Cleaning the Gold Read online

“We’ll be off the base. If we want to know what she’s doing, we have to find out tonight.”

  “Do we want?”

  “This thing could last forever. I hate long engagements. Better to nail her tonight.”

  “Better for you.”

  “When do you guys want to do it? Tonight’s the night, surely. We can catch her red-handed. Continue the mental exercise. Pretend you’re a law enforcement officer of some kind, pretending not to be. You would agree we need to act fast.”

  “If I was a law enforcement officer, I would probably point out we have no legal means of achieving these objectives. We’re confined to quarters tonight, and we have no vehicle, not to mention no warrant or even jurisdiction.”

  “This is Kentucky,” Reacher said. “I’m sure there’s some kind of overriding doctrine.”

  “She’ll put a guard on the hotel.”

  “Two, I’m sure. One front, one back. We’re going to need both of them.”

  They ate an early dinner in the hotel, Reacher somewhat dutifully, in obedience to his motto, which said eat when you can, because you never knew the next chance. By comparison, Trent ate eagerly. Reacher formed the impression he had been hungry at one time in his life. Maybe as a boy.

  Then they stepped out back. The sentry was an MP two-striper, in the new battledress uniform, a pistol on his belt, a cap on his head, an amiable expression on his face, almost jocular, as if there was no us and them, just all soldiers together, and the sentry bullshit was just a formality, like a charade.

  Reacher hit him under the chin with a right-hand uppercut. Then he took his gun. Then he wrapped the guy up with duct tape from a service closet. Will Trent didn’t like it. A cop for sure. Maybe a human rights lawyer.

  Then Reacher walked back through the lobby and did the same thing with the front sentry. Two guns now. Then he stole their car. A drab green Charger, fully loaded. He got right in and started it up. Trent stayed about nine feet away. They spoke through the window.

  Reacher said, “There’s a Supreme Court ruling. They call it imperfect necessity. It can be okay to commit a small crime to stop a big crime.”

  “Can be?”

  “I’m sure it depends. These people are lawyers. They want to keep working.”

  Trent didn’t answer.

  “I’m going now,” Reacher said. “I can’t afford to miss her.”

  Trent got in.

  Lukather left the base thirty minutes later. Just as dusk was falling. But not only her. Baldani was riding shotgun. And right behind was a whole separate car full of four big men. Then came Reacher, with Trent riding shotgun, a hundred yards back, in a drab green car, which was a color chosen mostly for cheapness, but it was cheap because there was a lot of it available, like economy of scale, and there was a lot of it available because over many decades no other color had ever worked better for merging into the background, especially at dusk. Therefore easy surveillance. It was a part of the country with long roads that led nowhere else. Traffic could hang together for hours. The MP car was a peach. Full of gas, great GPS, shotguns in the trunk, huge amounts of nine-millimeter ammunition.

  Will said, “My price estimate keeps going up. She’s driving a very long distance, with four heavies to protect her. Therefore she’s got something very valuable. Which means her contact will be someone way up the ladder.”

  “Interested now?” Reacher said.

  “As a mental exercise.”

  “If her contact is way up the ladder, he’ll have heavies of his own. It’s a status thing. If she’s bringing four, he’s going to have five or more.”

  “We won’t get close.”

  “I agree there will be an element of challenge.”

  Just before the trip turned over a hundred miles, Lukather pulled over into a gravel lot, in front of a roadhouse bar. The chase car pulled in after her. Reacher coasted on, to the next building in view, maybe three hundred yards away, which turned out to be a surplus store, that sold pretty much anything you wanted, as long as you wanted it in camouflage colors. It was closed. Reacher parked there and they walked back.

  The roadhouse bar was a commercial operation. Open to all. Except not really. One of those places. The only way Lukather could have felt comfortable walking in was to have five guys with her. Even Reacher would have gotten hard stares. Which he would have returned, which they might have returned again, because it was that kind of place, and after that it would be all about numbers. Altogether safer to stay outside and look in through the windows.

  They saw Lukather across a table from a man with pale skin. A blank, hard face. Completely empty, from a lifetime of practice. Russian for sure. He had five men behind him. Lukather’s four were arrayed behind her. Baldani was sitting to the side, with another Russian, like chiefs of staff.

  Lukather gave the pale guy the USB drive.

  The pale guy nodded.

  Two of his men lifted two suitcases onto the table. A little bigger than they would let you carry on an airplane.

  “Okay,” Reacher whispered. “We saw the transaction. So now we need to do this fair but efficient. Agreed?”

  “Sure,” Will whispered back.

  “Fair in the sense that we limit ourselves to strictly proportionate responses only, strictly in self-defense. Agreed?”

  “Sure,” Will whispered again.

  “Efficient in the sense we do it first. Before they’re ready.”

  “That’s not self-defense.”

  “Big picture.”

  “Jesus,” Will said.

  “Don’t worry about the fine print. Just help me out like a pal from work. It might all come to nothing anyway. I’m not looking for a fight here. I’m hoping they offer a speedy surrender. I really am.”

  They didn’t. The plan was Reacher would line up with the end window, and Trent would sneak inside, whereupon the two divergent lines of fire might force the crowd of thirteen down the side wall, toward the far back corner. Where, huddled together, they would raise their hands and quit.

  It didn’t work out that way. One of the Russians saw Reacher through the glass. The guy fired instantly. He bust the window and missed by a foot. Reacher fired back through the jagged hole and killed the guy. And then another. And another. Whereupon the return fire grew steady and serious. Apparently serious enough to trigger some kind of an exigent emergency threshold in Trent’s buttoned-up thinking. Suddenly he started firing from the flank. After that it got easier. But confused. Baldani hit the deck. Unhurt. Just hiding. Then a stray ricochet shattered a bracket and a fire extinguisher fell on his head. Guys were going down left and right.

  Reacher fought his way in through the window, which was all shredded and shattered by then. Just a hole in the wall. Trent fought his way in from the door. The survivors pushed back to the farthest corner. They started to think about raising their hands. Reacher had them covered.

  Then suddenly Lukather rushed for the door. Just Trent in her way. Who reacted perfectly. Instantly, without thinking, he swung a fist at her face.

  Then he reacted imperfectly. Some kind of late-breaking gentlemanly instinct kicked in and made him stop the punch dead. It tapped Lukather on the nose. Hard enough to notice. Hard enough to be annoying. Not hard enough to do damage.

  Lukather roared in fury and swung a huge right hook that caught Trent on the ear and spun him around. She hammered her elbow into his kidney. She was lining up a forearm smash to his throat when the gentlemanly instinct suddenly kicked back out again, and he threw the punch he should have thrown all along. It caught her full in the mouth and lifted her off her feet in a mist of blood and dumped her down flat on her back.

  Reacher shrugged and nodded.

  Like, nice work, can’t deny it.

  Trent slid Lukather over next to Baldani. Which gave them two unconscious forms, and then the pale guy, and two of his stooges, all three of those awake but sullen. They had the USB, and they had the suitcases. Which Trent opened. He brushed his fingers length and width
, counting, and he multiplied in his head.

  “A million dollars in each,” he said.

  “Put the USB in one,” Reacher said. “Then close them again. Put them neatly by the door. All the valuables in one place.”

  Trent did.

  He said, “Are you going to steal them?”

  “Harsh word.”

  “Are you?”

  “Can you stop me?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I’m sure not,” Reacher said.

  “Okay,” Will said.

  “Of course I’m not going to steal them,” Reacher said. “They’re evidence. The problem is figuring out who to call. Not the local police department. That’s for damn sure. Not all the way the hell out here. This would make their heads explode. If there is a local police department. Not the MPs back at Knox, either. I just hit two of them in the face. They’re going to start out by taking a distorted view. Plus, this is a very big deal. Russians, and all. Cash in a suitcase. I think we should call the Pentagon direct.”

  Less than an hour and forty minutes later it was all cleaned up. Reacher had given a sworn account. Trent had done the same. The prisoners had been taken into formal custody. The physical evidence had been bagged and tagged and taken away. The meat wagons were coming. Reacher and Trent drove home in the drab green car. Almost a hundred miles. Almost silent.

  5

  When Will arrived at the depository the next morning, he found that the second shift had motored through the night. Apparently, the cogs continued to turn the wheels fine without Lukather and Baldani cranking on them. The two vault doors that had been open yesterday were locked tight. The ribbons had been re-hung. The pages with the serial numbers dangled in their plastic envelopes. Two new doors were wide open. Two layers of gold bars were already on one of the pallets.

  Lukather had been right about one thing. They could finish today if they established a good pace.

  Will heard a familiar clink of gold hitting gold from inside the far vault. Reacher was already at work, which was not wholly unexpected. Something had told Will that despite the events of the previous evening, Reacher was not the type of man who left a job unfinished.

  He didn’t have a lot of quit in him.

  “Morning,” Will said.

  Reacher gave him a nod as he placed gold onto the pallet. Left to his own devices, he had tripled up the bars, three in each hand, which was a humiliating data point for Will, who needed both hands to barbell curl 175 pounds. And that was on a good day.

  Reacher silently stacked the bars, then turned back into the vault for more.

  Will winced as he pulled on his cotton gloves. His knuckles were shredded. Black bruises dotted his skin like ink spots. If the prosecutor needed an impression of Colonel Stephanie Lukather’s teeth, Will would be able to supply them. His never hit a woman policy had gone to hell the second she had smacked him in the ear and driven a surprisingly sharp elbow into his kidney.

  He waited for Reacher to kneel by the pallet, then went into the vault and grabbed two bars with both hands. When he turned, he saw Reacher’s toothbrush sticking out of his back pocket.

  The bristles. The handle. The plastic. As good as a buccal swab from a DNA testing kit.

  Reacher stood up. He stepped into the vault. Will stacked his two bars. They went back and forth, stretching and grabbing and kneeling and stacking, synchronized like a timing belt turning the crank and cam.

  Will mentally ran through what had happened at the bar last night. He tried to see all of the angles. Why would Reacher involve himself in something like that? He had risked his life, his health, but for what? Not for the money or for the USB drive. Will had been incapable of stopping him from taking both and leaving the bar. But Reacher had not only stuck around, he had voluntarily given a statement.

  That wasn’t the behavior of a criminal. That was more like a cop. And Reacher had been a cop, but he had just as clearly turned his back on the law.

  Will had seldom felt so conflicted.

  Here was the problem with Jack Reacher: he was a bad guy who sometimes did good things. Given his itinerant lifestyle, Will thought of him as an American James Bond—not the Bond from the movies but the Bond from the books who was one level up from a street fighter. There was no M to temper his feralness. Reacher did not have a legal license to kill. Or maim. Or shoot people in their knees, which was a really mean thing to do, even to a stone-cold gangster.

  To Will’s thinking, Reacher was the worst kind of criminal. This wasn’t because he was the size of a Mack truck, but because he was smart. Street smart, obviously educated, also methodical and strategic in a way that put him at the top of the top one percent of the criminal class. In most cases, the only thing that cops had going for them was that bad guys tended to be really, really stupid.

  Jack Reacher was not stupid.

  Will turned away.

  “Did you call your people?” Reacher asked.

  Will turned back.

  “About what?” he said.

  “The USB drive,” Reacher said. “It’s in the system now. It’s evidence.”

  “No,” Will said.

  “I called CID. Through USACIDC.” Reacher was still inside the vault. His mask was pulled down. He leaned against the doorjamb, folded his arms over his engine block of a chest. “That’s the Criminal Investigation Division, Captain Wolfe.”

  “And?”

  “Social security numbers,” Reacher said. “Turns out Major Baldani’s wife works in HR Command. Right here on the base. What they used to call Personnel. She downloads the service numbers of dead soldiers. At least two thousand so far.”

  “Baldani was married to a human woman?”

  “She didn’t report the deaths, so the new owners of the service numbers would be eligible for all kinds of benefits.”

  Will wasn’t going to try to pretend he knew what a service number was.

  Reacher gave him another assist. “It’s the military’s version of a social security number. Every soldier is assigned one. Your time of service is attached to the number, and benefits are based on time of service. We’re talking pension, disability, exchange privileges, small business loans, VA home loans, GI Bill, life insurance, TRICARE—that’s healthcare. You get one of those numbers, you’re set for life.”

  Will felt his stomach turn. Lukather hadn’t just tried to sell these soldiers’ identities. She had tried to sell their service.

  “I’m guessing the contents of that USB drive could bring in tens of millions on the black market. There was only two million in the suitcases. Lukather sold herself short.”

  Will was glad the woman was going to spend some serious time behind bars. There was not enough money to go around for veterans in the first place. For one of their own to exploit the system felt like treason.

  Reacher started to push his mask back up, but Will stopped him with a question.

  “Why’d you leave the job?”

  Reacher waited.

  “You were an MP. I know you quit the Army, but the job gets in your lungs. You can’t breathe it out. Why haven’t you ever put yourself back on the right side of a badge?”

  “‘One can’t be out in the cold all of the time.’”

  He was quoting le Carré. “Don’t make me love you.”

  Reacher said, “I don’t like being stuck behind a desk.”

  “There are a lot of ways to be a cop without sitting behind a desk.”

  Reacher said, “Like going undercover inside Fort Knox?”

  No answer.

  Reacher said, “You were never a soldier. You’re not here for Baldani or Lukather. You’re here for someone else. You’re from Georgia, I’m guessing. Maybe some local police department.”

  “GBI,” Will said. “Georgia Bureau of Investigation. A cold case.”

  “You should tell me what’s on your mind.”

  Will debated his options, which boiled down to two. One: try to snag the toothbrush fast, and get his face broke
n into exactly one trillion pieces. Two: come clean and hope for the best.

  He asked Reacher, “You ever hear of a town called Margrave?”

  “South of Atlanta.”

  Will waited. When Reacher didn’t volunteer anything further, he prompted, “April 16, 1997.”

  Reacher kept on waiting.

  “Deputy Phillip Michael Deacon was shot twice in the head outside the Margrave public library. An eyewitness puts a stranger behind the trigger. A stranger whose description matches yours exactly.”

  Reacher said, “I was not in Margrave on that date.”

  “I’ve got DNA on a library book that proves otherwise.”

  Reacher didn’t seem worried. “What library book?”

  “A Guide to Birds of the Southeastern United States.”

  Reacher’s mouth twisted into something that could have been a smile.

  Will asked, “Do hummingbirds mean anything to you?”

  “They can be ferocious. You get a bully at the feeder, he’ll scare off the other birds or try to stab them with his beak.” Reacher added, “It’s best to take out the bully as soon as possible. Protect the weaker birds before he starves them all.”

  Will got the point, but said, “Forensics pulled DNA from three drops of dried sweat on the pages of the hummingbird chapter.”

  “The toothbrush,” Reacher said. “I was wondering why you kept staring at my ass.”

  Will figured it was his turn to wait for more information.

  Reacher asked, “Did you talk to the eyewitness?”

  “Died in her sleep two years ago. Natural causes.”

  Reacher nodded, like that was how it should be. “What do you know about Phillip Deacon?”

  “Family man. Spent twenty-one years of his life in uniform, then another twenty-two in a hospital gown.” Will explained, “He survived the gunshots, but he was in a coma until two months ago. He died of pneumonia.”

  “I see,” Reacher said. “Thereby converting the charge of attempted murder of a peace officer into murder with aggravating circumstances. A State of Georgia case.”

  “A death penalty case.”