Worth Dying For_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [38]
He slogged onward, another five minutes, then ten, then twenty. The three Duncan houses fell away behind his shoulder. The wooden buildings up ahead stayed resolutely on the horizon, but they got a little larger, because they were getting a little closer. Four hundred yards away was another bramble thicket, spreading wide and chest-high, but apart from that there was nothing in sight taller than an inch. Reacher was dangerously exposed, and he knew it.
In Las Vegas a Lebanese man named Safir took out his phone and dialed a number. The call was answered six blocks away by an Italian man named Rossi. There were no pleasantries. No time for any. The first thing Safir said was “You’re making me angry.”
Rossi said nothing in reply. He couldn’t really afford to. It was a question of protocol. He was absolutely at the top of his own particular tree, and it was a big tree, high, wide, and handsome, with roots and branches spreading everywhere, but there were bigger trees in the forest, and Safir’s was one of them.
Safir said, “I favored you with my business.”
Rossi said, “And I’m grateful for that.”
“But now you’re embarrassing me,” Safir said. Which, Rossi thought, was a mistake. It was an admission of weakness. It made it clear that however big Safir was, he was worried about someone bigger still. A food chain thing. At the bottom were the Duncans, then came Rossi, then came Safir, and at the top came someone else. It didn’t matter who. The mere existence of such a person put Safir and Rossi in the same boat. For all their graduated wealth and power and glory, they were both intermediaries. Both scufflers. Common cause.
Rossi said, “You know that merchandise of this quality is hard to source.”
Safir said, “I expect promises to be kept.”
“So do I. We’re both victims here. The difference between us is that I’m doing something about it. I’ve got boots on the ground up in Nebraska.”
“What’s the problem there?”
“They claim a guy is poking around.”
“What, a cop?”
“No,” Rossi said. “Absolutely not a cop. The chain is as secure as ever. Just a passerby, that’s all. A stranger.”
“Who?”
“Nobody. Just a busybody.”
“So how is this nobody busybody stranger holding things up?”
“I don’t think he is, really. I think they’re lying to me. I think they’re just making excuses. They’re late, that’s all.”
“Unsatisfactory.”
“I agree. But this is a seller’s market.”
“Who have you got up there?”
“Two of my boys.”
“I’m going to send two of mine.”
“No point,” Rossi said. “I’m already taking care of it.”
“Not to Nebraska, you idiot,” Safir said. “I’m going to send two of my boys across town to babysit you. To keep the pressure on. I want you to be very aware of what happens to people who let me down.”
The Port of Vancouver had been combined with the Fraser River Port Authority and the North Fraser Port Authority and the shiny new three-in-one business had been renamed Port Metro Vancouver. It was the largest port in Canada, the largest port in the Pacific Northwest, the fourth largest port on the West Coast of North America, and the fifth largest port in North America overall. It occupied 375 miles of coastline, and had twenty-five separate terminals, and handled three thousand vessel arrivals every year, for a total annual cargo throughput of a hundred million tons, which averaged out to considerably more than a quarter-million tons every day. Almost all of those tons were packed into intermodal shipping containers, which, like a lot of things, traced their origins all the way back to United States Department of Defense drawings made in the 1950s, because in the 1950s the U.S. DoD had been one of the few agencies in the world with the will and the energy to make drawings at all, and the only one with the power to make them stick.
Intermodal shipping containers