Personal (Jack Reacher, #19)(64)

‘They have big sturdy bags too.’

‘They won’t give me a big sturdy bag for gum or candy.’

‘They won’t give you any kind of bag. You have to buy them here. Which means you can choose whatever kind you want.’

‘You have to buy the stuff and the bag it goes in?’

‘I read about it in a magazine.’

‘What kind of country is this?’

‘Environmental. You’re supposed to buy a durable bag and use it over and over again.’

I said nothing, but I got out of the car and walked up to the corner. The store was a bare-bones version of a big supermarket. Daily necessities, lunch items, six-packs, and soft drinks. And bags, just like Nice had predicted. There was a whole bunch of them near the checkout lanes. I picked one out. It was brown. It looked about as environmental as you could get. Like it had been woven out of recycled hemp fibres by one-eyed virgins in Guatemala. It had the supermarket’s name screen printed on it, faintly, probably with all kinds of vegetable dye. Carrots, mainly, I thought. Like the writing would all disappear in a shower of rain. But as a bag it was OK. It had rope handles, and it opened out into a boxy shape.

I didn’t really want gum or candy, so I asked the woman at the register whether I could buy the bag on its own. She didn’t answer directly. She just looked at me like I was a moron and slid the bag’s tag across her scanner, with an electronic pop, and she said, ‘Two pounds.’

Which I figured was OK. It would have been fifty bucks in a West Coast boutique. The Romford Boys paid for it, and I put their change in my back pocket, and I walked back to the parked Skoda.

It wasn’t there.





THIRTY-SIX


I PUT MY hand on the Glock in my pocket, and the back part of my brain told the front part, seventeen in the magazine plus one in the chamber minus two fired in the Serbian garage equals sixteen rounds available, and it pulled me back against a real estate broker’s window, to cut 360 degrees of vulnerability to 180, but mostly it screamed at me: Dominique Kohl.

I took a breath and looked left and right. There was no traffic cop to be seen. Which would have been logical. Nice would have taken off in a heartbeat if she had spotted one. Digital information in a camera system could be erased at the touch of a button, but Nice’s face and the Skoda’s plate in the same human memory at the same time couldn’t be managed so easily. Grander schemes had unravelled for less. But there was no cop on the block. There was no uniformed individual sauntering along, with notebook in hand.

And there were no members of the public staring open-mouthed at the empty length of blacktop, either, as if after some big commotion. And Nice wouldn’t have gone down easy, not for the Romford Boys, not for the Serbians, not for anyone. She had doors that locked and a loaded gun in her pocket. Sixteen rounds available, the same as me. The street was far from quiet, but it was humming with nothing more than normal city activity. No big incident had taken place. That seemed clear.

I slid along the broker’s window and stepped back into a doorway, for ninety degrees of exposure, like I had only a baseball diamond ahead of me. Traffic on the street was one-way, from my right to my left. There was a steady flow. Small hatchback cars, black taxis, an occasional larger sedan, delivery vans. No drivers peering left and right, no shotgun passengers searching faces. No one looking for me. I stepped out a pace and checked the corners. No one waiting there.

She knows what she signed up for. And she’s tougher than she looks.

She was captured, mutilated, and killed. I should have gone myself.

I’m going to hang way back. It’s not going to happen again.

I stepped out of my doorway and walked against the flow of traffic. There were people on both sidewalks, hurrying in both directions, in cheap suits and thin raincoats, carrying small furled umbrellas, like British people do, just in case, and briefcases and shopping bags and backpacks, no one doing anything other than just hustling along. No furtive behaviour. No black vans idling at the kerb, no big guys looking around, no cop cars.

I took out the phone Scarangello had given me, and I found Nice’s number in the directory, and I called it. There was a long pause, nothing but scratchy silence, maybe waiting for network access, maybe waiting for an encryption protocol to lock in, and then I heard a ring tone, a long soft American purr in the heart of London, and another, and more, for a total of six.

No answer.

I clicked off.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Maybe she was driving, and couldn’t talk. Maybe something had spooked her off the kerb, and she was circling the block. Some innocent reason. Left, and left again, and again, as many times as it took for me to finish my business in the convenience store. Eventually she would see me standing on the sidewalk, and she would swoop in and pick me up.

I watched the corner ahead of me.

She didn’t come.

Or worst case, her phone was in some other guy’s hand, who would have a calculating gleam in his eye, as he watched the screen and saw my name there. Maybe they would stop, and try to reel me in. Right there and then. A two-for-one special. An improvised plan. Some kind of a trap, nearby. Casey Nice as bait, and some kind of an ambush.

I watched my own screen.

No one called me back.

Plan for the worst. The only other number in the directory was O’Day’s. There’s GPS in our cell phones, so they’ll be watching over us every step of the way. He could lead me to her. Literally step by step. Until they ditched her phone, at least. I dialled, and heard the scratchy silence again.