by Lee Child
He watched and waited, and he saw the bubble of light resolve itself into twin nervous beams and then twin oval shapes close together and low to the ground. He saw the car slow two hundred yards away and then he saw it turn one hundred yards away, straight into the mouth of the driveway. It was the tiny red Mazda Miata he had seen parked at the restored Duncan farmhouse. The daughter-in-law’s car. She was visiting. Not a social occasion, presumably. Not so late at night. She had called ahead on the phone, probably. She had reported the encounter with the strange Iranian man, and she had been told to come on in, for safety’s sake. Probably the Duncans knew certain things were due to be settled before dawn, and they didn’t want one of their own caught in the crossfire.
Mahmeini’s man watched the Mazda bump and bounce down the driveway. He watched it park alongside the old pick-up trucks. He saw its lights go off. Ten seconds later he saw a doorway flare bright in the distance as a figure went inside, and then the scene went dark again.
Mahmeini’s man watched the road, and waited. The night mist was getting worse. It was becoming a problem. The Cadillac’s windshield was going opaque. He fumbled around and found the wiper stalk and flicked the blades right, left, right, left, and cleared it. Which made the rear screen all the worse in comparison. It was completely dewed over. Even a car with its headlights on would be hard to recognize. Its lights would be atomized into a million separate shards, into a single blinding mess. Worse than useless.
Mahmeini’s man kept one eye on the road ahead and groped around for the rear defogger button. It was hard to find. With the lights off outside, the dash and all the consoles were unlit inside. And there were a lot of buttons. It was a luxury car, fully equipped. He ducked his head and found a button with zigzag symbols on it. It looked like something to do with heating. And it had a red warning lens laid into it. He pressed it, and waited. Nothing happened to the rear window, but his ass got hot. It was the seat warmer, not the defogger. He turned it off and found another button, one eye on the console, one eye on the road ahead. He pressed the button. The radio came on, very loud. He shut it down in a hurry and tried again, another button close by, a satisfying tactile click under his fingertip.
The trunk lid clunked and popped and raised itself up, slowly and smoothly, damped and hydraulic, all the way open, completely vertical.
Now he had no view at all out the back.
Not good.
And presumably there was a courtesy light in the trunk, in reality quite weak and yellow, but no doubt looking like a million-watt searchlight in the dark of the night.
Not good at all.
He pressed the button again, not really thinking. Afterward he realized he had half-expected the trunk lid to close again, slowly and obediently, like the seat warmer and the radio had gone off again. But of course the trunk lid didn’t close again. The release mechanism merely clicked and whirred one more time, and the trunk lid stayed exactly where it was.
Wide open.
Blocking his view.
He was going to have to get out and close it by hand.
Chapter 45
Roberto Cassano and Angelo Mancini had been in the area three whole days, and they figured their one real solid-gold advantage over Mahmeini’s crew was their local knowledge. They knew the lay of the land, literally. Most of all, they knew it was flat and empty. Like a gigantic pool table, with brown felt. Big fields, for efficiency’s sake, no ditches, no hedges, no other natural obstacles, the ground frozen firm and hard. So even though their car was a regular street sedan, they could drive it cross-country without a major problem, pretty much like sailing a small boat on a calm open sea. And they had seen the Duncan compound up close. They had been in it. They knew it well. They could loop around behind it in the car, slow and quiet, lights off, inky blue and invisible in the dark, and then they could get out and climb the crappy post-and-rail fence, and storm the place from the rear. Surprise was everything. There might be eyeballs to the front, but in back there would be nothing at all except the Duncans and Mahmeini’s guys all sitting around in one of the kitchens, probably toasting each other with cheap bourbon and sniggering about their newly streamlined commercial arrangements.
Two handgun rounds would take care of that happy conversation.
Cassano came south on the two-lane and switched off his lights level with the motel. The Ford was still burning in the lot, but only just. The remains of the tires were still giving off coils of greasy rubber smoke, and small flames were licking out of the gravel all around where oil had spilled. Safir’s boys were dark shrunken shapes about half their original size, both fused to the zigzag springs that were all that was left of the seats, their mouths forced open like awful shrieks, their heads burned smooth, their hands up like talons. Mancini smiled and Cassano rolled slowly past them and headed on down the road, cautiously, navigating by the light of the moon.
Four miles south of the motel and one mile north of the Duncan place he slowed some more and turned the wheel and bumped across the shoulder and struck out across the open land. The car lurched and pattered. In a geological sense the ground was dead flat, but down there where the rubber met the dirt it was rutted and lumpy. The springs creaked and bounced and the wheel jumped and chattered in Cassano’s hands. But he made steady progress. He kept it to about twenty miles an hour and held a wide curve, aiming to arrive about half a mile behind the compound. Two minutes, he figured. At one point he had to brake hard and steer around a bramble thicket. Just beyond it they saw the burned-out shell of an SUV. It loomed up at them out of the dark, all black and ashen gray. Reacher’s work, from earlier in the day. But after that it was easy all the way. They could see a pool of faint yellow light ahead, like a homing beacon. A kitchen window, almost certainly, spilling warmth. The southernmost house, probably. Jacob Duncan’s place. The big cheese.
Mahmeini’s man climbed out of the Cadillac and stood for a second in the nighttime cold. He looked all around, east, west, north, south, and he saw nothing stirring. He closed his door, to kill the interior light. He took a step, toward the trunk. He had been right. There was a light in the trunk. It was throwing a pale sphere of yellow glow into the mist. Not serious from the front, but a problem from behind. The human eye was very sensitive.
He took another step, past the rear passenger door, and he raised his left hand, palm flat, somehow already feeling the familiar sensations associated with an action he had performed a thousand times before, his palm on the metal maybe a foot from the edge of the lid, so that the force of his push would act on both hinges equally, so that the panel would not buckle, so that both calibrated springs would stretch together with soft creaks, whereupon the lid would go down smooth and easy until the upmarket mechanism grabbed at it and sucked it all the way shut.
He got as far as putting his palm on the panel.
Subconsciously he leaned into the motion, not really intending to slam the lid, not at all bad-tempered, just seeking a little physical leverage, and his change of position hunched his shoulders a little, which brought his head forward a little, which changed his eye line a little, which meant he had to look somewhere, and given the choice of the lit interior of a previously closed space or a featureless length of dark blacktop, well, any human eye would opt for the former over the latter.
Asghar Arad Sepehr stared back at him.
His sightless eyes were wide open. His olive skin was pale with death and yellow in the light. Forces from braking and accelerating and turning had jammed him awkwardly into the far rear corner of the trunk. His limbs were in disarray. His neck was bent. His look was quizzical.
Mahmeini’s man stood absolutely still, his hand on the cold metal, his mouth open, not really breathing, his heart hardly beating. He forced himself to look away. Then he looked back. He wasn’t hallucinating. Nothing had changed. He started breathing again. Then he started panting. His heart started thumping. He started to shake and shiver.
Asghar Arad Sepehr stared up at him.
&nb
sp; Mahmeini’s man took his hand off the trunk lid and shuffled all the way around to the rear of the car. He stood there with the idling exhaust pooling around his knees and with his fingers steepled against his forehead, looking down, not understanding. Asghar was stone dead, but there was no blood. No gunshot wound between the eyes. No blunt-force trauma, no caved-in skull, no signs of strangulation or suffocation, no knife wounds, no defensive injuries. Nothing at all, except his friend, dead in the trunk, all slack and undignified, all thrown about and jumbled up.
Mahmeini’s man walked away, ten feet, then twenty, and then he turned back and raised his head and raised his arms and howled silently at the moon, his eyes screwed tight shut, his mouth wide open in a desperate snarl, his feet stamping alternately like he was running in place, all alone in the vast empty darkness.
Then he stopped and swiped his hands over his face, one after the other, and he started thinking. But the subtleties were almost completely beyond him. His friend had been killed sixty miles away, by an unknown person and an unknown method with no visible signs, and then locked in the trunk of a car that could have absolutely nothing at all to do with either Rossi’s boys, or Safir’s. Then his own rental had been taken away, so that he had been forced to steal the very same car, the only possible choice in an entire town, inevitably and inexorably, like a puppet being manipulated from afar by a grinning intelligence much greater than his own.
It was incomprehensible.
But facts were facts. He walked back to the trunk and steeled himself to investigate further. He pushed and pulled and hauled Asghar into the center of the space and began a detailed examination, like a pathologist leaning over a mortuary table. The trunk light burned bright and hot, but it revealed nothing. Asghar had no broken bones, and no bruises. His neck was intact. He had no wounds, no cuts, no scrapes, no scratches, and there was nothing under his fingernails. His gun and his knife and his money were missing, which was interesting. And all around him in the trunk were the usual kinds of things a person might expect to find in a trunk, which was odd. No attempt had been made to clean it up. No incriminating evidence had been removed. There was an empty grocery bag with a week-old register receipt inside, and a month-old local newspaper never read and still neatly folded, and some browned and curled leaves and some crumbs of dirt as if items had been hauled home from a plant nursery. Clearly the car belonged to someone who used it in a fairly normal manner, and who had not prepared it in any special way for its current gruesome task.
So, whose car was it? That was the first question. The license plates would reveal the answer, of course, assuming they were genuine. But there might be a faster way to find out, given the fact that nothing seemed to have been sanitized. Mahmeini’s man stepped away to the front passenger door, and opened it, and leaned in, and opened the glove box. He found a black leather wallet the size of a hardcover book, stamped on the front with the Cadillac shield in gold. Inside it he found two instruction books, one thick, one thin, one for the car and one for the radio, and a salesman’s business card clipped into four angled slots, and a registration document, and an insurance document. He pulled out both documents and dropped the wallet in the footwell and held the documents close to the light inside the glove box.
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.