Blue Moon (Jack Reacher #24)(94)

They left the guy on the floor behind the counter. They stepped out to the well of the store. They looked out the dusty front windows, at the taxi dispatcher across the street.





Chapter 44


They managed to scope out the whole of the block by staying back in the pawn shop, back in the shadows, traversing side to side, peering out at oblique angles. There were two guys on the sidewalk outside the taxi office door, and two guys some distance away on the left-hand street corner, and two guys the same distance away on the right. Six men visible. Plus probably the same again inside. At least. Maybe two in the hallway the pawnbroker had described, plus two in the conference room, plus two at the mouth of the corridor that led onward to the offices. Each of which was no doubt occupied by a made man with a gun in his pocket and a spare in a drawer.

Not good. What the military academies would call a tactical challenge. A head-on assault against a numerically superior opponent in a tightly constrained battle space. Added to which, the guys from the street corners would fold into the action from the rear. Bad guys in front, bad guys behind, no body armor, no grenades, no automatic weapons, no shotguns, no flamethrower.

Reacher said, “I guess the real question is whether Gregory trusts Danilo.”

“Does that matter?” Hogan said.

“Why wouldn’t he?” Abby asked.

“Two reasons,” Reacher said. “First, he trusts no one. You don’t get to be Gregory by trusting people. He’s a snake, so he assumes everyone else is a snake. And second, Danilo is by far his biggest threat. The second in command. The leader in waiting. It’s on the news every night. The generals get deposed, and the colonels take over.”

“Does this help us?”

“You have to go through Danilo’s office to get to Gregory’s office.”

“That’s normal,” Hogan said. “Everyone does it that way. That’s how a chief of staff operates.”

“Think about it in reverse. In order to leave his own office, Gregory has to walk through Danilo’s office. And he’s paranoid, with good reason. And with good results. He’s still alive. In his head this is not necessarily like a CEO in a movie, saying goodnight to his secretary, and calling her sweetheart. This is like walking into a death trap. This is assassination squads behind the desk. Or maybe even worse, this is a blockade, until he accedes to their demands. Maybe they’ll let him step down, with his dignity intact.”

Abby nodded.

“Human nature,” she said. “Mostly bullshit, but sometimes it rings a bell.”

“What?” Hogan said.

“He built an emergency exit.”



* * *



—

They went back behind the counter, and sat on the floor against the cabinets, not far from the tied-up guy. A high-level staff conference. Always held behind the lines. Hogan played the part of the gloomy Marine. Partly because he was, and partly as a professional obligation. Every plan had to be stress tested, from every possible direction.

He said, “Worst case, we’re going to find exactly the same situation, but flipped around 180. Guys on the sidewalk the next street over, watching the back door, and then more guys inside, in narrow corridors, just the same. There’s a word for it.”

“Symmetrical,” Reacher said.

“Got to be.”

“Human nature,” Abby said. “Mostly bullshit, but sometimes it rings a bell.”

“What now?”

“It’s a bad look,” she said. “An escape hatch makes him look scared. Best case, it makes it look like he doesn’t trust the protection he bought, or the army of loyal soldiers standing in front of him. He can’t admit to any of those feelings. He’s Gregory. He has no weaknesses. His organization has no weaknesses.”

“So?”

“The emergency exit is secret. No one is guarding it because no one knows it exists.”

“Not even Danilo?”

“Most of all not Danilo,” Reacher said. “He’s the biggest threat. This was done behind Danilo’s back. I bet you could trawl through the records and find a two-week spell when he was sent away somewhere, and just before he got back, I bet you would find a couple of construction workers mysteriously dead in some kind of gruesome accident.”

“So that no one except Gregory would know where the secret tunnel is.”

“Exactly.”

“Which includes us. We don’t know where it is either.”

“Some guy’s cellar connects to some other guy’s cellar.”

“That’s your plan?”

“Think about it from Gregory’s point of view. This is a guy who got where he is by taking no chances at all. He’s thinking about slamming the door on an assassination attempt and getting the hell out of there. A high-stress situation. He can’t afford confusion. He needs it clear and simple. Maybe arrows on the wall. Maybe emergency lighting, like on an airplane. All we need to do is find the street door at the far end. We can go in and follow the arrows backward. Maybe we’ll come out behind an oil painting on his office wall.”

“We’ll have all the same people ahead of us. Except in reverse order. They’ll come pouring in through the office door.”

“We can only hope.”