Blue Moon

THIRTY-SIX

Abby sat with her back against the front tyre, hugging her knees, her head ducked between them as low as it would go. Directly behind her was the big V-8 engine block, which was hundreds of pounds of iron, almost three feet long and about a foot and a half high. No doubt a tanker like Vantresca would have ridiculed it as defensive armour, but under the circumstances it was the best they could get. Against handgun rounds it would do its job.

Reacher took up position eight feet back, in a posture the army called modified sitting. His butt was on the concrete. His left leg was bent, like an upside down V, and so was his right, but it was folded down flat on the floor, like a triangle pointing outward, in a different direction, with the heel of his boot wedged up against the cheek of his butt. His left elbow was propped on his left knee, and his left hand was supporting his right forearm, which was straight out from the shoulder. Altogether he was a human geodesic dome, braced and rigid in every separate vector. Which was why the army liked the position enough to give it a name. His eight-feet-back location was textbook, too. It meant he could keep very low. From the far side of the car all that would show above the line of the hood would be the muzzle of his gun, his eyes, and the top of his head. He could skim his rounds exactly nine millimetres over the sheet metal and keep his trajectories flat and level. All good. Except it meant he was firing directly over Abby’s head. She would feel the slipstream in her hair.

He started with a Glock. It seemed appropriate. It was an Albanian weapon. And it was full. Total of eighteen rounds. He figured it might get the job done all by itself. But still he laid out the others, in a fan shape by his right knee. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Partly to test the gun and partly to get the party started he put a round into the pyramid of chemical drums. Second level up, which would be centre mass on a standing man. There was a crack and a boom and a clang, and thick brown liquid gurgled out of the hole in the drum, which appeared more or less where he intended it to. The Glock worked OK.

A guy on the right craned up and fired a round from behind a stack of boards, then ducked back down again. The round hit the car. Maybe the driver’s door. Poor shooting. Snatched and panicky. A guy on the left tried to do better. He leaned out and aimed. He was static and exposed for half a second. Mistake. Reacher hit him in the chest, and again in the head, after he was down, just to be sure. Three rounds gone. Seven guys left. They had all backed off a yard. Maybe rethinking their whole approach. There was a certain amount of low conversation. Plenty of whispered to and fro. Some kind of plan being made. Reacher wondered how good it would be. Probably not very. The obvious play was to split up, into two squads, and send one out a back entrance, and around the building, and back in through the roll-up door. Which would give Reacher a two-front problem. It was what he would have done. But the remaining seven guys seemed to have no leader. Their command structure seemed to have collapsed. Maybe some kind of a coup. Or a failed coup. A palace revolution. He had heard the muffled shooting when they arrived. First doubly muffled by the trunk lid, then more distinct after it was raised. It was clear a whole bunch of people were getting it in the head. Far away in the back offices, where the bigwigs lived.

The plan turned out to be a conventional infantry assault based on fire and movement. In other words some would shoot and some would run, and then those who had run would drop down and shoot, and those who had shot would jump up and run. Like leapfrog, with bullets. But not many. They were low on ammunition. Which took the sting out. Covering fire was supposed to be heavy enough to distract or suppress or intimidate or bewilder. Or at least to preoccupy. But Reacher was able to more or less ignore it. Ten thousand generations were screaming at him to take cover, but the front part of his brain was fighting back with the new stuff, math and geometry and probabilities, calculating how likely it was that seven random guys could hit a target as small as a man’s eyes and the top of his head, at range, with handguns, while agitated, and the covering fire was weak enough that the ancient reflexes lost the argument, and were boxed up and put away, leaving the modern man to do his lethal work undisturbed. It was like shooting ducks in a carnival sideshow. The guys on the right laid down the fire, and two guys from the left stood up and charged.

Reacher hit the first.

He hit the second.

They thumped on the concrete, which seemed to spark some kind of over-literal obedience to the part of the plan about getting up when the other side dropped down, because immediately two guys on the right jumped up and ran, completely premature and uncovered.

Reacher hit the first.

He hit the second.

They went down, sliding, sprawling, coming to rest.

Three guys left.

Like a carnival sideshow.

Then it wasn’t. Then it was something Reacher had never seen before. It was something he never wanted to see again. Afterwards he was grateful Abby had her head ducked down and her eyes screwed shut. There was a long, long moment of ominous silence, and then all three remaining guys jumped up simultaneously, firing wild, roaring, screaming, heads thrown back, eyes bulging, insane, primitive, like berserkers from an ancient legend, like dervishes from an ancient myth. They charged the car, still roaring, still screaming, still firing wild, like a mad epic gesture, like cavalry charging tanks, three crazy men heading for certain death, knowing it, wanting it, needing it, seeking it, demanding it.

Reacher hit the first.

He hit the second.

He hit the third.

The long low shed went quiet.

Reacher unwound his contorted position and got to his feet. He saw a total of twelve sprawled bodies, in a ragged line stretching back fifty feet. He saw blood on the concrete. He saw a wide pool of brown preservative. It was still dripping out of the drum.

Plink, plink, plink.

He said, ‘All good now.’

Abby looked up at him.

She didn’t speak.

He shook pebbles of glass out of his jacket and put it on. He put the guns back in the pockets. He made a mental note: forty-four rounds remaining.

He said, ‘We should go check the back offices.’

She said, ‘Why?’

‘They might have money.’

Reacher and Abby stepped and minced around the bodies and the blood and the chemical spill, all the way to the far back corner. Ahead of them through the archway was a long narrow corridor. Doors to the left, doors to the right. First on the left was a windowless room with four laminate tables pushed together end to end. Like a boardroom. First on the right was a plain office with a desk and a chair and filing cabinets. No clue about its function. No cash in the cabinets. Nothing in the desk either, except normal office crap and a dozen cigars and a box of kitchen matches. They moved on. They found nothing of interest, until the last door on the left.

There was an outer office, and an inner office. Like a suite. Some kind of a CEO set-up. Like a commanding officer and an executive officer. The doorway between the two was piled high with bodies. There were more in the room beyond. Twelve in total. Including a guy behind a big desk, shot once in the face, and a guy in a chair, shot three times in the chest. A bizarre, static tableau. Infinitely still. Absolutely silent. It was impossible to reconstruct what had happened. It looked like everyone had shot everyone else. Some kind of unexplained rampage.

Abby stayed out of the inner office. Reacher went in. He put his hands high on the door jambs and clambered over the piled bodies. He trod on backs and necks and heads. Once inside he picked his way around behind the desk. The guy who had been shot in the face was slumped in a leather chair with wheels. Reacher moved it out the way. He checked the desk drawers. Right away in the bottom left he found a metal cash box, about the size of a family Bible, painted stern metallic colours, like something from an old-time country savings and loan. It was locked. He pulled the chair closer again and patted the dead guy’s pockets. Felt keys in the pants, right side. A decent bunch. He pulled them out, finger and thumb. Some were big, some were small. The third small key he tried opened the box.

In it was a lift-out tray at the top, with a handful of greasy ones and fives, and a scattering of nickels and dimes. Not good. But it got better. Under the tray was a banded brick of hundred dollar bills. Brand new. Unbroken. Fresh from the bank. A hundred notes. Ten thousand dollars. Close to what the Shevicks needed. Short by a grand, but better than a poke in the eye.

Reacher put the money in his pocket. He threaded his way back to the door. He climbed over the bodies again.

Abby said, ‘I want to go.’

‘Me too,’ Reacher said. ‘Just one more thing.’

He led her back to the first office they had seen. On the right, opposite the boardroom. The cigar smoker. Newly dead, Reacher assumed. But not from smoking. He took the box of kitchen matches from his desk. And paper, from everywhere he could find it. He struck a match and lit a sheet. He held it until it flamed up high. Then he dropped it in a trash basket.

Abby asked him, ‘Why?’

‘It’s never enough just to win,’ he said. ‘The other guy has got to know for sure he lost. Plus it’s safer this way. We were here. We probably left traces. Best to avoid any kind of confusion later on.’

They struck match after match and lit sheet after sheet of paper. They dropped them in every room. Grey smoke was drifting when they left the corridor. They lit the shrink wrap around the piles of boards. Reacher dropped a match in the pool of preservative, but it sputtered out immediately. Not flammable. Which made sense, in a lumber yard. But gasoline was flammable. That was for damn sure. Reacher took the gas cap off the shattered car and dropped the last sheet of burning paper down the filler neck.

Then they hustled. Thirty yards to the scooped-out kerb, seventy more to the first corner, and then they were gone.

Abby’s phone was full of missed calls from Vantresca. He said he was waiting across the street from the propped-up building with the heavy black net. He said he had been waiting there a long time. He said he didn’t know what to do next. Abby called him back. Between them they worked out a new rendezvous. He would drive in one direction, and they would walk in the other direction, and they would spot each other somewhere along the way. Before they set out again Reacher looked back the way they had come. Half a mile away there was a thread of smoke in the sky. The next time he checked it was a pillar of smoke, a mile away. Then it was a distant boiling black mass with flames dancing at the base. They heard fire truck sirens, booming and barking, more and more of them, until the faraway sound was a continuous bass wail. They heard police car sirens echoing through the east side streets.

Then Vantresca showed up in a black car. It was wide and squat and muscular. It had a chrome hood ornament, in the shape of a big cat leaping. A jaguar, presumably, for a Jaguar. It was small inside. Vantresca was driving. Hogan was next to him in the front. Barton was in the back. Only one place left. Abby had to sit in Reacher’s lap. Which was OK with him.

Hogan said, ‘Something is on fire over there.’

‘Your fault,’ Reacher said.

‘How?’

‘You pointed out that if the Ukrainians go down, the Albanians would take over the city. I didn’t want that to happen. It felt like it would be a win-lose.’

‘So what’s on fire?’

‘The Albanian HQ. It’s in the back of a lumber yard. It should burn for days.’

Hogan said nothing.

Barton said, ‘Someone else will take over.’

‘Maybe not,’ Reacher said. ‘The new commissioner will have a clean slate. Maybe it’s easier to stop new people coming in than it is to get old people out.’

Vantresca said, ‘What next?’

‘We need to find the Ukrainian nerve centre.’

‘Sure, but how?’

‘I guess we need to know exactly what it does. That might tell us what to look for. To some extent form follows function. For instance, if it was a drug lab, it would need exhaust fans, and gas and water, and so on and so forth.’

‘I don’t know what it does,’ Vantresca said.

‘Call the journalist,’ Reacher said. ‘The woman you helped. She might know. At least she might know what they’re into. If necessary we could work it out backward, about what kind of place they would need.’

‘She won’t talk to me. She was terrified.’

‘Give me her number,’ Reacher said. ‘I’ll call her.’

‘Why would she talk to you?’

‘I have a nicer personality. People talk to me all the time. Sometimes I can’t stop them.’

‘I would have to go to my office.’

‘Go to the Shevicks’ first,’ Reacher said. ‘I have something for them. Right now they need reassurance.’