He turned north at the tower. The sun had moved on. Now it was high and almost behind him, an hour before the season’s drab version of noon. There was no warmth in it. Just light, a little brighter than the rest of the day. Far ahead, to the right, he could see a smudge on the horizon. The three Duncan houses, he guessed, grouped together at the end of their long shared driveway. He couldn’t make out any detail. Certainly nothing man-sized. Which meant no one there could make out any man-sized detail either, in reverse. Same number of miles east to west as west to east, same grey gloom, same mist. But even so, he tracked left a little, following a curve, maintaining his distance, making sure.
Dorothy the housekeeper sat Mr Vincent down in a red velvet chair and sponged the blood off his face. He had a split lip and a cut brow and a lump the size of an egg under his eye. He had apologized for being so slow with his warning call. He had passed out, he said, and had scrambled for the phone as soon as he came around.
Dorothy told him to hush up.
On the other side of the circular room one of the bar stools was lying on its side and a mirrored panel on the bar back had been shattered. Shards of silvered glass had fallen among the bottles like daggers. One of the NASA mugs was broken. Its handle had come right off.
* * *
Angelo Mancini had the doctor’s shirt collar bunched in his left hand and he had his right hand bunched into a fist. The doctor’s wife was sitting in Roberto Cassano’s lap. She had been ordered to, and she had refused. So Mancini had hit her husband, hard, in the face. She had refused again. Mancini had hit her husband again, harder. She had complied. Cassano had his hand on her thigh, his thumb an inch under the hem of her skirt. She was rigid with fear and shuddering with revulsion.
‘Talk to me, baby,’ Cassano whispered, in her ear. ‘Tell me where you told Jack Reacher to hide.’
‘I didn’t tell him anything.’
‘You were with him twenty minutes. Last night. The weirdo at the motel told us so.’
‘I didn’t tell him anything.’
‘So what were you doing there for twenty minutes? Did you have sex with him?’
‘No.’
‘You want to have sex with me?’
She didn’t answer.
‘Shy?’ Cassano asked. ‘Bashful? Cat got your tongue?’
He moved his hand another inch, upward. He licked the woman’s ear. She ducked away. Just twisted at the waist and leaned right over, away from him.
He said, ‘Come back, baby.’
She didn’t move.
He said, ‘Come back,’ a little louder.
She straightened up. He got the impression she was about to puke. He didn’t want that. Not all over his good clothes. But he licked her ear one more time anyway, just to show her who was boss. Mancini hit the doctor one more time, just for fun. Travelling men, roaming around, getting the job done. But wasting their time in Nebraska, that was for sure. No one knew a damn thing. The whole place was as barren as the surface of the moon, with much less to do. Who would stay? This guy Reacher was long gone, obviously, totally in the wind, probably halfway to Omaha by the time the sun came up, rumbling along in the stolen truck, completely unnoticed by the county cops, who clearly sat around all night with their thumbs up their butts, because hadn’t they missed every single one of the deliveries roaring through from Canada to Vegas? For months? Hadn’t they? Every single one?
Assholes.
Yokels.
Retards.
All of them.
Cassano jerked upright and spilled the doctor’s wife off his lap. She sprawled on the floor. Mancini punched the doctor one more time, and then they left, back to the rented Impala parked outside.
Reacher kept the three smudged shapes far to his right and tracked onward. He was used to walking. All soldiers were. Sometimes there was no alternative to a long fast advance on foot, so soldiers trained for it. It had been that way since the Romans, and it was still that way, and it would stay that way for ever. So he kept on going, satisfied with his progress, enjoying the small compensations that fresh air and country smells brought with them.
Then he smelled something else.
Up ahead was a tangle of low bushes, like a miniature grove. Wild raspberries or wild roses, maybe, a remnant, somehow spared by the ploughs, now bare and dormant but still thick and dense with thorns. There was a thin plume of smoke coming from them, from right in the middle, horizontal and almost invisible on the wind. It smelled distinctive. Not a wood fire. Not a cigarette.
Marijuana.
Reacher was familiar with the smell. All cops are, even military cops. Grunts get high like anyone else, off duty. Sometimes even on duty. Reacher guessed what he was smelling was a fine sativa, probably not imported junk from Mexico, probably a good home-grown strain. And why not, in Nebraska? Corn country was ideal for a little clandestine farming. Corn grew as high as an elephant’s eye, and dense, and a twenty-foot clearing carved out a hundred yards from the edge of a field was as secret a garden as could be planted anywhere. More profitable than corn, too, even with all the federal subsidies. And these people had their haulage fees to meet. Maybe someone was sampling his recent harvest, judging its quality, setting its price in his mind.
It was a kid. A boy. Maybe fifteen years old, maybe sixteen. Reacher walked on and looked down into the chest-high thicket and found him there. He was quite tall, quite thin, with the kind of long centre-parted hair Reacher hadn’t seen on a boy for a long time. He was wearing thick pants and a surplus parka from the old West German army. He was sitting on a spread-out plastic grocery bag, his knees drawn up, his back against a large granite rock that jutted up from the ground. The rock was wedge-shaped, as if it had been broken out of a bigger boulder and rolled into a different position far from its source. And the rock was why the ploughs had spared the thicket. Big tractors with vague steering had given it a wide berth, and nature had taken advantage. Now the boy was taking advantage in turn, hiding from the world, getting through his day. Maybe not a semi-commercial grower after all. Maybe just an amateur enthusiast, with mail-order seeds from Boulder or San Francisco.
‘Hello,’ Reacher said.
‘Dude,’ the boy said. He sounded mellow. Not high as a kite. Just cruising gently a couple of feet off the ground. An experienced user, probably, who knew how much was too much and how little was too little. His thought processes were slow, and right there in his face. First: Am I busted? Then: No way.
‘Dude,’ he said again. ‘You’re the man. You’re the guy the Duncans are looking for.’
Reacher said, ‘Am I?’
The kid nodded. ‘You’re Jack Reacher. Six-five, two-fifty, brown coat. They want you, man. They want you real bad.’
‘Do they?’
‘We had Cornhuskers at the house this morning. We’re supposed to keep our eyes peeled. And here you are, man. You snuck right up on me. I guess your eyes were peeled, not mine. Am I right?’ Then he lapsed into a fit of helpless giggles. He was maybe a little higher than Reacher had thought.
Reacher said, ‘You got a cell phone?’
‘Hell yes. I’m going to text my buddies. I’m going to tell them I’ve seen the man, large as life, twice as natural. Hey, maybe I could put you on the line with them. That would be a kick, wouldn’t it? Would you do that? Would you talk to my buds? So they know I’m not shitting them?’
‘No,’ Reacher said.
The kid went instantly serious. ‘Hey, I’m with you, man. You got to lie low. I can dig that. But dude, don’t worry. We’re not going to rat you out. Me and my buds, I mean. We’re on your side. You’re putting it to the Duncans, we’re with you all the way.’
Reacher said nothing. The kid concentrated hard and lifted his arm high out of the brambles and held out his joint.
‘Share?’ he said. ‘That would be a kick too. Smoking with the man.’
The joint was fat and well rolled, in yellow paper. It was about half gone.
‘No, thanks,’ Reache
r said.
‘Everyone hates them,’ the kid said. ‘The Duncans, I mean. They’ve got this whole county by the balls.’
‘Show me a county where someone doesn’t.’
‘Dude, I hear you. The system stinks. No argument from me on that score. But the Duncans are worse than usual. They killed a kid. Did you know that? A little girl. Eight years old. They took her and messed her up real bad and killed her.’
‘Did they?’
‘Hell yes. Definitely.’
‘You sure?’
‘No question, my friend.’
‘It was twenty-five years ago. You’re what, fifteen?’
‘It happened.’
‘The FBI said different.’
‘You believe them?’
‘As opposed to who? A stoner who wasn’t even born yet?’
‘The FBI didn’t hear what I hear, man.’
‘What do you hear?’
‘Her ghost, man. Still here, after twenty-five years. Sometimes I sit out here at night and I hear that poor ghost screaming, man, screaming and wailing and moaning and crying, right here in the dark.’
NINETEEN
OUR SHIP HAS COME IN. AN OLD, OLD PHRASE, FROM OLD SEA-faring days, full of hope and wonder. An investor could spend all he had, building a ship, fitting it out, hiring a crew, or more than all he had, if he was borrowing. Then the ship would sail into a years-long void, unimaginable distances, unfathomable depths, incalculable dangers. There was no communication with it. No radio, no phone, no telegraph, no mail. No news at all. Then, maybe, just maybe, one chance day the ship would come back, weather-beaten, its sails heaving into view, its hull riding low in the channel waters, loaded with spices from India, or silks from China, or tea, or coffee, or rum, or sugar. Enough profit to repay the costs and the loans in one fell swoop, with enough left over to live generously for a decade. Subsequent voyages were all profit, enough to make a man rich beyond his dreams. Our ship has come in.
Jacob Duncan used that phrase, at eleven-thirty that morning. He was with his brothers, in a small dark room at the back of his house. His son Seth had gone home. Just the three elders were there, stoic, patient, and reflective.
‘I got the call from Vancouver,’ Jacob said. ‘Our man in the port. Our ship has come in. The delay was about weather in the Luzon Strait.’
‘Where’s that?’ Jasper asked.
‘Where the South China Sea meets the Pacific Ocean. But now our goods have arrived. They’re here. Our truck could be rolling tonight. Tomorrow morning, at the very latest.’
‘That’s good,’ Jasper said.
‘Is it?’
‘Why wouldn’t it be?’
‘You were worried before, in case the stranger got nailed before the delay went away. You said that would prove us liars.’
‘True. But now that problem is gone.’
‘Is it? Seems to me that problem has merely turned itself inside out. Suppose the truck gets here before the stranger gets nailed? That would prove us liars, too.’
‘We could hold the truck up there.’
‘We couldn’t. We’re a transportation company, not a storage company. We have no facilities.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘We think. That’s what we do. Where is that guy?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘We know he hasn’t slept or eaten since yesterday. We know we’ve had our boys out driving the roads all morning and they haven’t seen a damn thing. So where is he?’
Jonas Duncan said, ‘Either he’s snuck in a chicken coop somewhere, or he’s out walking the fields.’
‘Exactly,’ Jacob said. ‘I think it’s time to turn our boys off the nice smooth roads. I think it’s time they drove out across the land, big circles, sweeping and beating.’
‘We only have seven of them left.’
‘They all have cell phones. First sight of the guy, they can call the boys from the south and turn the problem over to the professionals. If they need to, that is. Or at least they can get some coordinated action going. Let’s turn them loose.’
* * *
By that point Reacher was starting to hurry. He was about four hundred yards due west of the three Duncan houses, which was about as close as he intended to get. He was walking parallel to the road. He could already see the wooden buildings ahead. They were tiny brown pinpricks on the far horizon. Nothing between him and them. Flat land. He was watching for trucks. He knew they would be coming. By now his hunters would have checked the roads, and found nothing. Therefore they would have concluded he was travelling cross-country. They would be putting trucks in the fields, and soon, if they hadn’t already. It was predictable. Fast, mobile patrols, cell phone communications, maybe even radios, the whole nine yards. Not good.
He slogged onward, another five minutes, then ten, then twenty. The three Duncan houses fell away behind his shoulder. The wooden buildings up ahead stayed resolutely on the horizon, but they got a little larger, because they were getting a little closer. Four hundred yards away was another bramble thicket, spreading wide and chest-high, but apart from that there was nothing in sight taller than an inch. Reacher was dangerously exposed, and he knew it.
In Las Vegas a Lebanese man named Safir took out his phone and dialled a number. The call was answered six blocks away by an Italian man named Rossi. There were no pleasantries. No time for any. The first thing Safir said was, ‘You’re making me angry.’
Rossi said nothing in reply. He couldn’t really afford to. It was a question of protocol. He was absolutely at the top of his own particular tree, and it was a big tree, high, wide, and handsome, with roots and branches spreading everywhere, but there were bigger trees in the forest, and Safir’s was one of them.
Safir said, ‘I favoured you with my business.’
Rossi said, ‘And I’m grateful for that.’
‘But now you’re embarrassing me,’ Safir said. Which, Rossi thought, was a mistake. It was an admission of weakness. It made it clear that however big Safir was, he was worried about someone bigger still. A food chain thing. At the bottom were the Duncans, then came Rossi, then came Safir, and at the top came someone else. It didn’t matter who. The mere existence of such a person put Safir and Rossi in the same boat. For all their graduated wealth and power and glory, they were both intermediaries. Both scufflers. Common cause.
Rossi said, ‘You know that merchandise of this quality is hard to source.’
Safir said, ‘I expect promises to be kept.’
‘So do I. We’re both victims here. The difference between us is that I’m doing something about it. I’ve got boots on the ground up in Nebraska.’
‘What’s the problem there?’
‘They claim a guy is poking around.’
‘What, a cop?’
‘No,’ Rossi said. ‘Absolutely not a cop. The chain is as secure as ever. Just a passer-by, that’s all. A stranger.’
‘Who?’
‘Nobody. Just a busybody.’
‘So how is this nobody busybody stranger holding things up?’
‘I don’t think he is, really. I think they’re lying to me. I think they’re just making excuses. They’re late, that’s all.’
‘Unsatisfactory.’
‘I agree. But this is a sellers’ market.’
‘Who have you got up there?’
‘Two of my boys.’
‘I’m going to send two of mine.’
‘No point,’ Rossi said. ‘I’m already taking care of it.’
‘Not to Nebraska, you idiot,’ Safir said. ‘I’m going to send two of my boys across town to babysit you. To keep the pressure on. I want you to be very aware of what happens to people who let me down.’
The Port of Vancouver had been combined with the Fraser River Port Authority and the North Fraser Port Authority and the shiny new three-in-one business had been renamed Port Metro Vancouver. It was the largest port in Canada, the largest port in the Pacific Northwest, the fourth largest port o
n the west coast of North America, and the fifth largest port in North America overall. It occupied 375 miles of coastline, and had twenty-five separate terminals, and handled three thousand vessel arrivals every year, for a total annual cargo throughput of a hundred million tons, which averaged out to considerably more than a quarter-million tons every day. Almost all of those tons were packed into intermodal shipping containers, which, like a lot of things, traced their origins all the way back to United States Department of Defense drawings made in the 1950s, because in the 1950s the U.S. DoD had been one of the few agencies in the world with the will and the energy to make drawings at all, and the only one with the power to make them stick.
Intermodal shipping containers were corrugated metal boxes. They could be easily swapped between different modes of transport, like ships, or railroad flatcars, or semi trucks. Hence, intermodal. They were all a little more than eight feet high and eight feet wide. The shortest and rarest were twenty feet long. Most were forty feet long, or forty-five, or forty-eight, or fifty-three. But traffic was always measured by reference to the basic minimum length, in multiples called twenty-foot-equivalent-units, or TEUs. A twenty-foot container was scored as a one, and a forty-foot as a two, and so on. Port Metro Vancouver handled two million TEUs a year.
The Duncans’ shipment came in a twenty-foot container. The smallest available. One TEU. Gross weight was 6,110 pounds, and net weight was 4,850 pounds, which meant that there were 1,260 pounds of cargo inside, in a space designed to handle more than sixty thousand. In other words, the box was about 98 per cent empty. But that proposition was not as wasteful or as inefficient as it first appeared. Each of the pounds that the container carried was worth more than gold.
It was lifted off a South Korean ship by a gantry crane, and it was placed gently on Canadian soil, and then it was immediately picked up again by another crane, which shuttled it to an inspection site where a camera read its BIC code. BIC was the Bureau International des Containers, which was headquartered in Paris, France, and the code was a combination of four letters from the Latin alphabet and seven numbers. Together they told Port Metro Vancouver’s computers who owned the container, and where it had come from, and what was in it, and that those contents had been pre-cleared by Canadian customs, none of which information was in the least little bit true. The code also told the computers where the container was going, and when, which was true, to a limited extent. It was going onward into the interior of Canada, and it was to be loaded immediately, without delay, on to a semi truck that was already waiting for it. So it was shuttled on ahead, through a sniffer designed to detect smuggled nuclear material, a test that it passed very easily, and then out to the marshalling yard. At that point the port computers generated an automatic text message to the waiting driver, who fired up his truck and swung into position. The container was lowered on to his flatbed and clamped down. A minute later it was rolling, and ten minutes after that it was through the port gates, heading east, sitting high and proud and alone on a trailer more than twice its length, its minimal weight barely noticed by the roaring diesel.
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