Ли Чайлд - Persuader

“OK,” I said.

She twisted around in her seat.

“You sure they’re all out at the house?” she said.

“Did you notice Harley’s suit?” I said.

“Black,” she said. “Cheap.”

“It was as close as he could get to a tux. It was his idea of evening wear. And Emily Smith had a black cocktail dress ready in her office. She was going to change. She already had her smart shoes on. I think there’s going to be a banquet.”

“Keast and Maden,” Villanueva said. “The caterers.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Banquet food. Eighteen people at fifty-five dollars a head. Tonight. And Emily Smith made a note on the order. Lamb, not pork. Who eats lamb and not pork?”

“People who keep kosher.”

“And Arabs,” I said. “Libyans, maybe.”

“Their suppliers.”

“Exactly,” I said again. “I think they’re about to cement their commercial relationship. I think all the Russian stuff in the crates was some kind of a token shipment. It was a gesture. Same with the Persuaders. They’ve demonstrated to each other that both sides can deliver. Now they’re going to break bread together and go into business for real.”

“At the house?”

I nodded. “It’s an impressive location. Isolated, very dramatic. And it’s got a big dining table.”

He turned the windshield wipers on. The glass streaked and smeared. It was sea spray, whipping horizontally off the Atlantic. Full of salt.

“Something else,” I said.

“What?”

“I think Teresa Daniel is part of the deal,” I said.

“What?”

“I think they’re selling her along with the shotguns. A cute blond American girl. I think she’s the ten-thousand-dollar bonus item.”

Nobody spoke.

“Did you notice what Harley said about her? Mint condition.”

Nobody spoke.

“I think they’ve kept her fed and alive and untouched.” I thought: Paulie wouldn’t have bothered with Elizabeth Beck if Teresa had been available to him. With all due respect to Elizabeth.

Nobody spoke.

“They’re probably cleaning her up right now,” I said.

Nobody spoke.

“I think she’s headed for Tripoli,” I said. “Part of the deal. Like a sweetener.”

Villanueva accelerated hard. The wind howled louder around the windshield pillars and the door mirrors. Two minutes later we reached the spot where we had ambushed the bodyguards and he slowed again. We were five miles from the house. Theoretically we were already visible from the upper floor windows. We came to a stop in the center of the road and we all craned forward and stared into the east.

I used an olive-green Chevrolet and made it out to MacLean in twenty-nine minutes. Stopped in the center of the road two hundred yards shy of Quinn’s residence. It was in an established subdivision. The whole place was quiet and green and watered and was baking lazily in the sun. The houses were on acre lots and were half-hidden behind thick evergreen foundation plantings. Their driveways were jet black. I could hear birds singing and a far-off sprinkler turning slowly and hissing against a soaked sidewalk through sixty degrees of its rotation. I could see fat dragonflies in the air.

I took my foot off the brake and crawled forward a hundred yards. Quinn’s house was sided with dark cedar boards. It had a stone walk and knee-high stone walls boxing in earth beds full of low spruces and rhododendrons. It had small windows and the way the eaves of the roof met the tops of the walls made it feel like the house was crouched down with its back to me.

Frasconi’s car was parked in the driveway. It was an olive-green Chevrolet identical to my own. It was empty. Its front bumper was tight against Quinn’s garage door. The garage was a long low triple. It was closed up. There was no sound anywhere, except the birds and the sprinkler and the hum of insects.

I parked behind Frasconi’s car. My tires sounded wet on the hot blacktop. I slid out and eased my Beretta out of its holster. Clicked the safety to fire and started up the stone walk. The front door was locked. The house was silent. I peered in through a hallway window. Saw nothing, except the kind of solid neutral furniture that goes into an expensive rental.

I walked around to the rear. There was a flagstone patio with a barbecue grill on it. A square teak table going gray in the weather and four chairs. An off-white canvas sun umbrella on a pole. A lawn, and plenty of low-maintenance evergreen bushes. A cedar fence stained the same dark color as the house siding closed off the neighbors’ view.

I tried the kitchen door. It was locked. I looked in the window. Saw nothing. I moved around the rear perimeter. Came to the next window and saw nothing. Moved to the next window and saw Frasconi lying on his back.

He was in the middle of the living room floor. There was a sofa and two armchairs all covered in durable mud-colored fabric. The floor was done in wall-to-wall carpet and it matched the olive of his uniform. He had been shot once through the forehead. Nine millimeter. Fatal. Even through the window I could see the single crusted hole and the dull ivory color of his skull under his skin. There was a lake of blood under his head. It had soaked into the carpet and was already drying and turning dark.

I didn’t want to go in on the first floor. If Quinn was still in there he would be waiting upstairs where he had the tactical advantage. So I dragged the patio table over to the back of the garage and used it to climb onto the roof. Used the roof to get me next to an upstairs window. Used my elbow to get me through the glass. Then I went feetfirst into a guest bedroom. It smelled musty and unused. I walked through it and came out in an upstairs hallway. Stood still and listened. Heard nothing. The house sounded completely empty. There was a deadness. A total absence of sound. No human vibrations.

But I could smell blood.

I crossed the upstairs hallway and found Dominique Kohl in the master bedroom. She was on her back on the bed. She was completely naked. Her clothes had been torn off. She had been hit in the face enough times to make her groggy and then she had been butchered. Her breasts had been removed with a large knife. I could see the knife. It had been thrust upward through the soft flesh under her chin and through the roof of her mouth and into her brain.

By that point in my life I had seen a lot of things. I had once woken up after a terrorist attack with part of another man’s jawbone buried in my gut. I had had to wipe his flesh out of my eyes before I could see well enough to crawl away. I had crawled twenty yards through severed legs and arms and butted my knees against severed heads with my hands pressed hard into my abdomen to stop my own intestines falling out. I had seen homicides and accidents and men machine-gunned in feuds and people reduced to pink paste in explosions and blackened twisted lumps in fires. But I had never seen anything as bad as Dominique Kohl’s butchered body. I threw up on the floor and then for the first time in more than twenty years I cried.

“So what now?” Villanueva said, ten years later.

“I’m going in alone,” I said.

“I’m coming with you.”

“Don’t argue,” I said. “Just get me a little closer. And drive real slow.”

It was a gray car on a gray day and slow-moving objects are less perceptible than fast-moving objects. He took his foot off the brake and touched the gas and got it rolling at about ten miles an hour. I checked the Beretta and its spare magazines. Forty-five rounds, less two fired into Duke’s ceiling. I checked the Persuaders. Fourteen rounds, less one fired through Harley’s gut. Total of fifty-six rounds, against less than eighteen people. I didn’t know who was on the guest list, but Emily Smith and Harley himself were going to be no-shows for sure.