Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  Taylor’s right tricep was all torn up. Reacher cut his shirt away with the kitchen knife from his shoe and field-dressed the wound as best he could with a first-aid kit in the upstairs bathroom. But Taylor was going to need attention. That was clear. He volunteered to delay it by a couple of days. The wound was not necessarily recognizable as a gunshot and it was unlikely anyone in the neighborhood had heard anything, but it seemed smart to distance an ER visit from mayhem in the night.

  Jackson was OK apart from cut eyebrows and some facial bruising and a split lip and a couple of loose teeth. Nothing worse than he had experienced half a dozen times before, he said, after bar fights wherever 1st Para had been posted and where the local boys always seemed to have something to prove.

  Pauling was fine. Reacher had cut her ropes and she had torn the tape off her mouth herself and then kissed him hard. She seemed to have had total confidence that he would show up and work something out. He wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth or flattering him. Either way he didn’t mention exactly how close he had come to walking away on a phantom pursuit. Didn’t mention how lucky it was that a stray peripheral glance at the driveway’s surface had fired some random synapse in his brain.

  He searched the Toyota and found Lane’s leather duffel. The one he had seen before, in the Park Lane Hilton. The eight hundred thousand dollars. It was all there. Untouched. He gave it to Pauling for safe keeping. Then he sat on the floor, leaning back on the post that Kate had been tied to, six feet away from Gregory’s corpse. He was calm. Just another night of business as usual in his long and spectacularly violent life. He was used to it, literally. And the remorse gene was missing from his DNA. Entirely. It just wasn’t there. Where some men might have retrospectively agonized over justification, he spent his energy figuring out where best to hide the bodies.

  * * *

  They hid them in a ten-acre field near the northwest corner of the farm. Fallow land, hidden by trees, unplowed for a year. Jackson finished fixing the backhoe and then fired it up and drove off with headlights blazing. Started work immediately on a massive pit that needed to be thirty feet long, nine feet wide, and nine feet deep. A ninety-yard excavation, because they had decided to bury the cars as well.

  Reacher asked Pauling, “Did you check the box for extra insurance?”

  She nodded.

  He said, “Call them tomorrow. Tell them it was stolen.”

  Taylor was walking wounded so he was excused from heavy work. Instead he scoured the whole area for every piece of physical evidence he could find. He came up with all that anyone could think of, including all twenty-seven shell casings from Perez’s MP5. Pauling scrubbed his blood off the upstairs hallway floor and replaced the shattered bathroom tile. Reacher piled the bodies inside the Toyota Land Cruiser.

  * * *

  The sun had been up for hours before the pit was finished. Jackson had left a neat graded slope at one end and Reacher drove the Toyota down it and smashed it hard against the earth wall at the other end. Jackson drove the backhoe to the house and used the front bucket to jack the Mini up and shove it backward. He maneuvered it all the way to the pit and rolled it down the grade and jammed it hard against the Toyota’s rear bumper. Taylor showed up with all the other items and threw them in the hole. Then Jackson started to fill it. Reacher just sat and watched. The sky was pale blue and the sun was watery. There were thin high clouds and a mild breeze that felt warm. He knew that in the flat land all around him Stone Age people had been buried in long mounds called barrows, and then Bronze Age people, and Iron Age people, and Celts, and Romans, and Saxons, and Angles, and Viking invaders in longships, and Normans, and then the English themselves for a thousand years. He guessed the land could take four more dead. He watched Jackson work until the dirt hid the top of the cars, and then he walked away, slowly, back to the house.

  * * *

  Exactly twelve months later to the hour the ten-acre field was neatly plowed and dusted pale green with a brand-new winter crop. Tony and Susan Jackson and Graham and Kate Taylor were working the field next to it. The sun was shining. Back at the house the nine-year-old cousins and best friends Melody Jackson and Jade Taylor were watching Jade’s baby brother, a healthy five-month-old boy named Jack.

  Three thousand miles west of Grange Farm it was five hours earlier and Lauren Pauling was alone in her Barrow Street apartment, drinking coffee and reading the New York Times. She had missed a piece inside the main section that reported the deaths of three newly arrived private military contractors in Iraq. Their names were Burke, Groom, and Kowalski, and they had died two days previously when a land mine exploded under their vehicle outside of Baghdad. But she caught a piece in the Metro Section in which it was reported that the cooperative board at the Dakota Building had foreclosed on an apartment after twelve consecutive months of unpaid monthly maintenance. On entering the apartment they had found more than nine million dollars in a locked closet.

  Six thousand miles west of Grange Farm it was eight hours earlier and Patti Joseph was fast asleep in a waterfront condominium in Seattle, Washington. She was ten months into a new job as a magazine copy-editor. Her perseverance and her relentless eye for detail made her good at it. She was seeing a local journalist from time to time. She was happy.

  Far from Seattle, far from New York City, far from Bishops Pargeter, down in Birmingham, Alabama, Dee Marie Graziano was up early, in a hospital gymnasium, watching her brother grasp his new metal canes and walk across the floor.

  Nobody knew where Jack Reacher was. He had left Grange Farm two hours after the backhoe had shut down, and there had been no news of him since.

  Bad Luck & Trouble

  1

  The man was called Calvin Franz and the helicopter was a Bell 222. Franz had two broken legs, so he had to be loaded on board strapped to a stretcher. Not a difficult maneuver. The Bell was a roomy aircraft, twin-engined, designed for corporate travel and police departments, with space for seven passengers. The rear doors were as big as a panel van’s and they opened wide. The middle row of seats had been removed. There was plenty of room for Franz on the floor.

  The helicopter was idling. Two men were carrying the stretcher. They ducked low under the rotor wash and hurried, one backward, one forward. When they reached the open door the guy who had been walking backward got one handle up on the sill and ducked away. The other guy stepped forward and shoved hard and slid the stretcher all the way inside. Franz was awake and hurting. He cried out and jerked around a little, but not much, because the straps across his chest and thighs were buckled tight. The two men climbed in after him and got in their seats behind the missing row and slammed the doors.

  Then they waited.

  The pilot waited.

  A third man came out a gray door and walked across the concrete. He bent low under the rotor and held a hand flat on his chest to stop his necktie whipping in the wind. The gesture made him look like a guilty man proclaiming his innocence. He tracked around the Bell’s long nose and got in the forward seat, next to the pilot.

  “Go,” he said, and then he bent his head to concentrate on his harness buckle.

  The pilot goosed the turbines and the lazy whop-whop of the idling blade slid up the scale to an urgent centripetal whip-whip-whip and then disappeared behind the treble blast of the exhaust. The Bell lifted straight off the ground, drifted left a little, rotated slightly, and then retracted its wheels and climbed a thousand feet. Then it dipped its nose and hammered north, high and fast. Below it, roads and science parks and small factories and neat isolated suburban communities slid past. Brick walls and metal siding blazed red in the late sun. Tiny emerald lawns and turquoise swimming pools winked in the last of the light.

  The man in the forward seat said, “You know where we’re going?”

  The pilot nodded and said nothing.

  The Bell clattered onward, turning east of north, climbing a little higher, heading for darkness. It crossed a highway far below, a river of white l
ights crawling west and red lights crawling east. A minute north of the highway the last developed acres gave way to low hills, barren and scrubby and uninhabited. They glowed orange on the slopes that faced the setting sun and showed dull tan in the valleys and the shadows. Then the low hills gave way in turn to small rounded mountains. The Bell sped on, rising and falling, following the contours below. The man in the forward seat twisted around and looked down at Franz on the floor behind him. Smiled briefly and said, “Twenty more minutes, maybe.”

  Franz didn’t reply. He was in too much pain.

  The Bell was rated for a 161-mph cruise, so twenty more minutes took it almost fifty-four miles, beyond the mountains, well out over the empty desert. The pilot flared the nose and slowed a little. The man in the forward seat pressed his forehead against the window and stared down into the darkness.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  The pilot said, “Where we were before.”

  “Exactly?”

  “Roughly.”

  “What’s below us now?”

  “Sand.”

  “Height?”

  “Three thousand feet.”

  “What’s the air like up here?”

  “Still. A few thermals, but no wind.”

  “Safe?”

  “Aeronautically.”

  “So let’s do it.”

  The pilot slowed more and turned and came to a stationary hover, three thousand feet above the desert floor. The man in the forward seat twisted around again and signaled to the two guys way in back. Both unlocked their safety harnesses. One crouched forward, avoiding Franz’s feet, and held his loose harness tight in one hand and unlatched the door with the other. The pilot was half-turned in his own seat, watching, and he tilted the Bell a little so the door fell all the way open under its own weight. Then he brought the craft level again and put it into a slow clockwise rotation so that motion and air pressure held the door wide. The second guy from the rear crouched near Franz’s head and jacked the stretcher upward to a forty-five degree slope. The first guy jammed his shoe against the free end of the stretcher rail to stop the whole thing sliding across the floor. The second guy jerked like a weightlifter and brought the stretcher almost vertical. Franz sagged down against the straps. He was a big guy, and heavy. And determined. His legs were useless but his upper body was powerful and straining hard. His head was snapping from side to side.

  The first guy took out a gravity knife and popped the blade. Used it to saw through the strap around Franz’s thighs. Then he paused a beat and sliced the strap around Franz’s chest. One quick motion. At the exact same time the second guy jerked the stretcher fully upright. Franz took an involuntary step forward. Onto his broken right leg. He screamed once, briefly, and then took a second instinctive step. Onto his broken left leg. His arms flailed and he collapsed forward and his upper-body momentum levered him over the locked pivot of his immobile hips and took him straight out through the open door, into the noisy darkness, into the gale-force rotor wash, into the night.

  Three thousand feet above the desert floor.

  For a moment there was silence. Even the engine noise seemed to fade. Then the pilot reversed the Bell’s rotation and rocked the other way and the door slammed neatly shut. The turbines spun up again and the rotor bit the air and the nose dropped.

  The two guys clambered back to their seats.

  The man in front said, “Let’s go home now.”

  2

  Seventeen days later Jack Reacher was in Portland, Oregon, short of money. In Portland, because he had to be somewhere and the bus he had ridden two days previously had stopped there. Short of money, because he had met an assistant district attorney called Samantha in a cop bar, and had twice bought her dinner before twice spending the night at her place. Now she had gone to work and he was walking away from her house, nine o’clock in the morning, heading back to the downtown bus depot, hair still wet from her shower, sated, relaxed, destination as yet unclear, with a very thin wad of bills in his pocket.

  The terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, had changed Reacher’s life in two practical ways. Firstly, in addition to his folding toothbrush he now carried his passport with him. Too many things in the new era required photo ID, including most forms of travel. Reacher was a drifter, not a hermit, restless, not dysfunctional, and so he had yielded gracefully.

  And secondly, he had changed his banking methods. For many years after leaving the army he had operated a system whereby he would call his bank in Virginia and ask for a Western Union wire transfer to wherever he happened to be. But new worries about terrorist financing had pretty much killed telephone banking. So Reacher had gotten an ATM card. He carried it inside his passport and used 8197 as his PIN. He considered himself a man of very few talents but some varied abilities, most of which were physical and related to his abnormal size and strength, but one of which was always knowing what time it was without looking, and another of which was some kind of a junior-idiot-savant facility with arithmetic. Hence 8197. He liked 97 because it was the largest two-digit prime number, and he loved 81 because it was absolutely the only number out of all the literally infinite possibilities whose square root was also the sum of its digits. Square root of eighty-one was nine, and eight and one made nine. No other nontrivial number in the cosmos had that kind of sweet symmetry. Perfect.

  His arithmetic awareness and his inherent cynicism about financial institutions always compelled him to check his balance every time he withdrew cash. He always remembered to deduct the ATM fees and every quarter he remembered to add in the bank’s paltry interest payment. And despite his suspicions, he had never been ripped off. Every time his balance came up exactly as he predicted. He had never been surprised or dismayed.

  Until that morning in Portland, where he was surprised, but not exactly dismayed. Because his balance was more than a thousand dollars bigger than it should have been.

  Exactly one thousand and thirty dollars bigger, according to Reacher’s own blind calculation. A mistake, obviously. By the bank. A deposit into the wrong account. A mistake that would be rectified. He wouldn’t be keeping the money. He was an optimist, but not a fool. He pressed another button and requested something called a mini-statement. A slip of thin paper came out of a slot. It had faint gray printing on it, listing the last five transactions against his account. Three of them were ATM cash withdrawals that he remembered clearly. One of them was the bank’s most recent interest payment. The last was a deposit in the sum of one thousand and thirty dollars, made three days previously. So there it was. The slip of paper was too narrow to have separate staggered columns for debits and credits, so the deposit was noted inside parentheses to indicate its positive nature: (1030.00).

  One thousand and thirty dollars.

  1030.

  Not inherently an interesting number, but Reacher stared at it for a minute. Not prime, obviously. No even number greater than two could be prime. Square root? Clearly just a hair more than thirty-two. Cube root? A hair less than ten and a tenth. Factors? Not many, but they included 5 and 206, along with the obvious 10 and 103 and the even more basic 2 and 515.

  So, 1030.

  A thousand and thirty.

  A mistake.

  Maybe.

  Or, maybe not a mistake.

  Reacher took fifty dollars from the machine and dug in his pocket for change and went in search of a pay phone.

  He found a phone inside the bus depot. He dialed his bank’s number from memory. Nine-forty in the West, twelve-forty in the East. Lunch time in Virginia, but someone should be there.

  And someone was. Not someone Reacher had ever spoken to before, but she sounded competent. Maybe a back-office manager hauled out to cover for the meal period. She gave her name, but Reacher didn’t catch it. Then she went into a long rehearsed introduction designed to make him feel like a valued customer. He waited it out and told her about the deposit. She was amazed that a customer would call about a bank error in his own favor.


  “Might not be an error,” Reacher said.

  “Were you expecting the deposit?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Do third parties frequently make deposits into your account?”

  “No.”

  “It’s likely to be an error, then. Don’t you think?”

  “I need to know who made the deposit.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “That would take some time to explain.”

  “I would need to know,” the woman said. “There are confidentiality issues otherwise. If the bank’s error exposes one customer’s affairs to another, we could be in breach of all kinds of rules and regulations and ethical practices.”

  “It might be a message,” Reacher said.

  “A message?”

  “From the past.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Back in the day I was a military policeman,” Reacher said. “Military police radio transmissions are coded. If a military policeman needs urgent assistance from a colleague he calls in a ten-thirty radio code. See what I’m saying?”

  “No, not really.”

  Reacher said, “I’m thinking that if I don’t know the person who made the deposit, then it’s a thousand and thirty bucks’ worth of a mistake. But if I do know the person, it might be a call for help.”