They backed off two corners and spoke so low they could barely hear each other. Reacher whispered, “I guess the real question is whether the hinges squeal. If yes, we do it fast. If no, we do it slow. Ready?”
A tight nod from Hogan.
A determined nod from Abby.
They retraced their steps. Two turns. Back to the steel hatch. Abby held her phone close to a hinge. It looked like a quality item. Forged steel. A glassy surface. But no trace of grease or oil. Unpredictable. The hatch had no handle. Not as such. Just two thick hoops for the bolt to lock into. Reacher hooked his finger through one of them. In his mind he rehearsed what he would do next, either fast or slow. The hatch would be hidden on the inside by some kind of camouflage. Nothing too fancy. Nothing that would have involved visible workers. Nothing that would have changed the room’s appearance. Nothing that Danilo would have noticed on his return. Probably an existing piece of furniture. As tall as Abby. Probably a bookcase. He would have to open the hatch and move it aside. Either fast or slow.
It turned out fast. Reacher eased the hatch open, and inside the first inch of travel both hinges let out a piercing squeal. So he flung it open the rest of the way and the glow of Abby’s phone showed him the rough lumber back of a piece of heavy wooden furniture. He shoved it hard and it fell forward and toppled over and crashed down. Completely unstable. A bookcase for sure. He scrambled out over it, into the room.
—
Gregory had been sitting at his desk, in his green leather chair, running important things through his mind. Then he heard the hinges squeal behind him, and he spun his chair halfway around, just in time for the bookcase to fall on him. It was made of Baltic oak, all solid, no veneer. It was loaded with books and trophies and photos in frames. First the front edge of a shelf broke his shoulder, and then an imperceptible millisecond later the next shelf up cracked his skull, and then the full bulk of the thing crushed him down, tipping his chair, driving the side of his head against the edge of the desk top, but driving the rest of him onward to the floor, so that his neck bent grotesquely and snapped like a twig, killing him instantly. Reacher’s extra weight as he clambered out over the felled furniture did him no further damage at all.
—
Reacher saw the back of the bookcase ahead of him, tilted up like a ramp. It had fallen against a desk. He scrambled over it and saw a double door, standing open, and an outer office beyond it, with a guy rising up out of a chair behind a desk, all kinds of shock and surprise on his face. This was Danilo, Reacher assumed. There was a door from the outer office to the corridor beyond. It was open, too. Coming through it were the sounds of scraping chairs and feet hitting linoleum floors. The loud screech and the loud crash had gotten folks’ attention.
Reacher had a Glock in his right hand and a Glock in his left. With his right he was covering Danilo. With his left he was covering the door. Hogan arrived behind him. Then Abby.
She said, “Gregory is dead under the bookcase.”
Reacher said, “How?”
“It fell on him. He was at his desk. The bookcase was behind him. I think it broke his neck.”
“I pushed it on him.”
“I guess technically.”
Reacher paused a beat.
“He was a lucky man,” he said.
Then he nodded at Danilo and said to Hogan, “Place this guy under arrest. Keep him safe and unharmed. He and I need to have an important discussion.”
“About what?”
“It’s what we say in the army when we’re going to beat someone to death.”
“Got it.”
Then time unspooled in a way that afterward Reacher thought was partly inevitable, even preordained, partly driven by culture, partly by peer pressure, by blind obedience, by hopeless lack of alternatives. Hard to comprehend. But it helped him understand the pile of bodies in the doorway in back of the lumber yard. They kept on coming. First a solid guy, taking in the scene, going for his gun. Reacher let him get it out. Allowed him to make his intent crystal clear. Then he shot him center mass. A single round. Then a second guy barreled in, pumped up with some kind of ludicrous I-can-do-better bravado. But he couldn’t. Reacher dropped him and he fell right on top of the first guy. Which is how the pile started. It deterred no one. They kept on adding to it. One after the other. We’ll have all the same people ahead of us. Except in reverse order. Hogan was absolutely right. First came the senior figures from the offices, then the smart muscle from inside the building, then finally the dumb muscle from out on the street corners, all of them driven, all of them relentless, all of them doomed. At first Reacher thought of their sacrifice in medieval terms, but then he revised his estimate backward, all the way to the dawn of time, a hundred thousand generations, to the pure insane grip of the tribe, and the absolute terror of being without it.
It had kept them alive then. But not now. Eventually there were no more footsteps. Reacher gave it another minute. Just to be sure. The sound of his endless firing died away to angry, hissing silence.
Then he turned to face Danilo.
Chapter 46
Danilo was a small man by Reacher’s standards, maybe five-ten, and wiry rather than heavy. Hogan had stripped him of his suit coat and emptied his shoulder holster. As a result he looked naked and vulnerable. Already defeated. Hogan had him standing next to the desk inside the inner office. The desk was a massive thing made of toffee-colored wood. The fallen bookcase was propped on it. It was huge. It must have weighed a ton. Books and ornaments had spilled out all over the place. From his new angle Reacher could see Gregory on the floor. He was folded into a Z shape. Kind of compressed. Otherwise a healthy individual. Tall, hard, and solid. But dead. Pity.
Reacher hooked his left forefinger under the knot of Danilo’s tie and maneuvered him out into clear space. He turned him around and squared him up. Shoulders back, chin out.
He stood back.
He said, “Tell me about your porn sites on the internet.”
“Our what?” Danilo said.
Reacher slapped him. Open handed, but a colossal blow all the same. It knocked Danilo right off his feet. He did half of a sideways somersault and landed crumpled where the wall met the floor.
“Get up,” Reacher said.
Danilo got up, slow and shaky, hands and knees first, palming his way up the wall.
“Try again,” Reacher said.
“They’re a sideline,” Danilo said.
“Where are they?”
Danilo hesitated.
Reacher hit him again. The other side. Open handed. Even harder than before. Danilo went down again, cartwheeling sideways, banging his head on the other wall.
“Get up,” Reacher said again.
Danilo got up again. Slow and shaky, hands and knees, hauling himself up the wall.
“Where are they?” Reacher asked again.
“Nowhere,” Danilo said. “Everywhere. It’s the internet. There are bits and pieces on servers all over the planet.”
“Controlled from where?”
Danilo watched Reacher’s right hand. He had figured out the sequence. Not difficult. Right, left, right. He didn’t want to answer, but he was going to.
He said the word. Not a hive or a burrow, but a nest, way up high. Then he clamped his lips. Now he was between a rock and a hard place. He couldn’t reveal the location. It was their biggest and best-kept secret. Instead he continued to stare at Reacher’s right hand.
Reacher said, “We already know where it is. You got nothing left to trade.”
Danilo didn’t answer. Then a cell phone rang. Distant and muffled. From the far doorway. In a pocket, somewhere in the pile of corpses. It pealed six times, and stopped. Then another rang. Equally distant, equally muffled. Then two more.