“I don’t know,” he said. “Can’t figure it out. I’ve been going over and over it. They both did good work. Milosevic found the dry cleaner. He brought the video in. Brogan did a lot of work tracing it all back here to Montana. He traced the truck. He liaised with Quantico. My gut says neither one is bent.”
“When was I ID’d?” Reacher asked.
“Thursday morning,” McGrath said. “We had your complete history.”
Reacher nodded.
“He called it in right away,” he said. “These people suddenly knew who I was, Thursday morning.”
McGrath shrugged again.
“They were both there at the time,” he said. “We were all down at Peterson.”
“Did you get Holly’s fax?” Reacher asked.
“What fax?” McGrath said. “When?”
“This morning,” Reacher said. “Early, maybe ten to five? She faxed you a warning.”
“We’re intercepting their line,” McGrath said. “In a truck, down the road here. But ten to five, I was in bed.”
“So who was minding the store?” Reacher asked.
McGrath nodded.
“Milosevic and Brogan,” he said, sourly. “The two of them. Ten to five this morning, they’d just gone on duty. Whichever one of them it is must have gotten the fax and concealed it. But which one, I just don’t know.”
Reacher nodded back.
“We could figure it out,” he said. “Or we could just wait and see. One of them will be walking around best of friends and the other will be in handcuffs, or dead. We’ll be able to tell the difference.”
McGrath nodded, sourly.
“I can’t wait,” he said.
Then Reacher stiffened and pulled him ten yards farther into the woods. He had heard the patrol coming back through the trees.
INSIDE THE COURTROOM. Borken had heard the three shots. He was sitting in the judge’s chair, and he heard them clearly. They went: crack crack . . . crack and repeated a dozen times as each of the distant slopes cannoned the echo back toward him. He sent a runner back to the Bastion. A mile there, a mile back on the winding path through the woods. Twenty minutes wasted, and then the runner got back panting with the news. Three corpses, four cut ropes.
“Reacher,” Borken said. “I should have wasted him at the beginning.”
Milosevic nodded in agreement.
“I want him kept away from me,” Milosevic said. “I heard the autopsy report on your friend Peter Bell. I just want my money and safe passage out of here, OK?”
Borken nodded. Then he laughed. A sharp, nervous laugh that was part excitement, part tension. He stood up and walked out from behind the bench. Laughed and grinned and slapped Milosevic on the shoulder.
HOLLY JOHNSON KNEW no more than most people do about dynamite. She couldn’t remember its exact chemical composition. She knew ammonium nitrate and nitrocellulose were in there somewhere. She wondered about nitroglycerin. Was that mixed in too? Or was that some other kind of explosive? Either way, she figured dynamite was some kind of a sticky fluid, soaked into a porous material and molded into sticks. Heavy sticks, quite dense. If her walls were packed with heavy dense sticks, they would absorb a lot of sound. Like a soundproofing layer in a city apartment. Which meant the shots she’d heard had been reasonably close.
She’d heard: crack crack . . . crack. But she didn’t know who was shooting at who, or why. They weren’t handgun shots. She knew the flat bark of a handgun from her time at Quantico. These were shots from a long gun. Not the heavy thump of the big Barretts from the rifle range. A lighter weapon than that. Somebody firing a medium-caliber rifle three times. Or three people firing once, in a ragged volley. But whichever it was, something was happening. And she had to be ready.
GARBER HEARD THE shots, too. Crack crack . . . crack, maybe a thousand yards northwest of him, maybe twelve hundred. Then a dozen spaced echoes coming back from the mountainsides. He was in no doubt about what they represented. An M-16, firing singles, the first pair in a tight group of two which the military called a double tap. The sound of a competent shooter. The idea was to get the second round off before the first shell case hit the ground. Then a third target, or maybe an insurance shot into the second. An unmistakable rhythm. Like a signature. The audible signature of somebody with hundreds of hours of weapons training behind him. Garber nodded to himself and moved forward through the trees.
“IT MUST BE Brogan,” Reacher whispered.
McGrath looked surprised.
“Why Brogan?” he asked.
They were squatted down, backs to adjacent trunks, thirty yards into the woods, invisible. The search patrol had tracked back and missed them again. McGrath had given Reacher the whole story. He had rattled through the important parts of the investigation, one professional to another, in a sort of insider’s shorthand. Reacher had asked sharp questions and McGrath had given short answers.
“Time and distance,” Reacher said. “That was crucial. Think about it from their point of view. They put us in the truck, and they raced off straight to Montana. What’s that? Maybe seventeen hundred miles? Eighteen hundred?”
“Probably,” McGrath allowed.
“And Brogan’s a smart guy,” Reacher said. “And he knows you’re a smart guy. He knows you’re smart enough to know that he’s smart enough. So he can’t dead-end the whole thing. But what he can do is keep you all far enough behind the action to stop you being a problem. And that’s what he did. He managed the flow of information. The communication had to be two-way, right? So Monday, he knew they’d rented a truck. But right through Wednesday, he was still focusing you on stolen trucks, right? He wasted a lot of time with that Arizona thing. Then he finally makes the big breakthrough with the rental firm and the stuff with the mud, and he looks like the big hero, but in reality what he’s done is keep you way behind the chase. He’s given them all the time they need to get us here.”
“But he still got us here, right?” McGrath said. “A ways behind them, OK, but he brought us right here all the same.”
“No loss to him,” Reacher said. “Borken was just itching to tell you where she was, soon as she was safely here, right? The destination was never going to be a secret, was it? That was the whole point. She was a deterrent to stop you attacking. No point in that, without telling you exactly where she was.”
McGrath grunted. Thinking about it. Unconvinced.
“They bribed him,” Reacher said. “You better believe it. They’ve got a big war chest, McGrath. Twenty million dollars, stolen bearer bonds.”
“The armored car robbery?” McGrath asked. “Northern California somewhere? They did that?”
“They’re boasting about it,” Reacher said.
McGrath ran it through his head. Went pale. Reacher saw it and nodded.
“Right,” he said. “Let me make a guess: Brogan was never short of money, was he? Never groused about the salary, did he?”
“Shit,” McGrath said. “Two alimony checks every month, girlfriend, silk jackets, and I never even thought twice about it. I was just so grateful he wasn’t one of the moaners.”
“He’s collecting his next payment right now,” Reacher said. “And Milosevic is dead or locked up somewhere.”
McGrath nodded slowly.
“And Brogan worked out of California,” he said. “Before he came to me. Shit, I never thought twice. A buck gets ten he was the exact agent who went after Borken. He said Sacramento couldn’t make it stick. Said the files were unclear as to why not. Why not is because Borken was handing him bucketfuls of dollars to make sure it didn’t stick. And the bastard was taking them.”
Reacher nodded. Said nothing.
“Shit,” McGrath said again. “Shit, shit, shit. My fault.”
Still Reacher said nothing. More tactful just to keep quiet. He understood McGrath’s feelings. Understood his position. He had been in the same position himself, time to time in the past. He had felt the knife slip in, right between the shoulder blades.
“I’ll deal with Brogan later,” McGrath said finally. “After we go get Holly. She mention me at all? She realize I’d come get her? She mention that?”
Reacher nodded.
“She told me she trusted her people,” he said.
44
HOLLY WAS STANDING upright and facing her door when they came for her. The tight wrap on her knee was drying stiff. So she had to stand, because her leg would no longer bend. And she wanted to stand, because that was the best way to do it.
She heard the footsteps in the lobby. Heard them clatter up the stairs. Two men, she estimated. She heard them halt outside her door. Heard the key slide in and the lock click back. She blinked once and took a breath. The door opened. Two men crowded in. Two rifles. She stood upright and faced them. One stepped forward.
“Outside, bitch,” he said.
She gripped her crutch. Leaned on it heavily and limped across the floor. Slowly. She wanted to be outside before anybody realized she could move better than they thought. Before anybody realized she was armed and dangerous.
“STRIKE THE FIRST blow,” Reacher said. “I interpreted that all wrong.”
“Why?” McGrath asked urgently.
“Because I haven’t seen Stevie,” Reacher said. “Not since early this morning. Stevie’s not here anymore. Stevie’s gone somewhere else.”
“Reacher, you’re not making any sense,” McGrath said.
Reacher shook his head like he was clearing it and snapped back into focus. Set off racing east through the trees. Talking quiet, but urgently.
“I was wrong,” he said. “Borken said they were going to strike the first blow. Against the system. I thought he meant the declaration of independence. I thought that was the first blow. The declaration, and the battle to secure this territory. I thought that was it. On its own. But they’re doing something else as well. Somewhere else. They’re doing two things at once. Simultaneous.”
“What are you saying?” McGrath asked.
“Attention,” Reacher said. “The declaration of independence is focusing attention up here in Montana, right?”
“Sure,” McGrath said. “They planned to have CNN and the United Nations up here watching it happen. That’s a lot of attention.”
“But they’d have been in the wrong place,” Reacher said. “Borken had a bookcase full of theory telling him not to do what they expect. A whole shelf all about Pearl Harbor. And I overheard him talking in the mine. When he was fetching the missile launcher. Fowler was with him. Borken told Fowler by tonight this place will be way down the list of priorities. So they’re doing something else someplace else as well. Something different, maybe something bigger. Twin blows against the system.”
“But what?” McGrath asked. “And where? Near here?”
“No,” Reacher said. “Probably far away. Like Pearl Harbor was. They’re reaching out, trying to land a killer blow somewhere. Because there’s a time factor here. It’s all coordinated.”
McGrath stared at him.
“They planned it well,” Reacher said. “Getting everybody’s attention fixed up here. Independence. That stuff they were going to do with you. They were going to kill you slowly, with the cameras watching. Then the threats of mass suicide, women and children dying. A high-stakes siege. So nobody would be looking anywhere else. Borken’s cleverer than I thought. Twin blows, each one covering for the other. Everybody’s looking up here, then something big happens someplace else, everybody’s looking down there, and he consolidates his new nation back up here.”
“But where is it happening, for God’s sake?” McGrath asked. “And what the hell is it?”
Reacher stopped and shook his head.
“I just don’t know,” he said.
Then he froze. There was a crashing noise up ahead and a patrol of six men burst around a tight thicket of pines and stopped dead in front of them. They had M-16s in their hands, grenades on their belts, and surprise and delight on their faces.
BORKEN HAD DEPLOYED every man he had to the search for Reacher, except for the two he had retained to deal with Holly. He heard them start down the courthouse stairs. He pulled the radio from his pocket and flipped it open. Extended the stubby antenna and pressed the button.
“Webster?” he said. “Get focused in, OK? We’ll talk again in a minute.”
He didn’t wait for any reply. Just snapped the radio off and turned his head as he tracked the sound of the footsteps on their way outside.
FROM SEVENTY-FIVE YARDS south, Garber saw them come out the door and down the steps. He had moved out of the woods. He had moved forward and crouched behind the outcrop of rock. He figured that was safe enough, now he had backup of a sort. The Chinook crewmen were thirty yards behind him, well separated, well hidden, instructed to yell if anybody approached from the rear. So Garber was resting easy, staring up the slope at the big white building.
He saw two armed men, bearded, starting down the steps. They were dragging a smaller figure with a crutch. A halo of dark hair, neat green fatigues. Holly Johnson. He had never seen her before. Only in the photographs the Bureau men had shown him. The photographs had not done her justice. Even from seventy-five yards, he could feel the glow of her character. Some kind of radiant energy. He felt it, and pulled his rifle closer.
THE M-16 IN Reacher’s hands was a 1987 product manufactured by the Colt Firearms Company in Hartford, Connecticut. It was the A2 version. Its principal new feature was the replacement of automatic fire with burst fire. For the sake of economy, the trigger relocked after each burst of three shells. The idea was to waste less ammunition.
Six targets, three shells each from the fresh magazine, a total of eighteen shells and six trigger pulls. Each burst of three shells took a fifth of a second, so the firing sequence itself amounted to just one and a fifth seconds. It was pulling the trigger over and over again which wasted the time. It wasted so much time for Reacher that he ran into trouble after the fourth guy was down. He wasn’t aiming. He was just tracking a casual left-to-right arc, close range into the bodies in front of him. The opposing rifles were coming up as a unit. The first four never got there. But the fifth and the sixth were already raised horizontal by the time the fourth went back down, two and a quarter seconds into the sequence.
So Reacher gambled. It was the sort of instinctive gamble you take so fast that to call it a split-second decision is to understate the speed by an absurd factor. He skipped his M-16 straight to the sixth guy, totally sure that McGrath would take the fifth guy with the Glock. The sort of instinctive gamble you take based on absolutely nothing at all except a feeling, which is itself based on absolutely nothing at all except the look of the guy, and how he compares with the look of other people worth trusting in the past.
The flat crack of the Glock was lost under the rattle of the M-16, but the fifth guy went down simultaneous with the sixth. Reacher and McGrath crashed sideways together into the brush and flattened into the ground. Stared through the sudden dead silence at the cordite smoke rising gently through the shafts of sunlight. No movement. No survivors. McGrath blew a big sigh and stuck out his hand, from flat on the ground. Reacher twisted around and shook it.
“You’re pretty quick for an old guy,” he said.
“That’s how I got to be an old guy,” McGrath said back.
They stood up slowly and ducked back farther into the trees. Then they could hear more people moving toward them in the forest. A stream of people was moving northwest out of the Bastion. McGrath raised the Glock again and Reacher snicked the M-16 back to singles. He had twelve shells left. Too few to waste, even with the A2’s economy measure. Then they saw women through the trees. Women and children. Some men with them. Family groups. They were marching in columns of two. Reacher saw Joseph Ray, a woman at his side, two boys marching blankly in front of him. He saw the woman from the mess kitchen, marching side by side with a man. Three children walking stolidly in front of them.
“Where are they going?” McG
rath whispered.
“The parade ground,” Reacher said. “Borken ordered it, right?”
“Why don’t they just run for it?” McGrath said.
Reacher shrugged and said nothing. He had no explanation. He stood concealed and watched the blank faces pass through the dappled woods. Then he touched McGrath’s arm and they sprinted on through the trees and came out behind the mess hall. Reacher glanced cautiously around. Stretched up and grabbed at the roof overhang. Put a foot on the window ledge and hauled himself up onto the shingles. Crawled up the slope of the roof and steadied himself against the bright metal chimney. Raised the stolen field glasses and trained them southeast, down toward the town, thinking: OK, but what the hell else is happening? And where?
GENERAL JOHNSON’SAIDE had the most aptitude with the computer controls, either from familiarity with such things, or from being younger. He used the rubber knobs and the joystick to focus on the area in front of the courthouse steps. Then he zoomed out a touch to frame the view. He had the western face of the courthouse on the right of the screen and the eastern face of the ruined county office on the left. In between were the two lawns, one abandoned and scrubby, the other still reasonably flat. The road ran vertically up the center of the picture, like a map. The jeep which had brought McGrath in was still there where they had dumped it. The aide used it to check his focus. It came in crisp and clear. It was a military-surplus vehicle. Smudged white stencils. They could see the windshield folded down, and a canvas map case, and a jerrican for fuel and a short-handled shovel clipped on the rear.
They all saw the two men bring Holly out. From above, they were in a perfect straight diagonal line, with Holly alone in the middle, like the shape you see when a die rolls a three. They brought her out and waited. Then they saw a huge figure lumbering down the courthouse steps behind them. Borken. He stepped into the road and looked up. Right into the camera, invisible seven miles above him. He stared and waved. Raised his right hand high. There was a black gun in it. Then he looked down and fiddled with something in his left hand. Raised it to his ear. The radio on the desk in front of Webster crackled. Webster picked it up and flipped it open.
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