The Essential Jack Reacher 12-Book Bundle

by Lee Child

  The car was Seth Duncan’s.

  Which was logical, in a sudden, awful, spectacular way. Because everything had been utterly, utterly miscalculated, right from the start. There was no other possible explanation. There was no giant stranger on the rampage. No one had seen him and no one could describe him, because he didn’t exist. He was an invention. He was imaginary. He was bait. He was a ruse. The whole delivery delay was bullshit. It had been staged, from beginning to end. The purpose had been to lure everyone to Nebraska, to be cut out, to be eliminated, to be killed. The Duncans were removing links, severing the chain, intending to remake it with nobody between themselves at the bottom and the Saudis at the top, with a truly massive increase in profit as their prize. Audacious, but obvious, and clearly feasible, clearly within their grasp, because clearly their abilities had been grotesquely underestimated by everyone. They were not the clueless rural hicks everyone thought they were. They were ruthless strategists of stunning and genuine quality, subtle, sophisticated, capable of great insight and penetrating analysis. They had foreseen Mahmeini as their strongest opponent, quite correctly and accurately and realistically, and they had absolutely crippled his response from the get-go by taking Asghar down, somehow, mysteriously, before the bell had even sounded, and then by leaving his untouched body in a car they knew for sure would be found and identified as one of their own.

  So, not just a coup, but a message too, brazenly and artfully and subtly delivered. A message that said: We can do anything we want. We can reach out and touch anyone, anywhere, anytime, and you won’t even begin to understand how we did it. And in case subtlety didn’t impress, they had reached out and burned Safir’s guys to death in the motel lot, in a brutal demonstration of range and power. Rossi’s boys hadn’t done that. Rossi’s boys were probably already dead themselves, somewhere else, somehow else, maybe dismembered or bled out or even crucified. Or buried alive. Rossi’s spokesman had used those very words, on the subject of the Duncans’ tastes.

  Mahmeini’s man felt completely alone. He was completely alone. He was the last survivor. He had no friends, no allies, no familiarity with the terrain. And no idea what to do next, except to lash out, to fight back, to seek revenge.

  No desire to do anything else, either.

  He stared through the darkness at the three Duncan houses. He closed the trunk lid on Asghar, reverently, with soft pressure from eight gentle fingertips, like a sad chord on a church organ. Then he walked along the dirt on the shoulder, back to the passenger door, and he leaned in and picked up his Glock from where it lay on the seat. He closed the door, and skirted the hood, and crossed the road, and stepped onto the dirt of someone’s fallow field, and walked a straight line, parallel with the Duncans’ fenced driveway, their three houses a hundred yards ahead of him, his gun in his right hand, his knife in his left.

  Half a mile behind the Duncan houses, Roberto Cassano slowed and hauled the Chevrolet through a tight turn and let it coast onward toward the compound. A hundred yards out he brought it to a stop with the parking brake. He reached up and switched the dome light so it would stay off when the doors opened. He looked at Angelo Mancini next to him, and they both paused and then nodded and climbed out into the night. They drew their Colts and held them behind their backs, so that the moon glinting off the shiny steel would not be visible from the front. They walked forward together, shoulder to shoulder, a hundred yards to go.

  Chapter 46

  The doctor and his wife and Dorothy Coe were sitting quiet in the dining room, but the football player with the shotgun had moved out of the doorway and gone into the living room, where he was sprawled out full-length on the sofa, watching recorded NFL highlights in high definition on the doctor’s big new television set. His partner had moved off the basement door and was leaning comfortably on the hallway wall, watching the screen at an angle, from a distance. They were both absorbed in the program. The sound was low but distinct, grumbling richly and urgently through the big loudspeakers. The room lights were off, and bright colors from the screen were dancing and bouncing off the walls. Outside the window, the night was dark and still. The phone had rung three times, but no one had answered. Apart from that, all was peaceful. It could have been the day after Christmas, or late on a Thanksgiving afternoon.

  Then all the power in the house went out.

  The TV picture died abruptly and the sound faded away and the subliminal hum of the heating system disappeared. Silence clamped down, elemental and absolute, and the temperature seemed to drop, and the walls seemed to dissolve, as if there was no longer a difference between inside and out, as if the house’s tiny footprint had suddenly blended with the vast emptiness on which it stood.

  The football player in the hallway pushed off the wall and stood still in the center of the space. His partner in the living room swiveled his feet to the floor and sat up straight. He said, “What happened?”

  The other guy said, “I don’t know.”

  “Doctor?”

  The doctor got up from behind the dining table and fumbled his way to the door. He said, “The power went out.”

  “No shit, Sherlock. Did you pay your bill?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Could be the whole area.”

  The guy in the living room found his way to the window and peered into the blackness outside. He said, “How the hell would anyone know?”

  The guy in the hallway asked, “Where are the circuit breakers?”

  The doctor said, “In the basement.”

  “Terrific. Reacher’s awake. And he’s playing games.” The guy crept through the dark to the basement door, feeling his way with his fingertips on the hallway wall. He identified the door by touch and pounded on it. He called, “Turn it back on, asshole.”

  No response.

  Pitch-black throughout the house. Not even a glimmer, anywhere.

  “Turn the power back on, Reacher.”

  No response.

  Cold, and silence.

  The guy from the living room found his way out to the hallway. “Maybe he isn’t awake. Maybe it’s a real outage.”

  His partner asked, “Got a flashlight, doctor?”

  The doctor said, “In the garage.”

  “Go get it.”

  “I can’t see.”

  “Do your best, OK?”

  The doctor shuffled down the hallway, hesitantly, fingers brushing the wall, colliding with the first guy, sensing the second guy’s hulking presence and avoiding it, making it to the kitchen, stumbling against a chair with a hollow rattle of wood, hitting the edge of the table with his thighs. The world of the blind. Not easy. He trailed his fingers along the countertops, passing the sink, passing the stove, making it to the mud room lobby in back. He turned ninety degrees with his hands out in front of him and found the door to the garage. He groped for the knob and opened the door and stepped down into the chill space beyond. He found the workbench and reached up and traced his fingers over the items clipped neatly above it. A hammer, good for hitting. Screwdrivers, good for stabbing. Wrenches, stone cold to the touch. He found the flashlight’s plastic barrel and pulled it out from its clip. He thumbed the switch and a weak yellow beam jumped out. He rapped the head against his palm and the beam sparked a little brighter. He turned and found a football player standing right next to him. The one from the living room.

  The football player smiled and took the flashlight out of his hand and held it under his chin and made a face, like a Halloween lantern. He said, “Good work, doc,” and turned away and used the beam up and down and side to side to paint his way back into the house. The doctor followed, using the same lit memories a second later. The football player said, “Go back in the dining room now,” and shone the beam ahead, showing the doctor the way. The doctor went back to the table and the football player said, “All of you stay right where you are, and don’t move a muscle,” and then he closed the door on them.

  His part
ner said, “So what now?”

  The guy with the flashlight said, “We need to know if Reacher is awake or asleep.”

  “We hit him pretty hard.”

  “Best guess?”

  “What’s yours?”

  The guy with the flashlight didn’t answer. He stepped back down the hallway to the basement door. He pounded on it with the flat of his hand. He called, “Reacher, turn the power back on, or something bad is going to happen up here.”

  No response.

  Silence.

  The guy with the flashlight hit the door again and said, “I’m not kidding, Reacher. Turn the damn power back on.”

  No response.

  Silence.

  The other guy asked again, “So what now?”

  The guy with the flashlight said, “Go get the doctor’s wife.” He aimed the beam at the dining room door and his partner went in and came back out holding the doctor’s wife by the elbow. The guy with the flashlight said, “Scream.”

  She said, “What?”

  “Scream, or I’ll make you.”

  She paused a beat and blinked in the light of the beam, and then she screamed, long and high and loud. Then she stopped and dead silence came back and the guy with the flashlight hammered on the basement door again and called, “You hear that, asshole?”

  No response.

  Silence.

  The guy with the flashlight jerked the beam back toward the dining room and his partner led the doctor’s wife back down the hallway and pushed her inside and closed the door on her again. He said, “So?”

  The guy with the flashlight said, “We wait for daylight.”

  “That’s four hours away.”

  “You got a better idea?”

  “We could call the mothership.”

  “They’ll just tell us to handle it.”

  “I’m not going down there. Not with him.”

  “Me either.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We wait him out. He thinks he’s smart, but he isn’t. We can sit in the dark. Anyone can. It ain’t exactly rocket science.”

  They followed the dancing beam back to the living room and sat side by side on the sofa with the old Remington propped between them. They clicked off the flashlight, to save the battery, and the room went pitch-dark again, and cold, and silent.

  Mahmeini’s man walked parallel with the driveway for a hundred yards and then came up against a length of fence that ran south directly across his path. It defined the lower left-hand part of the cross-bar of the hollow T that was the Duncans’ compound. It was made of five-inch rails, all of them a little gnarled and warped, but easy enough to climb. He got over it without any difficulty and paused for a second with the three pick-up trucks and the Mazda parked to his left, and the southernmost house straight in front of him. The center house was the only one that was dark. The southernmost and the northernmost houses both had light in them, faint and a little secondhand, as if only back rooms were in use and stray illumination was finding its way out to the front windows through internal passageways and open doors. There was the smell of woodsmoke in the air. But no sound, not even talking. Mahmeini’s man hesitated, choosing, deciding, making up his mind. Left or right?

  Cassano and Mancini came on the compound from the rear, out of the dark and dormant field, and they stopped on the far side of the fence opposite the center house, which was Jonas’s, as far as they knew. It was closed up and dark, but both its neighbors had light in their kitchen windows, spilling out in bright bars across the weedy backyard gravel. The gravel was matted down into the dirt, but it was still marginally noisy, Cassano knew. He had walked across it earlier in the day, to find undisturbed locations for his phone calls to Rossi. Their best play would be to stay on the wrong side of the fence, in the last of the field, and then head directly for their chosen point of entry. That would reduce the sound of their approach to a minimum. But which would be their chosen point of entry? Left or right? Jasper’s place, or Jacob’s?

  All four Duncans were in Jasper’s basement, hunting through old cartons for more veterinary anesthetic. The last of the hog dope had been used on Seth’s nose, and his busted hand was going to need something stronger anyway. Two fingers were already swollen so hard the skin was fit to burst. Jasper figured he had something designed for horses, and he planned to find it and flood Seth’s wrist joint with it. He was no anatomist, but he figured the affected nerves had to pass through there somewhere. Where else could they go?

  Seth was not complaining at the delay. Jasper figured he was taking it very well. He was growing up. He had been petulant after the broken nose, but now he was standing tall. Because he had captured his assailant all by himself, obviously. And because he was planning what to do with the guy next. The glow of achievement and the prospect of revenge were anesthetics all by themselves.

  Jonas asked, “Is this it?” He was holding up a round pint bottle made of brown glass. Its label was stained and covered in long technical words, some of them Latin. Jasper squinted across the dim space and said, “Good man. You found it.”

  Then they heard footsteps on the floor above their heads.

  Chapter 47

  Jacob was first up the cellar stairs. His initial thought was that a football player was checking in, but the floors in their houses were typical of old-style construction in rural America, built of boards cut from the hearts of old pines, thick and dense and heavy, capable of transmitting noise but not detail. So it was not possible to say who was in the house by sound alone. He saw no one in the hallway, but when he got to the kitchen he found a man in there, standing still, small and wiry, dark and dead-eyed, rumpled, not very clean, wearing a buttoned shirt without a tie, holding a knife in his left hand and a gun in his right. The knife was held low, but the gun was pointing straight at the center of Jacob’s chest.

  Jacob stood still.

  The man put his knife on the kitchen table and raised his forefinger to his lips.

  Jacob made no sound.

  Behind him his son and his brothers crowded into the kitchen, too soon to be stopped. The man moved the muzzle of his gun, left and right, back and forth. The four Duncans lined up, shoulder to shoulder. The man turned his wrist and moved the muzzle down and up, down and up, patting the air with it. No one moved.

  The man said, “Get on your knees.”

  Jacob asked, “Who are you?”

  The man said, “You killed my friend.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “One of you Duncans did.”

  “We didn’t. We don’t even know who you are.”

  “Get on your knees.”

  “Who are you?”

  The little man picked up his knife again and asked, “Which one of you is Seth?”

  Seth Duncan paused a beat and then raised his good hand, like a kid in class.

  The little man said, “You killed my friend and you put his body in the trunk of your Cadillac.”

  Jacob said, “No, Reacher stole that car this afternoon. It was him.”

  “Reacher doesn’t exist.”

  “He does. He broke my son’s nose. And his hand.”

  The gun didn’t move, but the little man turned his head and looked at Seth. The aluminum splint, the swollen fingers. Jacob said, “We haven’t left here all day. But Reacher was at the Marriott. This afternoon and this evening. We know that. He left the Cadillac there.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “We’re not sure. Close by, we think.”

  “How did he get back?”

  “Perhaps he took your rental car. Did your friend have the key?”

  The little man didn’t answer.

  Jacob asked, “Who are you?”

  “I represent Mahmeini.”

  “We don’t know who that is.”

  “He buys your merchandise from Safir.”

  “We don’t know anyone of that name either. We sell to an Italian gentleman in Las Vegas, name of Mr. Rossi, and after that we have no
further interest.”

  “You’re trying to cut everyone out.”

  “We’re not. We’re trying to get our shipment home, that’s all.”

  “Where is it?”

  “On its way. But we can’t bring it in until Reacher is down.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know why not. This kind of business can’t be done in public. You should be helping us, not pointing guns at us.”

  The little man didn’t answer.

  Jacob said, “Put the gun away, and let’s all sit down and talk. We’re all on the same side here.”

  The little man kept the gun straight and level and said, “Safir’s men are dead too.”

  “Reacher,” Jacob said. “He’s on the loose.”

  “What about Rossi’s boys?”

  “We haven’t seen them recently.”

  “Really?”

  “I swear.”

  The little man was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “OK. Things change. Life moves on, for all of us. From now on you will sell direct to Mahmeini.”

  Jacob Duncan said, “Our arrangement is with Mr. Rossi.”

  The little man said, “Not anymore.”

  Jacob Duncan didn’t answer.

  Cassano and Mancini opted to try Jacob Duncan’s place first. A logical choice, given that Jacob was clearly the head of the family. They backed off the fence a couple of paces and walked parallel with it to a spot opposite Jacob’s kitchen window. The bar of yellow light coming out of it laid a bright rectangle on the gravel, but it fell six feet short of the base of the fence. They climbed the fence and skirted the rectangle, moving quietly across the gravel, Cassano to the right, Mancini to the left, and then they flattened themselves against the back wall of the house and peered in.