she said. “His dad was a railroad worker. His mom stayed at home. They lived in a small house in the north of the state. He inherited it, and it’s his only asset. And we can assume he’s been on military pay since college.”

“OK,” I said.

“He’s a poor boy, Reacher,” she said. “So how come he rents a big house in MacLean, Virginia? How come he owns a yacht?”

“Is it a yacht?”

“It’s a big sailboat with bedrooms. That’s a yacht, right?”

“POV?”

“A brand-new Lexus.”

I said nothing.

“Why don’t his own people ask these kind of questions?” she said.

“They never do,” I said. “Haven’t you noticed that? Something can be plain as day and it passes them by.”

“I really don’t understand how that happens,” she said.

I shrugged.

“They’re human,” I said. “We should cut them some slack. Preconceptions get in the way. They ask themselves how good he is, not how bad he is.”

She nodded. “Like I spent two days watching the envelope, not the newspaper. Preconceptions.”

“But they should know better.”

“I guess.”

“Military Intelligence,” I said.

“The world’s biggest oxymoron,” she replied, in the familiar old ritual. “Like safe danger.”

“Like dry water,” I said.

“Did you enjoy it?” Elizabeth Beck asked me, ten years later.

I didn’t answer. Preconceptions get in the way.

“Did you enjoy it?” she asked again.

I looked straight at her. Preconceptions.

“Sorry?” I said. Everything I had heard.

“Dinner,” she said. “Did you enjoy it?”

I looked down. My plate was completely empty.

“It was fabulous,” I said. Everything I had seen.

“Really?”

“No question,” I said. You haven’t found anything useful.

“I’m glad,” she said.

“Forget Hopper and Pasternak,” I said. “And Raymond Chandler. Your cook is a genius.”

“You feeling OK?” Beck said. He had left half his meat on his plate.

“Terrific,” I said. Not a thing.

“You sure?”

I paused. No evidence at all.

“Yes, I really mean it,” I said.

And I really did mean it. Because I knew what was in the Saab. I knew for sure. No doubt about it. So I felt terrific. But I felt a little ashamed, too. Because I had been very, very slow. Painfully slow. Disgracefully slow. It had taken me eighty-six hours. More than three and a half days. I had been every bit as dumb as Quinn’s old unit. Something can be plain as day and it passes them by. I turned my head and looked straight at Beck like I was seeing him for the very first time.