by Lee Child
“You’re going to break my legs and dump me on the side of the road.”
“That’s a little pessimistic. Why would I break both of them?”
“It’s not a joke. Those four guys you hurt will never work again.”
“They’ll never work for the Duncans again. But there are other things to do in life. Better things.”
“Like what?”
“You could shovel shit on a chicken farm. You could whore yourself out in Tijuana. With a donkey. Either thing would be better than working for the Duncans.”
The guy said nothing. Just drove.
Reacher asked, “How much do the Duncans pay you?”
“More than I could get back in Kentucky.”
“In exchange for what, precisely?”
“Just being around, mostly.”
Reacher asked, “Who are those Italian guys in the overcoats?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do they want?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where are they now?”
“I don’t know.”
They were in the blue Impala, already ten miles north of the Marriott, Roberto Cassano at the wheel, Angelo Mancini sitting right beside him. Cassano was working hard to stay behind Safir’s boys in their red Ford, and both drivers were working hard to keep Mahmeini’s guys in sight. The big black Cadillac was really hustling. It was doing more than eighty miles an hour. It was way far outside of its comfort zone. It was bouncing and wallowing and floating. It was quite a sight. Angelo Mancini was staring ahead at it. He was obsessed with it.
He asked, “Is it a rental?”
Cassano was much quieter. Occupied by driving, certainly, concentrating on the crazy high-speed dash up the road, definitely, but thinking, too. Thinking hard.
He said, “I don’t think it’s a rental.”
“So what is it? I mean, what? Those guys have their own cars standing by in every state? Just in case? How is that possible?”
“I don’t know,” Cassano said.
“I thought at first maybe it’s a limo. You know, like a car service. But it isn’t. I saw the little squirt driving it himself. Not a car service driver. Just a glimpse, but it was him. The one who mouthed off at you.”
Cassano said, “I didn’t like him.”
“Me either. And even less now. They’re way bigger than we are. Way bigger than we thought. I mean, they have their own cars on standby in every state? They fly in on the casino plane, and there’s a car there for them, wherever? What’s that about?”
“I don’t know,” Cassano said again.
“Is it a funeral car? Do the Iranians run funeral parlors now? That could work, right? Mahmeini could call the nearest parlor and say, send us one of your cars.”
“I don’t think the Iranians took over the funeral business.”
“So what else? I mean, how many states are there? Fifty, right? That’s at least fifty cars standing by.”
“Not even Mahmeini can be active in all fifty states.”
“Maybe not Alaska and Hawaii. But he’s got cars in Nebraska, apparently. How far up the list is Nebraska likely to be?”
“I don’t know,” Cassano said again.
“OK,” Mancini said. “You’re right. It has to be a rental.”
“I told you it’s not a rental,” Cassano said. “It can’t be. It’s not a current model.”
“Times are tough. Maybe they rent older cars now.”
“It’s not even last year’s model. Or the year before. That’s practically an antique. That’s an old-guy car. That’s your neighbor’s granddad’s Cadillac.”
“Maybe they have rent-a-wreck here.”
“Why would Mahmeini need that?”
“So what is it?”
“It doesn’t really matter what it is. You’re not looking at the big picture. You’re missing the point.”
“Which is what?”
“That car was already at the hotel. We parked right next to it, remember? Late afternoon, when we got back. Those guys were there before us. And you know what that means? It means they got there before Rossi even asked Mahmeini to send them. Something really weird is going on here.”
The metallic gold GMC Yukon turned left off the north-south two-lane and headed west toward Wyoming on another two-lane that was just as straight and featureless as the first. Reacher pictured planners and engineers a century before, hard at work, leaning over parchment maps and charts with long rulers and sharp pencils, drawing roads, dispatching crews, opening up the interior. He asked, “How far now, John?”
The kid said, “We’re real close,” which as always turned out to be a relative statement. Real close in some places meant fifty yards, or a hundred. In Nebraska it meant ten miles and fifteen minutes. Then Reacher saw a group of dim lights, off to the right, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. The truck slowed and turned, another precise ninety-degree angle, and headed north on a blacktop strip engineered in a different way from the standard county product. A private approach road, leading toward what looked like a half-built or half-demolished industrial facility of some kind. There was a concrete rectangle the size of a football field, possibly an old parking lot but more likely the floor slab of a factory that had either never been completed or had been later dismantled. It was enclosed on all four sides by a head-high hurricane fence that was topped by a mean and token allocation of razor wire. Here and there the fence posts carried lights, like domestic backyard fixtures, containing what must have been regular sixty- or hundred-watt bulbs. The whole enormous space was empty, apart from two gray panel vans in a marked-off bay big enough to handle three.
The approach road was scalloped out at one point to allow access in and out of the concrete rectangle through a pair of gates. Then it ran onward toward a long low one-story building built of brick in an unmistakable style. Classic 1940s industrial architecture. The building was an office block, built to serve the factory it once stood next to. The factory would have been a defense plant, almost certainly. Give a government a choice of where to build in wartime, and it will seek the safe center of a landmass, away from coastal shelling and marauding airplanes and potential invasion sites. Nebraska and other heartland states had been full of such places. The ones lucky enough to be engaged on fantasy Cold War systems were probably still in business. The ones built to produce basic war-fighting items like boots and bullets and bandages had perished before the ink was dry on the armistice papers.
The kid called John said, “This is it. We live in the office building.”
The building had a flat roof with a brick parapet, and a long line of identical windows, small panes framed with white-painted steel. In the center was an unimpressive double door with a lobby behind it and dim bulkhead lights either side of it. In front of the doors was a short concrete path that led from an empty rectangle made of cracked and weedy paving stones, the size of two tennis courts laid end to end. Managerial parking, presumably, back in the day. There were no lights on inside the building. It just stood there, dead to the world.
Reacher asked, “Where are the bedrooms?”
John said, “To the right.”
“And your buddies are in there now?”
“Yes. Five of them.”
“Plus you, that’s six legs to break. Let’s go do it.”
Chapter 38
Reacher made the guy get out of the truck the same way he had before, through the passenger door, awkward and unbalanced and unable to spring any surprises. He tracked him with the Glock and glanced beyond the wire and asked, “Where are all the harvest trucks?”
The guy said, “They’re in Ohio. Back at the factory, for refurbishment. They’re specialist vehicles, and some of them are thirty years old.”
“What are the two gray vans for?”
“This and that. Service and repairs, tires, things like that.”
“Are there supposed to be three?”
“One is out. It’s been gone a few days.”
“Doing what?”
“I don’t know.”
Reacher asked, “When do the big trucks get back?”
The guy said, “Spring.”
“What’s this place like in the early summer?”
“Pretty busy. The first alfalfa crop gets harvested early. There’s a lot of preparation ahead of time and a lot of maintenance afterward. This place is humming.”
“Five days a week?”
“Seven, usually. We’re talking forty thousand acres here. That’s a lot of output.” The guy closed the passenger door and took a step. Then he stopped dead, because Reacher had stopped dead. Reacher was staring ahead at the empty rectangle in front of the building. The cracked stones. The managerial parking lot. Nothing in it.
Reacher asked, “Where do you normally park your truck, John?”
“Right out front there, by the doors.”
“Where do your buddies park?”
“Same place.”
“So where are they?”
The nighttime silence clamped down and the young man’s mouth came open a little, and he whirled around as if he was expecting his friends to be hiding somewhere behind him. Like a practical joke. But they weren’t. He turned back and said, “I guess they’re out. They must have gotten a call.”
“From you?” Reacher asked. “When you saw Mrs. Duncan?”
“No, I swear. I didn’t call. You can check my phone.”
“So who called them?”
“Mr. Duncan, I guess. Mr. Jacob, I mean.”
“Why would he?”
“I don’t know. Nothing was supposed to happen tonight.”
“He called them but he didn’t call you?”
“No, he didn’t call me. I swear. Check my phone. He wouldn’t call me anyway. I’m on sentry duty. I was supposed to stay put.”
“So what’s going on, John?”
“I don’t know.”
“Best guess?”
“The doctor. Or his wife. Or both of them together. They’re always seen as the weakest link. Because of his drinking. Maybe the Duncans think they have information.”
“About what?”
“You, of course. About where you are and what you’re doing and whether you’re coming back. That’s what’s on their minds.”
“It takes five guys to ask those questions?”
“Show of force,” the kid said. “That’s what we’re here for. A surprise raid in the middle of the night can shake people up.”
“OK, John,” Reacher said. “You stay here.”
“Here?”
“Go to bed.”
“You’re not going to hurt me?”
“You already hurt yourself. You showed no fight at all against a smaller, older man. You’re a coward. You know that now. That’s as good to me as a dislocated elbow.”
“Easy for you to say. You’ve got a gun.”
Reacher put the Glock back in his pocket. He folded the flap down and stood with his arms out, hands empty, palms forward, fingers spread.
He said, “Now I don’t. So bring it on, fat boy.”
The guy didn’t move.
“Go for it,” Reacher said. “Show me what you’ve got.”
The guy didn’t move.
“You’re a coward,” Reacher said again. “You’re pathetic. You’re a waste of good food. You’re a useless three-hundred-pound sack of shit. And you’re ugly, too.”
The guy said nothing.
“Last chance,” Reacher said. “Step up and be a hero.”
The guy walked away, head down, shoulders slumped, toward the dark building. He stopped twenty feet later and looked back. Reacher looped around the rear of the Yukon, to the driver’s door. He got in. The seat was too far back. The kid was huge. But Reacher wasn’t about to adjust it in front of the guy. Some stupid male inhibition, way in the back of his brain. He just started up and turned and drove away, and fixed it on the fly.
The Yukon drove OK, but the brakes were a little spongy. The result of the panic stop, probably, back at the old roadhouse. Five years’ wear and tear, all in one split second. But Reacher didn’t care. He wasn’t braking much. He was hustling hard, concentrating on speeding up, not slowing down. Twenty miles was a long distance, through the empty rural darkness.
He saw nothing the whole way. No lights, no other vehicles. No activity of any kind. He got back to the main two-lane north of the motel and five minutes later he passed the place. It was all closed up and dark. No blue neon. No activity. No cars, except the wrecked Subaru. It was still there, beaded over with dew, low down on slowly softening tires, sad and inert, like roadkill. Reacher charged onward past it, and then he made the right and the left and the right, along the boundaries of the dark empty fields, like twice before, to the plain ranch house with the post-and-rail fence and the flat, featureless yard.
There were lights on in the house. Plenty of them. Like a cruise ship at night on the open ocean. But there was no sign of uproar. There were no cars on the driveway. No pick-up trucks, no SUVs. No large figures in the shadows. No sound, no movement. Nothing. The front door was closed. The windows were intact.
Reacher turned in and parked in the driveway and walked to the door. He stood right in front of the spy hole and rang the bell. There was a whole minute’s delay. Then the spy hole darkened and lightened and locks and chains rattled and the doctor opened up. He looked tired and battered and worried. His wife was standing behind him in the hallway, in the bright light, with the phone to her ear. The phone was the old-fashioned kind, big and black on a table, with a dial and a curly wire. The doctor’s wife was not talking. She was just listening, concentrating hard, her eyes narrowing and widening.
The doctor said, “You came back.”
Reacher said, “Yes, I did.”
“Why?”
“Are you OK? The Cornhuskers are out and about.”
“We know,” the doctor said. “We just heard. We’re on the phone tree right now.”
“They didn’t come here?”
“Not yet.”
“So where are they?”
“We’re not sure.”
Reacher said, “Can I come in?”
“Of course,” the doctor said. “I’m sorry.” He stepped back and Reacher stepped in. The hallway was very warm. The whole house was warm, but it felt smaller than before, like a desperate little fortress. The doctor closed the door and turned two keys and put the chain back on. He asked, “Did you see the police files?”
Reacher said, “Yes.”
“And?”
“They’re inconclusive,” Reacher said. He moved on into the kitchen. He heard the doctor’s wife say, “What?” She sounded puzzled. Maybe a little shocked. He glanced back at her. The doctor glanced back at her. She said nothing more. Just continued to listen, eyes moving, taking mental notes. The doctor followed Reacher into the kitchen.
“Want coffee?” he asked.
I’m not drunk, he meant.
Reacher said, “Sure. Lots of it.”
The doctor set about filling the machine. The kitchen was even warmer than the hallway. Reacher took off his coat and hung it on the back of a chair.
The doctor asked, “What do you mean, ‘inconclusive’?”
Reacher said, “I mean I could make up a story about how the Duncans did it, but there’s really no proof either way.”
“Can you find proof? Is that why you came back?”
Reacher said, “I came back because those two Italian guys who were after me seem to have joined up with a regular United Nations of other guys. Not a peacekeeping force, either. I think they’re all coming here. I want to know why.”
“Pride,” the doctor said. “You messed with the Duncans, and they won’t tolerate that. Their people can’t handle you, so they’ve called in reinforcements.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” Reacher said. “Those Italians were here before me. You know that. You heard what Eleanor Duncan said. So there’s some other reason. They
have some kind of a dispute with the Duncans.”
“Then why would they help the Duncans in their own dispute with you?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many of them are coming?” the doctor asked.
From the hallway his wife said, “Five of them.” She had just gotten off the phone. She stepped into the kitchen and said, “And they’re not coming. They’re already here. That was the message on the phone tree. The Italians are back. With three other men. Three cars in total. The Italians in their blue Chevy, plus two guys in a red Ford, and one guy in a black car that everyone swears is Seth Duncan’s Cadillac.”
Chapter 39
Reacher poured himself a cup of coffee and thought for a long moment then said, “I left Seth Duncan’s Cadillac at the Marriott.”
The doctor’s wife asked, “So how did you get back here?”
“I took a Chevy Malibu from one of the bad guys.”
“That thing in the driveway?”
“No, that’s a GMC Yukon I took from a football player.”
“So what happened with the Cadillac?”
“I left a guy stranded. I stole his car, and then I guess he stole mine. Probably not deliberate tit for tat. Probably just coincidental, because there wasn’t really an infinite choice down there. He didn’t want some piece-of-shit pick-up truck, obviously, and he didn’t want anything with big-time security built in. The Cadillac fit the bill. Probably the only thing that did. Or else he was just plain lazy, and didn’t want to look around too long. The Cadillac was right there. We were all in the same hotel.”
“Did you see the guys?”
“I didn’t see the Italians. But I saw the other four.”
“That makes six, not five. Where’s the other one?”
“I’ll tell you something,” Reacher said. “The guy who took the Cadillac put his bag on the back seat, not in the trunk.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that’s where the sixth guy is. In the trunk. I put him there.”
“Does he have air?”
“He doesn’t need air. Not anymore.”
“Sweet Jesus. What happened?”
Reacher said, “I think whatever else they’re doing, they’re coming here to get me first. Like a side issue of some kind. Like mission creep. I don’t know why, but that’s the only way I can explain it. The way I see it, they all assembled tonight in the Marriott and the Italians announced the mission and gave the others a description, probably vague and definitely secondhand, because they haven’t actually laid eyes on me yet, and then I bumped into one of the others after that, in the lobby, and he was looking at me, like he was asking himself, is that the guy? Can it be? Can it? I could see him thinking. We got out to the lot and he put his hand in his pocket and I hit him. You ever heard of commotio cordis?”