by Lee Child
“How?”
“My contacts in Nebraska have a bug up their ass.”
“I know all about that,” Safir said. “My men gave me a full report.”
“I want you to send them up there to help.”
“Send who? Up where?”
“Your men. To Nebraska. There’s no point in having them here in my office. Your interests are my interests, and I’m already working as hard as I can on this. So I’m thinking your guys could go help my guys and between us we could solve this problem.”
The doctor made it to Dorothy’s farmhouse unobserved and parked in the yard behind it, nose to tail with Dorothy’s own pick-up. He found her in her kitchen, washing dishes. Breakfast dishes, presumably. Hers and Reacher’s. Which had been a crazy risk.
He asked, “How are you holding up?”
She said, “I’m OK. You look worse than me.”
“I’ll survive.”
“You’re in a Duncan truck.”
“I know.”
“That’s dumb.”
“Like cooking breakfast for the guy was dumb.”
“He was hungry.”
The doctor asked, “You need anything?”
“I need to know how this is going to end.”
“Not well, probably. He’s one guy, on his own. And there’s no guarantee he’ll even stick around.”
“You know where he is right now?”
“Yes. More or less.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“I won’t.”
Dorothy said, “You should go check on Mr. Vincent. He was hurt pretty bad.”
“That’s where I’m headed next,” the doctor said.
Safir clicked off the call with Rossi and thought hard for ten long minutes, and then he dialed his customer Mahmeini, eight blocks across town. He took a breath and held it and asked, “Have you ever seen better merchandise?”
Mahmeini said, “Get to the damn point.”
“There’s a kink in the chain.”
“Chains don’t have kinks. Hoses have kinks. Chains have weak links. Are you confessing? You’re the weak link?”
“I’m just saying. There’s a speed bump. A Catch-22. It’s crazy, but it’s there.”
“And?”
“We all have a common goal. We all want that shipment. And we’re not going to get it until the speed bump disappears. That’s a fact, unfortunately. There’s nothing any of us can do about it. We’re all victims here. So I’m asking you to put our differences aside and make common cause, just for a day or two.”
“How?”
“I want you to take your guys out of my office and send them up to Nebraska. I’m sending my guys. We could all work together and solve this problem.”
Mahmeini went quiet. Truth was, he was nothing more than a link in a chain, too, the same as Safir, the same as Rossi, who he knew all about, the same as the Duncans, who he knew all about too, and Vancouver. He knew the lay of the land. He had done due diligence. He had done the research. They were all links in a chain, except that he was the penultimate link, the second to last, and therefore he was under the greatest strain. Because right next to him at the top were Saudis, unbelievably rich and beyond vicious. A bad combination.
Mahmeini said, “Ten percent discount.”
Safir said, “Of course.”
Mahmeini said, “Call me back with the arrangements.”
The doctor parked to the rear of the motel lounge, between its curved wall and a circular stockade that hid the trash cans and the propane tanks, nose to tail with Vincent’s own car, which was an old Pontiac sedan. Not a perfect spot. The truck would be clearly visible from certain angles, both north and south. But it was the best he could do. He got out and paused in the chill and checked the road. Nothing coming.
He found Vincent in the lounge, just sitting there in one of his red velvet armchairs, doing absolutely nothing at all. He had a black eye and a split lip and a swelling the size of a hen’s egg on his cheek. Exactly like the doctor himself, in fact. They were a matched pair. Like looking in a mirror.
The doctor asked, “You need anything?”
Vincent said, “I have a terrible headache.”
“Want painkillers?”
“Painkillers won’t help. I want this to be over. That’s what I want. I want that guy to finish what he started.”
“He’s on his way to Virginia.”
“Great.”
“He said he’s going to check in with the county cops along the way. He said he’s going to come back if there’s something wrong with the case file from twenty-five years ago.”
“Ancient history. They’ll have junked the file.”
“He says not.”
“Then they won’t let him see it.”
“He says they will.”
“But what can he find now, that they didn’t find then? Saying all that just means he’s never coming back. He’s softening the blow, that’s all he’s doing. He’s slipping away, with an excuse. He’s leaving us in the lurch.”
The strange round room went quiet.
“You need anything?” the doctor asked again.
“Do you?” Vincent asked back. “You want a drink?”
“Are you allowed to serve me?”
“It’s a little late to worry about that kind of thing, don’t you think? You want one?”
“No,” the doctor said. “I better not.” Then he paused and said, “Well, maybe just one, for the road.”
Safir called Rossi back and said, “I want a twenty percent discount.”
Rossi said, “In exchange for what?”
“Helping you. Sending my boys up there.”
“Fifteen percent. Because you’ll be helping yourself too.”
“Twenty,” Safir said. “Because I’m talking about sending more boys than just mine.”
“How so?”
“I’ve got guys babysitting me too. Two of them. Right here, right now. I told you that, didn’t I? So you think I’m taking my guys out of your office while I’ve still got guys in my own office? Well, dream on. That’s not going to happen anytime soon, believe me. So I got my customer to agree to send his guys, too. Like a shared sacrifice. And anyway, a thing like this, we’ll all want our fingers in the pie.”
Rossi paused.
“OK,” he said. “That’s good. That’s real good. Between us we’ll have six men up there. We can take care of this thing real fast. We’ll be out of the woods in no time at all.”
“Arrangements?”
Rossi said, “The nearest civilization is sixty miles south. Where the county offices are. The only accommodation is a Courtyard Marriott. My guys are based there. I’ll tell them to pull back there right now and I’ll book a couple more rooms. Then everyone can meet up as soon as possible, and then they can all get going.”
The two-lane road stayed arrow-straight the whole way. Reacher kept the Cadillac rolling along at a steady sixty per, covering a mile a minute, no stress at all. Fifty minutes from where he started he passed a lonely bar on the right shoulder. It was a small hunched building made of wood, with dirty windows with beer signs in them, and three cars in its lot, and a nameboard that said Cell Block. Which was marginally appropriate. Reacher figured that if he squinted the place might look like a jail from an old Western movie. He blew past it and a mile later the far horizon changed. A water tower and a Texaco sign loomed up out of the afternoon gloom. Civilization. But not much of it. The place looked small. It was just a checkerboard of a dozen low-rise blocks dumped down on the dirt in the middle of nowhere.
Eight hundred yards out there was a Chamber of Commerce billboard that listed five different ways a traveler could spend his money. If he wanted to eat, there were two restaurants. One was a diner and one wasn’t. Reacher recognized neither name. Not chains. If a traveler needed to fix his car, there was a service station and a tire shop. If he wanted to sleep, the only choice was a Courtyard Marriott.
Chapter 27
Reacher blew straight past the billboard and then slowed and checked ahead. In his experience most places reserved the main drag for profit-and-loss businesses. Municipal enterprises like cops and county offices would be a block or two over. Maybe more. Something to do with tax revenues. A town couldn’t charge as much for a lot on a back street.
He slowed a little more and passed the first building. It was on the left. It was an aluminum coach diner, as advertised on the billboard, as mentioned by Dorothy the housekeeper. It was the place where the county cops got their morning coffee and doughnuts. And their afternoon snacks, apparently. There was a black and white Dodge police cruiser parked outside. Plus two working pick-up trucks, both of them farm vehicles, both of them dented and dirty. Next up in terms of infrastructure was a gas station across the street, Texaco, with three service bays attached. Then came a long sequence of miscellaneous enterprises, on the left and the right: a hardware store, a liquor store, a bank, tire bays, a John Deere dealership, a grocery, a pharmacy. The street was broad and muddy and had diagonal parking on both sides.
Reacher drove all the way through town. At the end of it was a genuine crossroads, signposted left to an ethanol plant and right to a hospital and straight ahead to I-80, another sixty miles farther on. He U-turned shoulder-to-shoulder and came back again, north on the main drag. There were three side streets on the right, and three on the left. They all had names that sounded like people. Maybe original Nebraska settlers, or famous football players, or coaches, or champion corn growers. He made the first right, on a street named McNally, and saw the Marriott hotel up ahead. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, which was awkward. The old files would be in the police station or a county storeroom, and either way the file clerks would be quitting at five. He had one hour. That was all. Access alone might take thirty minutes to arrange, and there was probably plenty of paper, which would take much more than the other thirty to read. He was going to have to wait for the morning.
Or, maybe not.
Worth a try.
He rolled ahead and took a look at the hotel on the way. He wasn’t sure what the difference was between a regular Marriott and a Courtyard Marriott. Maybe one was high-rise and the other was low-rise. This was a low-rise, just two stories, H-shaped, a lobby flanked by two modest wings of bedrooms. There was a parking lot out front with marked spaces for about twenty cars, only two of them occupied. Same again at the rear of the building. Twenty spaces, only two of them occupied. Plenty of vacancies. Wintertime, in the middle of nowhere.
He made a left and came back north again, parallel to the main drag, three blocks over. He saw the second restaurant. It was a rib shack. It boasted a dry rub recipe direct from Kansas. He turned left again just beyond it and came back to the main street and pulled in at the diner. The cop car was still there. Still parked. The diner wasn’t busy. Reacher could see in through the windows. Two cops, three civilians, a waitress, and a cook behind a hatch.
Reacher locked the Cadillac and walked in. The cops were face-to-face in a booth, each of them wide and bulky, each of them taking up most of a two-person bench. One of them was about Reacher’s age, and one of them was younger. They had gray uniforms, with badges and insignia, and nameplates. The older cop was called Hoag. Reacher walked past him and stopped and pantomimed a big double take and said, “You’re Hoag, right? I don’t believe it.”
The cop said, “Excuse me?”
“I remember you from Desert Storm. Don’t I? The Gulf, in 1991? Am I right?”
The cop said, “I’m sorry, my friend, but you’ll have to help me out here. There’s been a lot of water over the dam since ’91.”
Reacher offered his hand. He said, “Reacher, 110th MP.”
The cop wiped his hand on his pants and shook. He said, “I’m not sure I was ever in contact with you guys.”
“Really? I could have sworn. Saudi, maybe? Just before? During Desert Shield?”
“I was in Germany just before.”
“I don’t think it was Germany. But I remember the name. And the face, kind of. Did you have a brother in the Gulf? Or a cousin or something?”
“A cousin, sure.”
“Looks just like you?”
“Back then, I guess. A little.”
“There you go. Nice guy, right?”
“Nice enough.”
“And a fine soldier, as I recall.”
“He came home with a Bronze Star.”
“I knew it. VII Corps, right?”
“Second Armored Cavalry.”
“Third Squadron?”
“That’s the one.”
“I knew it,” Reacher said again. An old, old process, exploited by fortune-tellers everywhere. Steer a guy through an endless series of yes-no, right-wrong questions, and in no time at all a convincing illusion of intimacy built itself up. A simple psychological trick, sharpened by listening carefully to answers, feeling the way, and playing the odds. Most people who wore nametags every day forgot they had them on, at least initially. And a lot of heartland cops were ex-military. Way more than the average. And even if they weren’t, most of them had big families. Lots of brothers and cousins. Virtually certain that at least one of them would have been in the army. And Desert Storm had been the main engagement for that whole generation, and VII Corps had been by far its largest component, and a Bronze Star winner from the Second Armored Cavalry was almost certainly from the Third Squadron, which had been the tip of the spear. An algorithm. Playing the odds. No-brainers all the way.
Reacher asked, “So what’s your cousin doing now?”
“Tony? He’s back in Lincoln. He got out before the second go-round, thank God. He’s working for the railroad. Two kids, one in junior high and one in college.”
“That’s terrific. You see him much?”
“Now and then.”
“Be sure to remember me to him, OK? Jack Reacher, 110th MP. One desert rat to another.”
“So what are you doing now? He’s bound to ask.”
“Me? Oh, the same old, same old.”
“What, you’re still in?”
“No, I mean I was an investigator, and I’m still an investigator. But private now. My own man, not Uncle Sam’s.”
“Here in Nebraska?”
“Just temporarily,” Reacher said. Then he paused. “You know what? Maybe you could help me out. If you don’t mind me asking.”
“What do you need?”
“You guys going on duty or going off?”
“We’re coming on. We got the night shift ahead of us.”
“Mind if I sit down?”
The cop called Hoag scooted over, all swishing vinyl and creaking leather. Reacher perched on the part of the bench he had vacated. It was warm. He said, “I knew this other guy, name of McNally. Another Second Armored guy, as a matter of fact. Turns out he has a friend of a friend who has an aunt in this county. She’s a farmer. Her daughter disappeared twenty-five years ago. Eight years old, never seen again. The woman never really got over it. Your department handled it, with the FBI as the icing on the cake. McNally’s friend of a friend thinks the FBI screwed up. So McNally hired me to review the paperwork.”
“Twenty-five years ago?” Hoag said. “Before my time.”
“Right,” Reacher said. “I guess we were both in basic back then.”
“And the kid was never seen again? That means it’s an open case. Cold, but open. Which means the paperwork should still exist. And someone should remember it.”
“That’s exactly what McNally was hoping.”
“And he’s looking to screw the FBI? Not us?”
“The story is you guys did a fine job.”
“And what did the FBI do wrong?”
“They didn’t find the kid.”
“What good will all this do?”
“I don’t know,” Reacher said. “You tell me. You know how it is with people. It might put some minds at rest, I guess.”
“OK,” Hoag said. “I’ll put the word out at th
e station house. Someone will get you in, first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Any chance of doing something tonight? If I could get this done by midnight, it would cut McNally’s bill by one day. He doesn’t have much money.”
“You turning down a bigger paycheck?”
“One veteran to another. You know how it is. Plus I’ve got business elsewhere. I need to get to Virginia as soon as I can.”
Hoag checked his watch. Twenty minutes past four. He said, “All that old stuff is in the basement under the county clerk’s office. You can’t be in there after five o’clock.”
“Any way of getting it out?”
“Oh, man, that’s asking a lot.”
“I don’t need court exhibits. I don’t want the physical evidence, assuming there is any. I just want the paperwork.”
“I could get my ass kicked real bad.”
“I just want to read it. Where’s the harm in that? In and out in one night. Who’s even going to know?”
“There’s probably a lot of it. Boxes and boxes.”
“I’ll help with the grunt work.”
“McNally was Second Armored? Same as Tony?”
Reacher nodded. “But Second Squadron, not Third. Not quite in Tony’s class.”
“Where are you staying?”
“The Marriott. Where else?”
There was a long pause. The younger cop looked on. Hoag was well aware of his scrutiny. Reacher watched the dynamic unfold. Hoag cycled through proper civil caution to a kind of nostalgic old-school can-do soldier-to-soldier recklessness. He looked at Reacher and said, “OK, I know a guy. We’ll get this done. But it’s better that you’re not there. So go wait for us. We’ll deliver.”
So Reacher drove back to the Courtyard Marriott and put the Cadillac way in the rear, behind the building itself, where it couldn’t be seen from the front. Safer that way, in case Seth Duncan couldn’t be stopped from getting on the horn and spreading the word. Then he walked back and waited at the lobby desk for the clerk to finish on the phone. He seemed to be taking a couple of bookings from someone. When he was done Reacher bought a night in a ground floor room, which turned out to be way in the back of the H, very quiet and very adequate, very clean and very well equipped, all green and tan colors and brass accents and pale wood. Then forty minutes later Hoag and his partner showed up in a borrowed K-9 van loaded with eleven cardboard cartons of files. Five minutes after that, all eleven cartons were in Reacher’s room.