Tripwire

Jodie drove right past the building, not fast, not slow, just plausible city-street speed over the potholed road. Reacher craned his head around, getting a feel for the place. Jodie made a left and came back around the block. Reacher glimpsed a service alley running behind the row, with rusted fire escapes hanging above piles of garbage.

"So how do we do this?" Jodie asked him.

"We walk right in," he said. "First thing we do is we watch his reaction. If he knows who we are, we’ll play it one way. If he doesn’t, we’ll play it another."

She parked two spaces south of the storefront, in the shadow of a blackened brick warehouse. She locked the car and they walked north together. From the sidewalk they could make out what was behind the dirty window. There was a lame display of Army-surplus equipment, dusty old camouflage jackets and water canteens and boots. There were field radios and MRE rations and infantry helmets. Some of the stuff was already obsolete before Reacher graduated from West Point.

The door was stiff and it worked a bell when it opened. It was a crude mechanical system whereby the moving door flicked a spring that flicked the bell and made the sound. The store was deserted. There was a counter on the right with a door behind it to the garage. There was a display of clothing on a circular chrome rack and more random junk piled high on a single shelf. There was a rear door out to the alley, locked shut and alarmed. In a line next to the rear door were five padded vinyl chairs. Scattered all around the chairs were cigarette butts and empty beer bottles. The lighting was dim, but the dust of years was visible everywhere.

Reacher walked ahead of Jodie. The floor creaked under him. Two paces inside, he could see a trapdoor open beyond the counter. It was a sturdy door, made from old pine boards, hinged with brass and rubbed to a greasy shine where generations of hands had folded it back. Floor joists were visible inside the hole, and a narrow staircase built from the same old wood was leading down toward hot electric light. He could hear feet scraping on a cement cellar floor below him.

"I’ll be right there, whoever the hell you are," a voice called up from the hole.

It was a man’s voice, middle-aged, suspended somewhere between surprise and bad temper. The voice of a man not expecting callers. Jodie looked at Reacher and Reacher closed his hand around the butt of the Steyr in his pocket.

A man’s head appeared at floor level, then his shoulders, then his torso, as he came on up the ladder. He was a bulky figure and had difficulty climbing out of the hole. He was dressed in faded olive fatigues. He had greasy gray hair, a ragged gray beard, a fleshy face, small eyes. He came out on hands and knees and stood up.

"Help you?" he said.

Then another head and shoulders appeared behind him. And another. And another. And another. Four men stamped up the ladder from the cellar. Each one straightened and paused and looked hard at Reacher and Jodie and then stepped away to the line of chairs. They were big men, fleshy, tattooed, dressed in similar old fatigues. They sat with big arms crossed against big stomachs.

"Help you?" the first guy said again.

"Are you Rutter?" Reacher asked.

The guy nodded. There was no recognition in his eyes. Reacher glanced at the line of men on their chairs. They represented a complication he had not anticipated.

"What do you want?" Rutter asked.

Reacher changed his plan. Took a guess about the true nature of the store’s transactions and what was stacked up down in the cellar.

"I want a silencer," he said. "For a Steyr GB."

Rutter smiled, real amusement in the set of his jaw and the light in his eyes.

"Against the law for me to sell you one, against the law for you to own one."

The singsong way he said it was an outright confession that he had them and sold them. There was a patronizing undercurrent in the tone that said I’ve got something you want, and that makes me better than you. There was no caution in his voice. No suspicion that Reacher was a cop trying to set him up. Nobody ever thought Reacher was a cop. He was too big and too rough. He didn’t have the precinct pallor or the urban furtiveness people subconsciously associate with cops. Rutter was not worried about him. He was worried about Jodie. He didn’t know what she was. He had spoken to Reacher but looked at her. She was looking back at him, steadily.

"Against whose law?" she asked dismissively.

Rutter scratched at his beard. "Makes them expensive."

"Compared to what?" she asked.

Reacher smiled to himself. Rutter wasn’t sure about her, and with two answers, just six words, she had him adrift, thinking she could be anything from a Manhattan socialite worried about a kidnap threat against her kids, to a billionaire’s wife intending to inherit early, to a Rotary wife aiming to survive a messy love triangle. She was looking at him like she was a woman used to getting her own way without opposition from anybody. Certainly not from the law, and certainly not from some squalid little Bronx trader.

"Steyr GB?" Rutter asked. "You want the proper Austrian piece?"

Reacher nodded, like he was the guy who dealt with the trivial details. Rutter clicked his fingers and one of the heavy men peeled off from the line of chairs and dropped down the hole. He came back up a long moment later with a black cylinder wrapped in paper that gun oil had turned transparent.

"Two thousand bucks," Rutter said.

Reacher nodded. The price was almost fair. The pistol was no longer manufactured, but he figured it probably last retailed around eight or nine hundred bucks. Final factory price for the suppressor was probably more than two hundred. Two grand for illegal supply ten years later and four thousand miles from the factory gate was almost reasonable.

"Let me see it," he said.

Rutter wiped the tube on his pants. Handed it over. Reacher came out with the gun and clicked the tube in place. Not like in the movies. You don’t hold it up to your eyes and screw it on, slowly and thoughtfully and lovingly. You use light, fast pressure and a half-turn and it clicks on like a lens fits a camera.

It improved the weapon. Improved its balance. Ninety-nine times in a hundred, a handgun gets fired high because the recoil flips the muzzle upward. The weight of the silencer was going to counteract that likelihood. And a silencer works by dispersing the blast of gas relatively slowly, which weakens the recoil in the first place.

"Does it work real good?" Reacher asked.

"Sure it does," Rutter said. "It’s the genuine factory piece."

The guy who had brought it upstairs was back on his chair. Four guys, five chairs. The way to take out a gang is to hit the leader first. It’s a universal truth. Reacher had learned it at the age of four. Figure out who the leader is, and put him down first, and put him down hard. This situation was going to be different. Rutter was the leader, but he had to stay in one piece for the time being, because Reacher had other plans for him.

"Two thousand bucks," Rutter said again.

"Field test," Reacher said.

There is no safety catch on a Steyr GB. The first pull needs a pressure of fourteen pounds on the trigger, which is judged to be enough to avoid an accidental discharge if the gun is dropped, because fourteen pounds is a very deliberate pull. So there is no separate safety mechanism. Reacher flicked his hand left and pulled the fourteen pounds. The gun fired and the empty chair blew apart. The sound was loud. Not like in the movies. It’s not a little cough. Not a polite little spit. It’s like taking the Manhattan phone book and raising it way over your head and smashing it facedown on a desk with all your strength. Not a quiet sound. But quieter than it could be.

The four guys were frozen with shock. Shredded vinyl and dirty horsehair stuffing were floating in the air. Rutter was staring, motionless. Reacher hit him hard, left-handed in the stomach, and kicked his feet away and dumped him on the floor. Then he lined up the Steyr on the guy next to the shattered chair.

"Downstairs," he said. "All of you. Right now, OK?"

Nobody moved. So Reacher counted out loud one, two, and on three he fired again. The same loud blast. The floorboards splintered at the first guy’s feet. One, two, and Reacher fired again. And again, one, two, and fire. Dust and wood splinters were bursting upward. The noise of the repeated shots was crushing. There was the strong stink of burned powder and hot steel wool inside the suppressor. The men moved all at once after the third bullet. They fought and crowded to the hatch. Crashed and tumbled through. Reacher dropped the door closed on them and dragged the counter over the top of it. Rutter was up on his hands and knees. Reacher kicked him over on his back and kept on kicking him until he had scrambled all the way backward and his head was jammed up hard against the displaced counter.

Jodie had the faked photograph in her hand. She crouched and held it out to him. He blinked and focused on it. His mouth was working, just a ragged hole in his beard. Reacher ducked down and caught his left wrist. Dragged his hand up and took hold of the little finger.

"Questions," he said. "And I’ll break a finger every time you lie to me."

Rutter started struggling, using all his strength to twist up and away. Reacher hit him again, a solid blow to the gut, and he went back down.

"You know who we are?"

"No," Rutter gasped.

"Where was this picture taken?"

"Secret camps," Rutter gasped. "Vietnam."