Blue Moon

FORTY-SIX

Danilo was a small man by Reacher’s standards, maybe five-ten, and wiry rather than heavy. Hogan had stripped him of his suit coat and emptied his shoulder holster. As a result he looked naked and vulnerable. Already defeated. Hogan had him standing next to the desk inside the inner office. The desk was a massive thing made of toffee-coloured wood. The fallen bookcase was propped on it. It was huge. It must have weighed a ton. Books and ornaments had spilled out all over the place. From his new angle Reacher could see Gregory on the floor. He was folded into a Z shape. Kind of compressed. Otherwise a healthy individual. Tall, hard, and solid. But dead. Pity.

Reacher hooked his left forefinger under the knot of Danilo’s tie and manoeuvred him out into clear space. He turned him around and squared him up. Shoulders back, chin out.

He stood back.

He said, ‘Tell me about your porn sites on the internet.’

‘Our what?’ Danilo said.

Reacher slapped him. Open handed, but a colossal blow all the same. It knocked Danilo right off his feet. He did half of a sideways somersault and landed crumpled where the wall met the floor.

‘Get up,’ Reacher said.

Danilo got up, slow and shaky, hands and knees first, palming his way up the wall.

‘Try again,’ Reacher said.

‘They’re a sideline,’ Danilo said.

‘Where are they?’

Danilo hesitated.

Reacher hit him again. The other side. Open handed. Even harder than before. Danilo went down again, cartwheeling sideways, banging his head on the other wall.

‘Get up,’ Reacher said again.

Danilo got up again. Slow and shaky, hands and knees, hauling himself up the wall.

‘Where are they?’ Reacher asked again.

‘Nowhere,’ Danilo said. ‘Everywhere. It’s the internet. There are bits and pieces on servers all over the planet.’

‘Controlled from where?’

Danilo watched Reacher’s right hand. He had figured out the sequence. Not difficult. Right, left, right. He didn’t want to answer, but he was going to.

He said the word. Not a hive or a burrow, but a nest, way up high. Then he clamped his lips. Now he was between a rock and a hard place. He couldn’t reveal the location. It was their biggest and best-kept secret. Instead he continued to stare at Reacher’s right hand.

Reacher said, ‘We already know where it is. You got nothing left to trade.’

Danilo didn’t answer. Then a cell phone rang. Distant and muffled. From the far doorway. In a pocket, somewhere in the pile of corpses. It pealed six times, and stopped. Then another rang. Equally distant, equally muffled. Then two more.

The sound of the mothership not answering.

Danilo said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘For what?’ Reacher said.

‘Things I did.’

‘But you did them. Can’t change that.’

Danilo didn’t answer.

Abby said, ‘Yes.’

Hogan said, ‘Yes.’

Reacher shot Danilo in the forehead with the H&K P7 Hogan had taken from him. German police issue. Identical to all the others. Maybe even sequential serial numbers. A bulk order, from some bent German copper. Danilo went down, with what was left of his head in his own office, and the rest of him in Gregory’s. Reacher looked left and right. We’ll be taking them out from the top to the bottom. Much more efficient. Job done. They were laid out like a corporate chart. Gregory, Danilo, the heap of senior deputies. Cell phones ringing everywhere.

They left the same way they arrived, through the emergency exit corridor. They walked through the vacant store. Twist, pull, go, back to the street. The guys from the corners were still where they had fallen. No one would dream of calling the cops about dead bodies near a black Town Car on a back street on the west side of the city. Such a thing was obviously someone else’s private business.

‘Where next?’ Abby asked.

‘You OK?’ Reacher asked back.

‘Doing well. Where next?’

Reacher glanced at the downtown skyline. Six towers. Three office buildings, three hotels.

He said, ‘I should go say goodbye to the Shevicks. I might not get another chance.’

‘Why not?’

‘The lumber yard won’t burn for ever. Sooner or later the cops will be back west of Center. No more grand a week. They’ll be mad at somebody. Questions will be asked. Always better not to be around for a thing like that.’

‘You’re going to leave?’

‘Come with me.’

She didn’t answer.

He said, ‘Call Vantresca and tell him to meet us.’

They left the Lincoln where it was. Insurance, of sorts. Like a road sign. Not Don’t Walk, but Don’t Ask. The sun was out. No clouds in the sky. Middle of the afternoon. They strolled back the way they had driven. They rode up to the Shevicks’ room. Maria looked at them through the peephole, and let them in. Barton and Vantresca were already there.

Vantresca pointed out the window. At the left-hand of two office towers west of Center. It was a plain rectangular structure about twenty storeys tall, faced with glass that reflected the sky. Above the top floor’s windows was a bland and anodyne name. Could have been an insurance company. Could have been a laxative medicine.

‘You sure?’ Reacher asked.

‘The only new lease in the right time frame. The top three floors. A corporation no one ever heard of. All kinds of weird shit going up in the elevator.’

‘Good work.’

‘Thank Barton. He knows a saxophone player with a day job in the department of buildings.’

Apparently Vantresca had called room service on arrival, because a waiter showed up with a cart full of things to eat and drink. Finger sandwiches, cupcakes, a plate of cookies still warm from the microwave oven. Plus water, and soda, and iced tea, and hot tea, and best of all hot coffee, in a tall chromium flask that flashed in the sun. They ate and drank together. Vantresca said he had already sent a biohazard clean-up crew to the Shevicks’ house, and a drywall guy, and a painter. He said they could go home in the morning. If they wanted. They said they did, very much. They said thank you for fixing the holes.

Then they looked at Reacher, a question in their eyes.

‘Close of business today,’ he said. ‘Watch out for a wire transfer.’

Aaron hesitated a second, politely, and asked, ‘How big?’

‘I’m pretty much a round-figures type of guy. If it’s too much, give the rest away. To people in the same situation. Maybe some to those lawyers. Julian Harvey Wood, Gino Vettoretto, and Isaac Mehay-Byford. They’re doing good work, for guys with so many names.’

Then he got out the envelope from the pawn shop. The wedding bands, the small solitaires, the watch with the broken crystal. He gave it to Maria. He said, ‘They went out of business.’

Then they left, Reacher, Abby, Barton, Hogan, Vantresca, riding down in the elevator together, stepping out to the street.

Half a block short of the office tower’s street-level lobby was a single-wide coffee shop with tables in back. They went in and crowded knee to knee, five people at a four-top. Vantresca and Barton ran through what they knew. The building had been completed three years previously. It had twenty floors. It had a total of forty suites. So far it was a commercial failure. The local economy was uncertain. The unknown corporation had gotten a great deal on eighteen, nineteen and twenty. The only other tenants were a dentist, down on three, and a commercial real estate broker, on two. The rest was empty.

Reacher asked Hogan, ‘What would the Marine Corps do?’

‘Most likely evacuate the broker and the dentist and then set the building on fire. Either the high-floor targets would make it down the emergency stairs, or they would get burned up where they were. Either way a win-win, for not much effort.’

Reacher asked Vantresca, ‘What would the armoured divisions do?’

‘Standard urban doctrine is shoot out the ground-floor walls, so the building falls directly in on itself. You need to keep the streets clear of rubble if you can. Anything still moving a minute later, you hit it with the machine gun.’

‘OK,’ Reacher said.

Vantresca asked, ‘What would the MPs do?’

‘No doubt something subtle and ingenious. Given our comparative lack of resources.’

‘Like what?’

Reacher thought hard for a minute, and then he told them.