by Lee Child
“He won’t,” Reacher said. “He and I are going to work something out.”
Eleanor Duncan said nothing more. She just put her lights back on and her car in gear and drove away, fast and crisp, the sound of her exhaust ripping the night air behind her. Reacher glanced back twice, once when she was half a mile away and again when she was gone altogether. Then he slid into the Malibu’s passenger seat, alongside the guy called John, and he closed his door. He held the Glock right-handed across his body. He said, “Now you’re going to park this car around the back of this old roadhouse. If the speedo gets above five miles an hour, I’m going to shoot you in the side. Without immediate medical attention you’ll live about twenty minutes. Then you’ll die, in hideous agony. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen. Truth is, John, I’ve made it happen, more than once. We clear?”
“Yes.”
“Say it, John. Say we’re clear.”
“We’re clear.”
“How clear are we?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I want you to say we’re crystal clear.”
“You got it. Crystal.”
“OK, so let’s do it.”
The guy fumbled the lever into gear and turned the wheel and drove a wide circle, painfully slow, bumping up on the far shoulder, coming around to the near shoulder, bumping down onto the beaten earth of the old lot, passing the south gable wall, turning sharply behind the building. Reacher said, “Pull ahead and then back in, between the two bump-outs, like parallel parking. Do they ask for that in the Nebraska test?”
The guy said, “I passed in Kentucky. In high school.”
“Does that mean you need me to explain it to you?”
“I know how to do it.”
“OK, show me.”
The guy pulled ahead of the second square bump-out and lined up and backed into the shallow U-shaped bay. Reacher said, “All the way, now. I want the back bumper hard against the wood and I want your side of the car hard against the building. I want you to trash your door mirror, John. Totally trash it. Can you do that for me?”
The guy paused and then turned the wheel harder. He did pretty well. He got the rear bumper hard against the bump-out and he trashed his door mirror good, but he left about an inch between his flank of the car and the back of the building. He checked behind him, checked left, and then looked at Reacher like he was expecting praise.
“Close enough,” Reacher said. “Now shut it down.”
The guy killed the lights and turned off the motor.
Reacher said, “Leave the key.”
The guy said, “I can’t get out. I can’t open my door.”
Reacher said, “Crawl out after me.” He opened his own door and slid out and backed off and stood tall and aimed the gun two-handed.
The guy came out after him, hands and knees, huge and awkward, feet-first, ass high up in the air. He got straight and turned around and said, “Want me to close the door?”
Reacher said, “You’re thinking again, aren’t you, John? You’re thinking it’s dark out here, now the lights are off, and maybe I can’t see too well. You’re figuring maybe this would be a good time. But it isn’t. I can see just fine. An owl has got nothing on me in the eyesight department, John. An owl with night-vision goggles sees worse. Believe it, kid. Just hang in there. You can get through this.”
“I’m not thinking anything,” the guy said.
“So close the door.”
The guy closed the door.
“Now step away from the car.”
The guy stepped away. The car was crammed tight in the back southwest quarter of the shallow bay, occupying a fifteen-by-six footprint within the total thirty-by-twelve space. It would be invisible from the road, either north or south, and no one was going to be in the fields to the east until spring plowing. Safe enough.
Reacher said, “Now move to your right.”
“Where?”
“So when I aim the gun at you I’m aiming parallel with the road.”
The guy moved, two steps, three, and then he stopped and turned and faced front, with his back to the forty empty miles between him and the Cell Block bar.
Reacher asked him, “How close is the nearest house?”
He said, “Miles away.”
“Close enough to hear a gunshot in the night?”
“Maybe.”
“What would they think if they did?”
“Varmint. This is farm country.”
Reacher said, “I’d be happier if you heard the gun go off, John. At least once. I’d be happier if you knew what it was like to have a bullet coming your way. It might help you with all that thinking. It might help you reach sensible conclusions.”
“I won’t try anything.”
“Do I have your word on that?”
“Absolutely.”
“So we’re bonded now, John. I’m trusting you. Am I wise to do that?”
“Absolutely.”
“OK, turn around and walk back to your truck.” Reacher kept ten feet behind the guy all the way, around the back corner of the building, along the face of the south gable wall, across the old lot, back to the two-lane. Reacher said, “Now get in the truck the same way you got out of the car.”
The guy closed the driver’s door and tracked around the hood and opened the passenger door. Reacher watched him all the way. The guy climbed into the passenger seat and lifted his feet one at a time into the driver’s footwell, and then he jacked himself up and over the console between the seats, on the heels of his hands, squirming, scraping, ducking his head. Reacher watched him all the way. When he was settled, Reacher climbed into the passenger seat and closed the door. He swapped the gun into his left hand for a second and put his seat belt on. Then he swapped the gun back to his right and said, “I’ve got my seat belt on, John, but you’re not going to put yours on, OK? Just in case you’re getting ideas. Just in case you’re thinking about driving into a telephone pole. See the point? You do that, and I’ll be fine, but you’ll be hurt bad, and then I’ll shoot you anyway. We clear on that?”
The guy said, “Yes.”
“Say it, John.”
“I’m clear on that.”
“How clear?”
“Crystal.”
“And we’re bonded, right? I have your word, don’t I?”
“Yes.”
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
“Where do you live?”
“At the Duncan Transportation depot.”
“Where is that?”
“From here? About thirty miles, give or take, north and then west.”
“OK, John,” Reacher said. “Take me there.”
Chapter 37
Mahmeini’s man was in his room at the Courtyard Marriott. He was on the phone with Mahmeini himself. The conversation had not started well. Mahmeini had been reluctant to accept that Sepehr had lit out. It was inconceivable to him. It was like being told the guy had grown a third arm. Just not humanly possible.
Mahmeini’s man said, “He definitely wasn’t in the bar.”
“By the time you got there.”
“He was never there. It was a most unpleasant place. I didn’t like it at all. They looked at me like I was dirt. Like I was a terrorist. I doubt if they would even have served me. Asghar wouldn’t have lasted five minutes without getting in a fight. And there was no sign of trouble. There was no blood on the floor. Which there would have been. Asghar is armed, and he’s fast, and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly.”
Mahmeini said, “Then he went somewhere else.”
“I checked all over town. Which didn’t take long. The sidewalks roll up when it gets dark. There’s nowhere to hide. He isn’t here.”
“Women?”
“Are you kidding me? Here?”
“Did you try his phone again?”
“Over and over.”
There was a long, long pause. Mahmeini, in his Las Vegas office, processing data, changing gears
, improvising. He said, “OK, let’s move on. This business is important. It has to be taken care of tomorrow. So you’ll have to manage on your own. You can do that. You’re good enough.”
“But I don’t have a car.”
“Get a ride from Safir’s boys.”
“I thought of that. But the dynamic would be weird. I wouldn’t be in charge. I would be a passenger, literally. And how would I explain why I let Asghar take off somewhere and leave me high and dry? We can’t afford to look like idiots here. Or weak. Not in front of these people.”
“So get another car. Tell the others you told Asghar to go on ahead, or somewhere else entirely, for some other purpose.”
“Get another car? From where?”
Mahmeini said, “Rent one.”
“Boss, this isn’t Vegas. They don’t even have room service here. The nearest Hertz is back at the airport. I’m sure it’s closed until the morning. And I can’t get there anyway.”
Another long, long pause. Mahmeini, recalibrating, re-evaluating, reassessing, planning on the fly. He asked, “Did the others see the first car you were in?”
His guy said, “No. I’m sure they didn’t. We all arrived separately, at different times.”
Mahmeini said, “OK. You’re right about the dynamic. We need to be visibly in charge. And we need to keep the others off balance. So here’s what you’re going to do. Find a suitable car, within the hour. Steal one, if you have to. Then call the others, in their rooms. I don’t care what time it is. Midnight, one o’clock, whatever. Tell them we’ve decided to start the party early. Tell them you’re leaving for the north immediately. Give them five minutes, or you’re going without them. They’ll be in disarray, packing up and running down to the parking lot. You’ll be waiting in your new car. But they won’t know it’s new. And they won’t even notice that Asghar isn’t with you. Not in the dark. Not in all the confusion. Then drive fast. Like a bat out of hell. Be the first one up there. When the others get there, tell them you turned Asghar loose, on foot, behind the lines. That will worry them. It will keep them even more off balance. They’ll be looking over their shoulders all the time. That’s it. That’s what you’re going to do. That’s pretty much a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, wouldn’t you say?”
Mahmeini’s man put his coat on and carried his bag down to the lobby. The desk guy had gone off duty. Presumably there was an all-purpose night porter holed up in a back room somewhere, but Mahmeini’s man didn’t see any sign of him. He just walked out, bag in hand, looking for a car to steal. Which in many ways was a backward step and an affront to his dignity. Guys in his position had left car theft behind a long time ago. But needs must. And he still remembered how. There would be no technical difficulty. He would perform with his usual precision. The difficulty would come from being forced to work with such a meager pool of potential targets.
He had two requirements. First, he needed a vehicle with a degree of prestige. Not necessarily much, but at least some. He couldn’t be seen in a rusted and listing pick-up truck, for instance. That would not be remotely appropriate or plausible for a Mahmeini operative, especially one tasked to impress the Duncans. Image was by no means everything, but it greased the skids. Perception was reality, at least half the time.
Second, he needed a car that wasn’t brand-new. Late-model cars had too much security built in. Computers, micro-chips in the keys, matching micro-chips in the keyholes. Nothing was unbeatable, of course, but a quick-and-dirty street job had its practical limits. Newer cars were best tackled with tow trucks or flat-beds, and then patient hours hidden away with ethernet cables and laptop computers. Lone men in the dark needed something easier.
So, a clean sedan from a mainstream manufacturer, not new, but not too old either. Easy to find in Vegas. Five minutes, tops. But not in rural Nebraska. Not in farm country. He had just walked all over town looking for Asghar, and ninety percent of what he had seen had been utilitarian, either pick-up trucks or ancient four-wheel drives, and ninety-nine percent of those had been worn out, all battered and corroded and failing. Apparently Nebraskans didn’t have much money, and even if they did they seemed to favor an ostentatiously blue-collar lifestyle.
He stood in the cold and reviewed his options. He mapped out the blocks he had quartered before, and he tried to identify the kind of density he needed, and he came up with nothing. He had seen a sign to a hospital, and hospital parking lots were often good, because doctors bought new cars and sold their lightly used cast-offs to nurses and medical students, but for all he knew the hospital was miles away, certainly too far to walk without a guarantee of success.
So he started in the Marriott lot.
And finished there.
He walked all around the H-shaped hotel and saw three pick-up trucks, two with fitted camper beds, and an old Chrysler sedan with Arizona plates and a dented fender and sun-rotted paint, and a blue Chevrolet Impala, and a red Ford Taurus, and a black Cadillac. The pick-ups and the old Chrysler were out of the question for obvious reasons. The Impala and the Taurus were out of the question because they were too new, and they were obviously rentals, because they had bar code stickers in the rear side windows, which meant that almost certainly they belonged to Safir’s guys and Rossi’s guys, and he couldn’t call them down to the lot and have them find him sitting in one of their own cars.
Which left the Cadillac. Right age, right style. Local plates, neat, discreet, well looked after, clean and polished. Black glass. Practically perfect. A no-brainer. He put his bag on the ground right next to it and dropped flat and shuffled on his back until his head was underneath the engine. He had a tiny LED Maglite on his key chain, and he fumbled it out and lit it up and went hunting. Cars of that generation had a module bolted to the frame designed to detect a frontal impact. A simple accelerometer, with a two-stage function. Worst case, it would trigger the airbags. Short of that, it would unlock the doors, so that first responders could drag dazed drivers to safety. A gift to car thieves everywhere, therefore not much publicized, and replaced almost immediately with more sophisticated systems.
He found the module. It was a simple tin can, square and small, cheap and basic, all caked in dry dirt, with wires coming out of it. He took out his knife and used the butt end of the handle and banged hard on the module. Dirt flaked off, but nothing else happened. He thought the dirt was maybe insulating the force of the blow, so he popped the blade on his knife and scraped the front of the module clean. Then he closed the blade and tried again. Nothing happened. He tried a third time, hard enough to worry about the noise he was making, bang, and the message got through. The Cadillac’s dim electronic brain thought it had just suffered a minor frontal impact, not serious enough for the airbags, but serious enough to consider the first responders. There were four ragged thumps from above, and the doors unlocked.
Technology. A wonderful thing.
Mahmeini’s man scrambled out and stood up. A minute later his bag was on the back seat and he was in the driver’s seat. It was set way back. There was enough leg room for a giant. More proof, as if he needed any. Like he had told Rossi’s guy, American peasants were all huge. He found the button and buzzed the cushion forward, on and on, about a foot, and then he jacked the seat back upright and got to work.
He used the tip of his blade to force the steering lock, and then he pulled off the column shroud and stripped the wires he needed with the knife and touched them together. The engine started and a chime told him he didn’t have his seat belt on. He buckled up and backed out and turned around and waited in the narrow lane parallel to the long side of the H, the engine idling silently, the climate control already warming.
Then he pulled out his phone and went through the Marriott switchboard, first to Safir’s guys, then to Rossi’s, in both cases following Mahmeini’s script exactly, telling them that plans had changed, that the party was starting early, that he and Asghar were leaving for the north immediately, and that they had five minutes to get their asses in gear,
no more, or they would be left behind.
The SUV was a GMC Yukon, metallic gold in color, equipped to a high standard with a couple of option packs. It had beige leather inside. It was a nice truck. Certainly the kid called John seemed proud of it, and Reacher could see why. He was looking forward to owning it for the next twelve hours, or however long his remaining business in Nebraska might take.
He said, “Got a cell phone, John?”
The guy paused a fatal beat and said, “No.”
Reacher said, “And you were doing so well. But now you’re screwing up. Of course you’ve got a cell phone. You’re part of an organization. You were on sentry duty. And you’re under thirty, which means you were probably born with a minutes plan.”
The guy said, “You’re going to do to me what you did to the others.”
“What did I do?”
“You crippled them.”
“What were they going to do to me?”
The guy didn’t answer that. They were on the two-lane road, north of the motel, well out in featureless farm country, rolling steadily along, nothing to see beyond the headlight beams. Reacher was half-turned in his seat, his left hand on his knee, his right wrist resting on his left forearm, the Glock held easy in his right hand.
Reacher said, “Give me your cell phone, John.” He saw movement in the guy’s eyes, a flash of speculation, a narrowing of the lids. Fair warning. The guy jacked his butt off the seat and took one hand off the wheel and dug in his pants pocket. He came out with a phone, slim and black, like a candy bar. He went to hand it over, but he lost his grip on it for a moment and juggled it and dropped it in the passenger footwell.
“Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Reacher smiled.
“Good try, John,” he said. “Now I bend over to pick it up, right? And you cave the back of my skull in with your right fist. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.”
The guy said nothing.
Reacher said, “So I guess we’ll leave it right where it is. If it rings, we’ll let it go to voice mail.”
“I had to try.”
“Is that an apology? You promised me.”