One Shot (51 page)

'Which room?'

Had he told her? 'Room eight,' Yanni said.

'He didn't leave the room during the night?'

'No, he didn't'

'Not at all?'

'No.'

'How can you be sure?'

Yanni looked away. 'Because we didn't actually sleep a
wink.' The office went quiet.

'Can you offer any corroboration?' Emerson asked.

'Like what?' Yanni asked back.

'Distinguishing marks? That I can't see right now but
that someone who had been in your position would
have seen?' 'Oh, please.'

'It's the last question,' Emerson said.

Yanni said nothing. Reacher recalled switching on the
Mustang's dome light and lifting his shirt to reveal the
tyre iron. He moved his cuffed hands and laid them
across his waistband. 'Anything?' Emerson said.

'It's important,' Rodin said.

'He has a scar,' Yanni said. 'Low down on his stomach.

A horrible big thing.'

Emerson and Rodin both turned and looked at
Reacher. Reacher got to his feet.

Grabbed a fold of fabric in both hands and pulled his
shirt out of his pants.

Lifted it. 'OK,' Emerson said.

'What was that?' Rodin asked.

'Part of a Marine sergeant's jawbone,' Reacher said.

'The medics figured it must have weighed about four
ounces. It was travelling at five thousand feet per
second away from the epicentre of a trinitrotoluene
explosion. Just surfing along on the pressure wave,
until it hit me.' He dropped his shirt back down. Didn't
try to tuck it in. The handcuffs would have made it
difficult. 'Satisfied now?' he asked. 'Have you
embarrassed the lady enough?'

Emerson and Rodin looked at each other. One of you
knows for sure I'm innocent, Reacher thought. And I
don't care what the other one thinks. 'Ms Yanni will have
to put it in writing,' Emerson said.

"You type it, I'll sign it,' Yanni said.

Rodin looked straight at Reacher. 'Can you offer
corroboration?'

'Like what?'

'Something along the lines of your scar. But relating to
Ms Yanni.'

Reacher nodded. 'Yes, I could. But I won't. And if you
ask again I'll knock your teeth down your throat.'

Silence in the office. Emerson dug in his pocket and
found a handcuff key. Turned suddenly and tossed it
underarm through the air. Reacher's hands were cuffed
but he was careful to lead with his right. He caught the
key in his right palm, and smiled. 'Bellantonio been
talking to you?' he said.

"Why did you give Ms Yanni a false name?' Emerson
asked.

'Maybe I didn't,' Reacher said. 'Maybe Gordon is my
real name.'

He tossed the key back and stepped over and held his
wrists out and waited for Emerson to unlock the cuffs.

The Zee took the phone call two minutes later. A
familiar voice, low and hurried. 'It didn't work,' it said.

'He had an alibi.'

'For real?'

'Probably not. But we're not going to go there.'

'So what next?'

'Just sit tight. He can't be more than one step away
now. In which case he'll be coming for you soon. So be
locked and loaded and ready for him.'

'They didn't fight very hard,' Ann Yanni said. 'Did they?'

She started the Mustang's engine before Reacher even
got his door closed. 'I didn't expect them to,' he said.

The innocent one knows the case was weak. And the
guilty one knows putting me back on the street takes
me off the board about as fast as putting me in a cell
right now.' 'Why?'

'Because they've got Rosemary Barr and they know I'll
go find her. So they'll be waiting for me, ready to rock
and roll. I'll be dead before morning. That's the new
plan. Cheaper than jail.'

They drove straight back to Franklin's office and ran
up the outside staircase and found Franklin sitting at his
desk. The lights were off and his face was bathed in the
glow from his computer screen. He was staring at it
blankly, like it was telling him nothing. Reacher broke
the news about Rosemary Barr.

Franklin went very still and glanced at the door. Then
the window. 'We were right here,' he said.

Reacher nodded. 'Three of us. You, me, and Helen.'

'I didn't hear anything.'

The either,' Reacher said. 'They're really good.'

'What are they going to do to her?'

'They're going to make her give evidence against her
brother. Some kind of a made-up story.' Will they hurt
her?'

'That depends on how fast she caves.'

'She's not going to cave,' Yanni said. 'Not in a million
years. Don't you see that? She's totally dedicated to
clearing her brother's name.' "Then they're going to hurt
her.'

'Where is she?' Franklin said. 'Best guess?' "Wherever
they are,' Reacher said. 'But I don't know where that is.'

She was in the upstairs living room, taped to a chair.

The Zee was staring at her. He was fascinated by
women. Once he had gone twenty-seven years without
seeing one. The penal battalion he had joined in 1943

had had a few, but they were a small minority and they
died fast. And then after the Great Patriotic War had
been won his nightmare progress through the Gulag
had begun. In 1949 he had seen a woman peasant near
the White Sea Canal. She was a stooped and bulky old
crone two hundred yards away in a beet field. Then
nothing, until in 1976 he saw a nurse riding a troika sled
through the frozen wastes of Siberia.

He was a quarryman then. He had come up out of the
hole with a hundred other zees and was walking home
in a long ragged column down a long straight road.

The nurse's sled was approaching on another road
that ran at right angles. The land was flat and
featureless and covered with snow. The zees could see
for ever. They stood and watched the nurse drive a
whole mile. Then they turned their heads as one as she
passed through the crossroads and watched her
through another mile. The guards denied them food that
night as punishment for the unauthorized halt. Four
men died, but the Zee didn't.

'Are you comfortable?' he asked.

Rosemary Barr said nothing. The one called Chenko
had returned her shoe. He had crouched in front of her
and fitted it to her foot like a store clerk.

Then he had backed away and sat down next to the
one called Vladimir on the sofa. The one called Sokolov
had stayed downstairs in a room full of surveillance
equipment. The one called Linsky was pacing the room,
white with pain. He had something wrong with his back.

"When the Zee speaks, you should answer,' the one
called Vladimir said.

Rosemary looked away. She was afraid of Vladimir.

More so than the others.

Vladimir was huge, and he gave off an air of depravity,
like a smell.

'Does she understand her position?' Linsky asked.

The Zee smiled at him, and Linsky smiled back. It was a
private joke between them. Any claim to rights or
humane treatment in the camps was always met with a
question: Do you understand your position? The
question was always followed by a statement: You don't
have a position. You are nothing to the Motherland. The
first time Linsky had heard the question he had been
about to reply, but the Zee had hauled him away. By that
point the Zee had eighteen years under his belt, and the
intervention was uncharacteristic. But clearly he had felt
something for the raw youngster. He had taken the kid
under his wing. They had been together ever since,
through a long succession of locations neither of them
could name. Many books had been written about the
Gulag, and documents had been discovered, and maps
had been made, but the irony was that those who had
participated had no idea where they had been. Nobody
had told them. A camp was a camp, with wire, huts,
endless forest, endless tundra, endless work. What
difference did a name make?

Linsky had been a soldier and a thief. In the west of
Europe or in America he would have served time, two
years here, three years there, but during the Soviet
stealing was an ideological transgression. It showed an
uneducated and antisocial preference for private
property. Such a preference was answered with a swift
and permanent removal from civilized society. In
Linsky's case the removal had lasted from 1963 until
civilized society had collapsed and Gorbachev had
emptied the Gulag.

'She understands her position,' the Zee said. 'And next
comes acceptance.'

Franklin called Helen Rodin. Ten minutes later she was
back in his office. She was still mad at Reacher. That
was clear. But she was too worried about Rosemary
Barr to make a big deal out of it. Franklin stayed at his
desk, one eye on his computer screen. Helen and Ann
Yanni sat together at a table.

Reacher stared out the window. The sky was
darkening.

'We should call someone,' Helen said.

'Like who?' Reacher asked.

'My father. He's the good guy.'

Reacher turned round. 'Suppose he is. What do we tell
him? That we've got a missing person? He'll just call the
cops, because what else can he do? And if Emerson's
the bad guy, the cops will sit on it. Even if Emerson's the
good guy the cops will sit on it just the same. Missing
adults don't get anyone very excited. Too many of
them.' 'But she's integral to the case.'

'The case is about her brother. So the cops will figure
it's only natural she ran away. Her brother is a notorious
criminal and she couldn't stand the shame.' 'But you
saw her get kidnapped. You could tell them.'

'I saw a shoe. That's all I can tell anybody. And I've got
no credibility here. I've been playing silly games for two
days.' 'So what do we do?'

Reacher turned back to the window.

'We take care of it ourselves,' he said.

'How?'

'All we need is a location. We work through the woman
who was shot, we get names, we get some kind of a
context, we get a place. Then we go there.'

'When?' Yanni asked.

'Twelve hours,' Reacher said. 'Before dawn. They'll be
working on some kind of a timetable. They want to take
care of me first, and then they want to start in on
Rosemary Barr. We need to get to her before they run
out of patience.'

'But that means you'll be showing up exactly when
they're expecting you.'

Reacher said nothing.

'It's like walking into a trap,' Yanni said.

Reacher didn't answer that. Yanni turned to Franklin
and said, 'Tell us more about the woman who was shot.'

'There's nothing more to tell,' Franklin said.

'I've

been

through

everything

forwards

and

backwards. She was very ordinary.'

'Family?'

'All of them are back east. Where she came from.'

'Friends?'

'Two, basically. A coworker and a neighbour. Neither
of them is interesting.

Neither of them is a Russian, for instance.' Yanni
turned back to Reacher.

'So maybe you're wrong. Maybe the third shot wasn't
the money shot.' 'It must have been,' Reacher said. 'Or
why would he pause after it? He was double-checking
he had a hit.'