by Lee Child
He said, “It’s a fairly simple job. Sixty miles north of here there’s a corner of the county with forty farms. There’s a guy running around causing trouble. Truth is, it’s not really very important, but our mutual supplier is taking it personally. Business is on hold until the guy goes down.”
Mahmeini’s man said, “We know all that. Next?”
“OK,” Cassano said. “Next is we all move up there and work together and take care of the problem.”
“Starting when?”
“Let’s say tomorrow morning, first light.”
“Have you seen the guy?”
“Not yet.”
“Got a name?”
“Reacher.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“It’s an American name. What’s yours?”
“My name doesn’t matter. Got a description?”
“Big guy, blue eyes, white, six-five, two-fifty, brown coat.”
Mahmeini’s man said, “That’s worthless. This is America. This is farm country. It’s full of settlers and peasants. They all look like that. I mean, we just saw a guy exactly like that.”
Safir’s guy said, “He’s right. We saw one too. We’re going to need a much better description.”
Cassano said, “We don’t have one. But it will be easier when we get up there. Reacher stands out, apparently. And the local population is prepared to help us. They’ve been told to phone in with sightings. And there’s no cover up there.”
Mahmeini’s man said, “So where is he hiding out?”
“We don’t know. There’s a motel, but he’s not in it. Maybe he’s sleeping rough.”
“In this weather? Is that likely?”
“There are sheds and barns. I’m sure we’ll find him.”
“And then what?”
“We put him down.”
“Risky.”
“I know. He’s tough. So far he’s taken out four of the local people.”
Mahmeini’s man said, “I don’t care how tough he thinks he is. And I don’t care how many local people he’s taken out either. Because I’m sure they’re all idiots up there. I mean it’s risky because this isn’t the Wild West anymore. Do we have a safe exit strategy?”
Cassano said, “They tell me he’s a kind of hobo. So nobody is going to miss him. There’s not going to be an investigation. There aren’t even any cops up there.”
“That helps.”
“And it’s farm country. Like you said. There must be backhoes all over the place. We’ll bury him. Alive, preferably, the way our supplier is talking.”
Chapter 31
The physical search of the area was described four separate ways, in four separate files, the first from the county PD, the second from the State Police, the third from the National Guard’s helicopter unit, and the fourth from the FBI. The helicopter report was thin and useless. Margaret Coe had been wearing a green dress, which didn’t help in corn country in early summer. And the pilot had stayed above a thousand feet, to stop his downdraft damaging the young plants. Priorities had to be observed in a farm state, even when a kid was missing. Nothing significant had been seen from the air. No freshly turned earth, no flash of pink or chrome from the bike, no flattened stalks in any of the fields. Nothing at all, in fact, except an ocean of corn.
A waste of time and aviation fuel.
Both the county PD and the State Police had covered the forty farms at ground level. First had come the loud-hailer appeals in the dark, and the next day every house had been visited and every occupant had been asked to verify that they hadn’t seen the kid and that they had searched their outbuildings thoroughly. There was near-universal cooperation. Only one old couple confessed they hadn’t checked properly, so the cops searched their place for themselves. Nothing was found. The motel had been visited, every cabin checked, the Dumpster emptied, the lot searched for evidence. Nothing was found.
The Duncan compound showed up in three files. Everyone except the helicopter unit had been there. First the county PD had gone in, then the county PD and the State Police together, then the State Police on its own, and then finally the FBI, which had been a lot of visits and a lot of people for such a small place. The searches had been intense, because the smallness of the place had struck people as somehow sinister in itself. Reacher could sense it between the lines, quite clearly, even a quarter-century later. Rural cops. They had been confused and disconcerted. It was almost like the Duncans hated the land. They had stripped away every inch of it they could. They had kept a single track driveway, plus token shoulders, plus a grudging five or ten yards beyond the foundations of their three houses. That was all. That was the whole extent of the place.
But the smallness had made it easy to search. The reports were meticulous. The piles of heavy lumber for the half-built fence had been taken apart and examined. Gravel had been raked up, and lines of men had walked slow and bent over, staring at the ground, and the dogs had covered literally every square inch ten times each.
Nothing was found.
The search moved indoors. As intense as it had been outside, it was twice as thorough inside. Absolutely painstaking. Reacher had searched a lot of places, a lot of times, and he knew how hard it was. But four times in quick succession not a single corner had been cut, and not a single effort had been spared. Stuff had been taken apart, and voids in walls had been opened up, and floors had been lifted. Reacher knew why. Nothing was stated on paper, and nothing was admitted, but again, he could read it right there between the lines. They were looking for a kid, certainly, but by that point they were also looking for parts of a kid.
Nothing was found.
The FBI contribution was a full-on forensics sweep, 1980s-style. It was documented and described at meticulous length on sheets of Bureau paper that had been photocopied and collated and stapled and passed on as a courtesy. Hairs and fibers had been collected, every flat surface had been fingerprinted, all kinds of magic lights and devices and gadgets had been deployed. A corpse-sniffing dog had been flown in from Denver and then sent back again after producing a null result. Technicians with a dozen different specialist expertises had been in and out for twelve solid hours.
Nothing was found.
Reacher closed the file. He could hear it in his head right then, the same way they must have heard it all those years ago: the sound of a case going cold.
Sixty miles north Dorothy Coe was standing at her sink, washing her plate and her knife and her fork and her glass, and scrubbing the oven dish that her chop had cooked in. She dried it all with a thin linen towel and put it all away, the plate and the glass in a cupboard, the silverware in a drawer, the oven dish in another cupboard. She put her napkin in the trash and wiped her table with a rag and pushed her chair in neatly. Then she stepped out to her front parlor. She intended to sit a spell, and then go to bed, and then get up early and drive to the motel. Maybe she could help Mr. Vincent fix the mirror behind his bar. Maybe she could even glue the handle back on his NASA mug.
Reacher sat a spell on the floor in his Marriott room, thinking. It was ten o’clock in the evening. His job was done, two hours ahead of his pretended midnight schedule. He got to his feet and packed up all eleven cartons and folded their flaps into place. He stacked them neatly in the center of the floor, two piles of four and one of three. He dialed nine for a line, from the bedside table, and then he dialed the switchboard number he remembered from the transcript of Dorothy Coe’s original panic call, twenty-five years earlier. It was still an active number. It was answered. Reacher asked for Hoag, not really expecting to get him, but there was a click and a second of dead air and then the guy himself came on.
“I’m done,” Reacher told him.
“Find anything?”
“You guys did a fine job. Nothing for you to worry about. So I’m moving out.”
“So soon? You’re not staying for the nightlife?”
“I’m a simple soul. I like peace and quiet.”
“OK, le
ave the stuff right there. We’ll swing by and pick it up. We’ll have it back in the basement before the file jockeys even get in tomorrow. They’ll never know a thing. Mission accomplished.”
“I owe you,” Reacher said.
“Forget it,” Hoag said. “Be all you can be, and all that shit.”
“The chance would be a fine thing,” Reacher said. He hung up and grabbed his coat and headed for the door. He was way in the back of the H-shaped layout, and he had to walk all the way forward to the lobby before getting outside and looping back around to where his car was parked. The stairs came down from the second floor just before the lobby, in a space that would have been another room in the wing, if it had been a one-story structure. Just as Reacher got to them, a guy stepped off the last stair and fell in alongside him, heading the same way, to the lobby, to the door. He was one of the guys Reacher had seen checking in at the desk. Small and rumpled. Unshaven. Iranian, possibly. The guy glanced across. Reacher nodded politely. The guy nodded back. They walked on together. The guy had car keys swinging from his finger. A red tag. Avis. The guy glanced at Reacher again, up and across. Reacher glanced back. He held the door. The guy stepped out. Reacher followed. The guy looked at him again. Some kind of speculation in his eyes. Some kind of intense curiosity.
Reacher stepped left, to loop around the length of the H on the outside. The Iranian guy stayed with him. Which made some kind of possible sense, after Reacher glanced ahead and saw two cars parked back there. Seth Duncan’s Cadillac, and a dark blue Chevrolet. Prime rental material. Avis probably had thousands of them.
A dark blue Chevrolet.
Reacher stopped.
The other guy stopped.
Chapter 32
Nobody knows how long it takes for thoughts to form. People talk about electrical impulses racing through nerves at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, but that’s mere transmission. That’s mail delivery. The letter is written in the brain, sparked to life by some sudden damp chemical reaction, two compounds arcing across synapses and reacting like lead and acid in an automobile battery, but instead of sending twelve dumb volts to a turn signal the brain floods the body with all kinds of subtle adjustments all at once, because thoughts don’t necessarily happen one at a time. They come in starbursts and waterfalls and explosions and they race away on parallel tracks, jostling, competing, fighting for supremacy.
Reacher saw the dark blue Chevrolet and instantly linked it through Vincent’s testimony back at the motel to the two men he had seen from Dorothy Coe’s barn, while simultaneously critiquing the connection, in that Chevrolets were very common cars and dark blue was a very common color, while simultaneously recalling the two matched Iranians and the two matched Arabs he had seen, and asking himself whether the rendezvous of two separate pairs of strange men in winter in a Nebraska hotel could be just a coincidence, and if indeed it wasn’t, whether it might then reasonably imply the presence of a third pair of men, which might or might not be the two tough guys from Dorothy’s farm, however inexplicable those six men’s association might be, however mysterious their purpose, while simultaneously watching the man in front of him dropping his car key, and moving his arm, and putting his hand in his coat pocket, while simultaneously realizing that the guys he had seen on Dorothy’s farm had not been staying at Vincent’s motel, and that there was nowhere else to stay except right there, sixty miles south at the Marriott, which meant that the Chevrolet was likely theirs, at least within the bounds of reasonable possibility, which meant that the Iranian with the moving arm was likely connected with them in some way, which made the guy an enemy, although Reacher had no idea how or why, while simultaneously knowing that likely didn’t mean shit in terms of civilian jurisprudence, while simultaneously recalling years of hard-won experience that told him men like this Iranian went for their pockets in dark parking lots for one of only four reasons: either to pull out a cell phone to call for help, or to pull out a wallet or a passport or an ID to prove their innocence or their authority, or to pull out a knife, or to pull out a gun. Reacher knew all that, while also knowing that violent reaction ahead of the first two reasons would be inexcusable, but that violent reaction ahead of the latter two reasons would be the only way to save his life.
Starbursts and waterfalls and explosions of thoughts, all jostling and competing and fighting for supremacy.
Better safe than sorry.
Reacher reacted.
He twisted from the waist in a violent spasm and started a low sidearm punch aimed at the center of the Iranian’s chest. Chemical reaction in his brain, instantaneous transmission of the impulse, chemical reaction in every muscle system from his left foot to his right fist, total elapsed time a small fraction of a second, total distance to target less than a yard, total time to target another small fraction of a second, which was good to know right then, because the guy’s hand was all the way in his pocket by that point, his own nervous system reacting just as fast as Reacher’s, his elbow jerking up and back and trying to free whatever the hell it was he wanted, be it a knife, or a gun, or a phone, or a driver’s license, or a passport, or a government ID, or a perfectly innocent letter from the University of Tehran proving he was a world expert on plant genetics and an honored guest in Nebraska just days away from increasing local profits a hundredfold and eliminating world hunger at one fell swoop. But right or wrong Reacher’s fist was homing in regardless and the guy’s eyes were going wide and panicked in the gloom and his arm was jerking harder and the brown skin and the black hair on the back of his moving hand was showing above the hem of his pocket, and then came his knuckles, all five of them bunched and knotted because his fingers were clamping hard around something big and black.
Then Reacher’s blow landed.
Two hundred and fifty pounds of moving mass, a huge fist, a huge impact, the zipper of the guy’s coat driving backward into his breastbone, his breastbone driving backward into his chest cavity, the natural elasticity of his ribcage letting it yield whole inches, the resulting violent compression driving the air from his lungs, the hydrostatic shock driving blood back into his heart, his head snapping forward like a crash test dummy, his shoulders driving backward, his weight coming up off the ground, his head whipping backward again and hitting a plate-glass window behind him with a dull boom like a kettle drum, his arms and legs and torso all going down like a rag doll, his body falling, sprawling, the hard polycarbonate click and clatter of something black skittering away on the ground, Reacher tracking it all the way in the corner of his eye, not a wallet, not a phone, not a knife, but a Glock 17 semiautomatic pistol, all dark and boxy and wicked. It ended up six or eight feet away from the guy, completely out of his reach, safe, not retrievable, partly because of the distance itself and partly because the guy was down and he wasn’t moving at all.
In fact he was looking like he might never move again.
Something Reacher had heard about, but never actually seen.
His army medic friends had called it commotio cordis, their name for low-energy trauma to the chest wall. Low energy only in the sense that the damage wasn’t done by a car wreck or a shotgun blast but by a line drive in baseball or a football collision or a punch in a fight or a bad fall onto a blunt object. Gruesome research on laboratory animals proved it was all about luck and timing. Electrocardiograms showed waveforms associated with the beating of the heart, one of which was called the T-wave, and the experiments showed that if the blow landed when the T-wave was between fifteen and thirty milliseconds short of its peak, then lethal cardiac dysrhythmias could occur, stopping the heart just like a regular heart attack. And in a high-stress environment like a confrontation in a parking lot, a guy’s heart was pounding away much harder than normal and therefore it was bringing those T-wave peaks around much faster than usual, as many as two or possibly three times a second, thereby dramatically increasing the odds that the luck and the timing would be bad, not good.
The Iranian lay completely still.
No visible pulse.
No signs of life.
The standard first-aid remedies taught by the army medics were artificial respiration and external chest compressions, eighty beats a minute, as long as it took, but Reacher’s personal rule of thumb was never to revive a guy who had just pulled a gun on him. He was fairly inflexible on the matter. So he let nature take its course for a minute, and then he helped it along a little with heavy pressure from his finger and thumb on the big arteries in the guy’s neck. Four minutes without oxygen to the brain was reckoned to be the practical limit. Reacher gave it five, just to be certain, squatting there, looking around, listening hard. No one reacted. No one came. The Iranian died, the slack tensions of deep unconsciousness fading away, the absolute soft limpness of recent death replacing them. Reacher stood up and found the car key and picked up the Glock. The key was marked with the Chevrolet stove bolt logo, but it wasn’t for the blue car. Reacher stabbed the unlock button and nothing happened. The Glock was close to new and fully loaded, seventeen bright nine-millimeter Parabellums in the magazine and one in the chamber. Reacher put it in his pocket with his screwdrivers.
He walked back to the front lot and tried again with the key. A yellow Chevy Malibu answered him. It flashed all four of its turn signals and unlocked all four of its doors. It was new and plain and clean. An obvious rental. He got in and pushed the seat back and started it up. The tank was close to full. There were rental papers in the door pocket, dated that day and made out to a Las Vegas corporation under a name that communicated nothing. There were bottles of water in the cup holders, one part-used, one unopened. Reacher backed out of the slot and drove around to the back of the H and stopped with the dead guy between the wall and the car. He found the remote button and popped the trunk. He got out and checked the space. It was not a very big opening and not a very big trunk, but then, the Iranian was not a very big guy.