Persuader

Truth is by that point I had been in for eleven whole days, since a damp shiny Saturday night in the city of Boston when I saw a dead man walk across a sidewalk and get into a car. It wasn't a delusion. It wasn't an uncanny resemblance. It wasn't a double or a twin or a brother or a cousin. It was a man who had died a decade ago. There was no doubt about it. No trick of the light. He looked older by the appropriate number of years and was carrying the scars of the wounds that had killed him.

I was walking on Huntington Avenue with a mile to go to a bar I had heard about. It was late. Symphony Hall was just letting out. I was too stubborn to cross the street and avoid the crowd. I just threaded my way through it. There was a mass of well-dressed fragrant people, most of them old. There were double-parked cars and taxis at the curb. Their engines were running and their windshield wipers were thumping back and forth at irregular intervals. I saw the guy step out of the foyer doors on my left. He was wearing a heavy cashmere overcoat and carrying gloves and a scarf. He was bareheaded. He was about fifty. We almost collided. I stopped. He stopped. He looked right at me. We got into one of those crowded-sidewalk things where we both hesitated and then both started moving and then both stopped again. At first I thought he didn't recognize me. Then there was a shadow in his face. Nothing definitive. I held back and he walked across in front of me and climbed into the rear seat of a black Cadillac DeVille waiting at the curb. I stood there and watched as the driver eased out into the traffic and pulled away. I heard the hiss of the tires on the wet pavement.

I got the plate number. I wasn't panicking. I wasn't questioning anything. I was ready to believe the evidence of my own eyes. Ten years of history was overturned in a second. The guy was alive. Which gave me a huge problem.

That was day one. I forgot all about the bar. I went straight back to my hotel and started calling half-forgotten numbers from my Military Police days. I needed somebody I knew and trusted, but I had been out for six years by then and it was late on a Saturday night so the odds were against me. In the end I settled for somebody who claimed he had heard of me, which might or might not have made a difference to the eventual outcome. He was a warrant officer named Powell.

"I need you to trace a civilian plate," I told him. "Purely as a favor."

He knew who I was, so he didn't give me any grief about not being able to do it for me. I gave him the details. Told him I was pretty sure it was a private registration, not a livery car. He took my number and promised to call me back in the morning, which would be day two.

He didn't call me back. He sold me out instead. I think in the circumstances anybody would have. Day two was a Sunday and I was up early. I had room service for breakfast and sat waiting for the call. I got a knock on the door instead. Just after ten o'clock. I put my eye to the peephole and saw two people standing close together so they would show up well in the lens. One man, one woman. Dark jackets. No overcoats. The man was carrying a briefcase. They both had some kind of official IDs held up high and tilted so they would catch the hallway light.

"Federal agents," the man called, just loud enough for me to hear him through the door.

In a situation like that it doesn't work to pretend you're not in. I'd been the guys in the hallway often enough. One of them stays right there and the other goes down to get a manager with a passkey. So I just opened up and stood back to let them in.

They were wary for a moment. They relaxed as soon as they saw I wasn't armed and didn't look like a maniac. They handed over their IDs and shuffled around politely while I deciphered them. At the top they said: United States Department of Justice. At the bottom they said: Drug Enforcement Administration. In the middle were all kinds of seals and signatures and watermarks. There were photographs and typed names. The man was listed as Steven Eliot, one l like the old poet. April is the cruelest month. That was for damn sure. The photograph was a pretty good likeness. Steven Eliot looked somewhere between thirty and forty and was thickset and dark and a little bald and had a smile that looked friendly in the picture and even better in person. The woman was listed as Susan Duffy. Susan Duffy was a little younger than Steven Eliot. She was a little taller than him, too. She was pale and slender and attractive and had changed her hair since her photograph was taken.

"Go ahead," I said. "Search the room. It's a long time since I had anything worth hiding from you guys."

I handed back their IDs and they put them away in their inside pockets and made sure they moved their jackets enough to let me see their weapons. They had them in neat shoulder rigs. I recognized the ribbed grip of a Glock 17 under Eliot's armpit. Duffy had a 19, which is the same thing only a little smaller. It was snug against her right breast. She must have been left-handed.

"We don't want to search the room," she said.

"We want to talk about a license plate," Eliot said.

"I don't own a car," I said.

We were all still standing in a neat little triangle just inside the door. Eliot still had the briefcase in his hand. I was trying to figure out who was the boss. Maybe neither one of them. Maybe they were equals. And fairly senior. They were well dressed but looked tired. Maybe they had worked most of the night and flown in from somewhere. From Washington D.C., maybe.

"Can we sit down?" Duffy asked.

"Sure," I said. But a cheap hotel room made that awkward. There was only one chair. It was shoved under a small desk crammed between a wall and the cabinet that held the television set. Duffy pulled it out and turned it around so it faced the bed. I sat on the bed, up near the pillows. Eliot perched on the foot of the bed and laid his briefcase down on it. He was still giving me the friendly smile and I couldn't find anything phony about it. Duffy looked great on the chair. The seat height was exactly right for her. Her skirt was short and she was wearing dark nylons that went light where her knees bent.

"You're Reacher, right?" Eliot asked.

I took my eyes off Duffy's legs and nodded. I felt I could count on them to know that much.

"This room is registered to somebody called Calhoun," Eliot said. "Paid for with cash, one night only."

"Habit," I said.

"You leaving today?"

"I take it one day at a time."

"Who's Calhoun?"

"John Quincy Adams's vice president," I said. "It seemed appropriate for this location. I used up the presidents long ago. Now I'm doing vice presidents. Calhoun was unusual. He resigned to run for the Senate."

"Did he get in?"

"I don't know."

"Why the phony name?"

"Habit," I said again.

Susan Duffy was looking straight at me. Not like I was nuts. Like she was interested in me. She probably found it to be a valuable interrogation technique. Back when I interrogated people I did the same thing. Ninety percent of asking questions is about listening to answers.

"We spoke to a military cop called Powell," she said. "You asked him to trace a plate."

Her voice was low and warm and a little husky. I said nothing.

"We have traps and flags in the computers against that plate," she said. "Soon as Powell's inquiry hit the wires we knew all about it. We called him and asked him what his interest was. He told us the interest came from you."

"Reluctantly, I hope," I said.

She smiled. "He recovered fast enough to give us a phony phone number for you. So you needn't worry about old unit loyalties."

"But in the end he gave you the right number."

"We threatened him," she said.

"Then MPs have changed since my day," I said.

"It's important to us," Eliot said. "He saw that."

"So now you're important to us," Duffy said.

I looked away. I've been around the block more times than I care to count but the sound of her voice saying that still gave me a little thrill. I began to think maybe she was the boss. And a hell of an interrogator.

"A member of the public calls in a plate," Eliot said. "Why would he do that? Maybe he got in a fender bender with the car the plate was on. Maybe it was a hit-and-run. But wouldn't he go to the cops for that? And you just told us you don't have a car anyway."

"So maybe you saw somebody in the car," Duffy said.

She let the rest of it hang. It was a neat Catch-22. If the person in the car was my friend, then I was probably her enemy. If the person in the car was my enemy, then she was ready to be my friend.

"You guys had breakfast?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

"So have I," I said.

"We know," she said. "Room service, a short stack of pancakes with an egg on top, over easy. Plus a large pot of coffee, black. It was ordered for seven forty-five and delivered at seven forty-four and you paid cash and tipped the waiter three bucks."

"Did I enjoy it?"

"You ate it."

Eliot snapped the locks on his briefcase and lifted the lid. Pulled out a stack of paper secured with a rubber band. The paper looked new but the writing on it was blurred. Photocopies of faxes, probably made during the night.

"Your service record," he said.

I could see photographs in his briefcase. Glossy black-and-white eight-by-tens. Some kind of a surveillance situation.

"You were a military cop for thirteen years," Eliot said. "Fast-track promotion all the way from second lieutenant to major. Citations and medals. They liked you. You were good. Very good."

"Thank you."

"More than very good, actually. You were their special go-to guy on numerous occasions."

"I guess I was."

"But they let you go."

"I was riffed," I said.

"Riffed?" Duffy repeated.

" RIF, reduction in force. They love to make acronyms out of things. The Cold War ended, military spending got cut, the army got smaller. So they didn't need so many special go-to guys."

"The army still exists," Eliot said. "They didn't chop everybody."

"No."

"So why you in particular?"

"You wouldn't understand."

He didn't challenge me.

"You can help us," Duffy said. "Who did you see in the car?"

I didn't answer.

"Were there drugs in the army?" Eliot asked.

I smiled.

"Armies love drugs," I said. "They always have. Morphine, Benzedrine. The German Army invented Ecstasy. It was an appetite suppressant. CIA invented LSD, tested it on the U.S. Army. Armies march on their veins."

"Recreational?"

"Average age of a recruit is eighteen. What do you think?"

"Was it a problem?"

"We didn't make it much of a problem. Some grunt goes on furlough, smokes a couple of joints in his girlfriend's bedroom, we didn't care. We figured we'd rather see them with a couple of blunts than a couple of six-packs. Outside of our care we liked them docile rather than aggressive."

Duffy glanced at Eliot and Eliot used his fingernails to scrape the photographs up out of his case. He handed them to me. There were four of them. All four were grainy and a little blurred. All four showed the same Cadillac DeVille I had seen the night before. I recognized it by the plate number. It was in some kind of a parking garage. There were two guys standing next to the trunk. In two of the pictures the trunk lid was down. In two of them it was up. The two guys were looking down at something inside the trunk. No way of telling what it was. One of the guys was a Hispanic gangbanger. The other was an older man in a suit. I didn't know him.

Duffy must have been watching my face.

"Not the man you saw?" she said.

"I didn't say I saw anybody."

"The Hispanic guy is a major dealer," Eliot said. "Actually he's the major dealer for most of Los Angeles County. Not provable, of course, but we know all about him. His profits must run to millions of dollars a week. He lives like an emperor. But he came all the way to Portland, Maine, to meet with this other guy."

I touched one of the photographs. "This is Portland, Maine?"

Duffy nodded. "A parking garage, downtown. About nine weeks ago. I took the pictures myself."

"So who's this other guy?"

"We're not exactly sure. We traced the Cadillac's plate, obviously. It's registered to a corporation called Bizarre Bazaar. Main office is in Portland, Maine. Far as we can tell it started out way back as some kind of hippy-dippy import-export trader with the Middle East. Now it specializes in importing Oriental rugs. Far as we can tell the owner is a guy called Zachary Beck. We're assuming that's him in the photographs."

"Which makes him huge," Eliot said. "If this guy from LA is prepared to fly all the way back east to meet with him, he's got to be a couple of rungs up the ladder. And anybody a couple of rungs above this LA guy is in the stratosphere, believe me. So Zachary Beck's a top boy, and he's fooling with us. Rug importer, drug importer. He's making jokes."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I never saw him before."

"Don't be sorry," Duffy said. She hitched forward on the chair. "It's better for us if he isn't the guy you saw. We already know about him. It's better for us if you saw one of his associates. We can try to get to him that way."

"You can't get to him head-on?"

There was a short silence. Seemed to me there was some embarrassment in it.

"We've got problems," Eliot said.

"Sounds like you've got probable cause against the LA player. And you've got photographs that put him side by side with this Beck guy."

"The photographs are tainted," Duffy said. "I made a mistake."

More silence.

"The garage was private property," she said. "It's under an office building. I didn't have a warrant. Fourth Amendment makes the pictures inadmissible."

"Can't you lie? Say you were outside the garage?"

"Physical layout makes that impossible. Defense counsel would figure it in a minute and the case would collapse."

"We need to know who you saw," Eliot said.

I didn't answer.

"We really need to know," Duffy said. She said it in the kind of soft voice that makes men want to jump tall buildings. But there was no artifice there. No pretense. She wasn't aware of how good she was sounding. She really needed to know.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I need to put this right."

"Everybody makes mistakes."

"We sent an agent after Beck," she said. "Undercover. A woman. She disappeared."

Silence.

"When?" I asked.

"Seven weeks ago."

"You looked for her?"

"We don't know where to look. We don't know where Beck goes. We don't even know where he lives. He has no registered property. His house must be owned by some phantom corporation. It's a needle in a haystack."

"Haven't you tailed him?"

"We've tried. He has bodyguards and drivers. They're too good."

"For the DEA?"

"For us. We're on our own. The Justice Department disowned the operation when I screwed up."

"Even though there's an agent missing?"

"They don't know there's an agent missing. We put her in after they closed us down. She's off the books."

I stared at her.

"This whole thing is off the books," she said.

"So how are you working it?"

"I'm a team leader. Nobody's looking over my shoulder day to day. I'm pretending I'm working on something else. But I'm not. I'm working on this."

"So nobody knows this woman is missing?"

"Just my team," she said. "Seven of us. And now you."

I said nothing.

"We came straight here," she said. "We need a break. Why else would we fly up here on a Sunday?"

The room went quiet. I looked from her to Eliot and back to her. They needed me. I needed them. And I liked them. I liked them a lot. They were honest, likable people. They were like the best of the people I used to work with.

"I'll trade," I said. "Information for information. We'll see how we get along. And then we'll take it from there."

"What do you need?"

I told her I needed ten-year-old hospital records from a place called Eureka in California. I told her what kind of a thing to look for. I told her I would stay in Boston until she got back to me. I told her not to put anything on paper. Then they left and that was it for day two. Nothing happened on day three. Or day four. I hung around. I find Boston acceptable for a couple of days. It's what I call a forty-eight town. Anything more than forty-eight hours, and it starts to get tiresome. Of course, most places are like that for me. I'm a restless person. So by the start of day five I was going crazy. I was ready to assume they had forgotten all about me. I was ready to call it quits and get back on the road. I was thinking about Miami. It would be a lot warmer down there. But late in the morning the phone rang. It was her voice. It was nice to hear.

"We're on our way up," she said. "Meet you by that big statue of whoever it is on a horse, halfway around the Freedom Trail, three o'clock."

It wasn't a very precise rendezvous, but I knew what she meant. It was a place in the North End, near a church. It was springtime and too cold to want to go there without a purpose but I got there early anyway. I sat on a bench next to an old woman feeding house sparrows and rock doves with torn-up crusts of bread. She looked at me and moved to another bench. The birds swarmed around her feet, pecking at the grit. A watery sun was fighting rainclouds in the sky. It was Paul Revere on the horse.

Duffy and Eliot showed up right on time. They were wearing black raincoats all covered in little loops and buckles and belts. They might as well have worn signs around their necks saying Federal Agents from Washington D.C. They sat down, Duffy on my left and Eliot on my right. I leaned back and they leaned forward with their elbows on their knees.

"Paramedics fished a guy out of the Pacific surf," Duffy said. "Ten years ago, just south of Eureka, California. White male, about forty. He had been shot twice in the head and once in the chest. Small-caliber, probably.22s. Then they figure he was thrown off a cliff into the ocean."

"He was alive when they fished him out?" I asked, although I already knew the answer.

"Barely," she said. "He had a bullet lodged near his heart and his skull was broken. Plus one arm and both legs and his pelvis, from the fall. And he was half-drowned. They operated on him for fifteen straight hours. He was in intensive care for a month and in the hospital recuperating for another six."

"ID?"

"Nothing on him. He's in the records as a John Doe."

"Did they try to ID him?"

"No fingerprint match," she said. "Nothing on any missing-persons lists. Nobody came to claim him."

I nodded. Fingerprint computers tell you what they're told to tell you.

"What then?" I asked.

"He recovered," she said. "Six months had passed. They were trying to work out what to do with him when he suddenly discharged himself. They never saw him again."

"Did he tell them anything about who he was?"

"They diagnosed amnesia, certainly about the trauma, because that's almost inevitable. They figured he might be genuinely blank about the incident and the previous day or two. But they figured he must be able to remember things from before that, and they got the strong impression he was pretending not to. There's a fairly extensive case file. Psychiatrists, everything. They interviewed him regularly. He was extremely resolute. Never said a word about himself."

"What was his physical condition when he left?"

"Pretty fair. He had visible scars from the GSWs, that's about all."

"OK," I said. I leaned my head back and looked up at the sky.

"Who was he?"

"Your guess?" I said.

".22s to the head and chest?" Eliot said. "Dumped in the ocean? It was organized crime. An assassination. Some kind of hit man got to him."

I said nothing. Looked up at the sky.

"Who was he?" Duffy said again.

I kept on looking up at the sky and dragged myself ten years backward through time, to a whole different world.

"You know anything about tanks?" I asked.

"Military tanks? Tracks and guns? Not really."

"There's nothing to them," I said. "I mean, you like them to be able to move fast, you want some reliability, you don't object to some fuel economy. But if I've got a tank and you've got a tank, what's the only thing I really want to know?"

"What?"

"Can I shoot you before you can shoot me? That's what I want to know. If we're a mile apart, can my gun reach you? Or can your gun reach me?"

"So?"

"Of course, physics being physics, the likely answer is if I can hit you at a mile, then you can hit me at a mile. So it comes down to ammunition. If I stand off another two hundred yards so your shell bounces off me without hurting me, can I develop a shell that doesn't bounce off you? That's what tanks are all about. The guy in the ocean was an army intelligence officer who had been blackmailing an army weapons specialist."

"Why was he in the ocean?"

"Did you watch the Gulf War on TV?" I asked.

"I did," Eliot said.

"Forget about the smart bombs," I said. "The real star of the show was the M1A1 Abrams main battle tank. It scored about four hundred to zip against the Iraqis, who were using the best anybody ever had to give them. But having the war on TV meant that we'd shown our hand to the whole world, so we better get on with dreaming up some new stuff for the next time around. So we got on with it."

"And?" Duffy asked.

"If you want a shell to fly farther and hit harder, you can stuff more propellant into it. Or make it lighter. Or both. Of course, if you're stuffing more propellant into it, you've got to do something pretty radical elsewhere to make it lighter. Which is what they did. They took the explosive charge out of it. Which sounds weird, right? Like, what's it going to do? Go clang and bounce off? But they changed the shape. They dreamed up this thing that looks like a giant lawn dart. Built-in fins and all. It's cast from tungsten and depleted uranium. The densest metals you can find. It goes real fast and real far. They called it the long-rod penetrator."

Duffy glanced at me with her eyelids low and smiled and blushed all at the same time. I smiled back.

"They changed the name," I said. "Now it's called the APFSDS. I told you they like initials. Armor Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot. It's powered by its own little rocket motor, basically. It hits the enemy tank with tremendous kinetic energy. The kinetic energy changes to heat energy, just like they teach you in high school physics. It melts its way through in a split second and sprays the inside of the enemy tank with a jet of molten metal, which kills the tankers and blows up anything explosive or flammable. It's a very neat trick. And either way, you shoot, you score, because if the enemy armor is too thick or you've fired from too far away, the thing just sticks partway in like a dart and spalls, which means it fragments the inner layer of the armor and throws scabs of scalding metal around inside like a hand grenade. The enemy crew come apart like frogs in a blender. It was a brilliant new weapon."

"What about the guy in the ocean?"

"He got the blueprints from the guy he was blackmailing," I said. "Piece by piece, over a long period of time. We were watching him. We knew exactly what he was doing. He was aiming to sell them to Iraqi Intelligence. The Iraqis wanted to level the playing field for the next time around. The U.S. Army didn't want that to happen."

Eliot stared at me. "So they had the guy killed?"

I shook my head. "We sent a couple of MPs down to arrest him. Standard operating procedure, all legal and aboveboard, believe me. But it went wrong. He got away. He was going to disappear. The U.S. Army really didn't want that to happen."

"So then they had him killed?"

I looked up at the sky again. Didn't answer.

"That wasn't standard procedure," Eliot said. "Was it?"

I said nothing.

"It was off the books," he said. "Wasn't it?"

I didn't answer.

"But he didn't die," Duffy said. "What was his name?"

"Quinn," I said. "Turned out to be the single worst guy I ever met."

"And you saw him in Beck's car on Saturday?"

I nodded. "He was being chauffeured away from Symphony Hall."

I gave them all the details I had. But as I talked we all knew the information was useless. It was inconceivable that Quinn would be using his previous identity. So all I had to offer was a physical description of a plain-looking white man about fifty years old with two.22 GSW scars on his forehead. Better than nothing, but it didn't really get them anywhere.

"Why didn't his prints match?" Eliot asked.

"He was erased," I said. "Like he never existed."

"Why didn't he die?"

"Silenced.22," I said. "Our standard issue weapon for covert close work. But not a very powerful weapon."

"Is he still dangerous?"

"Not to the army," I said. "He's ancient history. This all was ten years ago. The APFSDS will be in the museum soon. So will the Abrams tank."

"So why try to trace him?"

"Because depending on exactly what he remembers he could be dangerous to the guy who went to take him out."

Eliot nodded. Said nothing.

"Did he look important?" Duffy asked. "On Saturday? In Beck's car?"

"He looked wealthy," I said. "Expensive cashmere overcoat, leather gloves, silk scarf. He looked like a guy who was accustomed to being chauffeured around. He just jumped right in, like he did it all the time."

"Did he greet the driver?"

"I don't know."

"We need to place him," she said. "We need context. How did he act? He was using Beck's car, but did he look entitled? Or like somebody was doing him a favor?"

"He looked entitled," I said. "Like he uses it every day of the week."

"So is he Beck's equal?"

I shrugged. "He could be Beck's boss."

"Partner at best," Eliot said. "Our LA guy wouldn't travel to meet with an underling."

"I don't see Quinn as somebody's partner," I said.

"What was he like?"

" Normal," I said. "For an intelligence officer. In most ways."

"Except for the espionage," Eliot said.

"Yes," I said. "Except for that."

"And whatever got him killed off the books."

"That too."

Duffy had gone quiet. She was thinking hard. I was pretty sure she was thinking of ways she could use me. And I didn't mind at all.

"Will you stay in Boston?" she asked. "Where we can find you?"

I said I would, and they left, and that was the end of day five.

I found a scalper in a sports bar and spent most of days six and seven at Fenway Park watching the Red Sox struggling through an early-season homestand. The Friday game went seventeen innings and ended very late. So I slept most of day eight and then went back to Symphony Hall at night to watch the crowd. Maybe Quinn had season tickets to a concert series. But he didn't show. I replayed in my mind the way he had glanced at me. It might have been just that rueful crowded-sidewalk thing. But it might have been more.

Susan Duffy called me again on the morning of day nine, Sunday. She sounded different. She sounded like a person who had done a lot more thinking. She sounded like a person with a plan.

"Hotel lobby at noon," she said.

She showed up in a car. Alone. The car was a Taurus built down to a very plain specification. It was grimy inside. A government vehicle. She was wearing faded denim jeans with good shoes and a battered leather jacket. Her hair was newly washed and combed back from her forehead. I got in on the passenger side and she crossed six lanes of traffic and drove straight into the mouth of a tunnel that led to the Mass Pike.

"Zachary Beck has a son," she said.

She took an underground curve fast and the tunnel ended and we came out into the weak midday April light, right behind Fenway.

"He's a college junior," she said. "Some small no-account liberal-arts place, not too far from here, as it happens. We talked to a classmate in exchange for burying a cannabis problem. The son is called Richard Beck. Not a popular person, a little strange. Seems very traumatized by something that happened about five years ago."

"What kind of something?"

"He was kidnapped."

I said nothing.

"You see?" Duffy said. "You know how often regular people get kidnapped these days?"

"No," I said.

"Doesn't happen," she said. "It's an extinct crime. So it must have been a turf war thing. It's practically proof his dad's a racketeer."

"That's a stretch."

"OK, but it's very persuasive. And it was never reported. FBI has no record of it. Whatever happened was handled privately. And not very well. The classmate says Richard Beck is missing an ear."

"So?"

She didn't answer. She just drove west. I stretched out on the passenger seat and watched her out of the corner of my eye. She looked good. She was long and lean and pretty, and she had life in her eyes. She was wearing no makeup. She was one of those women who absolutely didn't need to. I was very happy to let her drive me around. But she wasn't just driving me around. She was taking me somewhere. That was clear. She had come with a plan.

"I studied your whole service record," she said. "In great detail. You're an impressive guy."

"Not really," I said.

"And you've got big feet," she said. "That's good, too."

"Why?"

"You'll see," she said.

"Tell me," I said.

"We're very alike," she said. "You and me. We have something in common. I want to get close to Zachary Beck to get my agent back. You want to get close to him to find Quinn."

"Your agent is dead. Eight weeks now, it would be a miracle. You should face it."

She said nothing.

"And I don't care about Quinn."

She glanced right and shook her head.

"You do," she said. "You really do. I can see that from here. It's eating you up. He's unfinished business. And my guess is you're the sort of guy who hates unfinished business." Then she paused for a second. "And I'm proceeding on the assumption that my agent is still alive, unless and until you supply definitive proof to the contrary."

"Me?" I said.

"I can't use one of my people," she said. "You understand that, right? This whole thing is illegal as far as the Justice Department is concerned. So whatever I do next has to stay off the books. And my guess is you're the sort of guy who understands off-the-books operations. And is comfortable with them. Even prefers them, maybe."

"So?"

"I need to get somebody inside Beck's place. And I've decided it's going to be you. You're going to be my very own long-rod penetrator."

"How?"

"Richard Beck is going to take you there."

She came off the pike about forty miles west of Boston and turned north into the Massachusetts countryside. We passed through picture-perfect New England villages. Fire departments were out on the curbs polishing their trucks. Birds were singing. People were putting stuff on their lawns and pruning their bushes. There was the smell of woodsmoke in the air.

We stopped at a motel in the middle of nowhere. It was an immaculate place with quiet brick facings and blinding white trim. There were five cars in the lot. They were blocking access to the five end rooms. They were all government vehicles. Steven Eliot was waiting in the middle room with five men. They had hauled their desk chairs in from their own rooms. They were sitting in a neat semicircle. Duffy led me inside and nodded to Eliot. I figured it was a nod that meant: I told him, and he hasn't said no. Yet. She moved to the window and turned so that she faced the room. The daylight was bright behind her. It made her hard to see. She cleared her throat. The room went quiet.

"OK, listen up, people," she said. "One more time, this is off the books, this is not officially sanctioned, and this will be done on our own time and at our own risk. Anybody wants out, just leave now."

Nobody moved. Nobody left. It was a smart tactic. It showed me she and Eliot had at least five guys who would follow them to hell and back.

"We have less than forty-eight hours," she said. "Day after tomorrow Richard Beck heads home for his mother's birthday. Our source says he does it every year. Cuts classes and all. His father sends a car with two pro bodyguards because the kid is terrified of a repeat abduction. We're going to exploit that fear. We're going to take down the bodyguards and kidnap him."

She paused. Nobody spoke.

"Our aim is to get into Zachary Beck's house," she said. "We can assume the supposed kidnappers themselves wouldn't exactly be welcome there. So what will happen is that Reacher will immediately rescue the kid from the supposed kidnappers. It will be a tight sequence, kidnap, rescue, like that. The kid comes over all grateful and Reacher is greeted like a hero around the family hearth."

People sat quiet at first. Then they stirred. The plan was so full of holes it made a Swiss cheese look solid. I stared straight at Duffy. Then I found myself staring out the window. There were ways of plugging the holes. I felt my brain start to move. I wondered how many of the holes Duffy had already spotted. I wondered how many of the answers she had already gotten. I wondered how she knew I loved stuff like this.

"We have an audience of one," she said. "All that matters is what Richard Beck thinks. The whole thing will be phony from beginning to end, but he's got to be absolutely convinced it's real."

Eliot looked at me. "Weaknesses?"

"Two," I said. "First, how do you take the bodyguards down without really hurting them? I assume you're not that far off the books."

"Speed, shock, surprise," he said. "The kidnap team will have machine pistols with plenty of blank ammunition. Plus a stun grenade. Soon as the kid is out of the car, we toss a flashbang in. Lots of sound and fury. They'll be dazed, nothing more. But the kid will assume they're hamburger meat."

"OK," I said. "But second, this whole thing is like method acting, right? I'm some kind of a passerby, and coincidentally I'm the type of guy who can rescue him. Which makes me smart and capable. So why wouldn't I just haul his ass around to the nearest cops? Or wait for the cops to come to us? Why wouldn't I stick around and give evidence and make all kinds of witness statements? Why would I want to immediately drive him all the way home?"

Eliot turned to Duffy.

"He'll be terrified," she said. "He'll want you to."

"But why would I agree? It doesn't matter what he wants. What matters is what is logical for me to do. Because we don't have an audience of one. We have an audience of two. Richard Beck and Zachary Beck. Richard Beck there and then, and Zachary Beck later. He'll be looking at it in retrospect. We've got to convince him just as much."

"The kid might ask you not to go to the cops. Like last time."

"But why would I listen to him? If I was Mr. Normal the cops would be the first thing on my mind. I'd want to do everything strictly by the book."

"He would argue with you."

"And I would ignore him. Why would a smart and capable adult listen to a crazy kid? It's a hole. It's too cooperative, too purposeful, too phony. Too direct. Zachary Beck would rumble it in a minute."

"Maybe you get him in a car and you're being chased."

"I'd drive straight to a police station."

"Shit," Duffy said.

"It's a plan," I said. "But we need to get real."

I looked out of the window again. It was bright out there. I saw a lot of green stuff. Trees, bushes, distant wooded hillsides dusted with new leaves. In the corner of my eye I saw Eliot and Duffy looking down at the floor of the room. Saw the five guys sitting still. They looked like a capable bunch. Two of them were a little younger than me, tall and fair. Two were about my age, plain and ordinary. One was a lot older, stooped and gray. I thought long and hard. Kidnap, rescue, Beck's house. I need to be in Beck's house. I really do. Because I need to find Quinn. Think about the long game. I looked at the whole thing from the kid's point of view. Then I looked at it again, from his father's point of view.

"It's a plan," I said again. "But it needs perfecting. So I need to be the sort of person who wouldn't go to the cops." Then I paused. "No, better still, right in front of Richard Beck's eyes, I need to become the sort of person who can't go to the cops."

"How?" Duffy said.

I looked straight at her. "I'll have to hurt somebody. By accident, in the confusion. Another passerby. Some innocent party. Some kind of ambiguous circumstance. Maybe I run somebody over. Some old lady walking her dog. Maybe I even kill her. I panic and I run."

"Too difficult to stage," she said. "And not really enough to make you run, anyway. I mean, accidents happen, in circumstances like these."

I nodded. The room stayed quiet. I closed my eyes and thought some more and saw the beginnings of a sketchy scene take shape right there in my mind.

"OK," I said. "How about this? I'll kill a cop. By accident."

Nobody spoke. I opened my eyes.

"It's a grand slam," I said. "You see that? It's totally perfect. It puts Zachary Beck's mind at rest about why I didn't act normally and go to the cops. You don't go to the cops if you've just killed one of their own, even if it's an accident. He'll understand that. And it'll give me a reason to stay on at his house afterward. Which I'll need to do. He'll think I'm in hiding. He'll be grateful about the rescue and he's a criminal anyway so his conscience won't get in his way."

There were no objections. Just silence, and then a slow indefinable murmur of assessment, agreement, consent. I scoped it out, beginning to end. Think about the long game. I smiled.

"And it gets better," I said. "He might even hire me. In fact I think he'll be very tempted to hire me. Because we're creating the illusion that his family's suddenly under attack and he'll be down by two bodyguards and he'll know I'm better than they were anyway because they lost and I didn't. And he'll be happy to hire me because as long as he thinks I'm a cop-killer and he's sheltering me he'll think he owns me."

Duffy smiled, too.

"So let's go to work," she said. "We've got less than forty-eight hours."

The two younger guys were tagged as the kidnap team. We decided they would be driving a Toyota pickup from the DEA's stock of impounded vehicles. They would be using confiscated Uzis filled with nine-millimeter blanks. They would have a stun grenade filched from the DEA SWAT stores. Then we started to rehearse my role as the rescuer. Like all good scam artists we decided I should stick as close to the truth as possible, so I would be an ex-military drifter, in the right place at the right time. I would be armed, which in the circumstances would be technically illegal in Massachusetts, but which would be in character and plausible.

"I need a big old-fashioned revolver," I said. "I have to be carrying something appropriate for a citizen. And the whole thing has to be a big drama, beginning to end. The Toyota comes at me, I need to disable it. I need to shoot it up. So I need three real bullets and three blanks, in strict sequence. The three real bullets for the truck, the three blanks for the people."

"We could load any gun like that," Eliot said.

"But I'll need to see the chambers," I said. "Right before I fire. I won't fire a mixed load without a visual check. I need to know I'm starting in the right place. So I need a revolver. A big one, not some small thing, so I can see clearly."

He saw my point. Made a note. Then we nominated the old guy as the local cop. Duffy proposed he should just blunder into my field of fire.

"No," I said. "It has to be the right kind of mistake. Not just a careless shot. Beck senior needs to be impressed with me in the right kind of way. I need to do it deliberately, but recklessly. Like I'm a madman, but a madman who can shoot."

Duffy agreed and Eliot thought through a mental list of available vehicles and offered me an old panel van. Said I could be a delivery guy. Said it would give me a legitimate reason to be hanging out on the street. We made lists, on paper and in our heads. The two guys my age were sitting there without an assigned task, and they were unhappy about it.

"You're backup cops," I said. "Suppose the kid doesn't even see me shoot the first one? He might have fainted or something. You need to chase us in a car, and I'll take you out when I'm certain he's watching."

"Can't have backup cops," the old guy said. "I mean, what's going on here? Suddenly the whole place is swarming with cops for no good reason?"

"College cops," Duffy said. "You know, those rent-a-cop guys colleges have? They just happen to be there. I mean, where else would you find them?"

"Excellent," I said. "They can start from right inside the campus. They can control the whole thing by radio from the rear."

"How will you take them out?" Eliot asked me, like it was an issue.

I nodded. I saw the problem. I would have fired six shots by then.

"I can't reload," I said. "Not while I'm driving. Not with blanks. The kid might notice."

"Can you ram them? Force them off the road?"

"Not in a crummy old van. I'll have to have a second revolver. Preloaded, waiting inside the van. In the glove compartment, maybe."

"You're running around with two six-shooters?" the old guy said. "That's a little odd, in Massachusetts."

I nodded. "It's a weak point. We're going to have to risk a few."

"So I should be in plain clothes," the old guy said. "Like a detective. Shooting at a uniformed cop is beyond reckless. That would be a weak point, too."

"OK," I said. "Agreed. Excellent. You're a detective, and you pull out your badge, and I think it's a gun. That happens."

"But how do we die?" the old guy asked. "We just clutch our stomachs and fall over, like an old Wild West show?"

"That's not convincing," Eliot said. "This whole thing has got to look exactly right. For Richard Beck's sake."

"We need Hollywood stuff," Duffy said. "Kevlar vests and condoms filled with fake blood that explode off of a radio signal."

"Can we get it?"

"From New York or Boston, maybe."

"We're tight for time."

"Tell me about it," Duffy said.

That was the end of day nine. Duffy wanted me to move into the motel and offered to have somebody drive me back to my Boston hotel for my luggage. I told her I didn't have any luggage and she looked at me sideways but didn't say anything. I took a room next to the old guy. Somebody drove out and got pizza. Everybody was running around and making phone calls. They left me alone. I lay on my bed and thought the whole thing through again, beginning to end, from my point of view. I made a list in my head of all the things we hadn't considered. It was a long list. But there was one item bothering me above all. Not exactly on the list. Kind of parallel to it. I got off my bed and went to find Duffy. She was out in the lot, hurrying back to her room from her car.

"Zachary Beck isn't the story here," I told her. "He can't be. If Quinn's involved, then Quinn's the boss. He wouldn't play second fiddle. Unless Beck is a worse guy than Quinn, and I don't even want to think about that."

"Maybe Quinn changed," she said. "He was shot twice in the head. Maybe that kind of rewired his brains. Diminished him, somehow."

I said nothing. She hurried away. I went back to my room.

Day ten started with the arrival of the vehicles. The old guy got a seven-year-old Chevy Caprice to act as his police unmarked. It was the one with the Corvette motor in it, from the final model year before General Motors stopped making them. It looked just right. The pickup was a big thing painted faded red. It had a bull bar on the front. I saw the younger guys talking about how they would use it. My ride was a plain brown panel van. It was the most anonymous truck I had ever seen. It had no side windows and two small rear windows. I checked inside for a glove compartment. It had one.

"OK?" Eliot asked me.

I slapped its side like van people do and it boomed faintly in response.

"Perfect," I said. "I want the revolvers to be big.44 Magnums. I want three heavy soft-nosed bullets and nine blanks. Make the blanks as loud as you can get."

"OK," he said. "Why soft-nose?"

"I'm worried about ricochets," I said. "I don't want to hurt anybody by accident. Soft-nose slugs will deform and stick to what they hit. I'm going to fire one into the radiator and two at the tires. I want you to pump the tires way high so they'll explode when I hit them. We've got to make it spectacular."

Eliot hurried away and Duffy came up to me.

"You'll need these," she said. She had a coat and a pair of gloves for me. "You'll look more realistic if you're wearing them. It'll be cold. And the coat will hide the gun."

I took them from her and tried on the coat. It fit pretty well. She was clearly a good judge of sizes.

"The psychology will be tricky," she said. "You're going to have to be flexible. The kid might be catatonic. You might need to coax some reaction out of him. But ideally he'll be awake and talking. In which case I think you need to show a little reluctance about getting yourself more and more involved. Ideally you need to let him talk you into driving him all the way home. But at the same time you need to be dominant. You need to keep events moving along so he doesn't have time to dwell on exactly what he's seeing."

"OK," I said. "In which case I'm going to change my ammunition requisition. I'm going to make the second bullet in the second gun a real one. I'll tell him to get down on the floor and then I'll blow out the window behind him. He'll think it was the college cops shooting at us. Then I'll tell him to get up again. It'll increase his sense of danger and it'll get him used to doing what I tell him and it'll make him a little happier to watch the college cops get it in the neck. Because I don't want him fighting me, trying to stop me. I might wreck the van and kill both of us."

"In fact you need to bond with him," she said. "He needs to speak well of you, later. Because I agree, getting hired on up there would hit the jackpot. It would give you access. So try to impress the kid. But keep it very subtle. You don't need him to like you. You just need to make him think you're a tough guy who knows what he's doing."

I went to find Eliot and then the two guys playing the college cops came to find me. We arranged that they would fire blanks at me first, then I would fire one blank at them, then I would shoot out the van's rear window, and then I would fire another blank, and finally I would fire my last three blanks in a spaced group. On the final shot they would blow out their own windshield with a real bullet from one of their own guns and then they would go sliding off the road like they had lost a tire or been hit.

"Don't get confused which load is which," one of them said.

"You either," I said back.

We had more pizza for lunch and then went out to cruise the target area. We parked a mile short and went over a couple of maps. Then we risked three separate passes in two cars right past the college gate. I would have preferred more time to study but we were worried about being conspicuous. We drove back to the motel in silence and regrouped in Eliot's room.

"Looks OK," I said. "Which way will they turn?"

" Maine is north of here," Duffy said. "We can assume he lives somewhere near Portland."

I nodded. "But I think they'll go south. Look at the maps. You get to the highway faster that way. And standard security doctrine is to get on wide busy roads as soon as possible."

"It's a gamble."

"They'll go south," I said.

"Anything else?" Eliot asked.

"I'd be nuts to stick with the van," I said. "Old man Beck will figure if I was doing this for real I'd ditch it and steal a car."

"Where?" Duffy asked.

"The map shows a mall next to the highway."

"OK, we'll stash one there."

"Spare keys under the bumper?" Eliot asked.

Duffy shook her head. "Too phony. We need this whole thing to be absolutely convincing. He'll have to steal it for real."

"I don't know how," I said. "I've never stolen a car."

The room went quiet.

"All I know is what I learned in the army," I said. "Military vehicles are never locked. And they don't have ignition keys. They start off a button."

"OK," Eliot said. "No problem is insuperable. We'll leave it unlocked. But you'll act like it is locked. You'll pretend to jimmy the door. We'll leave a load of wire and a bunch of coat hangers nearby. Maybe you could ask the kid to find something for you. Make him feel involved. It'll help the illusion. Then you screw around with it and, hey, the door pops open. We'll loosen the shroud on the steering column. We'll strip the right wires and only the right wires. You find them and touch them together and you're an instant bad guy."

"Brilliant," Duffy said.

Eliot smiled. "I do my best."

"Let's take a break," Duffy said. "Start again after dinner."

The final pieces fell into place after dinner. Two of the guys got back with the last of the equipment. They had a matched pair of Colt Anacondas for me. They were big brutal weapons. They looked expensive. I didn't ask where they got them from. They came with a box of real.44 Magnums and a box of.44 blanks. The blanks came from a hardware store. They were designed for a heavy-duty nail gun. The sort of thing that punches nails straight into concrete. I opened each Anaconda cylinder and scratched an X against one of the chambers with the tip of a nail scissor. A Colt revolver's cylinder steps around clockwise, which is different from a Smith amp; Wesson, which rotates counterclockwise. The X would represent the first chamber to be fired. I would line it up at the ten o'clock position where I could see it and it would step around and fall under the hammer with the first pull of the trigger.

Duffy brought me a pair of shoes. They were my size. The right one had a cavity carved into the heel. She gave me a wireless e-mail device that fit snugly into the space.

"That's why I'm glad you've got big feet," she said. "Made it easier to fit."

"Is it reliable?"

"It better be. It's new government issue. All departments are doing their concealed communications with it now."

"Great," I said. In my career more foul-ups had been caused by faulty technology than any other single cause.

"It's the best we can do," she said. "They'd find anything else. They're bound to search you. And the theory is if they're scanning for radio transmissions all they'll hear is a brief burst of modem screech. They'll probably think it's static."

They had three blood effects from a New York theatrical costumier. They were big and bulky. Each was a foot-wide square of Kevlar that was to be taped to the victim's chest. They had rubber gore reservoirs and radio receivers and firing charges and batteries.

"Wear loose shirts, guys," Eliot said.

The radio triggers were separate buttons I would have to tape to my right forearm. They were wired to batteries I would have to carry in my inside pocket. The buttons were big enough to feel through my coat and my jacket and my shirt, and I figured I would look OK supporting the Colt's weight with my left hand. We rehearsed the sequence. First, the pickup driver. That button would be nearest my wrist. I would trigger it with my index finger. Second, the pickup passenger. That button would be in the middle. Middle finger. Third, the old guy playing the cop. That button would be nearest my elbow, ring finger.

"You'll have to lose them afterward," Eliot said. "They'll search you for sure at Beck's house. You'll have to stop at a men's room or something and get rid of them."

We rehearsed endlessly in the motel lot. We laid out the road in miniature. By midnight we were as solid as we were ever going to get. We figured we would need all of eight seconds, beginning to end.

"You have the critical decision," Duffy said to me. "It's your call. If there's anything wrong when the Toyota is coming at you, anything at all, then you abort and you watch it go on by. We'll clean it up somehow. But you'll be firing three live rounds in a public place and I don't want any stray pedestrians getting hit, or cyclists, or joggers. You'll have less than a second to decide."

"Understood," I said, although I really didn't see any easy way of cleaning it up if it had already gotten that far. Then Eliot took a last couple of phone calls and confirmed they had a college security cruiser on loan and were putting a plausible old Nissan Maxima behind the mall's flagship department store. The Maxima had been impounded from a small-time marijuana grower in New York State. They still had tough drug laws down there. They were putting phony Massachusetts plates on it and filling it with the kind of junk a department store sales lady might be expected to haul around with her.

"Bed now," Duffy called. "Big day tomorrow."

That was the end of day ten.

Duffy brought doughnuts and coffee to my room for breakfast on day eleven, early. Her and me, alone. We went through the whole thing, one last time. She showed me photographs of the agent she had inserted fifty-nine days ago. She was a blonde thirty-year-old who had gotten a clerk's job with Bizarre Bazaar using the name Teresa Daniel. Teresa Daniel was petite and looked resourceful. I looked hard at the pictures and memorized her features, but it was another woman's face I was seeing in my mind.

"I'm assuming she's still alive," Duffy said. "I have to."

I said nothing.

"Try hard to get hired," she said. "We checked your recent history, the same way Beck might. You come out pretty vague. Plenty missing that would worry me, but I don't think it would worry him."

I gave the photographs back to her.

"I'm a shoo-in," I said. "The illusion reinforces itself. He's left shorthanded and he's under attack, all at the same time. But I'm not going to try too hard. In fact I'm going to come across a little reluctant. I think anything else would seem phony."

"OK," she said. "You've got seven objectives, of which numbers one, two, and three are, take a lot of care. We can assume these are extremely dangerous people."

I nodded. "We can do more than assume it. If Quinn's involved, we can absolutely guarantee it."

"So act accordingly," she said. "Gloves off, from the start."

"Yes," I said. I put my arm across my chest and started massaging my left shoulder with my right hand. Then I stopped myself, surprised. An army psychiatrist once told me that type of unconscious gesture represents feelings of vulnerability. It's defensive. It's about covering up and hiding. It's the first step toward curling yourself into a ball on the floor. Duffy must have read the same books, because she picked up on it and looked straight at me.

"You're scared of Quinn, aren't you?" she said.

"I'm not scared of anybody," I said. "But certainly I preferred it when he was dead."

"We can cancel," she said.

I shook my head. "I'd like the chance to find him, believe me."

"What went wrong with the arrest?"

I shook my head again.

"I won't talk about that," I said.

She was quiet for a beat. But she didn't push it. Just looked away and paused and looked back and started up with the briefing again. Quiet voice, efficient diction.

"Objective number four is find my agent," she said. "And bring her back to me."

I nodded.

"Five, bring me solid evidence I can use to nail Beck."

"OK," I said.

She paused again. Just a beat. "Six, find Quinn and do whatever you need to do with him. And then seven, get the hell out of there."

I nodded. Said nothing.

"We won't tail you," she said. "The kid might spot us. He'll be pretty paranoid by then. And we won't put a homing device on the Nissan, because they'd probably find it later. You'll have to e-mail us your location, soon as you know it."

"OK," I said.

"Weaknesses?" she asked.

I forced my mind away from Quinn.

"Three weaknesses that I can see," I said. "Two minor and one major. First minor one is that I'm going to blow the back window out of the van but the kid will have about ten minutes to realize the broken glass is in the wrong place and there isn't a corresponding hole in the windshield."

"So don't do it."

"I think I really need to. I think we need to keep the panic level high."

"OK, we'll put a bunch of boxes back there. You should have boxes anyway, if you're a delivery man. They might obscure his view. If they don't, just hope he doesn't put two and two together inside ten minutes."

I nodded. "And second, old man Beck is going to call the cops down here, sometime, somehow. Maybe the newspapers, too. He's going to be looking for corroborating information."

"We'll give the cops a script to follow. And they'll give the press something. They'll play ball for as long as they need to. What's the major weakness?"

"The bodyguards," I said. "How long can you hold them? You can't let them get near a phone, or they'll call Beck. So you can't formally arrest them. You can't put them in the system. You'll have to hold them incommunicado, completely illegally. How long can you keep that going?"

She shrugged. "Four or five days, tops. We can't protect you any longer than that. So be real fast."

"I plan to be," I said. "How long will the battery last on my e-mail thing?"

"About five days," she said. "You'll be out by then. We can't give you a charger. It would be too suspicious. But you can use a cell phone charger, if you can find one."

"OK," I said.

She just looked at me. There was nothing more to say. Then she moved close and kissed me on the cheek. It was sudden. Her lips were soft. They left a dusting of doughnut sugar on my skin.

"Good luck," she said. "I don't think we've missed anything."

But we had missed a lot of things. They were glaring errors in our thinking and they all came back to haunt me.