Blue Moon

TWENTY-SEVEN

The third guy in Barton’s hallway had the kind of hair and skin that made a person look ten years younger than he really was, which therefore in reality made him about Reacher’s own generation. He was smaller and neater. He had sharp watchful eyes set deep either side of a blade of a nose. He had a long unruly lock of hair that fell across his forehead. He was dressed with a modicum of style, in good shoes and corduroy pants and a shirt and a jacket.

Joe Hogan said, ‘This is who I was telling you about. The dogface who knows all the old Commie languages. His name is Guy Vantresca.’

Reacher stuck out his hand.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said.

‘Likewise,’ Vantresca said, and he shook hands, and then he did so all over again, with Abby.

Reacher said, ‘You got here fast.’

‘I was still awake,’ Vantresca said. ‘I live close by.’

‘Thanks for helping out.’

‘Actually that’s not why I’m here. I came to warn you off. You can’t mess with these people. Too many, too nasty, too protected. That would be my assessment.’

‘Were you Military Intelligence?’

Vantresca shook his head.

‘Armour,’ he said.

A company commander late on in the Cold War, Hogan had called him.

‘Tanks?’ Reacher asked.

‘Fourteen of them,’ Vantresca said. ‘All mine. All facing east. Happy days.’

‘Why did you learn the languages?’

‘I thought we were going to win. I thought I might be ruling a civilian district. Or at least ordering a bottle of wine in a restaurant. Or meeting girls. It was a long time ago. Plus Uncle Sam paid for it. Back then the army liked education. Everyone was getting postgraduate degrees.’

Reacher said, ‘Too many and too nasty are subjective judgements. We can talk about that kind of stuff later. But too protected is different. What do you know about that?’

‘I do some corporate consulting. Mostly physical security of buildings. But I hear things, and I get asked things. Last year a federal project ran a set of integrated numbers from all across the nation, and it turned out the two most law-abiding populations in America were the Ukrainian and Albanian communities right here in town. They don’t even get parking tickets. That suggests a very close relationship with all levels of law enforcement.’

‘But there must be a red line somewhere. I suggested to one of them that gunfire on the city streets at night would get a reaction, and the guy didn’t argue. In fact I guess he agreed with me, because he didn’t pull the trigger.’

‘Plus we’re getting a new police commissioner. They’re nervous. But there’s still plenty of boring invisible stuff their side of the line. Generally speaking this type of thing isn’t about bullets in the street. It’s about someone having a cosy chat with a potential witness, out of sight, out of earshot, probably in the witness’s own home, probably in a meaningful location, like an infant daughter’s bedroom, about what a weird thing memory is, how it comes and goes, how it fades in and out, how it plays tricks, and about how it’s no shame at all to say, look, man, I just can’t recall. People I know say that kind of case is very hard to investigate and very easy to bury.’

‘How many of them are there?’

‘Too many. Like I said. Too many, too nasty, too protected. You should forget it.’

‘Where was your company in the order of battle?’

‘Pretty near the tip of the spear,’ Vantresca said.

‘In other words hopelessly outnumbered, from day one and possibly for ever.’

‘I get the point you’re trying to make. But I had fourteen Abrams tanks. They were the finest fighting vehicles in the world. They were like something out of a science fiction book. I wasn’t walking through the Fulda Gap in a pair of pants and a jacket.’

‘As always with armoured people, you over-fetishize the machine. That said, clearly you felt you were more lethal than them. Outnumbered, but nastier. But in turn they were certainly protected, by a whole giant nation. One out of three in your favour. Two out of three against. But even so, you would have started your engines, if they had told you to.’

‘I get the point,’ Vantresca said again.

‘And you expected to win,’ Reacher said. ‘Which is why you learned the languages. Which are all I really need right now. I’m taking this one step at a time. First I need to understand what they’re saying in the texts, and then I need to use what I learn, in order to figure out what to do next. No combat readiness yet. No warnings necessary.’

‘Suppose what you learn is that it’s hopeless?’

‘Not an acceptable outcome. Can only be a failure of planning. Surely they taught you that in Germany.’

‘OK,’ Vantresca said. ‘One step at a time.’

They worked in the kitchen and started with the Ukrainian language. Vantresca admired Abby’s video capture. Smart, to the point, and efficient. He tapped his finger on the screen, in a slow, syncopated rhythm, play, pause, play, pause, and he read aloud from the freeze-framed screen, at first slow and halting, and then sometimes stopping altogether.

Because linguistically he was in trouble from the start. These were text messages, full of unknown slang, and single-letter abbreviations, and in-group acronyms, and also full of what could only be misspellings, unless in fact they were deliberate simplifications, perhaps following a convention developed especially for the medium. No one knew. Vantresca said the task could take him some time. He said it would be like translating a difficult foreign language while simultaneously breaking an espionage code. Or maybe two codes, given the oblique allusions and elisions any self-respecting gangster could be expected to use.

Abby got her laptop and worked with him side by side, tackling individual words with online dictionaries, or searching the single-letter abbreviations, or the acronyms, on language blogs, and word-nerd sites. She made notes on scraps of paper. A couple of things fell into place, but even so the work was slow. Never had so much come from so little. She had made the video as fast as she dared, five, ten, twenty seconds, scrolling at speed, pumping on and on. Now that vivid blur was giving up thousands and thousands of words, each one a challenge and a puzzle, most of them with two or three plausible solutions.

Reacher let them work. He hung out in the front parlour, with Barton and Hogan, in the spaces between the drums and the speaker cabinets. One cabinet was grey and about the size of a refrigerator. It had eight dirty circles on its grille. Reacher sat on the floor and leaned his back against it and it didn’t move at all. Barton hauled his battered Fender up into his lap, and played it unplugged, barely audible, with up and down runs of soft buzzy notes.

Hogan said, ‘Do you think we would have won? Do you think Vantresca would have wound up using his languages?’

‘On balance I think we would have prevailed,’ Reacher said. ‘As a technical matter I think we would have shut them down before they shut us down. Hard to call it winning, given the mess it would have made. But whatever, the tip of the spear would have been vaporized long ago. I’m afraid your friend wasted his time in school.’

Barton played a descending arpeggio, some kind of diminished minor chord, and ended with a bang on the open bottom string. Plugged in, it would have demolished the house. Unplugged, the string rattled and clattered against the frets, and gave out no fundamental at all. Barton looked at Reacher and said, ‘Now you’re the tip of the spear.’

‘I’m not looking to start a war,’ Reacher said. ‘All I want is the Shevicks’ money. If I can get it some kind of easy way, I absolutely will, believe me. I don’t feel the need to meet any of them face to face on the field of battle. In fact I would be happier not to.’

‘You won’t get the option. They must have Trulenko buttoned up pretty tight. Layers and layers. I’ve seen them do it, when a name comes to one of their clubs. They have a man on the corner, and a man on the door, and a man on the next door along, plus a couple of extra guys just roaming around.’

‘What do you remember about Trulenko?’

‘He was a nerd, like all those guys. I remember thinking it shouldn’t turn out that way. I was cool in high school. Now the nerds are billionaires and I’m scraping a living. I guess I should have learned software, not music.’

‘If he was working, what would he be doing?’

‘Is he working?’

‘Someone used that word.’

‘Then computers, I’m sure. That’s what he was good at. He was one of the top boys. His app was something to do with doctors, but basically all that stuff is computer software, isn’t it?’

Abby stuck her head in the door.

‘We figured it out,’ she said. ‘We’re ready to go with the Ukrainian. They mention Trulenko twice.’