Ли Чайлд - Persuader

“We never had our talk,” I said. “About the background information.”

“Later,” he said.

I passed Route One and used I-95 instead. Headed north for the city. The sky stayed gray. The wind was strong enough to push the car a little off line. I turned onto I-295 and passed by the airport. It was on my left, beyond the tongue of water. On my right was the back of the strip mall where the maid had been captured, and the back of the new business park where I figured she had died. I kept on going straight and threaded my way into the harbor area. I passed the lot where Beck parked his trucks. One minute later we arrived at his warehouse.

It was surrounded by vehicles. There were five of them parked head-in against the walls, like airplanes at a terminal. Like animals at a trough. Like suckerfish on a corpse. There were two black Lincoln Town Cars and two blue Chevy Suburbans and a gray Mercury Grand Marquis. One of the Lincolns was the car I had been in when Harley drove me out to pick up the Saab. After we put the maid into the sea. I looked for enough space to park the Cadillac.

“Just let me out here,” Beck said.

I eased to a stop. “And?”

“Head back to the house,” he said. “Take care of my family.”

I nodded. So maybe Richard had talked to him, after all. Maybe his ambivalence was swinging my way, just temporarily.

“OK,” I said. “Whatever you need. You want me to pick you up again later?”

He shook his head.

“I’m sure I’ll get a ride back,” he said.

He slid out and headed for the weathered gray door. I took my foot off the brake and looped around the warehouse and rolled back south.

I used Route One instead of I-295 and drove straight to the new business park. Pulled in and cruised through the network of brand-new roads. There were maybe three dozen identical metal buildings. They were very plain. It wasn’t the kind of place that depends on attracting casual passersby. Foot-traffic wasn’t important. There were no retail places. No gaudy come-ons. No big billboards. Just discreet unit numbers with business names printed small next to them. There were lock-and-key people, ceramic tile merchants, a couple of print shops. There was a beauty products wholesaler. Unit 26 was an electric wheelchair distributor. And next to it was Unit 27: Xavier eXport Company . The X s were much larger than the other letters. There was a main office address on the sign that didn’t match the business park’s location. I figured it referred to someplace in downtown Portland. So I rolled north again and recrossed the river and did some city driving.

I came in on Route One with a park on my left. Made a right onto a street full of office buildings. They were the wrong buildings. It was the wrong street. So I quartered the business district for five long minutes until I spotted a street sign with the right name on it. Then I watched the numbers and pulled up on a fireplug outside a tower that had stainless steel letters stretched across the whole of the frontage, spelling out a name: Missionary House. There was a parking garage under it. I looked at the vehicle entrance and was pretty sure Susan Duffy had walked through it eleven weeks earlier, with a camera in her hand. Then I recalled a high school history lesson, somewhere hot, somewhere Spanish, a quarter-century in the past, some old guy telling us about a Spanish Jesuit called Francisco Javier. I could even remember his dates: 1506 to 1552. Francisco Javier, Spanish missionary. Francis Xavier, Missionary House. Back in Boston at the start Eliot had accused Beck of making jokes. He had been wrong. It was Quinn with the twisted sense of humor.

I moved off the fireplug and found Route One again and headed south on it. I drove fast but it took me thirty whole minutes to reach the Kennebunk River. There were three Ford Tauruses parked outside the motel, all plain and identical apart from color, and even then there wasn’t much variation between them. They were gray, gray blue, and blue. I put the Cadillac where I had put it before, behind the propane store. Walked back through the cold and knocked on Duffy’s door. I saw the peephole black out for a second and then she opened up. We didn’t hug. I saw Eliot and Villanueva in the room behind her.

“Why can’t I find the second agent?” she said.

“Where did you look?”

“Everywhere,” she said.

She was wearing jeans and a white Oxford shirt. Different jeans, different shirt. She must have had a large supply. She was wearing boat shoes over bare feet. She looked good, but there was worry in her eyes.

“Can I come in?” I said.

She paused a second, preoccupied. Then she moved out of the way and I followed her inside. Villanueva was in the desk chair. He had it tilted backward. I hoped the legs were strong. He wasn’t a small guy. Eliot was on the end of the bed, like he had been in my room in Boston. Duffy had been sitting at the head of the bed. That was clear. The pillows were stacked vertically and the shape of her back was pressed into them.

“Where did you look?” I asked her again.

“The whole system,” she said. “The whole Justice Department, front to back, which means FBI as well as DEA. And she’s not there.”

“Conclusion?”

“She was off the books too.”

“Which begs a question,” Eliot said. “Like, what the hell is going on?”

Duffy sat down at the head of the bed again and I sat down next to her. There was no other place for me to go. She wrestled a pillow out from behind her and shoved it in behind me. It was warm from her body.

“Nothing much is going on,” I said. “Except all three of us started out two weeks ago just like the Keystone Cops.”

“How?” Eliot said.

I made a face. “I was obsessed with Quinn, you guys were obsessed with Teresa Daniel. We were all so obsessed we went right ahead and built a house of cards.”

“How?” he said again.

“My fault more than yours,” I said. “Think about it from the very beginning, eleven weeks ago.”

“Eleven weeks ago was nothing to do with you. You weren’t involved yet.”

“Tell me exactly what happened.”

He shrugged. Rehearsed it in his mind. “We got word from LA that a top boy just bought himself a first-class ticket to Portland, Maine.”

I nodded. “So you tracked him to his rendezvous with Beck. And took pictures of him doing what?”

“Checking samples,” Duffy said. “Doing a deal.”

“In a private parking garage,” I said. “And as an aside, if it was private enough to get you in trouble with the Fourth Amendment, maybe you should have wondered how Beck got himself in there.”

She said nothing.

“Then what?” I said.

“We looked at Beck,” Eliot said. “Concluded he was a major importer and a major distributor.”

“Which he most definitely is,” I said. “And you put Teresa in to nail him.”

“Off the books,” Eliot said.

“That’s a minor detail,” I said.

“So what went wrong?”

“It was a house of cards,” I said. “You made one tiny error of judgment at the outset. It invalidated everything that came after it.”

“What was it?”

“Something that I should have seen a hell of a lot earlier than I did.”

“What?”

“Just ask yourself why you can’t find a computer trail for the maid.”

“She was off the books. That’s the only explanation.”

I shook my head. “She was as legal as can be. She was all over the damn books. I found some notes she made. There’s no doubt about it.”

Duffy looked straight at me. “Reacher, what exactly is going on?”

“Beck has a mechanic,” I said. “Some kind of a technician. For what?”

“I don’t know,” she said.