One Shot (Page 72)

"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 Zec 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."

"Me 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 asked Reacher. "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 Zec 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 zecs 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 zecs could see forever. 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 Zec 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 Zec 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 Zec 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 Zec had hauled him away. By that point the Zec 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 Union, 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 Zec 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 around. "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."