The Fourth Man

The Fourth Man

I was walking south, with the traffic, on Fifth Avenue in New York City, on the right-hand sidewalk, on the block before the Empire State, when a complete stranger put her hand on my arm and said, ‘I know who you are.’

I was pretty sure she didn’t. I was pretty sure if I asked, she would say I was a guy about to luck into an unrepeatable financial opportunity. Or meet a tall dark stranger. Or some such advantageous thing. But only if I gave her twenty bucks first. Maybe fifty. That part would be somehow crucial. She was a fine-boned individual, with blonde hair and blue eyes, maybe forty, a little worn down and hard around the edges, wearing a black business suit, gone a little shiny from cleaning, and too warm for the weather. She was carrying a black leather pocketbook, slung over her shoulder. It was bulging with items, some of them heavy.

I said, ‘So who am I?’

‘You’re Jack Reacher,’ she said.

‘Am I?’

‘No middle name. Thirteen years in the military police.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Have you ever been to Australia?’

‘That’s a question, not an answer.’

‘Have you?’

She had been raised in Chicago, I thought, judging by her vowel sounds.

I asked her, ‘Where did you go to college?’

‘Yale,’ she said. ‘Does it matter?’

‘Remember your sophomore year?’

‘I guess.’

‘That was about the last time I went to Australia.’

‘You were still in the army then.’

‘I stopped off on my way back from Korea.’

‘Why?’

‘Vacation,’ I said. ‘It was summertime there, and winter everyplace else.’

‘Not everyplace,’ she said. ‘It’s a hemisphere thing.’

‘A woman was involved. I met her in Bali.’

‘Any problems with your visit?’

‘Who are you?’ I asked her again.

She unslung her bag. Heavy items clicked and shifted. She put her hand inside. Pedestrians flowed around us. Three NYPD cops watched from across the light. She came out with an ID wallet. A gold shield. She was FBI. A special agent. Her name was Cynthia Mitchell.

She said, ‘Would you come downtown and answer a couple of questions?’

‘Why?’

‘International cooperation,’ she said. ‘And it might be in your interest.’

‘How?’

‘Australian law enforcement found a list. There were four people on it, including you. The other three are dead.’

Special Agent Cynthia Mitchell made four cell phone calls from the sidewalk, and as she finished up the last of them a plain black sedan stopped at the kerb next to us. It had steel wheels with hubcaps, and two needle antennas on the roof. Inside it smelled of automotive cleaning products. Mitchell scooted in behind the driver. I sat next to her, behind the empty front passenger seat. The driver was a solid guy in a suit. He took off without a word, heading south with the traffic, towards the blank government buildings way downtown. Mitchell didn’t talk. Instead she worked her phone with her thumbs, doing texts and e-mails.

Twenty minutes later we parked underground and rode upstairs in a slow elevator that smelled of rubber. The guy in the suit peeled off in a different direction, and Mitchell led me onward to a double- wide office furnished as a conference room. It had a long table and leather chairs with slender chrome legs. In one of the chairs was a guy in a blue suit. He was about Mitchell’s own age, maybe forty, with unruly fair hair above an open-air tan, and wide shoulders, and battered hands. Worn down in a different way than Mitchell. Maybe a ballplayer once. Now a federal agent. Which he turned out to be, but not ours.

Mitchell said, ‘This is Pete Peterson from the Australian consulate. He’s their senior counterterrorism guy. His home office found the list. He’s the one with the questions. All we’re doing is helping out.’

Peterson said, ‘We asked all our friends to run some photographs through their facial recognition software and their local databases. Your picture matched both your old army photo, and the photo on your new passport. You haven’t changed much. Our friends in the FBI were good enough to pass on your name. We tried to contact you, but we got nowhere.’

I said, ‘When was this?’

‘A year ago.’

‘I was a hard man to find, a year ago.’

‘Evidently.’

‘The list came with photographs?’

Peterson shook his head.

‘Not with,’ he said. ‘The photographs were the list. That’s all there was. Four photographs in an envelope. Nothing else.’

‘Where?’

‘We got a tip about an address in Sydney. No one was home, but we got a houseful of evidence. It was part of a sophisticated gang operation. Maybe organized crime, maybe terrorism. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. Everything in the house was inventoried and studied. The envelope with the photographs seemed to mean nothing. Just four random guys. Definitely no one thought of them as a list of anything. They were filed away.’

‘A year ago?’

‘Three years ago. They seemed to mean nothing, so we didn’t put them on the wires. Not back then.’

‘What changed a year ago?’

‘A year ago we found out we were already a year late. The situation had started to change two years ago. One day we took a routine look at the tracks and traces, and we saw we had gotten three separate pings, from homicide detectives in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. They were running database searches of their own. Three out of our four photographs had been murdered over the previous twelve months. At which point we mentally turned the envelope into a list of targets. We put all four faces on the global wires. We thought we could get background from the three dead guys, and then maybe use it to save the fourth guy.’

‘It worked,’ I said. ‘Here I am.’

‘We didn’t get much background. We’re hoping you can tell us something.’

‘About what?’

‘Why you’re on the list.’

‘I have no idea. I never went to Australia with three other guys. And when I was there I’m pretty sure I didn’t offend anyone. Not that bad, anyway.’

Peterson ducked away and came back with a briefcase. He laid it on the table. He opened it up. He lifted out a thin khaki file.

‘Not the originals,’ he said. ‘Very high quality reproductions.’

In the file were ten sheets of glossy paper. Photographs of the photographs, plus their envelope, in each case front and back. The Australian lab had done an outstanding job. The images were grainless and highly detailed. Every fleck and fibre was visible. It was immediately obvious the original photographs were not really photographs at all. They were Xerox copies of photographs. Pretty good, but a little dull and sooty. Mine was an army photograph. Some new ID requirement, maybe five years before the end. The good old days.

The other three faces I had never seen before. But their pictures resembled mine, in terms of their rigid postures, and their impatient glares. All some kind of official ID.

I asked, ‘Who were they?’

Peterson said, ‘Two Brits and an American. All retired military.’

‘What kind?’

‘Cooperation only goes so far. We got pretty bland answers. Supply units, mostly.’

‘What did they say about me?’

‘Traffic duty, mostly.’

‘Not my fault,’ Mitchell said. ‘I’m just the messenger.’

I said, ‘Why were they in Australia?’

‘The Brits were visiting family,’ Peterson said. ‘Lots of Brits have family in Australia. The American was there on business.’

All four faces had a deep dimple in the paper, high on the forehead. From the metal butterfly clasp on the envelope. Which was made of stiff brown paper, unmarked on either side, except for a rime of perished glue under the flap.

I asked, ‘How often did the Brits go visit their families?’

‘Every couple of years,’ Peterson said. ‘Flights are cheap now. It’s a great vacation.’

‘Had the American been there before?’

‘Many times,’ Peterson said. ‘He was a mining executive. He was in and out like a fiddler’s elbow.’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘OK what?’

‘Who had been living at the address in Sydney?’

‘We couldn’t tell. They were highly disciplined. It was pretty much a sterile environment. Food and clothing were generic Australian.’

‘They were from the former Yugoslavia,’ I said.

Peterson asked me to come see him first thing the next morning, at his place. The Australian consulate, on 42nd Street, across from Grand Central. I said I would, if I hadn’t already left town by then. He thought I was kidding about that. He smiled. I didn’t. I left the FBI building and stopped in at the third copy shop I saw, which had computers to rent in ten-minute blocks, and no other customers, which meant the guy behind the counter would have time to answer technical questions, which I was sure I would have.

First I got a visa for Australia. On line, virtually automatic, virtually instantaneous. My name, my passport number, my ATM card. A healthy fee. Click to accept. Then I bought an airplane ticket on the next flight out. JFK to Los Angeles, and Los Angeles to Sydney. Then I paid for my computer time and caught a cab to the airport. First thing the next morning I was a long way from Grand Central Terminal.

I slept most of the way across the Pacific, in a hard upright seat. I was comfortable. Sleeping sitting up was a skill a person learned in the army, and I had never lost it. Arrival in Sydney was undramatic. Immigration was routine. I had no luggage, but even so I lingered in the baggage hall. My sense of day and time was scrambled. I felt I needed to be on the ball. I figured the clock was already ticking. I figured alerts were already going out, in all kinds of different directions.

Five minutes later I stepped out to the arrivals hall. I stopped under a sign about ground transportation. Trains and buses and taxis. This way and that way. I followed the arrow for the taxi line. I walked neither fast nor slow. I saw a guy in a suit watching me. Behind me, on my left. Trying hard, but completely obvious. A common problem, all over the world. Clearly no different in Australia. The kind of guy capable of the feats and achievements necessary to get promoted to an undercover role is not the kind of guy who looks natural, standing around doing nothing in a suit. Too much energy, and discipline, and purpose. Even standing still.

He was one of three things. Maybe just a routine post-Customs snoop, in this case interested in a passenger off a transcontinental flight, who carried no luggage at all. No suitcase on wheels, no backpack, no shoulder bag, no nothing. Not normal.

Or maybe he was one of Pete Peterson’s boys. Whatever day and time it was in Sydney, it was way after yesterday’s first thing next morning in New York. Maybe Peterson had asked around. Maybe he had checked his computers on a hunch. Or maybe there was an established protocol. Maybe all new visa applicants came across his desk. He had plenty of time to organize a reception committee. I was in the air a very long time.

The third possibility was he was a bad guy.

I walked on. I found the end of the taxi line. There were twenty people ahead of me. I leaned the base of my spine on the barrier rail, and arched my back, as if easing a pain, and twisted left, where I saw the head of the line, and the exit lanes beyond it, and then I twisted right, where I saw the guy in the suit still watching me.

And this time also talking on a cell phone.

I waited. We all shuffled up, one carful at a time. I watched the traffic behind me. Maybe the guy in the suit was calling up a chase car. To follow my taxi, when my turn came. I looked for vehicles idling at the kerb, loitering, going nowhere, just waiting. There were dozens of them. It was the arrivals lane at an airport.

My turn came. I slid in the back of a cab and asked for the opera house. I watched out the back window for the first mile. Dozens of cars were following us. Same speed, same relative position, never changing. A river of traffic. The main route between the airport and downtown. To be expected. Nothing to be learned. I faced front again. It was late morning, according to the sun. A beautiful day. Which beautiful day, I still wasn’t sure.

We got near the harbour. The opera house was built on a promontory. It was world famous and iconic and beautiful and one of the planet’s great attractions. But because of its position out over the water it needed a purposeful there-and-back detour. It needed a specific intention. You didn’t just pass it by, accidentally. Which is why I chose it. It would act as a filter. I would see which of the cars behind us really meant business.

The answer was only one. I got out of the cab and a car slowed to a stop twenty yards away. It was a large shapeless sedan painted brown. Made by the Australian version of General Motors. In it was a lone guy, wearing sunglasses and a black leather jacket. I turned to go and he shut the motor down and got out and left the car right where it was, parked not very straight in a no-parking zone. Which didn’t help me decide who he was. A Customs agent might park like that. Or any of Pete Peterson’s boys. Because they all had immunity. But equally a bad guy might park like that. Because he didn’t care. Because he had bigger things on his mind.

I walked on, towards the swooping structure. I didn’t look back. But I listened back. I heard the guy in the shades. I heard his footsteps. I picked them out. I detoured towards the water. Away from the crowds. The footsteps followed. About ten yards back. Ahead of me I saw a corner, and a barrier, and a gate, big enough for a truck. A scenery dock, maybe. The unseen guts of the building. Not famous or iconic or beautiful.

I ducked under the barrier and walked on. Then I stopped and looked out over the water. The footsteps got closer. When they were three steps away I turned around. The guy in the shades was thirty-something, medium height, dark-haired, and he needed a shave. He was muscled up to the point of looking stocky. His leather jacket was tight across his shoulders. It looked like motorcycle equipment.

I said, ‘Show me ID.’

Instead he showed me a knife.

Which answered my question about who he was. Not a Customs agent. Not one of Pete Peterson’s boys. The knife was a military-issue combat weapon. But not U.S. Not NATO. Maybe Czech. Or Yugoslavian.

I said, ‘Do you speak English?’

‘Funny man,’ he said.

‘You need to talk to your boss about tactics. This is really stupid. I’ve been in the country less than twenty minutes. You might as well draw a picture.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘You’re the last. We won’t be using this method again.’

‘Did you do the first three?’

‘You wearing a wire?’

‘Just curious.’

‘You think this is a TV show? You think I should tell you everything, and then somehow you’ll knock the knife out of my hand, and we’ll struggle, and you’ll take me prisoner?’

‘Something like that,’ I said. ‘Pretty much.’

‘The others thought so too. They were all hard men. Just like you. Didn’t help them. Won’t help you.’

‘They weren’t expecting you. I was. I led you right here. We’re in a loading bay. There’s no one around.’

‘I have a knife.’

‘And I have a rule. Pull a knife on me, I break your arm. It’s a childhood thing. Kind of stayed with me. Actually I have another rule first. I forgot to mention. Something my mother always made me say. I have to give you the chance to walk away. In this case you could carry a message for me. To your boss. No dishonour in that.’

‘What’s the message?’

‘Tell him they both cried like babies.’

The guy came straight at me, with the blade out in front. I don’t like knives. Never have. Never will. But over the years I have learned how to deal with them. Which is sometimes to ignore them. To delete them from the scene. Not a knife coming at you, but a fist. You want to get hit by a fist? Of course you don’t, so you stay calm, and you twist away, a routine evasive real-world manoeuvre, a move you have made a million times before, so you dodge the knife easily, without either thinking about it or getting all worked up about it.

And then you stay with the fistfight illusion by continuing to ignore the knife entirely, and by using your falling-away momentum to whip a hooking right into the guy’s face.

At which point he gave up the knife involuntarily. First his sunglasses exploded, and his heels came up in the air like he had run into a clothes line, and the knife clattered to the concrete, and he went down flat on his back, with a sound that was mostly a dusty thump, flesh and bone, but also a wet crack, behind his head, which didn’t bode well. He lay still. He kept on breathing. His eyes stayed open. But he wasn’t seeing anything. He wasn’t reacting to anything. Even when I broke his arm.

He had nothing in his pockets except a car key marked Holden, which was presumably the brown sedan, and a cell phone, which had a log showing incoming and outgoing calls between six different people. Clearly the guy liked to chat.

I put the key and the phone in my pocket and I walked away. I looped around to where the crowds were, and I sat on a wall, and I checked the phone in greater detail. Five out of the six callers were clearly friends. They would call him, or he would call them, and they would chat, sometimes up to twenty minutes. Back and forth, mutual, probably typical.

The sixth caller was different. He was incoming only. Not back and forth, and not mutual. And he was brief. Sometimes not more than forty-five seconds. He called every two or three days. He was the boss, I thought. Calling to issue instructions.

The phone said the boss’s name was Dragan.

I looked up and saw Pete Peterson getting out of a car about thirty yards away.

Peterson looked the same as he had in New York. Blue suit, boyish hair, the aches and pains and the battered hands of a one-time ballplayer. Cricket, most likely, I thought. A big deal in Australia. He looked tired. Maybe not good at sleeping sitting up.

I stood up and he walked over. He pointed at a café table outside a gift shop. We sat down face to face.

He said, ‘Tell me why you’re here.’

‘Flights are cheap now,’ I said. ‘It’s a great vacation.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘I was a company commander once. A long time ago. I did my share of paperwork. Those Xeroxes you showed me looked familiar. I recognized the technology. State-of-the-art photocopying at the time, but a couple generations out of date now.’

‘Our lab says the paper is about twenty-five years old.’

I nodded.

‘And it was stored for most of that time,’ I said. ‘The photocopies were sealed in the envelope and stacked with a bunch of other crap. You can tell by the way the metal butterfly closure has made a mark on the paper. All four sheets, deep and crisp and clear. Heavy pressure. That envelope was at the bottom of some random pile for nearly a quarter of a century. Long enough for the glue to perish on the flap. Let’s call it twenty-two years, for the sake of argument. Then three years ago someone found it. Maybe in an attic. Maybe by accident. A long-lost treasure. Right away they mailed it to the address here in Sydney. Then all kinds of mayhem broke out.’

‘Tell me the who and the how and the why.’

‘Someone wants vengeance,’ I said. ‘A quarter century ago something bad happened to them. Not here in Australia. Somewhere else. They had to flee. They moved here. All along they believed an old rumour, that back in the day someone had found out who the four men were, who had done the bad thing to them. But it was only a rumour. They had no actual information. Not until the photographs finally arrived.’

Peterson said, ‘Who are they?’

‘We’ll get to that,’ I said. ‘First we got to look at how they did it. Which you won’t like. Four unlabelled photographs don’t mean much. They must have run them through government software. Way before you did. They turned a list of faces into a list of names. Either they had an inside man, or someone took a bribe, or they hacked your systems.’

Peterson said nothing.

‘It gets worse,’ I said. ‘Four names don’t mean much either. Not unless you know when one of them happens to be headed for Australia. So you can be ready for him. Which means another inside man. Or more bribes. Or more hacking. Either your visa system, or the airline manifests, or the immigration desks themselves. Or all three, in a neat little sequence. They were plenty ready for me, for instance. That’s for damn sure. Some guy got to me less than twenty minutes after I stepped out of the baggage hall. Was it the same with the first three?’

‘Broadly,’ Peterson said. ‘Not twenty minutes. But within hours.’

‘Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. All international airports. The visa, the plane ticket, the arrival. Like one, two, three, go. They timed it perfectly.’

‘What guy got to you?’

I pointed.

‘Loading dock,’ I said. ‘Not talking. He hurt his head. But I got his phone. He works for a guy named Dragan.’

‘Who are they? And who are you, really? You said you didn’t know the other three.’

‘I don’t.’

‘But you said the four of you did a bad thing.’

‘Separately.’

‘What bad thing?’

‘It was only bad from their point of view. I was happy enough about it.’

‘What was it?’

‘I’m only guessing about the other three. But I’m sure I’m right. Unexplained men from shadowy military units. British and American. I asked myself, what was I doing a quarter century ago, that could have gotten me on a hit list? What could the other guys have been doing? The only possible answer was Kosovo. Before your time. Serbia and Croatia and all that stuff. The former Yugoslavia. All kinds of strife and civil war and atrocities. I was deployed there, briefly. Mostly during the clean-up.’

‘Doing what?’

I didn’t answer. I was neither proud of it nor not proud of it. It was a mission. One of many. But I remembered it pretty well.

Afterwards they gave me a medal. The Balkans, some police work, a search for two local men with wartime secrets to keep, both soon identified, and located, and visited, and shot in the head. All part of the peace process. No big deal.

I said, ‘It’s classified. Why they told you I was directing traffic.’

‘Assassination?’

‘You’re pretty smart, for a cricket player.’

‘Cricket players need to be. To understand the rules.’

‘They were very bad people.’

‘I believe you.’

‘I mean, really bad. You don’t want to know.’

‘How many?’

‘Two.’

‘And I guess they had brothers and cousins and so on, who moved to Sydney, and never forgot, because of their tribal culture.’

‘Which is why I’m here,’ I said. ‘People shouldn’t bottle things up. Much healthier to let it all out. I wanted to give them the chance.’

‘You’re taking a risk.’

‘I don’t like being on a list. A thing like that, I take it as a challenge. No doubt a flaw in my character, but it is what it is.’

Peterson did something with his phone. Some kind of encrypted communication.

He said, ‘The Sydney police department has the name Dragan in its database.’

‘Who is he?’

‘He’s a she. Maybe not a brother or a cousin. Maybe a sister. The Sydney police department thinks she’s a bad person in her own right. They think she runs drugs and prostitution and payday loans. But they can’t prove it.’

Then he went quiet.

Meaningfully quiet.

I said, ‘I’m going to go take a drive.’

‘Where?’

‘To see the sights,’ I said.

I got up and strolled back to the big brown sedan. It had a parking ticket under the wiper. I got in and fired it up. I headed for the beaches.

I parked in a municipal lot and took out the captured cell phone. I looked at the log again. I called Dragan back. The first time ever, from that particular phone. I was breaking the rules. A woman answered. She sounded surprised. Even affronted.

She said, ‘Why are you calling me?’

Her accent was obviously foreign, but fairly neutral. Not good enough for the movies.

I said, ‘This is not who you think it is.’

No reply.

I said, ‘Or maybe it should be. If you had thought harder in the first place. The boy you sent fell down on the job.’

‘Who are you?’

‘You tell me first. Tell me your name.’

‘My name is Dragan.’

‘And mine is Reacher. I’m the fourth man.’

‘You killed my brother.’

‘You say that like it’s a bad thing.’

‘Now I’m going to kill you.’

‘Which one was your brother? What rank?’

‘He was a colonel.’

‘He ordered his men to rape an eight-year-old to death. And her mother. Are you defending that?’

‘You’re a liar.’

‘I put my gun to his head and he cried like a baby. He begged and pleaded and wet his pants.’

‘You’re a liar.’

‘You should be glad he’s dead.’

‘You’re the last. I’m going to kill you.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Have it your way.’

I told her where I was. The beach, the municipal lot, the brown sedan.

By that point it was a few minutes after noon, so we all knew there was plenty of daylight ahead. We all knew we could take an hour to make a plan. They would assume I wouldn’t stay in the car. Maybe they would end up sending a guy to make sure, but most of their early energy would get spent figuring out where I would go next. Which they would recognize was a decision largely made by the terrain. The lot was served by a narrow road in. They would assume I would hide somewhere just outside the gate. Because then, as soon as they arrived, I would be instantly behind them. They wouldn’t be hunting me. I would be hunting them.

So they would park a hundred yards up the road, tickets be damned, and they would come in on foot. From what they would think was behind me.

So I would start two hundred yards up the road.

No, I thought. Three hundred. Their command post was all I was interested in. I was sure it would stay well to the rear. Command posts usually do.

I locked up the brown sedan and set out walking.

Just shy of three hundred yards up the road I found a café with a sandy patio covered in young people sitting cross-legged and playing guitars and bongo drums. I sat on the ground against a low wall with a bunch of other aficionados. Safe enough, I thought. I was below eye level, and a dull part of a colourful crowd. I could see down the road pretty well. Certainly I would see if anyone parked and got out.

I waited. The musicians seemed to have plenty of energy, which I was glad about. I figured I could be waiting a long time. Dragan would guess I would guess an hour, so she would make it two, except she would guess I would guess that too, so she would make it three. Or more. Or less.

I waited. I had waited for her brother. I broke into his house and sat in the dark. Not true that he cried and begged. I didn’t give him the chance. I put a double tap low in the back of his skull as soon as he stepped in the room.

I waited.

Then two ugly sedans rolled by. High-spec versions of the brown heap I had left in the lot. I watched them. They slowed down. They stopped. They parked a hundred yards ahead of me. Two hundred yards short of the beach lot gate.

Four men got out of the first car. Short black nylon jackets, black jeans, sunglasses. All kind of obvious. Decoys, I thought. Presumably the idea was I would wheel around, this way and that, always keeping them in sight, until I accidentally blundered backward into the guy who had really come for me.

Who got out of the second car.

He was a fat guy in a loud shirt and tattered shorts. The four obvious gangsters set out walking towards the beach, and the fat guy followed not far behind.

Nothing else happened.

I waited. Then I got up and started walking. I was a hundred yards behind the second car, and closing. I was about a hundred and fifty yards behind the five guys, and not closing, because they were walking too, same speed, same direction.

From forty yards out I saw there were still two people in the second car. One behind the wheel, and one in the back. The command post. Cell phone at the ready, no doubt. Ready to issue instructions if necessary. But mostly hoping to hear they got me. Alive. I figured that would have been her instruction.

Be careful what you wish for, I thought.

I walked on. Twenty yards out it was obvious the driver was a man, and the back-seat passenger was a woman. Black hair. Small, but not tiny. She was watching over the driver’s shoulder, staring out the windshield, trying to see what was happening up ahead. Her guys were almost to the parking lot.

I was almost to her back bumper.

I came down the driver’s side and tore open the driver’s door, at which point everything became a simple gamble, as to whether I could subdue and disarm the driver before the woman in the back could react, which was a bet I was pretty sure I could win, having done similar things before, with routine real-world manoeuvres, moves I had made a million times, not thinking or getting worked up, just grabbing the driver by the collar, and hauling him half out, and clubbing him in the face, and pulling his jacket up over his head, which would show me his belt, which had nothing stuck in it, and which would tell me if there was weight in his pocket, which there wasn’t, but I saw straps across his back, so I slammed him against the seat and took his gun from a shoulder holster, and knelt in on top of him and pointed the gun at the woman in the back. Who had her hand in her purse.

I said, ‘Keep still.’

I hit the driver again, just a maintenance dose, and reversed out of his compartment and got in the back.

I said, ‘Take your hand out your purse. If there’s a gun in it I’ll shoot you as soon as I see it. In the gut. So you die slow.’

She took her hand out. No gun.

I said, ‘Your brother did bad things. I think you know that. I think you were there. You must have been living under his protection. Which is why you had to flee when I killed him. I think you approved of what he did. I think you enjoyed it. I think you’re just as bad as him.’

She spat at me. Not the first time it had happened, but always a surprise. I swapped the gun into my left hand, and with my right I grabbed her by the throat. And squeezed. It was a small throat, but not tiny. But a very big hand. She was gone in a couple of minutes.

I got out of the car and walked back the way I had come. The guitar players and the bongo drummers were still at it. Beyond them Pete Peterson was leaning on the fender of his car.

‘We put a tracker on the brown car,’ he said. ‘We knew where you were and we worked out how you would do it. With the phone, and the outflanking manoeuvre.’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘Now I’m here to drive you to the airport.’

‘Already?’

‘Better that way.’

‘When is my flight?’

‘Now, basically. We’ll just about make it.’

I left Australian airspace less than five hours after entering it. Which made me resent the price of the visa. On the other hand, it was valid for an extended period of time. All was not lost. I decided I would come back one day. For a proper vacation. When it was winter in America. Maybe via Bali again.