Lee Child - Make Me

“Did we?”

“Sir, you have no luggage. Nothing checked, no carry-on, not even a personal item.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Frankly, sir, yes, it is. It’s unusual behavior. It’s one of the things on our list.”

“Whose list?”

The guy stared for a second, and then he figured it out and glanced down, to where his ID was hanging backward. He made a little noise in his throat, either irritation or frustration, and he flipped the badge around. Reacher saw a pink thumbnail photograph on the right, and the blue letters LAPD on the left, plus a bunch of lines too small and pale to read.

The guy said, “Counterterrorism.”

Reacher said, “I agree having no luggage is statistically rare. That’s a matter of simple observation. But I don’t see why negative inferences need to be drawn.”

“I don’t make the rules. You’ll have to come with me, I’m afraid. Both of you.”

Chang said, “Where?”

“To talk to my boss.”

“Where is he?”

“In the van at the curb.”

Reacher glanced out the sliding doors and saw a dark blue panel van parked in the no-waiting lane, about thirty yards away. Not very clean. Not very shiny.

“Surveillance,” the guy said. “And by boss I mean my watch supervisor for the day. Not my real boss. The man in the van has the responsibility. It’s that simple. This is pure routine. No big deal at all.”

Reacher said, “No.”

“Sir, that’s not a word right now. This is national security.”

“No, this is an airport. This is where people get on airplanes. Which is what we’re going to do. With one bag between us. So either arrest us or step aside.”

“That kind of attitude is on the list too.”

“Higher or lower than the no luggage thing?”

“Sir, you’re not helping yourself.”

“In what endeavor?”

The guy got all tensed up, and a pair of LAPD uniforms strolled into view, with all kinds of hardware on their bulky hips. Then the guy breathed out, with the same kind of sound as before, either irritated or frustrated, and he said, “OK, you folks have a safe flight.”

And he walked on, diagonally, already scanning the middle distance for new alerts.

Chang’s gold card guy had gotten them some kind of preapproved status on their boarding passes, which let them use a special line through security, and keep their shoes on. Reacher put his coins in a bowl, and raised his hands in the scanner, and joined Chang on the other side. They walked to the gate, and found a lounge nearby that more gold card coding let them in, and they waited a good long time on upholstered chairs, which they agreed were the modern-day equivalents of the old mahogany benches at the railroad stop in Mother’s Rest, in that both were more comfortable than they looked. Which the modern-day equivalents needed to be, because theirs was not the first flight out. Which Reacher eventually figured was the gold card downside.

Then they boarded, and the gold card guy came through strong again, with seats in the exit row, which meant more leg room, which Reacher obviously appreciated, yet also resented. He understood the theory. In an emergency people would have to exit that way, out through the window and over the wing. Hence all kinds of regulations mandated a minimum space, so people would be comfortable on their way through, except that if such a thing existed as a minimum space for a person to be comfortable, then why wasn’t every row just as capacious? It was a regulatory conundrum he couldn’t unravel.

Chang said, “This is nice.”

Reacher said, “It sure is.”

“Why didn’t you like that cop in the airport?”

“I liked him fine. I like everyone. I’m a happy, cheerful, and gregarious person.”

“No, you’re really not.”

“I liked him fine,” Reacher said again.

“You reacted to him in a negative way.”

“Did I?”

“You said no to him, and then you started pushing him. You were practically daring him to arrest us.”

“I had a question.”

“Which was what?”

“I mean, I thought he was plausible. Very plausible, really. We’ve both seen it happen. Some upstairs pointy-head writes a list. Based on what, no one knows. Maybe nine times out of ten no luggage means you’re a bad guy. Except my guess would be nearer one in a million. His too, probably. But he sticks to the list. Because he has to.”

“So what was your question?”

“Have you seen an LAPD photo ID recently? To compare?”

“I can’t recall.”

“Me neither.”

“You think he was phony?”

“I wish I knew. I guess if he wasn’t, at least he was proving the mind control thing was bullshit. Otherwise he would have been happy I wasn’t checking bags. I would have been leaving more room in the hold for the machinery.”

“If he was phony, who could he be really?”

“Maybe he was another Moynahan cousin.”

“In LA? How many can there be? I don’t buy it.”

“Why did he quit when he did?”

“Because you convinced him. He had no probable cause. And most likely he needed some. The legislation is probably weaker than we think it is.”

“No, he quit when he did because the cops came close.”

“They were his.”

“But suppose they weren’t. Suppose he was a con man whose job it was to get us in the van. But hey, nothing is that important. He’s a pro who wants to work again. He wasn’t sure what I was going to do next. I might have gone ballistic. He couldn’t risk attention. So he shut it down, because the cops happened to wander close, prowling around, looking for unusual behaviors. In other words, the guy covered his ass and ran.”

“Or he was a good soldier who spared you an hour in jail and himself an hour of paperwork by taking a deep breath and counting to ten and walking away.”

The plane turned onto the runway, amid noisy billows of dry brown air, and it accelerated slowly, complacently, as if fully aware the mysteries of flight had been worked out long ago, and it lifted off calmly, and glinted in the sun, and sideslipped in the haze, and curved upward on trails of soot, setting a dark but graceful course north and east.

Ten minutes later, twenty miles south of Mother’s Rest, the man with the ironed jeans and the blow-dried hair took the call on his land line. His contact said, “We’re going to put this right.”

“Put what right?”

“We got very unlucky.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There was a problem.”

“Did they get on the plane?”

At which point the contact went talkative again. Not from high spirits. From a bitter and incredulous should-have obsession. He said, “Hackett set it up perfectly. She booked the flight on the phone, so he had all the details. The timing was perfect. To the second. He watched them leave the motel, in a taxi. He was in the back of a Town Car by then, with a subcontractor driving, and they followed for a spell, and then they got alongside on the 405, and it was a total gimme, including she even had her window open, and the fast lane was moving well for the getaway, and a black Town Car on the road to LAX is invisible, because there are a million of them, so the shotgun was literally coming up, right then, point-blank range, but they got rear-ended by a Ferrari. Like getting kicked into next week, Hackett said. They never saw them again. You can’t move backward on a freeway.”

“So they’re on the plane?”

“It wasn’t the earliest flight. They chose it because she has a gold card. Hackett is ahead of them, by thirty-four minutes. I told you, we’re going to put this right.”

“In Chicago?”

“No extra charge. It wasn’t our Ferrari, but it is our reputation.”