Free Persuader by Lee Child

asked.
    I forced my mind away from Quinn.
    “Three weaknesses that I can see,” I said. “Two minor and one major. First minor one is that I’m going to blow the back window out of the van but the kid will have about ten minutes to realize the broken glass is in the wrong place and there isn’t a corresponding hole in the windshield.”
    “So don’t do it.”
    “I think I really need to. I think we need to keep the panic level high.”
    “OK, we’ll put a bunch of boxes back there. You should have boxes anyway, if you’re a delivery man. They might obscure his view. If they don’t, just hope he doesn’t put two and two together inside ten minutes.”
    I nodded. “And second, old man Beck is going to call the cops down here, sometime, somehow. Maybe the newspapers, too. He’s going to be looking for corroborating information.”
    “We’ll give the cops a script to follow. And they’ll give the press something. They’ll play ball for as long as they need to. What’s the major weakness?”
    “The bodyguards,” I said. “How long can you hold them? You can’t let them get near a phone, or they’ll call Beck. So you can’t formally arrest them. You can’t put them in the system. You’ll have to hold them incommunicado, completely illegally. How long can you keep that going?”
    She shrugged. “Four or five days, tops. We can’t protect you any longer than that. So be real fast.”
    “I plan to be,” I said. “How long will the battery last on my e-mail thing?”
    “About five days,” she said. “You’ll be out by then. We can’t give you a charger. It would be too suspicious. But you can use a cell phone charger, if you can find one.”
    “OK,” I said.
    She just looked at me. There was nothing more to say. Then she moved close and kissed me on the cheek. It was sudden. Her lips were soft. They left a dusting of doughnut sugar on my skin.
    “Good luck,” she said. “I don’t think we’ve missed anything.”
    But we had missed a lot of things. They were glaring errors in our thinking and they all came back to haunt me.

CHAPTER 3
    Duke the bodyguard came back to my room five minutes before seven in the evening, which was way too early for dinner. I heard his footsteps outside and a quiet click as the lock turned. I was sitting on the bed. The e-mail device was back in my shoe and my shoe was back on my foot.
    “Get a nap, asshole?” he asked.
    “Why am I locked up?” I asked back.
    “Because you’re a cop-killer,” he said.
    I looked away. Maybe he had been a cop himself, before he went private. Lots of ex-cops wind up in the security business, as consultants or private eyes or bodyguards. Certainly he had some kind of an agenda, which could be a problem for me. But it meant he was buying Richard Beck’s story without question, which was the upside. He looked at me for a second with nothing much in his face. Then he led me out of the room and down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor and through dark passageways toward the side of the house that faced north. I could smell salt air and damp carpet. There were rugs everywhere. Some places they were laid two-deep on the floor. They glowed with muted colors. He stopped in front of a door and pushed it open and stepped back so I was channeled into a room. It was large and square and paneled with dark oak. Rugs all over the floor. There were small windows in deep recesses. Darkness and rock and gray ocean outside. There was an oak table. My two Colt Anacondas were lying on it, unloaded.
    Their cylinders were open. There was a man at the head of the table. He was sitting in an oak chair with arms and a tall back. He was the guy from Susan Duffy’s surveillance photographs.
    In the flesh he was mostly unremarkable. Not big, not small. Maybe six feet, maybe two hundred pounds. Gray hair, not thin, not thick, not short, not long. He was about fifty. He was wearing a gray suit made out of expensive cloth cut without any attempt at