Ли Чайлд - No Middle Name

‘How far north do you want to go?’

‘West Point. It’s up the river a ways.’

‘I know where it is.’

‘So do we have a deal?’

Hemingway didn’t answer.

Hemingway finally agreed about thirty minutes later, close to one o’clock in the morning. But the plan went wrong immediately. First they couldn’t find a working phone. They searched up and down Carmine, and they tried the corner with Seventh Avenue, and the corner with Bleecker, and Sixth Avenue, and every pay phone they found was silent. They didn’t know if it was the result of the blackout, or just the general abject state of the city. Reacher figured the phone company had its own electricity, in its own wires, so he was all in favour of carrying on the search, but Hemingway was reluctant to foray further, in case she missed something over at Croselli’s place. So she walked back to the doorway on Carmine and Reacher went on alone, across Sixth, and on the corner between Minetta Street and Minetta Lane he found a phone with a dial tone.

It was too dark to see the numbers, so he dialled by feel, zero for the operator, and he waited a long time before she answered. He asked for the NYPD’s Sixth Precinct, and waited again, even longer, before the call was picked up and a voice barked, ‘Yes?’

Reacher said, ‘I want to report illegal narcotics in the West Village.’

The voice said, ‘What?’

‘There’s a storeroom full of drugs on Carmine just been bust open.’

‘Any dead bodies?’

‘No.’

‘Anyone currently in the act of getting killed?’

‘No.’

‘Fire?’

‘No.’

The voice said, ‘Then stop wasting my time,’ and the phone went dead. Reacher hung up and hustled back, sweating, ninety degrees at one in the morning, and he relayed the news to Hemingway, who nodded in the dark and said, ‘We should have seen that coming. I guess they’re all hands on deck right now.’

‘We might have to use your own people.’

‘Forget it. They wouldn’t take my call.’

Reacher said, ‘Still got your little sister’s cassette recorder?’

‘It’s my cassette recorder.’

‘Still got it?’

‘Why?’

‘Maybe I can get him to boast on the tape.’

‘You?’

‘Same principle. You can’t let this look like a vendetta.’

‘I can’t let you. You and him, face to face? I have a conscience.’

‘What’s he going to do to me?’

‘Beat you to death.’

‘He’s a made man,’ Reacher said. ‘He has soldiers. Which means he tells other people to do the heavy lifting. Which means he’s out of practice. He’s all hat and no cattle. He’s got nothing. We already saw that on Waverly. Any twelve-year-old in the Philippines could eat his lunch.’

‘Is this a Marine Corps thing?’

‘I’m not a Marine.’

‘How would you get in?’

‘I assume the church behind him is locked.’

‘Tonight for sure. If not every night.’

‘I’ll figure something out.’

‘How would the military do it?’

‘Marines or army?’

‘Army.’

‘They’d call in artillery support. Or air-to-ground.’

‘Marines?’

‘They’d start a fire, probably. That usually brings them out real fast.’

‘You can’t do that.’

‘I’m not a Marine,’ Reacher said again. He looked across the street. The second-storey windows were dark, obviously. Which meant Croselli could be right there, watching. But without seeing much. A man in a dark room watching a lit street had an advantage. A man in a dark room watching a dark street might as well have saved himself the eyestrain.

Reacher crossed the dark street, to the double doors. He put his fingertips on them. They felt like sandpaper. Fifty-year-old paint, plus fifty years of smoke and grime and dust. He tapped, first with his fingernails, then gently with his knuckles. The wood felt old and thick and solid, like it had been shipped a hundred years before, from some ancient forest out west. He slid his palms across the surface, until he found the judas gate. Same paint, same grime, same wood. He felt for the hinges, and didn’t find any. He felt for the lock, and rubbed it with his thumb. It seemed to be a small round Yale, worn brass, probably as old as the paint.

He headed back to Hemingway. He said, ‘The doors are probably two or three inches thick, and the judas gate is all of a piece. All quality lumber, probably hard as a rock by now.’

‘Then maybe the army way is the only way.’

‘Maybe not. The judas gate opens inward. The lock is an old Yale, put in maybe fifty years ago. I’m guessing they didn’t chase out a void in the door. Not in wood that hard. Not back then. People weren’t so uptight about security. I bet the lock is surface-mounted on the back. Like an old house. The tongue is in a little surface-mounted box. Two screws, is all.’

‘There will be another door. Out of the yard, into the building. Might have a newer lock.’

‘Then I’ll knock and rely on charm.’

‘I can’t let you do this.’

‘It’s the least I can do. I screwed you up before. You might have gotten something. You were going to take that slap and keep him talking.’

‘He had already found the wire.’

‘But he’s arrogant. He’s got an ego. He might have carried on regardless, just to taunt you.’

‘That’s what I was hoping.’

‘Then let me put it right.’

Reacher turned around and lifted his shirt and bared his back to Hemingway. He felt hot fingers scrabbling at his waistband, gapping it out, fitting the plastic box behind the elastic on his shorts. Then he felt the scrape of a wire, and her hand burrowed up his back, under his shirt, to his shoulder blade, and then on over the top, a curious vertical embrace, her breath on his neck, and then she turned him around again to face her, and her other hand went up the front of his shirt, to find the microphone, to pass it from hand to hand, and to pull it down into place. She stopped with it trapped against his chest, and she kept her hand there, flat, nothing between her palm and his skin except the small pebble of technology.

She said, ‘I put it in my bra. But you don’t have one.’

‘Imagine that,’ Reacher said.

‘There’s nothing to keep it in place.’

Reacher felt an immediate film of sweat between his chest and her hand. He said, ‘Got a Band-Aid in your purse?’

‘You’re a smart kid,’ she said, and she went into a one-hand-two-elbows contortion to root through her bag, and as she craned her neck to look downward into it her forehead touched his lips, just briefly, like a kiss. Her hair was limp, but it smelled like strawberries.

She jerked her bag back up on her shoulder and held up something that crackled slightly. A Band-Aid, he assumed, still in its hygienic wrapper. He took it from her and peeled it open in the space between their faces. Then in turn she took it back from him one-handed and used it to tape the microphone in the trench between his chest muscles. She smoothed the adhesive, once, twice, and then she took her hands out from under his shirt and pulled it down into place.

She put her palm on his chest, like Croselli had put his on hers, pressing hard on the damp cotton, and she said, ‘He’ll find it.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Reacher said. ‘If he puts his hands on me, I’ll beat him to death.’

Hemingway said nothing.

Reacher said, ‘That’s a Marine Corps thing.’

The darkness didn’t help. It didn’t help at all. Reacher lined up on the opposite kerb, like a sprinter at the start of a race, but he couldn’t exactly see where he was heading. Adjustments were going to be necessary as he ran. He took off, slow and clumsy, partly because of the dark, partly because he was a terrible runner, with long lumbering strides, and three paces out he saw the doors, and two paces out he saw the judas gate, and with one pace to go he saw its lock, and he launched his leading foot in a scything kick, slightly across his body, and he smashed his heel as close to the small Yale circle as he could get, with all his two hundred and twenty pounds behind it, multiplied significantly by the final acceleration of his foot, and by the fact that his whole bulk was moving briskly, if not exactly fast.