Lee Child - Persuader

“Why was Beck talking about the Uzis?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“All done,” the old guy called.

“Decision?” Duffy said.

I thought about Quinn. Thought about the way his gaze had traveled across my face, not fast, not slow. Thought about the.22 scars, like two extra eyes up there on the left of his forehead.

“I’m going back,” I said. “I think it’s safe enough. They’d have gone for me this morning if they had any doubts.”

Duffy said nothing. She didn’t argue. She just took her hand off my arm and let me go.

She let me go, but she didn’t ask for her gun back. Maybe it was subconscious. Maybe she wanted me to have it. I put it in the back of my waistband. It felt better there than the big Colt had. I hid the spare magazines in my socks. Then I hit the road and was back in the lot near the Portland docks exactly ten hours after I left it. There was nobody waiting there to meet me. No black Cadillac. I drove right in and parked. Dropped the key in the door pocket and slid out. I was tired and slightly deaf after five hundred highway miles.

It was six o’clock in the evening and the sun was way down behind the city on my left. The air was cold and dampness was blowing in from the sea. I buttoned my coat and stood still for a minute in case I was being watched. Then I wandered off. I tried to look aimless. But I headed generally north and took a good look at the buildings ahead of me. The lot was bordered by low offices. They looked like trailers without the wheels. They had been cheaply built and badly maintained. They had small untidy parking lots. The lots were full of mid-range cars. The whole place looked busy and down-to-earth. Real-world commerce happened there. That was clear. No fancy headquarters, no marble, no sculpture, just a bunch of ordinary people working hard for their money behind unwashed windows lined with broken venetian blinds.

Some of the offices were bumped-out additions built onto the sides of small warehouses. The warehouses were modern prefabricated metal structures. They had concrete loading platforms built up to waist height. They had narrow lots defined by thick concrete posts. The posts had every shade of automotive paint known to man scraped on them.

I found Beck’s black Cadillac after about five minutes. It was parked on a rectangle of cracked blacktop at an angle against the side of a warehouse, near an office door. The door looked like it belonged on a house in the suburbs. It was a colonial design made from hardwood. It had never been painted and it was gray and grainy from the salt air. It had a faded sign screwed to it: Bizarre Bazaar. The script was handpainted and looked like something from Haight-Ashbury in the sixties. Like it should have been promoting a concert at the Fillmore West, like Bizarre Bazaar was a one-hit wonder opening for Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead.

I heard a car approaching and backed off behind the adjacent building and waited. It was a big car, coming slowly. I could hear fat soft tires dropping into wet potholes. It was a Lincoln Town Car, shiny black, identical to the one we had trashed outside the college gate. The two of them had probably come off the line together, nose to tail. It drove slowly past Beck’s Cadillac and rounded the corner and parked in back of the warehouse. A guy I hadn’t seen before got out of the driver’s seat. He stretched and yawned like maybe he had just driven five hundred highway miles, too. He was medium height and heavy with close-cropped black hair. Lean face, bad skin. He was scowling, like he was frustrated. He looked dangerous. But junior, somehow. Like he was low down on the totem pole. And like he might be all the more dangerous because of it. He leaned back into the car and came out again carrying a portable radio scanner. It had a long chrome antenna and a mesh-covered speaker that would whine and squawk whenever an appropriate transmitter was within a mile or two of it.

He walked around the corner and pushed in through the unpainted door. I stayed where I was. Reviewed the whole of the last ten hours in my head. As far as radio surveillance went I had stopped three times. Each stop had been short enough to be plausible. Visual surveillance would be a different matter entirely. But I was pretty sure there had been no black Lincoln in my line of sight at any point. I tended to agree with Duffy. The guy and his scanner had been on Route One.

I stood still for a minute. Then I came out into plain sight and walked to the door. Pushed it open. There was an immediate right-angle turn to the left. It led to a small open area filled with desks and file cabinets. There were no people in it. None of the desks was occupied. But they had been until very recently. That was clear. They were part of a working office. There were three of them and they were covered with the kind of stuff people leave behind at the end of the day. Half-finished paperwork, rinsed coffee cups, notes to themselves, souvenir mugs filled with pencils, packs of tissues. There were electric heaters on the walls and the air was very warm and it smelled faintly of perfume.

At the back of the open area was a closed door with low voices behind it. I recognized Beck’s, and Duke’s. They were talking with a third man, who I guessed was the guy with the tracking equipment. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Couldn’t make out the tone. There was some urgency there. Some debate. No raised voices, but they weren’t discussing the company picnic.

I looked at the stuff on the desks and the walls. There were two maps pinned up on boards. One showed the whole world. The Black Sea was more or less in the exact center. Odessa was nestling there to the left of the Crimean Peninsula. There was nothing marked on the paper but I could trace the route a little tramp steamer would take, through the Bosphorus, through the Aegean Sea, through the Mediterranean, out past Gibraltar, and then full steam across the Atlantic to Portland, Maine. A two-week voyage, probably. Maybe three. Most ships are pretty slow.

The other map showed the United States. Portland itself was obliterated by a worn and greasy stain. I guessed people had put their fingertips on it to span their hands and calculate time and distance. A small person’s hand fully extended might represent a day’s driving. In which case Portland wasn’t the best location for a distribution center. It was a long way from everywhere else.

The papers on the desks were incomprehensible to me. At best I could just about interpret details about dates and loads. I saw some prices listed. Some were high, some were low. Opposite the prices were codes for something. They could have been for rugs. They could have been for something else. But on the surface the whole place looked exactly like an innocent shipping office. I wondered if Teresa Daniel had worked in it.

I listened to the voices some more. Now I was hearing anger and worry. I backed out to the corridor. Took the Glock out of my waistband and put it in my pocket with my finger inside the trigger guard. A Glock doesn’t have a safety catch. It has a sort of trigger on the trigger. It’s a tiny bar that latches back as you squeeze. I put a little pressure on it. Felt it give. I wanted to be ready. I figured I would shoot Duke first. Then the guy with the radio. Then Beck. Beck was probably the slowest and you always leave the slowest for last.

I put my other hand in my pocket, too. A guy with one hand in his pocket looks armed and dangerous. A guy with both hands in his pockets looks relaxed and lazy. No threat. I took a breath and walked back into the room, noisily.

“Hello?” I called.

The back office door opened up fast. The three of them crowded together to look out. Beck, Duke, the new guy. No guns.