by Lee Child
The guy said, “What is this?”
Reacher said, “This is where we take your guns and money.”
The guy glanced at the bag with the rubber bands on top. A reflex. Involuntary. Chang stepped in behind them. Fist in her pocket.
Reacher said, “Search them both.”
She did. Fast and thorough. Quantico training. She came up with nothing of interest from either guy except a car key and two handguns. The car key was for an Audi and the handguns were a Glock 17 and a Beretta 92. Both nine-millimeter weapons. Same as the Uzi. Their ammunition logistics were neat and tidy, if nothing else.
Reacher said, “Look in the bags.”
She did. The bag the Uzi had been sitting on held thousands of small glassine packets, full of dirty brown powder. Heroin, presumably, cut and cut and cut again, now packaged and ready for street-level sale.
The bag with the rubber bands held money.
A lot of money. Sour greasy bills, fives and tens and twenties, loose and bricked and rolled, some torn, some crumpled, all jammed in tight. Hence the rubber bands, Reacher guessed. Once he had read a book about a cartel accountant, who spent five grand a month on rubber bands alone, just to package all the cash.
He said, “Where’s the Audi?”
The guy said, “Out front. Good luck with that.”
“You’re coming with us. You’re going to carry the bags.”
“Bullshit.”
“Get over yourself. You win some, you lose some. We’re not the cops. You’re still in business. You’ll make this back in a couple of weeks. Now move your ass.”
The guy got a bag in each hand, and Reacher pushed him ahead to the hallway, one hand on his collar, the other jamming the Uzi in the small of his back. Chang carried the Glock in her right hand and the Beretta in her left. The hallway was long and filthy, and there were street sounds up ahead. Trash talk, laughter, scuffling feet, moving cars, all boxy and dulled by the heat and the distance, and the closed front door.
“Ten seconds more,” Reacher said. “Stay smart and live long.”
He hauled the guy to the side and let Chang duck ahead and open the door. Then Reacher pushed the guy outside, and the talk and the laughter stopped. There were eleven people out there, some in the yard, some on the sidewalk, some in the gutter, one of them a little boy about two years old, three of them women under twenty, two of them hard men about thirty, and the other five skinny kids about twelve, the back-and-forth gofers. On the street a car drove by, slowly, just posing, with a loud bass line flexing the panels. Then it was gone, and Reacher pushed the guy ahead, and his people stepped up, ready to fight, but the guy said, “Leave it.”
Chang blipped the key, and a black sedan flashed its lights. It was smaller than a Town Car, but not compact. Chang opened the rear door, and Reacher made the guy drop the bags on the seat. Then he turned the guy around and shoved him back toward the house. He kept the Uzi leveled. Chang got behind the wheel. Reacher backed into the passenger seat. Chang took off hard. Reacher pulled the heroin bag off the back seat and emptied it out the window as she accelerated away. Tiny glassine packets blew everywhere, shiny and brown, like a plague of dead locusts, like a whirlwind slipstream. Folks ran in the road, scooping them up, chasing the car, leapfrogging ahead of each other, trying to grab whatever they could, with the guys from the house running around too, trying to restore order, trying to reclaim what was theirs. And that was all Reacher saw, because Chang spooled a fast left turn at the end of the diagonal street, and after that its residents were lost to sight.
Chapter 51
They dumped the Audi in an off-street convention garage four blocks from the hotel, doors unlocked, key in, and they zipped the guns in the money bag, and carried it back to Westwood’s room. Where they hammed it up a little, at first, with slow reveals, like a magic show. Like rabbits from a hat. First the Beretta, and then the Glock, and then the Uzi, each one greeted with enthusiasm, and then finally the bag falling open, and the avalanche of money on the bedspread.
Westwood said, “I’m changing my mind about the philosophy section.”
He and Chang set about counting the cash, and Reacher checked the guns. All were fully loaded, plus one in the chamber. Sixty-seven rounds in total, all interchangeable. The Uzi was in good working order. Most Uzis were. Simple machines, built for what combat was, not what it should be. Like, some would say, the Kalashnikov. The handguns were different. Especially, some would say, the Beretta. They were precision instruments. Beautifully engineered and hard as nails, but still requiring some kind of basic minimal care. Which dope dealers generally didn’t give, in Reacher’s experience. Their cash spent the same as anyone else’s, but sometimes their weapons misfired. Fact of life. Poor maintenance. Or none at all. Both the Glock and the Beretta looked dry and felt gritty. Durable machines, and almost certainly OK, but almost wasn’t enough. Not for the kind of thing that made you pick up a gun in the first place. It was a circular argument. It was a Zen question. Was a weapon you couldn’t trust a weapon at all?
“Reacher, look at this,” Chang said.
He looked. Appearances had been deceptive. Evidently. The lone greasy fives and the rough bricks of tens and the loose rolls of twenties were real enough. But they weren’t the whole story. Not even most of it. They were an afterthought. They had been thrown in the bag as a thin extra layer on top of the main cargo. Which had been bricks of official bank-banded hundred dollar bills. All fresh and fragrant and crisp and new. And thick. A hundred bills in every brick.
A hundred hundreds was ten thousand bucks.
Per brick.
There were a lot of bricks.
He said, “How much?”
She said, “More than two hundred and thirty thousand dollars.”
He was quiet for a very long time.
Then he said, “Can I see the satellite pictures of that place again?”
Westwood’s computer was already wide awake and working, and the image was still in his internet history, so even though he said the wifi was slow, the picture was on the screen in seconds.
Reacher took a look.
As before, he saw a farm surrounded by a sea of wheat. Fences, beaten earth, hogs, chickens, and vegetable gardens. A house and six outbuildings. Parked cars, and satellite dishes. A generator shed. Faint traces of power lines looping between some of the buildings, and a phone line marching in on poles. The well head, and its shadow. Better than an architect’s drawing, because it was the actual as-built reality, not just the intention.
He did what he had seen the others do, and slid paired fingers around on the touchpad to make the picture move, and un-pinched it to make it bigger. He started where the cars were parked, and pretended one was moving. He followed it out of the farmyard, into the mouth of a dirt road, east toward the railroad track, and then north at the corner of a field. The field ran unbroken more than ten straight miles, and then the dirt road turned west at its far corner, and then north again, all the way up to Mother’s Rest itself, where it came in as a narrow and insignificant tributary at the dead end of the same wide plaza that later ran onward to the elevators. It was a private driveway, essentially, twenty miles long. It went nowhere else.
He drove the virtual trip in reverse, twenty miles back to the farm, and he parked where he had started. He un-pinched the picture until the farm filled the screen, side to side and top to bottom. Nearest the railroad was the hog pen. It had a large shelter, probably made of wood, and a fenced area in front about six times as big, all churned up and pockmarked by heavy feet. All mud and slime. There was a barn a little bigger than the hog shelter. Those two structures had no power. The generator shed was easily identifiable. It had an intake snorkel through the wall, and a top-hat exhaust vent in the roof. Diesel, for a plant that big. Some immense installation. Thumb-thick cables spider-webbed out, sagging from eave to eave, to the house, and the other three buildings.
Reacher said, “Let’s assume the biggest structure is the hous
e. With the cars and the satellite dishes. But which structure is the suicide suite?”
The others crouched next to him, shoulder to shoulder, one on each side.
Westwood said, “The suicide suite is probably the next biggest. Bedroom, living area, bathrooms, and so on.”
“With power, for heat and AC and dim ambient lighting. Maybe soft music. All the comforts of home.” Reacher pointed. “That one?”
“Almost certainly.”
“So where’s the small-block Chevy V-8?”
“In one of the other outbuildings. Remote and soundproofed.”
Reacher nodded. “I was in West Texas once, and I saw them being used to drive irrigation pumps. Back when gasoline was cheaper than water. Regular car engines, pulled out of wrecks, I guess. They poured a concrete pad, and bolted the thing down, like it was still under a hood somewhere. They painted them bright yellow, so they didn’t get hit by tractors or plows. But they were noisy, out in the open. So sure, you’d want to build walls around the concrete pad, and a roof. You could stuff the walls with something, and line the ceiling. Some kind of a sound-absorbing material.”
“And you’d need power,” Westwood said. “They don’t run it all the time. Just when needed. It would be embarrassing if it didn’t start. So you’d need a battery charger hooked up, permanently, on a trickle setting. Just to be sure.”
“So which building?”
Westwood pointed. “That one or that one.”
“Where’s the exhaust pipe?”
Silence, for a beat.
Westwood said, “Maybe we can’t see it.”
“We can see the power lines. We can see the phone line, just about. The power lines might be an inch thick. Probably a little less. A car exhaust is at least two inches. Maybe three. Take a look underneath sometime. Metal, because of the heat, and therefore welded in sections. But where is it? There’s no pipe running into the suicide suite. Not from any other building.”
“Maybe they buried it.”
“The damp would rust it out in weeks. It would leak exhaust. They’d be running to the muffler shop all the time. If they wanted to hide it they’d bring it in knee-high through a flower bed and grow climbing shrubs on it. Maybe roses. Which would make it even easier for us to see. But it isn’t there. It doesn’t exist. Their web site is a lie.”
Westwood leaned forward and made the picture bigger, and bigger, until it was crude and blurred and pixelated, as big as he could get it. He moved it around, carefully, slowly, and he followed all four walls of all seven buildings.
No exhaust pipe. No two structures were connected by anything more substantial than an electric cable.
Reacher said, “Two hundred and thirty thousand dollars to spend. This is like working for the Pentagon again. We can afford to make a new plan.”
The new plan was made slowly, with care, in depth and in detail, over the rest of that evening, and some of the night, and all the next morning. Computers helped. The plan had five moving parts, and all of them had to be synchronized exactly, and all of them were tricky, and all of them were vital. But because of technology what in the past would have taken days took merely hours. Both Westwood and Chang had laptops, and even Reacher got in the picture, with Chang’s phone. He was getting wifi. He was clicking and scrolling with the best of them. And when the time came to call people, when Westwood and Chang got busy on their cells, he used the land line on the night stand, and between them they got things done about ten times faster than back in the day.
The rest of the plan was a shopping list. At the top was a legitimate state resident. Not to be bought, as such, but merely rented. Or bribed, to be technical, to go buy the rest of the stuff on the list. Most of which couldn’t be done without an Oklahoma driver’s license. In the end the hotel concierge volunteered. He saw himself as a fixer, and a man of the world. He was no doubt attracted by the money on offer. He had no qualms. The cash was real. He was breaking no laws. He was protected by the Second Amendment.
He delivered in the late afternoon, by which time everything else was nailed down. They had rehearsed, and brainstormed, and gamed it all out. They had probed, and questioned, and sometimes started over. They had played it from the bad guys’ side, and scoped out their options. They had pondered the wild cards. What if it rained? What if a tornado blew in? All that remained was for Reacher to approve the purchases.
There were three main items. That was all. The temptation had been to go crazy, like kids in a candy store. Then logic had chipped away, and they had ended up where Reacher liked to be anyway, with everything they needed, and nothing they didn’t. All three selections were Heckler & Koch products. A P7 pistol for Westwood. Like Hackett’s back-up gun. Point and shoot. Nine millimeter. Smaller than an average handgun. To go in his hiking boot, in an ankle holster, also supplied.
The other two items made a matched pair. Two identical MP5K sub-machineguns. One for Reacher, and one for Chang. Bigger than an average handgun, but not by much. Some revolvers were longer. Pistol grips, matching front grips, fat and bulbous. A futuristic design, much loved by SWAT teams and counterterrorist squads everywhere. Single shot or full auto, and full auto could hit as high as nine hundred rounds a minute. Which was fifteen bullets a second.
Hence the rest of the delivery was ammunition. All nine-millimeter Parabellum, interchangeable between all three weapons, but at that point pre-loaded into four P7 magazines and twenty-four MP5 magazines. More would have been hard to carry.
Reacher took the guns apart and put them back together again, and dry-fired them, sometimes with his little finger, which he felt was more sensitive to mechanical nuance.
All three worked.
Plus a small bag of stuff from a hardware store.
“Everything OK?” Chang asked him.
“Looking good,” he said.
“You OK?”
“Feeling good,” he said.
“Happy with the plan?”
“It’s a great plan,” he said.
“But?”
“Something we used to say in the MPs. Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.”
Westwood checked his watch. A complex thing, made of steel, with many dials. It was five o’clock in the afternoon. He said, “Seven hours left. We should eat. I’m sure the restaurant is open.”
“You go ahead,” Reacher said. “We’ll get room service. We’ll knock on your door when it’s time.”
Chapter 52
From the metal walkway on top of the old concrete giant the dawn was vast, and remote, and infinitely slow. The eastern horizon was black as night, and it stayed that way, until at last a person with straining wide-open eyes might call it faintly gray, like the darkest charcoal, which lightened over long slow minutes, and spread, side to side and wafer-thin, and upward, like tentative fingers on some outer layer of the atmosphere, impossibly distant, the stratosphere perhaps, as if light traveled faster there, or got there sooner.
The edge of the world crept into view, at least to the straining wide-open eyes, limned and outlined in gray on gray, infinitely dim, infinitely subtle, hardly there at all, part imagination, and part hope. Then pale gold fingers probed the gray, moving, ethereal, as if deciding. And then spreading, igniting some thin and distant layer one molecule at a time, one lumen, lighting it up slowly, turning it luminous and transparent, the glass of the bowl, not white and cold, but tinted warmer.
The light stayed wan, but reached further, every new minute, until the whole sky was gold, but pale, not enough to see by, too weak to cast the faintest shadow. Then warmer streaks bloomed, and lit the horizon, and finally the sun rose, unstoppable, for a second as red and angry as a sunset, then settling to a hot yellow blaze, half-clearing the horizon, and throwing immediate shadows, at first perfectly horizontal, then merely miles long. The sky washed from pale gold to pale blue, down through all the layers, so the world above looked newly deep as well as infinitely high and infinitely wide. The night dew had settled t
he dust, and until it dried the air was crystal. The view was pure and clear in every direction.
The Cadillac driver was on the walkway, with the Moynahan who had gotten hit in the head and had his gun taken. The guy was still feeling bad, but there was a schedule to keep. He was wearing an old-style leather football helmet in lieu of a splint. For his cheekbone. The Cadillac driver was facing west, with the new sun weak on the back of his neck. Moynahan was squinting east against the glare, watching the road. He had seen no nighttime traffic. No headlights. Everything else was wheat. Then came the curvature of the earth.
Same in the west. The road, the wheat, the far horizon. No nighttime traffic. No headlights. No excitement. The third morning. Directly below in the plaza early risers were heading for breakfast. Like ants. Trucks were parking, like toys. Doors were slamming. Folks were calling good morning, one to the other. All familiar sounds, but dull and indistinct, because of the vertical distance.
After twenty minutes the sun had pulled clear of the horizon, and was already curving south of east, setting out on its morning journey. Dawn had become day. The sky had gotten brighter, and bluer, and perfectly uniform. There was no cloud. New warmth stirred the air, and the wheat moved and eddied, with a whispered rustle, as if waking up. From the top of Elevator Three to the horizon was fifteen miles. A question of elevation, and geometry, and the flatness of the land. Which meant the guys on the walkway were at the exact center of a thirty-mile circle, floating high above it, the whole visible world laid out at their feet. A golden disk, below a high blue sky, cut in equal halves top to bottom by the railroad line, and side to side by the road. From the walkway both looked narrow and crowded by the wheat. Like thin pencil lines, to the naked eye, scored completely straight with a ruler. The lines met at the railroad crossing, directly below them. The center of the disk. The center of the world.
The Cadillac driver was sitting with his knees up, to steady his binoculars. He was watching the far end of the road, all the way west. If something was coming, he wanted maximum warning. Moynahan had his right hand up, to blot out the sun, and his left hand held his binoculars to his eyes. A little shaky. Not easy, with the helmet. His technique was to scan back and forth, near to far. He wanted to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.