Ли Чайлд - Blue Moon

Abby took the guy’s gun. Hogan found his daily ledger. A big book, handwritten. Maybe a city regulation. Maybe just pawnbroker tradition. Hogan slid his finger up a bunch of lines.

‘Here it is,’ he said. ‘Maria Shevick, wedding bands, small solitaires, a watch with a broken crystal. Eighty dollars.’

Reacher asked the guy, ‘Where is that stuff?’

The guy said, ‘I could get it for you.’

‘You think eighty bucks was fair?’

‘Fair is what the market will bear. It depends how desperate people are.’

‘How desperate are you right now?’ Reacher asked.

‘I could certainly get that stuff for you.’

‘What else?’

‘I could maybe add a couple of pieces. Something nice. Maybe bigger diamonds.’

‘You got money?’

‘Sure I do, yes, of course.’

‘How much?’

‘Probably five grand. You can have it all.’

‘I know we can,’ Reacher said. ‘That goes without saying. We can take what we want. But that’s the least of your worries. Because this is about more than just a mean transaction. You ran across the street and ratted the old lady out. You caused no end of trouble. Why was that?’

‘Are you from Kiev?’

‘No,’ Reacher said. ‘But I had their chicken once. It was pretty good.’

‘What do you want from me?’

‘Gregory is going down. We need to decide if you’re going down with him.’

‘I get a text, I got to respond. No choice. Those are the terms, man.’

‘What terms?’

‘This was my store once. He took it from me. He made me lease it back. There are unwritten conditions.’

‘You got to run across the street.’

‘No choice.’

‘What’s it like over there?’

‘Like?’ the guy said.

‘The layout,’ Reacher said.

‘You go in a hallway on the left. There’s a door on the right to the taxi room. It’s a real operation. But you go straight on, to the back. There’s a conference room. You walk through it, to another corridor, in the opposite back corner. That’s how you get to the offices. The last one is Danilo’s. You go through Danilo’s office to get to Gregory’s office.’

‘How often do you go over there?’

‘Only when I have to.’

‘You work for them, but you don’t want to.’

‘That’s the truth of it.’

‘Everyone says that.’

‘I’m sure they do. But I mean it.’

Reacher said nothing.

Abby said, ‘No.’

Hogan said, ‘No.’

Reacher said, ‘Go get the stuff we talked about.’

The guy went and got it. The wedding bands, the small solitaires, the broken watch. He put them all in an envelope. Reacher put the envelope in his pocket. Plus all the cash from the register. About five grand. Hopefully the merest drop in the bucket, pretty soon, but Reacher liked cash. He always had. He liked the heft, and the deadness. Hogan roamed the store’s shelves and tore the cords off all the dusty old stereo items, and he tied the guy up with them, secure, uncomfortable, but survivable. Eventually someone would find him and let him go. What happened after that would be up to him.

They left the guy on the floor behind the counter. They stepped out to the well of the store. They looked out the dusty front windows, at the taxi dispatcher across the street.

They managed to scope out the whole of the block by staying back in the pawn shop, back in the shadows, traversing side to side, peering out at oblique angles. There were two guys on the sidewalk outside the taxi office door, and two guys some distance away on the left-hand street corner, and two guys the same distance away on the right. Six men visible. Plus probably the same again inside. At least. Maybe two in the hallway the pawnbroker had described, plus two in the conference room, plus two at the mouth of the corridor that led onward to the offices. Each of which was no doubt occupied by a made man with a gun in his pocket and a spare in a drawer.

Not good. What the military academies would call a tactical challenge. A head-on assault against a numerically superior opponent in a tightly constrained battle space. Added to which, the guys from the street corners would fold into the action from the rear. Bad guys in front, bad guys behind, no body armour, no grenades, no automatic weapons, no shotguns, no flamethrower.

Reacher said, ‘I guess the real question is whether Gregory trusts Danilo.’

‘Does that matter?’ Hogan said.

‘Why wouldn’t he?’ Abby asked.

‘Two reasons,’ Reacher said. ‘First, he trusts no one. You don’t get to be Gregory by trusting people. He’s a snake, so he assumes everyone else is a snake. And second, Danilo is by far his biggest threat. The second in command. The leader in waiting. It’s on the news every night. The generals get deposed, and the colonels take over.’

‘Does this help us?’

‘You have to go through Danilo’s office to get to Gregory’s office.’

‘That’s normal,’ Hogan said. ‘Everyone does it that way. That’s how a chief of staff operates.’

‘Think about it in reverse. In order to leave his own office, Gregory has to walk through Danilo’s office. And he’s paranoid, with good reason. And with good results. He’s still alive. In his head this is not necessarily like a CEO in a movie, saying goodnight to his secretary, and calling her sweetheart. This is like walking into a death trap. This is assassination squads behind the desk. Or maybe even worse, this is a blockade, until he accedes to their demands. Maybe they’ll let him step down, with his dignity intact.’

Abby nodded.

‘Human nature,’ she said. ‘Mostly bullshit, but sometimes it rings a bell.’

‘What?’ Hogan said.

‘He built an emergency exit.’

They went back behind the counter, and sat on the floor against the cabinets, not far from the tied-up guy. A high-level staff conference. Always held behind the lines. Hogan played the part of the gloomy Marine. Partly because he was, and partly as a professional obligation. Every plan had to be stress tested, from every possible direction.

He said, ‘Worst case, we’re going to find exactly the same situation, but flipped around one eighty. Guys on the sidewalk the next street over, watching the back door, and then more guys inside, in narrow corridors, just the same. There’s a word for it.’

‘Symmetrical,’ Reacher said.

‘Got to be.’

‘Human nature,’ Abby said. ‘Mostly bullshit, but sometimes it rings a bell.’

‘What now?’

‘It’s a bad look,’ she said. ‘An escape hatch makes him look scared. Best case, it makes it look like he doesn’t trust the protection he bought, or the army of loyal soldiers standing in front of him. He can’t admit to any of those feelings. He’s Gregory. He has no weaknesses. His organization has no weaknesses.’

‘So?’

‘The emergency exit is secret. No one is guarding it because no one knows it exists.’

‘Not even Danilo?’

‘Most of all not Danilo,’ Reacher said. ‘He’s the biggest threat. This was done behind Danilo’s back. I bet you could trawl through the records and find a two-week spell when he was sent away somewhere, and just before he got back, I bet you would find a couple of construction workers mysteriously dead in some kind of gruesome accident.’

‘So that no one except Gregory would know where the secret tunnel is.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Which includes us. We don’t know where it is either.’

‘Some guy’s cellar connects to some other guy’s cellar.’

‘That’s your plan?’

‘Think about it from Gregory’s point of view. This is a guy who got where he is by taking no chances at all. He’s thinking about slamming the door on an assassination attempt and getting the hell out of there. A high-stress situation. He can’t afford confusion. He needs it clear and simple. Maybe arrows on the wall. Maybe emergency lighting, like on an airplane. All we need to do is find the street door at the far end. We can go in and follow the arrows backward. Maybe we’ll come out behind an oil painting on his office wall.’