Persuader

“You’re scared of Qui

“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 Qui

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 Qui

“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.

CHAPTER 3

Duke the bodyguard came back to my room five minutes before seven in the evening, which was way too early for di

“Get a nap, asshole?” he asked.

“Why am I locked up?” I asked back.

“Because you’re a cop-killer,” he said.

I looked away. Maybe he had been a cop himself, before he went private. Lots of ex-cops wind up in the security business, as consultants or private eyes or bodyguards. Certainly he had some kind of an agenda, which could be a problem for me. But it meant he was buying Richard Beck’s story without question, which was the upside. He looked at me for a second with nothing much in his face. Then he led me out of the room and down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor and through dark passageways toward the side of the house that faced north. I could smell salt air and damp carpet. There were rugs everywhere. Some places they were laid two-deep on the floor. They glowed with muted colors. He stopped in front of a door and pushed it open and stepped back so I was cha

In the flesh he was mostly unremarkable. Not big, not small. Maybe six feet, maybe two hundred pounds. Gray hair, not thin, not thick, not short, not long. He was about fifty. He was wearing a gray suit made out of expensive cloth cut without any attempt at style. His shirt was white and his tie was no color at all, like gasoline. His hands and face were pale, like his natural habitat was underground parking garages at night, hawking samples of something from his Cadillac’s trunk.

“Sit down,” he said. His voice was quiet and strained, like it was all high up in his throat. I sat opposite him at the far end of the table.

“I’m Zachary Beck,” he said.

“Jack Reacher,” I said.

Duke closed the door gently and leaned his bulk against it from the inside. The room went quiet. I could hear the ocean. It wasn’t a rhythmic wave sound like you hear at the beach. It was a continuous random crashing and sucking of surf on the rocks. I could hear pools draining and gravel rattling and breakers coming in like explosions. I tried to count them. People say every seventh wave is a big one.

“So,” Beck said. He had a drink on the table in front of him. Some kind of amber liquid in a short heavy glass. Oily, like scotch or bourbon. He nodded to Duke. Duke picked up a second glass. It had been waiting there for me on a side table. It had the same oily amber liquid in it. He carried it awkwardly with his finger and thumb right down at the base. He walked across the room and bent a little to place it carefully in front of me. I smiled. I knew what it was for.

“So,” Beck said again.

I waited.

“My son explained your predicament,” he said. It was the same phrase his wife had used.

“The law of unintended consequences,” I said.

“It presents me with difficulties,” he said. “I’m just an ordinary businessman, trying to work out where my responsibilities lie.”

I waited.

“We’re grateful, naturally,” he said. “Please don’t misunderstand that.”

“But?”

“There are legal issues, aren’t there?” He said it with a little a

“It’s not rocket science,” I said. “I need you to turn a blind eye. At least temporarily. Like one good turn deserves another. If your conscience can accommodate that kind of a thing.”

The room went quiet again. I listened to the ocean. I could hear a full spectrum of sounds out there. I could hear brittle seaweed dragging on granite and a drawn-out undertow sucking backward toward the east. Zachary Beck’s gaze was moving all over the place. He was looking at the table, then at the floor, then into space. His face was narrow. Not much of a jaw. His eyes were set fairly close together. His brow was lined with concentration. His lips were thin and his mouth was pursed. His head was moving a little. The whole thing was a reasonable facsimile of an ordinary businessman struggling with weighty issues.

“Was it a mistake?” he asked.

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