Lee Child - Persuader

There were a lot to choose from. The whole place was a warren. I started at the front, where I had first come in the day before. The big oak door was closed tight. I gave it a wide berth, because I didn’t know how sensitive the metal detector was. Some of them beep when you’re a foot away. The floors were solid oak planks, covered in rugs. I stepped carefully, but I wasn’t too worried about noise. The rugs and the drapes and the paneling would soak up sound.

I scouted the whole of the ground floor. Only one place caught my attention. On the north side next to the room where I had spent the time with Beck was another locked door. It was opposite the family dining room, across a wide interior hallway. It was the only locked door on the ground floor. Therefore it was the only room that interested me. Its lock was a big brass item from back when things were manufactured with pride and aplomb. It had all kinds of fancy filigree edges where it was screwed into the wood. The screw heads themselves were rubbed smooth by a hundred and fifty years of polishing. It was probably original to the house. Some old artisan up in nineteenth-century Portland had probably fashioned it by hand, in between making boat chandlery. It took me about a second and a half to open.

The room was a den. Not an office, not a study, not a family room. I covered every inch with the flashlight beam. There was no television in there. No desk, no computer. It was just a room, simply furnished in an old-fashioned style. There were heavy velvet drapes pulled across the window. There was a big armchair padded with buttoned red leather. There was a glass-fronted collector’s cabinet. And rugs. They were three-deep on the floor. I checked my watch. It was nearly one o’clock. I had been on the loose for nearly an hour. I stepped into the room and closed the door quietly.

The collector’s cabinet was nearly six feet tall. It had two full-width drawers at the bottom and locked glass doors above them. Behind the glass were five Thompson submachine guns. They were the classic drum-magazine gangster weapons from the 1920s, the pieces you see in old grainy black-and-white photographs of Al Capone’s soldiers. They were displayed alternately facing left and right, resting on custom hardwood pegs that held them exactly level. They were all identical. And they all looked brand new. They looked like they had never been fired. Like they had never even been touched. The armchair was set to face the cabinet. There was nothing else of significance in the room. I sat down in the chair and got to wondering why anybody would want to spend time gazing at five old grease guns.

Then I heard footsteps. A light tread, upstairs, directly over my head. Three paces, four, five. Fast quiet steps. Not just deference to the time of night. A real attempt at concealment. I got up out of the chair. Stood still. Turned the flashlight off and put it in my left hand. Put the chisel in my right. I heard a door close softly. Then there was silence. I listened hard. Focused on every tiny sound. The background rush of the heating system built to a roar in my ears. My breathing was deafening. Nothing from above. Then the footsteps started again.

They were heading for the stairs. I locked myself inside the room. I knelt behind the door and tripped the tumblers, one, two, and listened to the creak of the staircase. It wasn’t Richard coming down. It wasn’t a twenty-year-old. There was a measured caution in the tread. Some kind of stiffness. Somebody getting slower and quieter as they approached the bottom. The sound disappeared altogether in the hallway. I pictured someone standing on the thick rugs, surrounded by the drapes and the paneling, looking around, listening hard. Maybe heading my way. I picked up the flashlight and the chisel again. The Glock was in my waistband. I had no doubt I could fight my way out of the house. No doubt at all. But approaching an alert Paulie over hundreds of yards of open ground and through the stadium lights would be difficult. And a firefight now would bury the mission forever. Quinn would disappear again.

There was no sound from the hallway. No sound at all. Just a crushing silence. Then I heard the front door open. I heard the rattle of a chain and a lock springing back and the click of a latch and the sucking sound of a copper insulating strip releasing its grip on the edge of the door. A second later the door closed again. I felt a tiny shudder in the structure of the house as the heavy oak hit the frame. No beep from the metal detector. Whoever had passed through it wasn’t carrying a weapon. Or even a set of car keys.

I waited. Duke was surely fast asleep. And he wasn’t the trusting type. I guessed he wouldn’t walk around at night without a gun. Neither would Beck. But either one of them might be smart enough just to stand there in the hallway and open and close the door to make me think they had gone out through it. When in fact they hadn’t. When in fact they were still standing right there, gun drawn, staring back into the gloom, waiting for me to show myself.

I sat down sideways in the red leather chair. Took the Glock out of my pants and aimed it left-handed at the door. Soon as they opened it wider than nine millimeters I would fire. Until then, I would wait. I was good at waiting. If they thought they were going to wait me out, they had picked the wrong guy.

But a whole hour later there was still absolute silence out in the hallway. No sound of any kind. No vibrations. There was nobody there. Certainly not Duke. He would have fallen asleep by then and hit the deck. Not Beck, either. He was an amateur. It takes tremendous skill to keep absolutely still and silent for a whole hour. So the door thing hadn’t been a trick. Somebody had gone out unarmed into the night.

I knelt down and used the bradawl on the tumblers again. Lay full-length on the floor and reached up and pulled the door open. A precaution. Anybody waiting for the door to open would have their eyes locked at head height. I would see them before they saw me. But there was nobody waiting. The hallway was empty. I stood upright and locked the door behind me. Walked silently down the basement stairs and put the flashlight back in its place. Felt my way back upstairs. Crept to the kitchen and slid all my hardware along the floor and out the door into the porch. Locked it behind me and crouched down and picked up all my stuff and checked the view out back. Saw nothing except an empty gray world of moonlit rocks and ocean.

I locked the porch door behind me and kept very close to the side of the house. Ducked through deep black shadows and made it back to the courtyard wall. Found the dip in the rock and wrapped the chisel and the bradawl in the rag and left them there. I couldn’t take them with me. They would tear the trash bag. I followed the courtyard wall onward toward the ocean. I aimed to get down on the rocks right behind the garage block, to the south, completely out of sight of the house.

I made it halfway there. Then I froze.

Elizabeth Beck was sitting on the rocks. She was wearing a white bathrobe over a white nightgown. She looked like a ghost, or an angel. She had her elbows on her knees and she was staring into the darkness in the east like a statue.

I kept completely still. I was thirty feet away from her. I was dressed all in black but if she glanced to her left I would show up against the horizon. And sudden movement would give me away. So I just stood there. The ocean swell lapped in and out, quiet and lazy. It was a peaceful sound. Hypnotic motion. She was staring at the water. She must have been cold. There was a slight breeze and I could see it in her hair.

I inched downward like I was trying to melt into the rock. Bent my knees and spread my fingers and eased myself down into a crouch. She moved. Just a quizzical turn of her head, like something had suddenly occurred to her. She looked right at me. Gave no sign of surprise. She stared directly at me for minute after minute. Her long fingers were laced together. Her pale face was lit by moonlight reflected off the lapping water. Her eyes were open, but clearly she wasn’t seeing anything. Or else I was low enough down against the sky that she thought I was a rock or a shadow.