Blue Moon - Lee Child Page 0,112

through Danilo’s office to get to Gregory’s office.”

“How often do you go over there?”

“Only when I have to.”

“You work for them, but you don’t want to.”

“That’s the truth of it.”

“Everyone says that.”

“I’m sure they do. But I mean it.”

Reacher said nothing.

Abby said, “No.”

Hogan said, “No.”

Reacher said, “Go get the stuff we talked about.”

The guy went and got it. The wedding bands, the small solitaires, the broken watch. He put them all in an envelope. Reacher put the envelope in his pocket. Plus all the cash from the register. About five grand. Hopefully the merest drop in the bucket, pretty soon, but Reacher liked cash. He always had. He liked the heft, and the deadness. Hogan roamed the store’s shelves and tore the cords off all the dusty old stereo items, and he tied the guy up with them, secure, uncomfortable, but survivable. Eventually someone would find him and let him go. What happened after that would be up to him.

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