Gone Tomorrow - Lee Child [74]
I double-checked the number in my head and I said, “I was in it last night. It was being used then. And I met the occupants again today, in the tea room. There’s a signature on a check.”
The guy tried again. He called up tea room checks that had been charged to guest accounts. He half-turned his screen so that I could see it too, in the sharing gesture that clerks use when they want to convince you of something. We had had tea for two plus a cup of coffee. There was no record of any such charge.
Then I heard small sounds behind me. The scuff of soles on carpet, the rattle of drawn breath, the sigh of fabric moving through the air. And the clink of metal. I turned around and found myself facing a perfect semicircle of seven men. Four of them were uniformed NYPD patrolmen. Three of them were the federal agents I had met before.
The cops had shotguns.
The feds had something else.
Chapter 42
Seven men. Seven weapons. The police shotguns were Franchi SPAS-12s. From Italy. Probably not standard NYPD issue. The SPAS-12 is a futuristic, fearsome-looking item, a semi-automatic 12-gauge smooth-bore weapon with a pistol grip and a folding stock. Advantages, many. Drawbacks, two. Cost was the first, but clearly some specialist division inside the police department had been happy to sign off on the purchase. Semi-automatic operation was the second drawback. It was held to be theoretically unreliable in a powerful shotgun. People who have to shoot or die worry about it. Mechanical failure happens. But I wasn’t about to bet on four mechanical failures happening all at once, for the same reason I don’t buy lottery tickets. Optimism is good. Blind faith is not.
Two of the feds had Glock 17s in their hands. Nine-millimeter automatic pistols from Austria, square, boxy, reliable, well proven through more than twenty years of useful service. I had retained a mild personal preference for the Beretta M9, like the Franchi also from Italy, but a million times out of a million-and-one the Glock would get the job done just as well as the Beretta.
Right then the job was to keep me standing still, ready for the main attraction.
The fed leader was in the exact center of the semicircle. Three men on his left, three on his right. He was holding a weapon I had seen before only on television. I remembered it well. A cable channel, in a motel room in Florence, Texas. Not the Military Channel. The National Geographic Channel. A program about Africa. Not civil wars and mayhem and disease and starvation. A wildlife documentary. Gorillas, not guerillas. A bunch of zoological researchers was tracking an adult male silverback. They wanted to put a radio tag in its ear. The creature weighed close to five hundred pounds. A quarter of a ton. They put it down with a dart gun loaded with primate tranquillizer.
That was what the fed leader was pointing at me.
A dart gun.
The National Geographic people had taken great pains to reassure their viewers that the procedure was humane. They had shown detailed diagrams and computer simulations. The dart was a tiny feathered cone, with a surgical steel shaft. The tip of the shaft was a sterile ceramic honeycomb laced with anesthetic. The dart fired at high velocity and the shaft buried itself a half-inch into the gorilla. And stopped. The tip wanted to keep on going. Momentum. Newton’s Law of Motion. The shock and the inertia exploded the ceramic matrix and the potion contained in the honeycomb flung itself onward, not quite droplets, not quite an aerosol. Like a heavy mist spreading under the skin, flooding tissue the way a paper towel soaks up a spilled drop of coffee. The gun itself was a one-shot deal. It had to be loaded with a single dart, and a single tiny bottle of compressed gas to power it. Nitrogen, as I recalled. Reloading was laborious. It was better to hit first time.
The researchers had hit first time in the documentary