"Ambush," I said. I was out of breath and I could hear my own voice loud inside my head. "There were at least eight of them."
"Where's Duke?"
"Dead. We got to go. Right now, Beck."
He froze for a second. Then he moved.
"Take his car," he said.
He already had the Cadillac rolling. He jammed his foot down and slammed his door and reversed down the driveway and out of sight. I jumped into the Lincoln. Fired it up. Stuck the selector in Reverse and got one elbow up on the back of the seat and stared through the rear window and hit the gas. We shot out backward onto the road one after the other and slewed around and took off again north, side by side like a stoplight drag race. We howled around the curves and fought the camber and stayed up around seventy miles an hour. Didn't slow until we reached the turn that would take us back toward Hartford. Beck edged ahead of me and I fell in behind him and followed. He drove five fast miles and turned in at a closed package store and parked at the back of the lot. I parked ten feet from him and just lay back in the seat and let him come to me. I was too tired to get out. He ran around the Cadillac's hood and pulled my door open.
"It was an ambush?" he said.
I nodded. "They were waiting for us. Eight of them. Maybe more. It was a massacre."
He said nothing. There was nothing for him to say. I picked up Duke's Steyr from the seat beside me and handed it over.
"I recovered it," I said.
"Why?"
"I thought you might want me to. I thought it might be traceable."
He nodded. "It isn't. But that was good thinking."
I gave him the H amp;K, too. He stepped back to the Cadillac and I watched him zip both pieces into his bag. Then he turned around. Clenched both hands and looked up at the black sky. Then at me.
"See any faces?" he asked.
I shook my head. "Too dark. But we hit one of them. He dropped this."
I handed him the PSM. It was like punching him in the gut. He turned pale and put out a hand and steadied himself against the Lincoln's roof.
"What?" I said.
He looked away. "I don't believe it."
"What?"
"You hit somebody and he dropped this?"
"I think Duke hit him."
"You saw it happen?"
"Just shapes," I said. "It was dark. Lots of muzzle flashes. Duke was firing and he hit a shape and this was on the floor when I came out."
"This is Angel Doll's gun."
"Are you sure?"
"Million to one it isn't. You know what it is?"
"Never saw one like it."
"It's a special KGB pistol," he said. "From the old Soviet Union. Very rare in this country."
Then he stepped away into the darkness of the lot. I closed my eyes. I wanted to sleep. Even five seconds would have made a difference.
"Reacher," he called. "What evidence did you leave?"
I opened my eyes.
"Duke's body," I said.
"That won't lead anybody anywhere. Ballistics?"
I smiled in the dark. Imagined Hartford PD forensic scientists trying to make sense of the trajectories. Walls, floors, ceilings. They would conclude the hallway had been full of heavily-armed disco dancers.
"A lot of bullets and shell cases," I said.
"Untraceable," he said.
He moved deeper into the dark. I closed my eyes again. I had left no fingerprints. No part of me had touched any part of the house except for the soles of my shoes. And I hadn't fired Duffy's Glock. I had heard something about a central registry somewhere that stored data on rifling marks. Maybe her Glock was a part of it. But I hadn't used it.
"Reacher," Beck called. "Drive me home."
I opened my eyes.
"What about this car?" I called back.
"Abandon it here."
I yawned and forced myself to move and used the tail of my coat to wipe the wheel and all the controls I had touched. The unused Glock nearly fell out of my pocket. Beck didn't notice. He was so preoccupied I could have taken it out and twirled it around my finger like the Sundance Kid and he wouldn't have noticed. I wiped the door handle and then leaned in and pulled the keys and wiped them and tossed them into the scrub at the edge of the lot.
"Let's go," Beck said.
He was silent until we were thirty miles north and east of Hartford. Then he started talking. He had spent the time getting it all worked out in his mind.
"The phone call yesterday," he said. "They were laying their plans. Doll was working with them all along."
"From when?"
"From the start."
"Doesn't make sense," I said. "Duke went south and got the Toyota's plate number for you. Then you gave it to Doll and told him to trace it. But why would Doll tell you the truth about the trace? If they were his buddies, he'd have dead-ended it, surely. Led you away from them. Left you in the dark."
Beck smiled a superior smile.
"No," he said. "They were setting up the ambush. That was the point of the phone call. It was good improvisation on their part. The kidnap gambit failed, so they switched tactics. They let Doll point us in the right direction. So that what happened tonight could happen."
I nodded slowly, like I was deferring to his point of view. The best way to clinch a pending promotion is to let them think you're just a little dumber than they are. It had worked for me before, three straight times, in the military.
"Did Doll actually know what you were planning for tonight?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. "We were all discussing it, yesterday. In detail. When you saw us talking, in the office."
"So he set you up."
"Yes," he said again. "He locked up last night and then left Portland and drove all the way down to wait with them. Told them all who was coming, and when, and why."
I said nothing. Just thought about Doll's car. It was about a mile away from Beck's office. I began to wish I had hidden it better.
"But there's one big question," Beck said. "Was it just Doll?"
"Or?"
He went quiet. Then he shrugged.
"Or any of the others that work with him," he said.
The ones you don't control, I thought. Quinn's people.
"Or all of them together," he said.
He started thinking again, another thirty, forty miles. He didn't speak another word until we were back on I-95, heading north around Boston.
"Duke is dead," he said.
"I'm sorry," I said.
Here it comes, I thought.
"I knew him a long time," he said.
I said nothing.
"You're going to have to take over," he said. "I need somebody right now. Somebody I can trust. And you've done well for me so far."
"Promotion?" I said.
"You're qualified."
"Head of security?"
"At least temporarily," he said. "Permanently, if you'd like."
"I don't know," I said.
"Just remember what I know," he said. "I own you."
I was quiet for a mile. "You going to pay me anytime soon?"
"You'll get your five grand plus what Duke got on top."
"I'll need some background," I said. "I can't help you without it."
He nodded.
"Tomorrow," he said. "We'll talk tomorrow."
Then he went quiet again. Next time I looked, he was fast asleep beside me. Some kind of a shock reaction. He thought his world was falling apart. I fought to stay awake and keep the car on the road. And I thought back to texts I had read from the British Army in India, during the Raj, at the height of their empire. Young subalterns trapped in junior ranks had their own mess. They would dine together in splendid dress uniforms and talk about their chances of promotion. But they had none, unless a superior officer died. Dead men's shoes was the rule. So they would raise their crystal glasses of fine French wine and toast bloody wars and dread diseases, because a casualty further up the chain of command was their only way to get ahead. Brutal, but that's how it's always been, in the military.