Ли Чайлд - Persuader

“I’m glad we used the real blueprints now,” she said.

I nodded.

“Good instinct,” I said. As far as evidence went we needed to slam-dunk the whole thing. For Quinn to be in possession of the real blueprints would go a long way. Anything less than that, he could start spinning stories about test procedures, war games, exercises, entrapment schemes of his own.

“It’s the Syrians,” she said. “And they’re paying in advance. On an installment plan.”

“How?”

“Briefcase exchange,” she said. “He meets with an attaché from the Syrian Embassy. They go to a café in Georgetown. They both carry those fancy aluminum briefcases, identical.”

“Halliburton,” I said.

She nodded. “They put them side by side under the table and he picks up the Syrian guy’s when he leaves.”

“He’s going to say the Syrian is a legit contact. He’s going to say the guy is passing him stuff.”

“So we say, OK, show us the stuff.”

“He’ll say he can’t, because it’s classified.”

Kohl said nothing. I smiled.

“He’ll give us a big song and dance,” I said. “He’ll put his hand on our shoulders and look into our eyes and say, Hey, trust me on this, folks, national security is involved. ”

“Have you dealt with these guys before?”

“Once,” I said.

“Did you win?”

I nodded. “They’re generally full of shit. My brother was MI for a time. Now he works for Treasury. But he told me all about them. They think they’re smart, whereas they’re really the same as anybody else.”

“So what do we do?”

“We’ll have to recruit the Syrian.”

“Then we can’t bust him.”

“You wanted two-for-one?” I said. “Can’t have it. The Syrian is only doing his job. Can’t fault him for that. Quinn is the bad guy here.”

She was quiet for a moment, a little disappointed. Then she shrugged.

“OK,” she said. “But how do we do it? The Syrian will just walk away from us. He’s an embassy attaché. He’s got diplomatic immunity.”

I smiled again. “Diplomatic immunity is just a sheet of paper from the State Department. The way I did it before was I got hold of the guy and told him to hold a sheet of paper up in front of his gut. Then I pulled my pistol out and asked him if he figured the paper was going to stop a bullet. He said I would get into trouble. I told him however much trouble I got into wasn’t going to affect how slowly he bled to death.”

“And he saw it your way?”

I nodded. “Played ball like Mickey Mantle.”

She went quiet again. Then she asked me the first of two questions that much later I wished I had answered differently.

“Can we see each other socially?” she said.

It was a private booth in a dark bar. She was cute as hell, and she was sitting there right next to me. I was a young man back then, and I thought I had all the time in the world.

“You asking me on a date?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

I said nothing.

“We’ve come a long way, baby,” she said. Then she added, “Women, I mean,” just in case I wasn’t up-to-date with current cigarette advertising.

I said nothing.

“I know what I want,” she said.

I nodded. I believed her. And I believed in equality. I believed in it big time. Not long before that I had met a woman Air Force colonel who captained a B52 bomber and cruised the night skies with more explosive power aboard her single plane than all the bombs ever dropped in the whole of human history put together. I figured if she could be trusted with enough power to explode the planet, then Sergeant First Class Dominique Kohl could be trusted to figure out who she wanted to date.

“So?” she said.

Questions I wished I had answered differently.

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Unprofessional,” I said. “You shouldn’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’ll put an asterisk next to your career,” I said. “Because you’re a talented person who can’t get any higher than sergeant major without going to officer candidate school, so you’ll go there, and you’ll ace it, and you’ll be a lieutenant colonel within ten years, because you deserve it, but everybody will be saying that you got it because you dated your captain way back when.”

She said nothing. Just called the waitress over and ordered us two beers. The room was getting hotter as it got more crowded. I took my jacket off, she took her jacket off. I was wearing an olive-drab T-shirt that had gotten small and thin and faded from being washed a thousand times. Her T-shirt was a boutique item. It was scooped a little lower at the neck than most T-shirts, and the sleeves were cut away at an angle so they rode up on the small deltoid muscles at the top of her arms. The fabric was snow white against her skin. And it was slightly translucent. I could see that she was wearing nothing underneath it.

“Military life is full of sacrifices,” I said, more to myself than to her.

“I’ll get over it,” she said.

Then she asked me the second question I wish I had answered differently.

“Will you let me make the arrest?” she said.

Ten years later I woke up alone in Duke’s bed at six o’clock in the morning. His room was at the front of the house, so I had no view of the sea. I was looking west, at America. There was no morning sun. No long dawn shadows. Just dull gray light on the driveway, and the wall, and the granite landscape beyond. The wind was blowing in off the sea. I could see trees moving. I imagined black storm clouds behind me, way out over the Atlantic, moving fast toward the shore. I imagined sea birds fighting the turbulent air with their feathers whipped and ruffled by the gale. Day fifteen, starting out gray and cold and inhospitable, and likely to get worse.

I showered, but I didn’t shave. I dressed in more of Duke’s black denim and laced my shoes and carried my jacket and my coat over my arm. Walked quietly down to the kitchen. The cook had already made coffee. She gave me a cup and I took it and sat at the table. She lifted a loaf of bread out of the freezer and put it in the microwave. I figured I would need to evacuate her, at some point before things turned unpleasant. And Elizabeth, and Richard. The mechanic and Beck himself could stay to face the music.

I could hear the sea from the kitchen, loud and clear. The waves crashed in and the relentless undertow sucked back out. Pools filled and drained, the gravel rattled across the rocks. The wind moaned softly through the cracks in the outer porch door. I heard frantic cries from the gulls. I listened to them and sipped my coffee and waited.

Richard came down ten minutes after me. His hair was all over the place and I could see his missing ear. He took coffee and sat down across from me. His ambivalence was back. I could see him facing up to no more college and the rest of his life hidden away with his folks. I figured if his mother got away without an indictment they could start over somewhere else. Depending on how resilient he was, he could get back to school without missing much more than a week of the semester. If he wanted to. Unless it was an expensive school, which I guessed it was. They were going to have money problems. They were going to walk away with nothing more than they stood up in. If they walked away at all.

The cook went out to set the dining room up for breakfast. Richard watched her go and I watched him and saw his ear again and a piece of the puzzle clicked into place.

“Five years ago,” I said. “The kidnap.”

He kept his composure. Just looked down at the table and then looked up at me and combed his hair over his scar with his fingers.

“Do you know what your dad is really into?” I asked.