Echo Burning by Lee Child

by Echo Burning (com v2. 0) (lit)

  Walker nodded.

  “I will,” he said. “I promise.”

  “We’ll go as FBI again,” the woman said. “It’s a no-brainer.”

  “All of us?” the driver asked. “What about the kid?”

  The woman paused. She had to go, because she was the shooter. And if she had to split the team two and one, she wanted the tall guy with her, not the driver.

  “You stay with the kid,” she said.

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Abort horizon?” the driver asked.

  It was their standard operating procedure. Whenever the team was split, the woman set an abort horizon. Which meant that you waited until the time had passed, and then, if the team wasn’t together again, you got the hell out, every man for himself.

  “Four hours, O.K.?” the woman said. “Done and dusted.”

  She stared at him a second longer, eyebrows raised, to make sure he understood the implication of her point. Then she knelt and unzipped the heavy valise.

  “So let’s do it,” she said.

  They did the exact same things they had done for Al Eugene, except they did them a whole lot faster because the Crown Vic was parked in the motel’s lot, not hidden in a dusty turnout miles from anywhere. The lot was dimly lit and mostly empty, and there was nobody around, but it still wasn’t a secure feeling. They pulled the wheel covers off and threw them in the trunk. They attached the communications antennas to the rear window and the trunk lid. They zipped blue jackets over their shirts. They loaded up with spare ammunition clips. They squared the souvenir ballcaps on their heads. They checked the loads in their nine-millimeter pistols and racked the slides and clicked the safety catches and jammed the guns in their pockets. The tall fair man slipped into the driver’s seat. The woman paused outside the motel room door.

  “Four hours,” she said again. “Done and dusted.”

  The driver nodded and closed the door behind her. Glanced over at the kid in the bed. Done and dusted meant leave nothing at all behind, especially live witnesses.

  Reacher took the Heckler & Koch and the maps of Texas and the FedEx packet out of the VW and carried them into Alice’s house, straight through the living room and into the kitchen area. It was still and cool inside. And dry. The central air was running hard. He wondered for a second what her utility bills must be like.

  “Where’s the scale?” he asked.

  She pushed past him and squatted down and opened a cupboard. Used two hands and lifted a kitchen scale onto the countertop. It was a big piece of equipment. It was new, but it looked old. A retro design. It had a big white upright face the size of a china plate, like the speedometer on an old-fashioned sedan. It was faced with a bulbous plastic window with a chromium bezel. There was a red pointer behind the window and large numbers around the circumference. A manufacturer’s name and a printed warning: Not Legal For Trade.

  “Is it accurate?” he asked.

  Alice shrugged.

  “I think so,” she said. “The nut roast comes out O.K.”

  There was a chromium bowl resting in a cradle above the dial. He tapped on it with his finger and the pointer bounced up to a pound and then back down to zero. He took the magazine out of the Heckler & Koch and laid the empty gun in the bowl. It made a light metallic sound. The pointer spun up to two pounds and six ounces. Not an especially light weapon. About right, he figured. His memory told him the catalog weight was in the region of forty-three ounces, with an empty magazine.

  He put the gun back together and opened cupboards until he found a store of food. He lifted out an unopened bag of granulated sugar. It was in a gaudy yellow packet that said 5 lbs. on the side.

  “What are you doing?” Alice asked.

  “Weighing things,” he said.

  He stood the sugar upright in the chromium bowl. The pointer spun up to five pounds exactly. He put the sugar back in the cupboard and tried a cellophane-wrapped packet of chopped nuts. The pointer read two pounds. He looked at the label on the packet and saw 2 lbs.

  “Good enough,” he said.

  He folded the maps and laid them across the top of the bowl. They weighed one pound and three ounces. He took them off and put the nuts back on. Still two pounds. He put the nuts back in the cupboard and tried the FedEx packet. It weighed one pound and one ounce. He added the maps and the pointer inched up to two pounds and four ounces. Added the loaded gun on top and the pointer jerked around to five pounds and three ounces. If he had wanted to, he could have calculated the weight of the bullets.

  “O.K., let’s go,” he said. “But we need gas. Long ride ahead. And maybe you should get out of that dress. You got something more active?”

  “I guess,” she said, and headed for the stairs.

  “You got a screwdriver?” he called after her.

  “Under the sink,” she called back.

  He bent down and found a brightly colored toolbox in the cupboard. It was made out of plastic and looked like a lunch pail. He clicked it open and selected a medium-sized screwdriver with a clear yellow handle. A minute later Alice came back down the stairs wearing baggy khaki cargo pants and a black T-shirt with the sleeves torn off at the shoulder seams.

  “O.K.?” she asked.

  “Me and Judith,” he said. “Got a lot in common.”

  She smiled and said nothing.

  “I’m assuming your car is insured,” he said. “It could get damaged tonight.”

  She said nothing. Just locked up her door and followed him out to the VW. She drove out of her complex, with Reacher craning his neck, watching the shadows. She got gas at a neon-bright all-night station out on the El Paso road. Reacher paid for it.

  “O.K., back to the courthouse,” he said. “Something I want from there.”

  She said nothing. Just turned the car and headed east. Parked in the lot behind the building. They walked around and tried the street door. It was locked up tight.

  “So what now?” she asked.

  It was hot on the sidewalk. Still up there around ninety degrees, and damp. The breeze had died again. There were clouds filling the sky.

  “I’m going to kick it in,” he said.

  “There’s probably an alarm.”

  “There’s definitely an alarm. I checked.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m going to set it off.”

  “Then the cops will come.”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  “You want to get us arrested?”

  “They won’t come right away. We’ve got three or four minutes, maybe.”

  He took two paces back and launched forward and smashed the flat of his sole above the handle. The wood splintered and sagged open a half inch, but held. He kicked again and the door crashed back and bounced off the corridor wall. A blue strobe high up outside started flashing and an urgent electric bell started ringing. It was about as loud as he had expected.

  “Go get the car,” he said. “Get it started and wait for me in the alley.”

  He ran up the stairs two at a time and kicked in the outer office door without breaking stride. Jinked through the secretarial pen like a running back and steadied himself and kicked in Walker’s door. It smashed back and the venetian blind jerked sideways and the glass pane behind it shattered and the shards rained down like ice in winter. He went straight for the bank of filing cabinets. The lights were off and the office was hot and dark and he had to peer close to read the labels. It was an odd filing system. It was arranged partly in date order and partly by the alphabet. That was going to be a minor problem. He found a cabinet marked B and jammed the tip of the screwdriver into the keyhole and hammered it in with the heel of his hand. Turned it sharp and hard and broke the lock. Pulled the drawer and raked through the files with his fingers.

  The files all had tiny labels encased in plastic tabs arranged so they made a neat diagonal from left to right. The labels were all typed with words starting with B. But the contents of the files were way too recent. Nothin
g more than four years old. He stepped two paces sideways and skipped the next B drawer and went to the next-but-one. The air was hot and still and the bell was ringing loud and the glare of the flashing blue strobe pulsed in through the windows. It was just about keeping time with his heartbeat.

  He broke the lock and slid the drawer. Checked the labels. No good. Everything was either six or seven years old. He had been inside the building two minutes and thirty seconds. He could hear a distant siren under the noise of the bell. He stepped sideways again and attacked the next B drawer. He checked the dates on the tabs and walked his fingers backward. Two minutes and fifty seconds. The bell seemed louder and the strobe seemed brighter. The siren was closer. He found what he was looking for three-quarters of the way back through the drawer. It was a two-inch-thick collection of paperwork in a heavy paper sling. He lifted the whole thing out and tucked it under his arm. Left the drawer all the way open and kicked all the others shut. Ran through the secretarial pen and down the stairs. Checked the street from the lobby and when he was certain it was clear he ducked around into the alley and straight into the VW.

  “Go,” he said.

  He was a little breathless, and that surprised him.

  “Where?” Alice asked.

  “South,” he said. “To the Red House.”

  “Why? What’s there?”

  “Everything,” he said.

  She took off fast and fifty yards later Reacher saw red lights pulsing in the distance behind them. The Pecos Police Department, arriving at the courthouse just a minute too late. He smiled in the dark and turned his head in time to catch a split-second glimpse of a big sedan nosing left two hundred yards ahead of them into the road that led down to Alice’s place. It flashed through the yellow wash of a streetlight and disappeared. It looked like a police-spec Crown Victoria, plain steel wheels and four VHF antennas on the back. He stared into the darkness that had swallowed it and turned his head as they passed.

  “Fast as you can,” he said to Alice.

  Then he laid the captured paperwork on his knees and reached up and clicked on the dome light so he could read it.

  The B was for “border patrol,” and the file summarized the crimes committed by it twelve years ago and the measures taken in response. It made for unpleasant reading.

  The border between Mexico and Texas was very long, and for an accumulated total of about half its length there were roads and towns near enough on the American side to make it worth guarding pretty closely. Theory was if illegals penetrated there, they could slip away into the interior fast and easily. Other sectors had nothing to offer except fifty or a hundred miles of empty parched desert. Those sectors weren’t really guarded at all. Standard practice was to ignore the border itself and conduct random vehicle sweeps behind the line by day or night to pick the migrants up at some point during their hopeless three- or four-day trudge north across the wastelands. It was a practice that worked well. After the first thirty or so miles on foot through the heat the migrants became pretty passive. Often they surrendered willingly. Often the vehicle sweeps turned into first-aid mercy missions, because the walkers were sick and dehydrated and exhausted because they had no food or water.

  They had no food or water because they had been cheated. Usually they would pay their life savings to some operator on the Mexican side who was offering them a fully accompanied one-way trip to paradise. Vans and minibuses would take them from their villages to the border, and then the guide would crouch and point across a deserted footbridge to a distant sandhill and swear that more vans and minibuses were waiting behind it, full of supplies and ready to go. The migrants would take a deep breath and sprint across, only to find nothing behind the distant sandhill. Too hopeful and too afraid to turn back, they would just blindly walk ahead into exhaustion.

  Sometimes there would be a vehicle waiting, but its driver would demand a separate substantial payment. The migrants had nothing left to offer, except maybe some small items of personal value. The new driver would laugh and call them worthless. Then he would take them anyway and offer to see what cash he could raise on them up ahead. He would drive off in a cloud of hot dust and never be seen again. The migrants would eventually realize they had been duped, and they would start stumbling north on foot. Then it became a simple question of endurance. The weather was key. In a hot summer, the mortality rate was very high. That was why the border patrol’s random sweeps were often seen as mercy missions.

  Then that suddenly changed.

  For a whole year, the roving vehicles were as likely to bring sudden death as arrest or aid. At unpredictable intervals, always at night, rifles would fire and a truck would roar in and swoop and maneuver until one lone runner was winnowed out from the pack. Then the lone runner would be hunted for a mile or so and shot down. Then the truck would disappear into the dark again, engine roaring, headlights bouncing, dust trailing, and stunned silence would descend.

  Sometimes it wasn’t so clean.

  Some victims were wounded and dragged away and tortured. The corpse of one teenage boy was found tied to a cactus stump with barbed wire. He had been partially flayed. Some were burned alive or beheaded or mutilated. Three teenage girls were captured over a period of four months. Their autopsy details were gruesome.

  None of the survivor families made official complaints. They all shared the illegal’s basic fear of involvement with bureaucracy. But stories began to circulate around the community of legal relatives and their support groups. Lawyers and rights advocates started compiling files. Eventually the subject was broached at the appropriate level. A low-level inquiry was started. Evidence was gathered, anonymously. A provable total of seventeen homicides was established. Added to that was an extrapolated figure of eight more, to represent cases where bodies had never been found or where they had been buried by the survivors themselves. Young Raoul García’s name was included in the second total.

  There was a map in the file. Most of the ambushes had taken place inside a pear-shaped pocket of territory enclosing maybe a hundred square miles. It was marked on the map like a stain. It was centered on a long north-south axis with the southerly bulge sitting mostly inside the Echo County line. That meant the victims had already made it fifty miles or more. By then they would be weak and tired and in no shape to resist.

  Border patrol brass launched a full-scale investigation one August, eleven months after the first vague rumors surfaced. There was one more attack at the end of that month, and then nothing ever again. Denied an ongoing forensic basis for examination, the investigation got nowhere at all. There were preventive measures enforced, like strict accounting of ammunition and increased frequency of radio checks. But no conclusions were reached. It was a thorough job, and to their credit the brass kept hard at it, but a retrospective investigation into a closed paramilitary world where the only witnesses denied ever having been near the border in the first place was hopeless. The matter wound down. Time passed. The homicides had stopped, the survivors were building new lives, the immigration amnesties had insulated the outrage. The tempo of investigation slowed to a halt. The files were sealed four years later.

  “So?” Alice said.

  Reacher butted the papers together with the heel of his hand. Closed the file. Pitched it behind him into the rear seat.

  “Now I know why she lied about the ring,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “She didn’t lie. She was telling the truth.”

  “She said it was a fake worth thirty bucks.”

  “And she thought that was the truth. Because some jeweler in Pecos laughed at her and told her it was a fake worth thirty bucks. And she believed him. But he was trying to rip her off, was all, trying to buy it for thirty bucks and sell it again for sixty thousand. Oldest scam in the world. Exact same thing happened to some of these immigrants in the file. Their first experience of America.”

  “The jeweler lied?”

  He nodded. “I should have figured it before, because it’
s obvious. Probably the exact same guy we went to. I figured he didn’t look like the Better Business Bureau’s poster boy.”

  “He didn’t try to rip us off.”

  “No, Alice, he didn’t. Because you’re a sharp-looking white lawyer and I’m a big tough-looking white guy. She was a small Mexican woman, all alone and desperate and scared. He saw an opportunity with her that he didn’t see with us.”

  Alice was quiet for a second.

  “So what does it mean?” she asked.

  Reacher clicked off the dome light. Smiled in the dark and stretched. Put his palms on the dash in front of him and flexed his massive shoulders against the pressure.

  “It means we’re good to go,” he said. “It means all our ducks are in a neat little row. And it means you should drive faster, because right now we’re maybe twenty minutes ahead of the bad guys, and I want to keep it that way as long as I can.”

  She blew straight through the sleeping crossroads hamlet once again and made the remaining sixty miles in forty-three minutes, which Reacher figured was pretty good for a yellow four-cylinder import with a bud vase next to the steering wheel. She made the turn in under the gate and braked hard and stopped at the foot of the porch steps. The porch lights were on and the VW’s dust fogged up around them in a khaki cloud. It was close to two o’clock in the morning.

  “Leave it running,” Reacher said.

  He led her up to the door. Hammered hard on it and got no reply. Tried the handle. It was unlocked. Why would it be locked? We’re sixty miles from the nearest crossroads. He swung it open and they stepped straight into the red-painted foyer.

  “Hold your arms out,” he said.

  He unloaded all six .22 hunting rifles out of the rack on the wall and laid them in her arms, alternately muzzle to stock so they would balance. She staggered slightly under the weight.

  “Go put them in the car,” he said.