Lee Child - Make Me

“They didn’t look it.”

“Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

That morning eight men met at the counter inside the Mother’s Rest dry goods store. As before, the store owner was already there, still in two shirts, still unkempt and unshaven. As before, the first in to join him was the spare-parts guy from the irrigation store, and then came the Cadillac driver from the FedEx store, and the one-eyed clerk from the motel, and the hog farmer, and the counterman from the diner, and the Moynahan who had gotten kicked in the balls and had his gun taken.

The eighth man arrived five minutes later, with his ironed jeans and his blow-dried hair. The first seven guys said nothing. They waited for him to speak.

He said, “The news is not good. Our faith was misplaced. The menu system did not function as expected. It did not do the job for us. As of now we’re on our own.”

Some shuffling, from the first seven. Not yet worry, but indignation. As in, it was all his own idea when it was looking good. Now it’s we and us and ours? The hog farmer said, “Is that what I saw on CNN this morning? From Phoenix? The Russian guy?”

“He was Ukrainian. And it wasn’t just him. The other three were his, too.”

“What about the first one? Was his name Hackett?”

“He’s in the hospital in Chicago. With a cop at the door.”

“So none of them got the job done?”

“I told you that.”

“Going outside of us was a big step.”

“It cost us nothing. Except money. They’re still out there, but they always were out there. They left, and now they’re coming back. We’ll deal with them here.”

“They’ll bring the cops.”

“I don’t think so. They put Hackett in the hospital. I know that for sure. It was probably them in Phoenix too. Which means they can’t talk to the cops. Any police department in the country would arrest them immediately. As a precaution. Until the smoke cleared. They’ll come here alone.”

More shuffling, from the first seven.

The Cadillac driver asked, “When will they come?”

The man with the jeans and the hair said, “Soon, I expect. But we all know the plan. And we all know it works. We’ll see them coming. We’ll be ready.”

Reacher and Chang joined Westwood downstairs for breakfast, and Westwood said he had called the guy in Palo Alto and set something up for happy hour. In Menlo Park. Although he expected the guy to be late. He was that kind of guy. Then he had booked flights from Sky Harbor to SFO. Three seats in business class, all that remained. And a hotel. Two rooms only, which helped. His department’s budget was cut every year. Reacher thought he had the nervous air of a gambler, deep in the hole, but about to win big.

When it was time they took a cab to the airport, where their fancy tickets got them in a lounge, where Reacher ate breakfast again, because it was free. They boarded the plane at the head of the line, and got a drink before taxi and takeoff. Better than the rows in back. Even the exit rows.

The flight itself was neither long nor short, but somewhere in between. Not a hop or a skip, but not a major portion of the earth’s circumference either. Less than New York to Chicago. The cab ride was easy, because it was basically out of town, not that the Santa Clara Valley was sleepy anymore. It was the center of the world, all the way past Mountain View, and people drove like they knew it. The upcoming happy hour was in a bar near a bookstore in Menlo Park, and they found it at the second attempt. They were early, but not early enough to get to the hotel and back, so they paid off the cab and got out.

The bar caused a moment of psychic concern, because every inch of it was painted red, and its name was Red, and the back of Reacher’s brain spun through fantastical conceits, trying to work out how Westwood was either a cop or a bad guy, tormenting him with the ghost of Pink, like something out of Shakespeare or Sherlock Holmes, but then he calmed down and figured the geek would have chosen the spot, and therefore the connection was coincidental. And not exact, anyway. The place was ironic, not tacky. The paint had a somber mid-century tone. Like military issue. There were dirty white-stenciled hammers and sickles, distressed and abraded to make them look old, and framed headlines from Pravda, and Red Army helmets, all battered and scratched. The sign at the door was written with a backward R, to make it look Russian, which caused a minor echo of panic. Was it a reference to Merchenko? No, surely Westwood knew the difference between Russia and Ukraine. But were there Ukrainian-themed bars, for a pedantic tormentor? Or would he have to settle for Russian anyway?

No, the geek chose it.

Chang said, “You OK?”

Reacher said, “Thinking too hard. Bad habit. Bad as not thinking at all.”

“Let’s wait in the bookstore.”

Reacher tripped at the curb. Just a stumble. He didn’t go down. More of a scuff than a trip. As if there was a lump, or an uneven surface. He looked back. Maybe. Maybe not.

Chang said, “You OK?”

He said, “I’m fine.”

Westwood said he had been in the bookstore before. A signing, for an anthology he was in. Science journalism. An award-winning piece. The store was a cool place, in every way, from its refrigerated temperature to its customers. Westwood wandered one way, and Chang another. Reacher looked at the books on the tables. He read when he could, mostly through the vast national library of lost and forgotten volumes. Battered paperbacks mostly, all curled and furry, found in waiting rooms or on buses, or on the porches of out-of-the-way motels, read and enjoyed and left somewhere else for the next guy. He liked fiction better than fact, because fact often wasn’t. Like most people he knew a couple of things for sure, up close and eyeballed, and when he saw them in books they were wrong. So he liked made-up stories better, because everyone knew where they were from the get-go. He wasn’t strict about genre. Either shit happened, or it didn’t.

Chang came back, and then Westwood, and they wandered back to the bar and got ready to wait. Being early gave them a choice of tables, and they took a four-top near a window. Reacher got coffee, and the others got sodas.

Westwood said, “This won’t be good news, I’m afraid. Even if the guy bites. The Deep Web is not an attractive place, overall. So they tell me. Not that I spend time there myself. But you might not like what you see.”

Reacher said, “It’s a free country. And Michael was McCann’s son, not mine. I don’t care what he was into.”

A clock on the wall ticked up to a Cyrillic twelve, the top of the hour, and vodka went down in price by half. Happy hour. The first new person through the door was a young woman in her twenties, flushed, unmistakably new at something, but good at it.

The second person through the door was the guy from Palo Alto.

Dead on time. Not late at all. He was small, white as a sheet, thin as a specter, always moving, even when he was still. The twenty-nine-year-old veteran. He was dressed all in black. He saw Westwood and headed over. He nodded three ways and sat down. He said, “The Valley likes irony, but you got to agree happy hour in a Soviet shrine is the ultimate contradiction in terms. And speaking of the former USSR, my blog alerts tell me a Ukrainian named Merchenko was a mob hit last night. Which is a happy coincidence. But he will be replaced. The market will fill the void. So I’m still not going public.”

Westwood said, “Neither are we. Not until long afterward, in the newspaper. By which time there will be so much to bury you won’t even be close to the top of the list. You have my word. You won’t be public. All we need is to search. In private. For a missing individual and his possible destination.”