a dark place. A crucial difference. He stood and waited.
The inner door opened and a thickset guy stepped out of the office into reception. Closed the door gently behind him. A thickset guy in a dark suit. The guy he’d pushed down the stairs in the Key West bar. The guy who had fired the Beretta up in Garrison. The guy who had clung to the Bravada’s door handle. He walked through reception and disappeared from view. Reacher stepped forward again and studied the inner door through the glass. It stayed closed. He knocked gently on the outer door. The guy came to the porthole and peered through. Reacher stood up straight and turned his shoulder so his brown jacket filled the view.
‘UPS,’ he said softly.
It was an office building and it was dark and it was a brown jacket, and the guy opened the door. Reacher stepped around the arc of its swing and shot his hand in and caught the guy by the throat. Do it fast enough and hard enough and you numb the guy’s voice box before he can get going with any sounds. Then you dig your fingers in and keep him from falling over. The guy went heavy against his grip and Reacher ran him all the way along the corridor to the fire door and threw him backward into the stairwell. The guy bounced off the far wall and went down on the concrete, with a cracked rasping sound coming from his throat.
‘Time to choose,’ Reacher whispered. ‘You help me, or you die.’
A choice like that, there’s only one sensible thing to do, but the guy didn’t do it. He struggled up to his knees and made like he was going to fight it out. Reacher tapped him on the top of the head, just
enough to send some shock down through his neck bones, and then stepped back and asked him again.
‘Help me out,’ he said. ‘Or I’ll kill you.’
The guy shook his head to clear it and launched himself across the floor. Reacher heard Leon say ask once, ask twice if you must, but for God’s sake don’t ask three times. He kicked the guy in the chest and spun him around backward and wedged his forearm across the top of his shoulders and put a hand under his chin and wrenched it once and broke his neck.
One down, but he was down without releasing any information, and in combat information is king. His gut still told him this was a small operation, but two guys or three or five could equally be called small, and there was a hell of a big difference between going in blind against two or three or five opponents. He paused in the stairwell and glanced at the fire-axe in the red cabinet. Next best thing to solid information is some kind of an arresting diversion. Something to make them worried and unsettled. Something to make them pause.
He did it as quietly as he could and checked the corridor was truly empty before dragging the body back. He swung the door open soundlessly and got the guy arranged in the middle of the lobby floor. Then he closed the door again and dodged down behind the reception counter. It was chest high, and more than ten feet long. He lay on the floor behind it and eased the silenced Steyr out of his jacket and settled down to wait.
It felt like a long wait. He was pressed to the thin office carpet, and he could feel the unyielding concrete under it, alive with the tiny vibrations of a giant building at work. He could feel the faint bass shudder
of the elevators stopping and starting. He could feel the tingle of the tension in their cables. He could hear the hum of air-conditioning and the tremor of the wind. He hooked his toes back against the resistance of the nylon pile and bunched his legs against them, ready for action.
He felt the fall of footsteps a second before he heard the click of the latch. He knew the inner door had opened because he heard the change in the acoustic. The reception area was suddenly open to a larger space. He heard four feet on the carpet and he heard them stop, like he knew they would. He waited. Present somebody with an astonishing sight, and it takes about three seconds for the maximum effect to develop. That was Reacher’s experience. They look at it, they see it, their brain rejects it, their eyes bounce it back again, and it sinks in. Three whole seconds, beginning to end. He counted silently one, two, three, and pushed out at the base of the counter, pressed to the floor, leading with the long black silencer on the end of the Steyr. He got his arms out, then his shoulders, then his eyes.