Ли Чайлд - Blue Moon

Vantresca pulled the trigger.

There was no insurrection.

The other three guys stayed where they were.

The rent-a-cop said, ‘Oh, shit.’

‘We’ll get to you in a minute,’ Reacher said. ‘First lock the door.’

On the nineteenth floor, someone noticed the lobby screen was dark. No one knew how long it had been that way. At first it was taken to be a technical fault. But then someone else felt the blankness was not completely uniform. Not zero volts across the board. Something else. So they rolled back the hard drive and saw a young woman spraying an aerosol can. After first posing with a gun. After first rushing in through the revolving door, with four other figures. All in different street clothes, but all equipped with identical mission-specific satchels. A black-ops unit, led by a woman. This was America.

Of course the first thing they did was call down to the lobby. Just in case. Four separate cell numbers. Four no answers. As feared, because as expected. The same everywhere, the last two hours. They even tried the building’s rent-a-cop. They had the number. The landline, on his silly desk.

No answer.

Completely isolated. No information at all. Now not even from the lobby. No idea what was happening. Cut off from the world. Nothing on the news. Nothing on the rumour sites. No weird deployments. No press secretaries waiting on standby.

They tried all the numbers again.

No answer.

Then the elevator rumbled. The centre shaft.

The car arrived, with a hiss of air.

The doors opened, smooth and swish.

On the back wall of the car someone had spray-painted the Ukrainian word for loser. Under its dripping Cyrillic was one of their own guys, from the lobby, black suit and tie, sitting splayed out, arms and legs at an angle. He had been shot in the chest.

His head had been cut off.

His head was propped up between his legs.

The doors closed, smooth and swish.

The elevator rumbled.

The car went back down.

Completely isolated. No contact. Everyone without a specific task to attend to gathered in the elevator lobby. Outside the cage. Close to the wire. Staring in. Positioning themselves as if laying bets. Some opposite the centre elevator. As if expecting it to return, with its gruesome tableau. Others chose the first elevator, or the third. Some outliers watched the fire stairs. There were all kinds of theories.

They waited.

Nothing happened.

People changed places at the wire. As if the delay was subtly altering the odds. As if it was making one scenario slightly more likely than another. Or less unlikely.

They waited.

They tried three sample numbers. One more time. First Gregory’s, then Danilo’s, then the watch leader’s, down in the lobby. With no real hope.

With no answer.

They waited. They changed position at the wire.

They listened.

The elevator rumbled. This time the left-hand shaft.

The car arrived, with a hiss of air.

The doors opened, smooth and swish.

On the floor of the car was another of their guys. From the lobby. Black suit and tie. Lying on his side. Hogtied, with his wrists and his ankles zipped together behind him. Gagged with a black rag wound around his head. Squirming, thrashing, appealing with his eyes, desperately, mouthing the gag, as if screaming, Please come get me, please come get me , and then nodding urgently, as if beckoning, as if to say, Yes, yes, it’s safe, please come get me , and then flopping his body, desperately, as if trying to reach the threshold.

The doors closed on him, smooth and swish.

The car went down again.

At first no one spoke.

Then someone said, ‘We should have saved him.’

Someone else said, ‘How could we?’

‘We should have been quicker. Somehow he escaped down there. We should have helped him.’

‘There was no time.’

The guy who had spoken first looked all around. First from where he was to the gate, and then at the keypad, and then from the gate to the left-hand elevator, on the inside. He timed it out in his mind. The doors open. The doors close. No. Not enough time. Especially with a what-the-hell split second of freeze at the very beginning.

Just not possible.

‘Pity,’ he said. ‘He escaped and we sent him back down.’

‘Escaped how?’

‘Maybe they trussed him up ready to cut his head off, but somehow he rolled away into the elevator, and he came up here, and he wanted us to save him. He was six feet away.’

No one spoke.

The guy said, ‘Listen.’

The elevator rumbled.

The left-hand shaft again.

Coming back up.

The guy said, ‘Open the gate.’

‘Not allowed.’

‘We got to get there this time. Open the gate.’

No one spoke.

The elevator rumbled.

Someone else said, ‘Yeah, open the damn gate. We can’t send the poor bastard down again a second time.’

Completely isolated. No orders, no leadership.

A third voice said, ‘Open the gate.’

The guy at the gate punched in the numbers. After its programmed delay, the lock clicked open. The panel swung back. Four guys stepped through. Guns out, cautious, up on their toes. The others stayed out, watching through the wire.

The elevator rumbled.

The car arrived, with a hiss of air.

The doors opened, smooth and swish.

Same guy on the floor. Black suit and tie. Hogtied the same, gagged the same, squirming, thrashing, pleading with his eyes, nodding desperately, beckoning, flopping around.

The four guys inside rushed forward, ready to lend a hand.

But it wasn’t the same guy. It was Vantresca. Average build. He fit the suit. He wasn’t hogtied. He was holding his hands behind his back, hiding two Glock 17s. Which he brought out and fired, four times, fast, aimed, deliberate.

At which point the right-hand elevator opened up, and Reacher stepped out, with Hogan, and Barton, and Abby. Four handguns. Hogan fired first. Must-win targets are any opponents within command and control distance of the gate had been Reacher’s briefing. Three rounds did the job. Meanwhile Reacher himself was clearing the fence, firing into the backs or half-backs of all those standing mesmerized by the sight of Vantresca shooting their buddies from the floor of his elevator car. Barton was covering one end of the lobby, and Abby was covering the other.

It was over fast. Hard not to be. As an exercise it was easy. The attackers had surprise on their side, and after that commanded a dense concentration of fire from the narrow corner of a rectangular battle space. The only friendly within the field of fire was inside a bulletproof concrete shaft all his own, and from there was able to provide effective enfilade fire. All of which made the victory routine. The prize was the gate. It was still standing open. Some kind of complicated lock, not currently engaged. Maybe electronic. There was a keypad on the post.

Reacher stepped through the gate, into the secret space beyond, followed by Hogan, and Abby, and Barton, with Vantresca bringing up the rear, in the borrowed suit, dusting it off, after his showmanship on the elevator floor.

The back part of Reacher’s brain was clattering away on some kind of a complicated computation, which involved dividing the total square footage of the nineteenth floor by the total number of KIA in its elevator lobby, which surely meant, after realistically allowing for officer-class accommodations for the important nerds, and densely packed barracks-class accommodations for the enlisted ranks, that the herd was already substantially thinned. Had to be. There couldn’t be many more guys available. Not unless they had been sleeping three to a bed, or stacked on the floor. Simple math.