Lee Child - Running Blind

She finished with another smile and he smiled back.

“Well, how about tomorrow night?” he said.

She shook her head. “All you need to know is I’m an FBI agent, on duty.”

“Doing what?”

“Watching you,” she said. “Where you go, I go. You’re classified SU, status unknown, maybe friendly, maybe hostile. Usually that means an organized-crime plea bargain, you know, some guy ratting out his bosses. Useful to us, but not reliable.”

“I’m not organized crime.”

“Our file says you might be.”

“Then the file is bullshit.”

She nodded, and smiled again. “I looked Petrosian up separately. He’s a Syrian. Therefore his rivals are Chinese. And they never employ anybody except other Chinese. Implausible they’d use an American WASP like you.”

“You point that out to anybody?”

“I’m sure they already know. They’re just trying to get you to take the threat seriously.”

“Should I take it seriously?”

She nodded. Stopped smiling.

“Yes, you should,” she said. “You should think very carefully about Jodie.”

“Jodie’s in the file?”

She nodded again. “Everything’s in the file.”

“So why don’t I have a handle on my door? My file shows I’m not the guy.”

“Because we’re very cautious and your profile is very bad. The guy will turn out to be very similar to you.”

“You a profiler too?”

She shook her head. The ponytail moved with it. “No, I’m operational. Assigned for the duration. But I listen carefully. Listen and learn, right? So let’s go.”

She held the door. It closed softly behind him as they walked to a different elevator. This one had buttons for five basement floors in a line beneath 3, 2, and 1. Lisa Harper pressed the bottom button. Reacher stood beside her and tried not to breathe in her scent. The elevator settled with a bump and the door slid back on a gray corridor bright with fluorescent light.

“We call this the Bunker,” Harper said. “It used to be our nuclear shelter. Now it’s BS.”

“That’s for damn sure,” Reacher said.

“Behavioral Science. And that’s a very old joke.”

She led him to the right. The corridor was narrow, and clean, but not public-area clean. It was a working place. It smelled faintly of sweat and old coffee and office chemicals. There were notice boards on the walls and random stacks of stationery cartons in the corners. There was a line of doors in the left-hand wall.

“Here,” Harper said.

She stopped him in front of a door with a number on it and reached across him and knocked. Then she used the handle and opened it up for him.

“I’ll be right outside,” she said.

He went in and saw Nelson Blake behind a crowded desk in a small untidy office. There were maps and photographs taped carefully to the walls. Piles of paper everywhere. No visitor chair. Blake was glowering. His face was red with blood pressure and pale with strain, all at the same time. He was watching a muted television set. It was tuned to a political cable channel. A guy in shirtsleeves was reading something to a committee. The caption read Director of the FBI .

“Budget hearings,” Blake muttered. “Singing for our damn supper.”

Reacher said nothing. Blake kept his eyes on the television.

“Case conference in two minutes,” he said. “So listen up for the rules. Consider yourself somewhere between a guest and a prisoner here, OK?”

Reacher nodded. “Harper already explained that.”

“Right. She stays with you, all the time. Everything you do, everywhere you go, you’re supervised by her. But don’t get the wrong idea. You’re still Lamarr’s boy, only she stays here, because she won’t fly. And you’ll need to get around some. Whereupon we need to keep an eye on you, so Harper goes too. The only time you’re alone is when you’re locked in your room. Your duties are what Lamarr tells you they are. You wear your ID at all times.”

“OK.”

“And don’t get ideas about Harper. Thing with her is, she looks nice, but you start messing with her, then she’s the bitch from hell, OK?”

“OK.”

“Anything else?”

“Is my phone tapped?”

“Of course it is.” Blake riffed through papers. Slid a thick finger down a printout. “You just called your girlfriend, private office line, apartment, mobile. No answer. ”

“Where is she?”

Blake shrugged. “Hell should I know?”

Then he scrabbled in the pile of paper on his desk and came up with a large brown envelope. Held it out.

“With Cozo’s compliments,” he said.

Reacher took the envelope. It was stiff and heavy. It contained photographs. Eight of them. They were color glossies, eight by ten. Crime scene photographs. They looked like stuff from a cheap skin magazine, except the women were all dead. The corpses were displayed in limp imitations of centerfolds. They were mutilated. Pieces were missing. Things had been inserted into them, here and there.

“Petrosian’s handiwork,” Blake said. “Wives and sisters and daughters of people who pissed him off.”

“So how come he’s still running around?”

There was silence for a second.

“There’s proof, and then there’s proof , right?” Blake said.

Reacher nodded. “So where’s Jodie?”

“Hell should I know?” Blake said again. “We’ve got no interest in her as long as you play ball. We’re not tailing her. Petrosian can find her himself, if it comes to that. We’re not going to deliver her to him. That would be illegal, right?”

“So would breaking your neck.”

Blake nodded. “Stop with the threats, OK? You’re in no position.”

“I know this whole thing was your idea.”

Blake shook his head. “I’m not worried about you, Reacher. Deep down, you think you’re a good person. You’ll help me, and then you’ll forget all about me.”

Reacher smiled. “I thought you profilers were supposed to be real insightful.”

THREE WEEKS IS a nice complicated interval, which is exactly why you chose it. It has no obvious significance. They’ll drive themselves mad, trying to understand a three-week interval. They’ll have to dig real, real deep before they see what you’re doing. Too deep to be feasible. The closer they get to it, the less it will mean. The interval leads nowhere. So the interval makes you safe.

But does it have to be maintained? Maybe. A pattern is a pattern. It ought to be a very strict thing. Very precise. Because that’s what they’re expecting. Strict adherence to a pattern. It’s typical in this sort of case. The pattern protects you. It’s important. So it should be maintained. But then again, maybe it shouldn’t. Three weeks is a pretty long interval. And pretty boring. So maybe you should speed it up. But anything less would be very tight, given the work required. Soon as one was done, the next would have to be prepared. A treadmill. Difficult work, on a tight schedule. Not everybody could do it. But you could.

THE CASE CONFERENCE was held in a long low room a floor above Blake’s office. There was light brown fabric on the walls, worn shiny where people had leaned on it or brushed against it. One long wall had four recesses let into it, with blinds and concealed lighting simulating windows, even though the room was four stories underground. There was a silent television mounted high on the wall, with the budget hearings playing to nobody. There was a long table made of expensive wood, surrounded by cheap chairs set at forty-five degree angles so they faced the head of the table, where there was a large empty blackboard set against the end wall. The blackboard was modern, like it came from a well-endowed college. The whole place was airless and quiet and isolated, like a place where serious work was done, like a postgraduate seminar room.