Blue Moon

FORTY-FOUR

They managed to scope out the whole of the block by staying back in the pawn shop, back in the shadows, traversing side to side, peering out at oblique angles. There were two guys on the sidewalk outside the taxi office door, and two guys some distance away on the left-hand street corner, and two guys the same distance away on the right. Six men visible. Plus probably the same again inside. At least. Maybe two in the hallway the pawnbroker had described, plus two in the conference room, plus two at the mouth of the corridor that led onward to the offices. Each of which was no doubt occupied by a made man with a gun in his pocket and a spare in a drawer.

Not good. What the military academies would call a tactical challenge. A head-on assault against a numerically superior opponent in a tightly constrained battle space. Added to which, the guys from the street corners would fold into the action from the rear. Bad guys in front, bad guys behind, no body armour, no grenades, no automatic weapons, no shotguns, no flamethrower.

Reacher said, ‘I guess the real question is whether Gregory trusts Danilo.’

‘Does that matter?’ Hogan said.

‘Why wouldn’t he?’ Abby asked.

‘Two reasons,’ Reacher said. ‘First, he trusts no one. You don’t get to be Gregory by trusting people. He’s a snake, so he assumes everyone else is a snake. And second, Danilo is by far his biggest threat. The second in command. The leader in waiting. It’s on the news every night. The generals get deposed, and the colonels take over.’

‘Does this help us?’

‘You have to go through Danilo’s office to get to Gregory’s office.’

‘That’s normal,’ Hogan said. ‘Everyone does it that way. That’s how a chief of staff operates.’

‘Think about it in reverse. In order to leave his own office, Gregory has to walk through Danilo’s office. And he’s paranoid, with good reason. And with good results. He’s still alive. In his head this is not necessarily like a CEO in a movie, saying goodnight to his secretary, and calling her sweetheart. This is like walking into a death trap. This is assassination squads behind the desk. Or maybe even worse, this is a blockade, until he accedes to their demands. Maybe they’ll let him step down, with his dignity intact.’

Abby nodded.

‘Human nature,’ she said. ‘Mostly bullshit, but sometimes it rings a bell.’

‘What?’ Hogan said.

‘He built an emergency exit.’

They went back behind the counter, and sat on the floor against the cabinets, not far from the tied-up guy. A high-level staff conference. Always held behind the lines. Hogan played the part of the gloomy Marine. Partly because he was, and partly as a professional obligation. Every plan had to be stress tested, from every possible direction.

He said, ‘Worst case, we’re going to find exactly the same situation, but flipped around one eighty. Guys on the sidewalk the next street over, watching the back door, and then more guys inside, in narrow corridors, just the same. There’s a word for it.’

‘Symmetrical,’ Reacher said.

‘Got to be.’

‘Human nature,’ Abby said. ‘Mostly bullshit, but sometimes it rings a bell.’

‘What now?’

‘It’s a bad look,’ she said. ‘An escape hatch makes him look scared. Best case, it makes it look like he doesn’t trust the protection he bought, or the army of loyal soldiers standing in front of him. He can’t admit to any of those feelings. He’s Gregory. He has no weaknesses. His organization has no weaknesses.’

‘So?’

‘The emergency exit is secret. No one is guarding it because no one knows it exists.’

‘Not even Danilo?’

‘Most of all not Danilo,’ Reacher said. ‘He’s the biggest threat. This was done behind Danilo’s back. I bet you could trawl through the records and find a two-week spell when he was sent away somewhere, and just before he got back, I bet you would find a couple of construction workers mysteriously dead in some kind of gruesome accident.’

‘So that no one except Gregory would know where the secret tunnel is.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Which includes us. We don’t know where it is either.’

‘Some guy’s cellar connects to some other guy’s cellar.’

‘That’s your plan?’

‘Think about it from Gregory’s point of view. This is a guy who got where he is by taking no chances at all. He’s thinking about slamming the door on an assassination attempt and getting the hell out of there. A high-stress situation. He can’t afford confusion. He needs it clear and simple. Maybe arrows on the wall. Maybe emergency lighting, like on an airplane. All we need to do is find the street door at the far end. We can go in and follow the arrows backward. Maybe we’ll come out behind an oil painting on his office wall.’

‘We’ll have all the same people ahead of us. Except in reverse order. They’ll come pouring in through the office door.’

‘We can only hope.’

‘I don’t see what we gain.’

‘Two things,’ Reacher said. ‘We’ll have no one behind us, and we’ll be taking them out from the top to the bottom, instead of the bottom to the top. Much more efficient.’

‘Wait,’ Hogan said. ‘There are guys on the street corners. Symmetrical. The back corners become the front corners. It won’t be easy to get in.’

‘If I wanted easy I would have joined the Marines.’

They left the pawn shop the same way they came in, through the back hallway, through the rear door, out to the cross street. They hustled back to the car, at first cautious, and then fast. The car was still there. No ticket. Even the traffic cops were east of Center. Abby drove. She knew her way around. She made a wide loop, well out of sight of the taxi office. She stopped two blocks behind it, on a quiet street, outside a mom-and-pop store that sold washing machine hoses. She left the motor running. Hogan got out, and she scooted across to the passenger seat. Hogan walked around the hood and got in again behind the wheel. Reacher stayed in the back.

‘Ready?’ he said.

A tight nod from Hogan.

A determined nod from Abby.

‘OK, let’s do it,’ he said.

Hogan drove the rest of the block and made a left at the end. A block ahead in the new direction were two guys on the corner. On the far sidewalk. Black suits, white shirts. Previously the far left corner, now the near right corner. Symmetrical. They were standing with their backs to the block they were guarding, looking outward, like good sentries should.

What they saw was one of their own cars cruising towards them. A black Lincoln. Indistinct faces behind the windshield. Black glass in the back. It made the left in front of them. Into the cross street. Gregory’s real estate on the right, civilian real estate on the left. And way up ahead, two more guys, on the next corner. Previously the far right, now the near left.

The car slowed and stopped on the kerb. The rear window rolled down and a hand came out and beckoned. The guys on the corner took a step towards it, automatically. Reflex action. Then they stopped and thought about it. But they didn’t change their minds. Why would they? It was their car, and anyone important enough to be out and about during Situation C wouldn’t want to be kept waiting. So they started up again and hustled.

Mistake.

The front door opened when they were ten feet away, and Abby stepped out. The rear door opened just as they got there, and Reacher stepped out. He head-butted the first to arrive, barely any effort or movement, all about timing and momentum, like a soccer forward meeting a hard cross from out wide. The guy went down in the gutter. His head cracked on the kerbstone. Not his day.

Reacher moved on, to the second guy. A face he suddenly realized he knew. From the bar with the tiny pizzas and Abby waiting tables. The guy on the door. Run along now, kid, he had said to her. I’ll see you again, Reacher had said to him. I hope.

Good things come to those who wait.

Reacher popped him with a short left to the face, just a tap, to straighten him up, for a second short left, this time to the gut, to bend him over, to bring his head down to a convenient position, which was chest height to Reacher, maybe a little below, so he could grab it and twist it and jerk it with all the torque in his upper body. The neck broke and the guy went down. Pretty close to his pal. Reacher squatted between them and took the magazines out of their pistols.

The Lincoln drove away.

Reacher watched. The guys on the far corner had come closer. Inevitable. Symmetrical. For the same reasons. They were still coming closer. Now they were running. Hogan accelerated hard and mounted the sidewalk and smashed straight into them. Not pretty. They came flailing up in the air, proving all the clichés true, like rag dolls, like they were flying. Probably they were already dead. From the impact. Certainly they made no attempt to cushion their fall. They just smashed down, sliding, rolling, scraping, arms and legs everywhere. Hogan parked the car and got out. Reacher got up and started walking.

They met in the middle of the block. Abby was already there. She pointed back the way Hogan had come.

She said, ‘It’s that way.’

‘How can you tell?’ Reacher asked.

It was not the kind of street he was expecting. Not like behind the pawn shop. There was no sullen brick, no barred windows, no drooping wires or cables. Instead there was a neat line of newly restored buildings. Like the street with the law project office. Clean and bright. In this case mostly retail stores. Nicer and better than the strip with the taxi company and the bail bond operation. It was a block with two fronts, one coming up, one staying down.

Abby said, ‘I figured he would start from the outside in. He couldn’t keep it a secret if he started from the inside out. He couldn’t have construction workers trooping through the taxi office. Not without questions being asked. So he started back here, during the renovations, which was the perfect cover. He would have had access to detailed plans and surveys. He would have known what was connected to what. So he got it done. The back of one of these stores leads to the back of his office.’

‘Symmetrical,’ Hogan said.

‘Only in principle,’ Abby said. ‘I’m sure the reality is a warren full of dog-leg turns. This block is more than a hundred years old.’

‘Which store?’ Reacher asked.

‘Human nature,’ Abby said. ‘I figured in the end he couldn’t bring himself to rent it out. He needed to be absolutely sure. He didn’t want to worry about someone putting a display cabinet against his secret door. He needed control. So I looked for vacant units. There’s only one. The window is papered over. It’s that way.’

She pointed again, back the way Hogan had come.

The vacant store was a classic unit, built in an old-fashioned style, with a floor to ceiling display window that curved around inward, to meet the front door maybe twelve feet back from the sidewalk, at the end of what amounted to a viewing arcade, with mosaic tile on the floor. The door itself was glass in a frame, papered over. Reacher guessed the lock would be simple. Like an old-fashioned household item. Twist the stubby lever, pull, and you were good to go. No key required. A key might be in the wrong pants pocket at the critical moment. And keys were slow. Gregory didn’t want slow. He would be running, probably for his life. He wanted twist, pull, go.

‘Is there an alarm?’ Hogan asked. ‘He’s a paranoid guy. He would want to know if someone was messing around back here.’

Reacher nodded.

‘I’m sure he would,’ he said. ‘But in the end I think he acted realistic. Alarms go wrong. He didn’t want to risk it beeping when he was out of the office. Because Danilo might be there to hear it. In which case questions would be asked, for sure. The secret wouldn’t last for long. So I think no alarm. But I’m sure it was a tough decision.’

‘OK, then.’

‘Ready?’

A tight nod from Hogan.

A determined nod from Abby.

Reacher took out his ATM card. The best way past such a household item. He fiddled it into the crack, and curved and curled it around, until it jammed against the tongue of the lock. He yanked the door back towards the hinge, and some combination of sudden pressures told the crude mechanism the key had been turned, so the lock sprang back obediently.

Reacher pushed the door and stepped inside.