Lee Child: Gone Tomorrow

Theresa Lee came back two hours later. She had a shopping bag with her. She told me the hospital wanted its bed, so the NYPD was putting me in a hotel. She had bought clothes for me. She showed me. Shoes, socks, jeans, boxers, and a shirt, all sized the same as the items the ER staff had burned. The shoes and the socks and the jeans and the boxers were fine. The shirt was weird. It was made of soft, worn white cotton. It was almost furry, down at a microscopic level. It was long-sleeved and tight. It had three buttons at the neck. It was like an old-fashioned undershirt. I was going to look like my grandfather. Or like a gold miner in California, way back in 1849.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

She told me the others were working on the math problem. She told me they were arguing about the route Susan would have used from the Turnpike to the Holland Tunnel. Locals used shortcuts through surface streets that looked wrong according to the road signs.

I said, ‘Susan wasn’t a local.’

She agreed. She felt that Susan would have used the obvious signposted route.

Then she said, ‘They won’t find the picture, you know.’

I said, ‘You think?’

‘Oh, they’ll find the stick, for sure. But they’ll say it was unreadable, or run over and damaged or broken, or there was nothing sinister on it after all.’

I didn’t answer.

‘Count on it,’ she said. ‘I know politicians, and I know the government.’

Then she asked, ‘How do you feel about Lila Hoth?’

I said, ‘All in all I’m regretting the approach on the train. With Susan. I wish I had given her a couple more stops.’

‘I was wrong. She couldn’t possibly have gotten over it.’

‘The opposite,’ I said. ‘Was there a sock in her car?’

Lee thought back to the FBI inventory. Nodded.

‘Clean?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘So think about Susan setting out. She’s living a nightmare. But she’s not sure exactly how bad it is. She can’t bring herself to believe it’s as bad as she suspects. Maybe it’s all a sick joke or an empty threat. Or a bluff. But she’s not sure. She’s dressed in what she wore for work. Black pants, white blouse. She’s heading for an unknown situation in the big bad city. She’s a woman on her own, she lives in Virginia, she’s been around the military for years. So she takes her gun. It’s probably still wrapped in a sock, like she stores it in her drawer. She puts it in her bag. She leaves. She gets stuck in the jam. She calls ahead. Maybe the Hoths call her. They won’t listen. They’re fanatics and they’re foreign. They don’t understand. They think a traffic jam is a dog-ate-my-homework kind of thing.’

‘Then she gets the midnight message.’

‘And she changes. The point is, she has time to change. She’s stuck in traffic. She can’t take off. She can’t go to the cops. She can’t drive into a telephone pole at ninety miles an hour. She’s trapped. She has to sit there and think. No alternative. And she arrives at a decision. She’s going to avenge her son. She makes a plan. She takes the gun out of the sock. Stares at it. She sees an old black jacket dumped on the back seat. Maybe it was there since the winter. She wants dark clothing. She puts it on. Eventually the traffic moves. She drives on to New York.’

‘What about the list?’

‘She was a normal person. Maybe working around to killing someone else produces the same feelings as working around to killing yourself. That’s what she was doing. She was climbing upon the plateau. But she wasn’t quite there yet. I disturbed her too early. So she quit. She took the other way out. Maybe by 59th Street she would have been ready.’

‘Better that she was spared that fight.’

‘Maybe she would have won. Lila would have been expecting her to take something out of her pocket or her bag. There would have been an element of surprise.’

‘She had a six-shooter. There were twenty-two of them.’

I nodded. ‘She’d have died, for sure. But maybe she would have died satisfied.’

A day later in the hotel Theresa Lee came back to visit. She told me that Sansom had scoped out a likely target area about half a mile long and the Jersey highway people had closed it off with orange barrels. Three hours into the search they found Susan’s cell phone. A second later, four feet away, they found the memory stick.

It had been run over. It was crushed. It was unreadable.

I left New York the next day. I moved south. I spent a large part of the next two weeks obsessing over what might have been in that picture. I came up with all kinds of speculations, some involving technical breaches of Sharia law, some involving domesticated animals. Alternating with the lurid imagined scenarios from the Korengal tent were repeated flashback memories of hitting Lila Hoth in the face. The straight left, the crunch of bone and cartilage under my fist. The ruined appearance. The episode replayed constantly in my mind. I didn’t know why. I had just cut her with a knife and later I strangled her, and I could barely remember those acts at all. Maybe hitting women ran counter to my subliminal values. Which was entirely illogical.

But eventually the images laded and I grew bored with imagining Osama bin Laden having his way with goats. By the time a month had passed I had forgotten all of it. My cut had healed very nicely. The scar was thin and white. The stitches were neat and tiny. My lower body was like a textbook illustration: this one is how it should be done, and that one is how it shouldn’t. But I never forgot how those earlier, clumsier stitches had saved me. What goes around comes around. A benign legacy, from the truck bomb in Beirut, planned and paid for and driven there by persons unknown.