Lee Child - Personal

‘Whatever needs doing.’

‘Can you kick down the door?’

The door was a stout wooden item, hardened with age, well fitted in its frame.

‘I could from the outside,’ I said. ‘Probably. But not from the inside.’

‘Can we break the window?’

The window was not a Victorian original. It was a 1930s pattern, I thought, a replacement, enhanced by the benefits of science. Low maintenance, because it was made of aluminium or some kind of galvanized metal. Which was evidently strong enough to support large panes of glass, for extra daylight. Large enough panes for an average person to climb out. The glass looked perfectly normal. I said, ‘I think we’re going to have to break it, yes.’

‘Where does it lead?’ She answered her own question by peering out, close up, nose against the glass, left and right. There was nothing ahead except a blank brick wall. She said, ‘It’s an alley. Fairly long and narrow. I think it’s closed off at both ends. We’d be trapped in it. Unless we could get in some other building’s back window. And then out their front door.’

I said, ‘Don’t worry about all that now.’

‘So when should I worry about it?’

‘First we wait. Five minutes. We could be wrong. Maybe it was just an excess of enthusiasm. Maybe he’ll come back with a price.’

We waited. Five minutes. The guy didn’t come back with a price. On the other side of the door the workshop was quiet. There was no automotive maintenance under way. Which was a situation I had misinterpreted completely. I thought the grease monkeys had been sent away so the gun deal would stay private. But it was our capture that was supposed to stay private.

Missed clues, missed connections, risks gone bad.

My failures.

Dominique Kohl .

I said, ‘We need a complete inventory of this room.’

Casey Nice said, ‘What are we looking for?’

‘Everything. When we know what we’ve got, we’ll decide how to use it.’

We didn’t have much. In terms of large items easily visible, we had three armchairs, a desk, and a desk chair. The armchairs were the kind of thing you might have seen thirty years before in a corporate waiting area. Danish, possibly, or Swedish. Stubby wooden legs, under a simple upholstered shape, with knobby fabric gone flat and greasy with wear. The desk was even older. It was made of oak, in a traditional shape and style, with a kneehole drawer and three more in either pedestal, the bottom pair deep enough for files. The desk chair looked like a dining chair. Or a kitchen chair. No castors, no arms, no reclining mechanism. No lumbar support, no ergonomics. Just four sturdy legs, and a hard seat with a vague butt-shaped moulding carved into it, and a straight back.

No phone, no desk light, nothing on the walls, no knives and forks left over after hasty working lunches. No electrical cords, no phone chargers, no letter openers, no paperweights. The desk’s kneehole drawer held three forgotten paperclips, all dull with age, and a lone shaving from a sharpened pencil, and dust and grit trapped in the corners, and nothing else. Five of the six other drawers were similarly barren, but the deep drawer on the left had a sweater in it, a malodorous old item maybe dumped one warm day and never retrieved. It was off-white wool, with thin denim panels applied at the shoulders and the elbows. Its size was medium, and its manufacturer was someone I had never heard of.

We stood back.

Casey Nice said, ‘What were you hoping to find?’

I said, ‘An armoured division would have been nice. Failing that, a couple of Heckler and Koch MP5s with a dozen spare magazines would have been convenient. Or even a book of matches would have been useful.’

‘We’ve got nothing.’

‘We’ve got what we’ve got.’

‘What are we going to do?’

So I told her what, and we rehearsed it carefully, over and over again, and then we started doing it.

I PICKED UP an armchair, fingers and thumbs dug hard into the soft upholstery, and I hoisted it in front of my face, holding it upside down at a forty-five-degree angle, leading with the stubby wooden legs, and I took two long strides and flung it at the window. The legs shattered the glass, very noisily, and the bulk of the thing bounced off the centre spine of the frame and fell back on the desk and ended up on its side on the floor. Noise, noise, noise.

Casey Nice stepped over close to the window, and I picked up the desk chair and went to the door to wait.

No point in us getting out the window , I had said. The alley leads nowhere. We need to bring the four guys back in the room .

And they came. Human nature. A sudden loud crash, obviously the window glass shattering, what else were they going to do? They were going to burst in, look around, hustle to the broken window, stick their heads out the hole, and look left and right.

The lock clicked, the door opened fast, and the first guy got part way in. He was the main man, who had done all the talking. I got my right hand on the back of his neck and helped him along, with a vicious backhand shove that sent him skittering towards Nice at the window. I can deal with numbers two, three and four , I had said. But number one is yours. Get the best jagged splinter you can find, wrap your hand in the old sweater, and stick the splinter in his eye .

Which I sincerely hoped she was doing, but I wasn’t watching, because at that point I was smashing the desk chair into the second guy’s head. Into it, not over it. Not like a saloon brawl in an old Western movie. Like a lion tamer in the circus. Because jabbing is better, like a punch, your whole moving bodyweight concentrated through the inch-square end of a leg. Mass and velocity, just like baseball, just like everything. I was aiming for a broken skull at the minimum, and instantaneous brain death at the maximum. I was hoping for an inch-square shard of bone punched right through into the soft tissue beyond. Which I might well have gotten. I couldn’t tell immediately. That would be a question for the autopsy. But either way, killed or just stunned, the guy went down like a sack. He was the guy who had driven us in the Skoda. I dropped the chair and ran right over him to get at the next two.

Two against one is never a problem , I had said. Don’t worry about me . Just look after the first guy. If the splinter doesn’t finish the job, slam him with the desk drawer, edge on, bridge of his nose, hard, and keep on slamming him until he goes quiet .

The third guy had slowed up dramatically, after seeing the fate of the first two unfold right in front of his eyes, and the fourth guy had crashed into him from behind, but the slapstick ended right there. The surprise was over, and they were not idiots. They reversed direction instantly, retreating and regrouping like they should. Neither one had a gun in his hand, which was a risk gone good. London was different. Guns were for special occasions, not routine. I was more worried about knives, because I don’t like them much, and Londoners do, apparently, but neither one had a knife out either. Not yet, anyway. No way of knowing what was still in their pockets.

The workshop floor was a cluttered space bigger than a basketball court, littered with tools and hoses, blocked here and there by cars and hoists, still lit by nothing more than electricity. The security shutter was still closed. The two guys ahead of me fanned out twenty feet, and then stopped and turned, and cast about, the third guy ducking left and picking up a tyre iron, the fourth guy ducking right and scooping a wrench off a bench. The third guy was one of the pair who had come out of the boxed-off room. The fourth guy was the one who had stepped out of the shadows and closed the security gate. They came back a step towards me, in unison, balanced easy, up on their toes, arms out, eyes on me, blank and unwavering. Not the worst I had ever seen. Tough lives, and perpetual conflict in their ancestral DNA, and maybe some military service, and maybe some guerrilla activity, and certainly the guts to muscle in on folks like Charlie White and Karel Libor and make a shady living in a foreign capital. They weren’t going to fall down in a dead faint if I shouted boo .