Карин Слотер - Cleaning the Gold

They saw Lukather across a table from a man with pale skin. A blank, hard face. Completely empty, from a lifetime of practice. Russian for sure. He had five men behind him. Lukather's four were arrayed behind her. Baldani was sitting to the side, with another Russian, like chiefs of staff.

Lukather gave the pale guy the USB drive.

The pale guy nodded.

Two of his men lifted two suitcases onto the table. A little bigger than they would let you carry on an airplane.

“Okay,” Reacher whispered. “We saw the transaction. So now we need to do this fair but efficient. Agreed?”

“Sure,” Will whispered back.

“Fair in the sense that we limit ourselves to strictly proportionate responses only, strictly in self-defense. Agreed?”

“Sure,” Will whispered again.

“Efficient in the sense we do it first. Before they're ready.”

“That's not self-defense.”

“Big picture.”

“Jesus,” Will said.

“Don't worry about the fine print. Just help me out like a pal from work. It might all come to nothing anyway. I'm not looking for a fight here. I'm hoping they offer a speedy surrender. I really am.”

They didn't. The plan was Reacher would line up with the end window, and Trent would sneak inside, whereupon the two divergent lines of fire might force the crowd of thirteen down the side wall, toward the far back corner. Where, huddled together, they would raise their hands and quit.

It didn't work out that way. One of the Russians saw Reacher through the glass. The guy fired instantly. He bust the window and missed by a foot. Reacher fired back through the jagged hole and killed the guy. And then another. And another. Whereupon the return fire grew steady and serious. Apparently serious enough to trigger some kind of an exigent emergency threshold in Trent's buttoned-up thinking. Suddenly he started firing from the flank. After that it got easier. But confused. Baldani hit the deck. Unhurt. Just hiding. Then a stray ricochet shattered a bracket and a fire extinguisher fell on his head. Guys were going down left and right.

Reacher fought his way in through the window, which was all shredded and shattered by then. Just a hole in the wall. Trent fought his way in from the door. The survivors pushed back to the farthest corner. They started to think about raising their hands. Reacher had them covered.

Then suddenly Lukather rushed for the door. Just Trent in her way. Who reacted perfectly. Instantly, without thinking, he swung a fist at her face.

Then he reacted imperfectly. Some kind of late-breaking gentlemanly instinct kicked in and made him stop the punch dead. It tapped Lukather on the nose. Hard enough to notice. Hard enough to be annoying. Not hard enough to do damage.

Lukather roared in fury and swung a huge right hook that caught Trent on the ear and spun him around. She hammered her elbow into his kidney. She was lining up a forearm smash to his throat when the gentlemanly instinct suddenly kicked back out again, and he threw the punch he should have thrown all along. It caught her full in the mouth and lifted her off her feet in a mist of blood and dumped her down flat on her back.

Reacher shrugged and nodded.

Like, nice work, can't deny it.

Trent slid Lukather over next to Baldani. Which gave them two unconscious forms, and then the pale guy, and two of his stooges, all three of those awake but sullen. They had the USB, and they had the suitcases. Which Trent opened. He brushed his fingers length and width, counting, and he multiplied in his head.

“A million dollars in each,” he said.

“Put the USB in one,” Reacher said. “Then close them again. Put them neatly by the door. All the valuables in one place.”

Trent did.

He said, “Are you going to steal them?”

“Harsh word.”

“Are you?”

“Can you stop me?”

“I'm not sure.”

“I'm sure not,” Reacher said.

“Okay,” Will said.

“Of course I'm not going to steal them,” Reacher said. “They're evidence. The problem is figuring out who to call. Not the local police department. That's for damn sure. Not all the way the hell out here. This would make their heads explode. If there is a local police department. Not the MPs back at Knox, either. I just hit two of them in the face. They're going to start out by taking a distorted view. Plus, this is a very big deal. Russians, and all. Cash in a suitcase. I think we should call the Pentagon direct.”

Less than an hour and forty minutes later it was all cleaned up. Reacher had given a sworn account. Trent had done the same. The prisoners had been taken into formal custody. The physical evidence had been bagged and tagged and taken away. The meat wagons were coming. Reacher and Trent drove home in the drab green car. Almost a hundred miles. Almost silent.

When Will arrived at the depository the next morning, he found that the second shift had motored through the night. Apparently, the cogs continued to turn the wheels fine without Lukather and Baldani cranking on them. The two vault doors that had been open yesterday were locked tight. The ribbons had been re-hung. The pages with the serial numbers dangled in their plastic envelopes. Two new doors were wide open. Two layers of gold bars were already on one of the pallets.

Lukather had been right about one thing. They could finish today if they established a good pace.

Will heard a familiar clink of gold hitting gold from inside the far vault. Reacher was already at work, which was not wholly unexpected. Something had told Will that despite the events of the previous evening, Reacher was not the type of man who left a job unfinished.

He didn't have a lot of quit in him.

“Morning,” Will said.

Reacher gave him a nod as he placed gold onto the pallet. Left to his own devices, he had tripled up the bars, three in each hand, which was a humiliating data point for Will, who needed both hands to barbell curl 175 pounds. And that was on a good day.

Reacher silently stacked the bars, then turned back into the vault for more.

Will winced as he pulled on his cotton gloves. His knuckles were shredded. Black bruises dotted his skin like ink spots. If the prosecutor needed an impression of Colonel Stephanie Lukather's teeth, Will would be able to supply them. His never hit a woman policy had gone to hell the second she had smacked him in the ear and driven a surprisingly sharp elbow into his kidney.

He waited for Reacher to kneel by the pallet, then went into the vault and grabbed two bars with both hands. When he turned, he saw Reacher's toothbrush sticking out of his back pocket.

The bristles. The handle. The plastic. As good as a buccal swab from a DNA testing kit.

Reacher stood up. He stepped into the vault. Will stacked his two bars. They went back and forth, stretching and grabbing and kneeling and stacking, synchronized like a timing belt turning the crank and cam.

Will mentally ran through what had happened at the bar last night. He tried to see all of the angles. Why would Reacher involve himself in something like that? He had risked his life, his health, but for what? Not for the money or for the USB drive. Will had been incapable of stopping him from taking both and leaving the bar. But Reacher had not only stuck around, he had voluntarily given a statement.

That wasn't the behavior of a criminal. That was more like a cop. And Reacher had been a cop, but he had just as clearly turned his back on the law.

Will had seldom felt so conflicted.

Here was the problem with Jack Reacher: he was a bad guy who sometimes did good things. Given his itinerant lifestyle, Will thought of him as an American James Bond—not the Bond from the movies but the Bond from the books who was one level up from a street fighter. There was no M to temper his feralness. Reacher did not have a legal license to kill. Or maim. Or shoot people in their knees, which was a really mean thing to do, even to a stonecold gangster.