Lee Child - Night School

By that point the clock in Reacher’s head told him the fight had been running a little over four seconds. The decoy from the doorway was still plastered against the wall. Not his business. The four sides of beef from the first bar were lumbering into action. They had broken raggedly from their concealed positions and were haphazardly placed. No rhyme or reason. Just random. Which was a problem. The first two would be easy. The third would not be difficult. But the fourth would be a problem. Reacher could see that. Time and space and movement. Like astronomy. Like planets on collision courses. Orbits and angles and relative speeds. The fourth guy would come pressing in before the third guy was down. No other possibility. It was in the way their centers of gravity were moving. There was no logical sequence beyond one, two, three. No matter where a person started.

All of which made Reacher regret he had told Neagley two minutes exactly. He still had a minute and fifty-five seconds to go. With no logical way of surviving. Against vengeful opposition. He should have left it to her discretion. She would have entered the alley as soon as she was sure attention was focused ahead, which meant right then she would be already waiting in the shadows of the alley’s mouth, watching, doing the same instinctive calculations he was doing, and therefore ready to step in and put a wrench in the fourth guy’s works.

A sergeant’s first duty is to keep her officer safe .

Maybe she had disobeyed him.

Which of course she had. He launched against the first two, using the bat like a fist, one, two, forehand, backhand, thinking ahead, lining up for the third guy, executing the pivot with speed and grace and economy, but even so the fourth guy came pressing in way too early, as predicted, just half a step behind, by blind luck timed to arrive just before the bat could start moving again.

But then the fourth guy disappeared. Like he had run full speed into a clothes rope. Like a special effect in a movie. One frame he was there, and the next he was gone. The third guy went down and behind him Reacher saw Neagley, following through from what looked like a roundhouse rabbit punch to the fourth guy’s throat.

The decoy from the doorway raised his hands.

Reacher said, “Thank you, sergeant.”

Neagley said, “You should have picked up the bottle. Better than the bat.”

Reacher walked over to the decoy and said, “Tell your boss to stop wasting my time. Tell him to come see me himself. One on one. I’ll walk him around the block. We’ll have an exchange of views.”

Then they left, back down the alley to the street, first Neagley, then Reacher. They stood in the sun and shrugged and straightened, and then they hustled back to the hotel.

They were late back to the hotel. The others were waiting. Bishop had sent a little bus. Like an airport shuttle. They were all in their seats, all watching out their windows. Waterman, Landry, White, and Vanderbilt. And Sinclair. Reacher and Neagley got in, and the door hissed shut behind them, and the bus took off. Not a long ride, around the Ausenalster lake, to a large and imposing but slightly odd building. It looked like a copy of the White House done purely from memory by a builder who had visited once as a kid. Inside, Bishop greeted them and showed them their room. Mostly desks and phones and fax machines and copy machines and telex machines and printers and bulky computer terminals with dirty beige keyboards. Bishop said the phones were set up as a replica of the McLean switchboard. Locally only Griezman had been given the numbers, in his case without being told their location.

It was Griezman who called first.

With a problem.

Reacher picked up and Griezman said, “Don’t put me on speaker.”

“Why not?”

“I screwed up. Or my department did. Which is the same thing.”

“What happened?”

“I think we lost Wiley. Somehow he was in a hit-and-run accident about two hours after you and I left. He was driving a car and he hit a bicycle. He was full of champagne, no doubt. A witness described him perfectly. She was shown Helmut Klopp’s sketch and made a positive ID. It’s all right there in the traffic division’s log.”

“So your guy missed him coming out.”

“At one point he was talking to a traffic cop. It might have happened then.”

“But either way you don’t know where Wiley is.”

“Not with an acceptable degree of certainty.”

“Is that something they teach you to say?”

“It sounds sober and mature, and burdened down with technicalities.”

Reacher said, “Shit happens, get over it.”

Griezman said, “I’m sorry we missed him.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’ll maintain the surveillance as long as I can.”

“Thank you.”

Reacher hung up and told the story and Sinclair asked everyone’s first question for them, when she said, “Was that the delivery? Did we miss it? Was he so stressed he knocked a bicycle over?”

“Too soon, surely,” Vanderbilt said. “It was the middle of the first night. He can’t have been paid yet. So he won’t have delivered yet. Not unless he’s really dumb.”

“Worst case, he was going to the airport,” Landry said. “For the early flight to Zurich. Maybe he’d rather wait a day or two there than here. In which case he took the delivery with him. If it’s small. To swap in the banker’s office, like Reacher said.”

“We should be watching the airports,” Waterman said.

“We are,” Sinclair said. “Both airports have closed-circuit television. CIA arranged temporary feeds. Unofficial, so they won’t last long, but so far Wiley has not passed through.”

“And he didn’t come home either,” Reacher said. “Not unless Griezman’s guy missed him twice. So where is he now?”

“Out and about,” Neagley said. “Somewhere in Germany. The phase before delivery. Like the dealer inspection when you buy a new car. Ahead of the big reveal.”

–

Wiley was waking up, in his bedroom, the same place he had woken up for the last three months. In his rented apartment on the waterfront. The new development. A village within the city. But not really. It was actually a giant dormitory, full of incurious people who rushed in and out in the dark, and slept the few hours between. He had never seen his neighbors, and as far as he knew they had never seen him. Perfect.

He got up and set his coffee machine going. He rinsed the fumes out of the Dom Perignon bottle and placed it in the recycle bin. He put his glass in the dishwasher.

He picked up his phone and dialed the rental franchise he had used before. The call was answered immediately, by a man who sounded young and efficient.

Wiley said, “Do you speak English?”

“Certainly, sir,” the young man said.

“I need to rent a panel van.”

“What size, sir?”

“Long wheelbase, high roof. I need plenty of space inside.”

“We have Mercedes-Benz or Volkswagen. The Mercedes-Benz is longer. Over four meters inside.”

Wiley did the math in his head. Four meters was thirteen feet. He needed twelve. He said, “How far off the ground is the load floor?”

“Quite normal, I think. I’m not sure exactly.”

“Does it have a roll-up rear door?”

“No, sir. It has hinged rear doors. Is that a problem?”

“I need to back it up to another truck and move stuff across. Can’t get close enough with hinged doors.”

“I’m afraid our only option with a roll-up door is in an altogether different class of vehicle. It’s a question of gross vehicle weight, technically. In Germany the heavier vehicles require a commercial license. Do you have one?”