Ли Чайлд - Blue Moon

Reacher looked at Hogan and Vantresca.

‘Same for you?’ he asked.

‘Exactly the same,’ Vantresca said. ‘It’s a pretty good upstream screen. Then it gets even better. The other two guys are on the other side of the security turnstiles. By the elevators. Which have been upgraded, with a new control panel. Like you see in really tall buildings with thousands of people. You punch in the floor you want, and the screen tells you which car to go wait for. Then the car takes you where you said. There are no buttons inside. It’s a very efficient system. But totally unnecessary for a building that small. Obviously there for a reason. Which is, the two guys won’t let you punch in your floor yourself. They have to do it for you. They ask where you’re going, you tell them, they press the buttons, they show you where to wait. Then you get in the elevator car, and you get out again when the doors open. No other option.’

‘Were there cameras in the lobby?’

‘There’s a little glass pip in the elevator panel. Almost certainly a fisheye lens, feeding straight upstairs.’

Reacher nodded.

He looked at Barton.

He asked, ‘How was the dentist?’

‘The third floor was all small suites, all of them off a rectangular inner corridor that ran around the building core. The core was blank on three sides. I went up to four on the fire stairs, and it was the same. Five had two larger suites in back. I couldn’t get all the way around the core. I guess the blank face becomes a wall inside the suite.’

Hogan said, ‘We ran up to six and started from there. The suites get bigger the higher you go. It’s safe to assume nineteen is a whole-floor extravaganza. The elevators come up in the centre. That’s all the architect gave them. I’m sure they built the rest out exactly the way they wanted it.’

‘Starting with the cage,’ Reacher said.

‘Guaranteed,’ Vantresca said. ‘It’s even simpler than we thought. Because the building is tall, but not large. There is only one service core, with only five structural openings per floor, and they’re all in a line. One cage could control them all. No need to weld anything shut. You could build a cage maybe six feet deep, maybe eight feet tall, starting from just before the first fire door, and running the whole width to just beyond the last. Every door opens into it. Elevators and fire stairs alike. It would be like a long rectangular reception area. Kind of shallow. You would have to wait there a minute, with armed men looking in at you through the wire. With more armed men on the gate to let you out. The mechanism might be electronic. Maybe there are two gates, like an airlock.’

‘Floors and ceilings?’

‘Concrete slab. No significant penetration. All the big-diameter risers run up and down inside the core, with the elevator shafts.’

‘OK,’ Reacher said.

‘OK what?’

‘Cautious, careful, scientific, and rational. That’s what I told Abby.’

‘Plus paranoid. You can bet they did the exact same things on eighteen and twenty. Which would make their buffer zones virtually impregnable.’

Reacher nodded.

‘It’s a thing of beauty,’ he said. ‘There’s no way in.’

‘So how do we do it?’

‘When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.’

‘Where?’

‘Hardware store.’

The nearest place was a national franchise, full of earnest slogans about doing things together and doing them now. Moscow would have approved. It was large enough to have what they wanted, but not large enough to offer a choice. Which hustled things along. A linoleum knife was a linoleum knife. A crosscut saw was a crosscut saw. And so on, and so forth. They bought a tool bag each. The store’s name was on them, but they looked professional. The hospitalized Gezim Hoxha paid for everything, via his potato-shaped wallet.

They packed their bags carefully, and slung them over their shoulders. Then they set out walking, back the way they had come, but this time not stopping at the coffee shop. This time heading straight on, the extra half block, to the office tower’s street-level door.

Like Barton had reported, the front wall of the lobby was all glass. Which meant the guys at the door saw them early. From maybe thirty feet away. Which at their current rate of speed was several seconds still to go. All of which Reacher hoped would be filled by spikes of mild confusion. Just enough to keep them guessing. Five people hustling were automatically suspect. Five people with tool bags, maybe not. Maybe plumbers on an urgent call-out, to fix a leak. Or electricians. Except one was a woman. But that was OK. Wasn’t it? This was America. Except one had a face like the guy from Kiev. Gregory had texted a picture, before he went quiet. Was the guy from Kiev a plumber? Just tiny stop-start, this-way, that-way flickers in the brain, enough to slow them down, enough to make their eventual reactions a fatal beat late.

Because by then the revolving door was already spinning fast, disgorging first Reacher, then Hogan, then Vantresca, then Barton, then Abby, all of them bringing guns up out of their tool bags, fanning out, Hogan and Vantresca sprinting ahead, Abby sprinting after them, Reacher and Barton jamming up the guys at the door, guns under chins, pushing them backward, Hogan and Vantresca and Abby hurdling the turnstiles, the guys slamming into the men in the suits, taking them down, Abby skidding to a halt in front of the elevator control panel.

Ready for her close-up. She stood still for a second. The light from the street was behind her. Petite and gamine, neat and slender, hipshot, dressed all in black, holding a Glock 17. Performance art. A figure from a nightmare.

Then she leaned forward and sprayed the little glass pip with a hiss of rattle-can paint. Flat black, from the hardware store. By which time Barton was already starting the same thing on the front wall of glass, but with white, for an effect like the vacant retail unit. The four men in suits were huddled together, with Reacher and Vantresca pointing guns at them, and Hogan preparing to make them secure, with long cable ties, from the hardware store.

The rent-a-cop at the security desk was looking on nervously.

Reacher called out to him, ‘Do you work for these people?’

The guy called back, ‘No sir, I most definitely do not.’

‘But nevertheless you hold a position. You have responsibilities, at least towards the owner of this building. Perhaps you swore an oath. If we let you go, you’re pretty much obliged to call the cops. You look like a man of principle. Therefore best if we tie you up too. Maybe even a blindfold. We’ll leave you on the floor behind your desk. You can deny everything afterwards. Would that be agreeable?’

‘Probably best,’ the guy said.

‘First come lock the door for us.’

The guy stood up.

Which was when the plan went wrong. When the so-far easy execution ran off the rails. Although, afterwards, in periods of honest reflection, Reacher found he thought of it as the moment when the plan went right. He wanted it. Secretly he had hoped for it. Hence the crosscut saws.

Something completely unhinged .

Hogan bent down to zip-tie the first guy’s ankle. Either the guy straight-up panicked, or he got hit by some kind of last-chance desperation, or both, or maybe he was hoping to start up some kind of insurrection, but for whatever reason, suddenly he bolted forward, straight at Vantresca, wild emotions in his eyes, wild energy in his actions. He more or less ran himself on to the muzzle of Vantresca’s gun.

Vantresca did everything right. In the corner of his eye he saw that Hogan was rolling away, like a good Marine should, to avoid the charging guy’s feet, to avoid friendly fire. He saw that there was no one behind. No danger from a through-and-through. He knew they were in a concrete building. No danger of a through-the-wall random calamity. Not even much noise, given the proximity shot. The guy’s chest cavity would act as a giant suppressor.