17 A Wanted Man

by Lee Child

  ‘You’re not on the witness stand here, sergeant. You’re not under oath. Anything you can remember might help me.’

  ‘All I have is impressions. I don’t want to mislead you.’

  ‘Anything at all might help.’

  ‘Well, I thought they were like Peter, Paul and Mary.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Folk singers. From back in the day. Before your time, maybe. They were all dressed the same. Like a singing group. Two men and a woman.’

  ‘Blue denim shirts?’

  ‘Exactly. Like a country music trio. I figured their trunk would be full of steel-strung guitars. I thought maybe they were heading from last night’s show to tonight’s. We see that sometimes. And the woman was all made up, like she had just come off stage.’

  ‘But the driver was different?’

  ‘I thought he was maybe a manager. Or a roadie. You know, big and rough. Just an impression, like I said.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Don’t quote me, OK?’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘There was an atmosphere. The woman looked mad. Or resentful, somehow. I thought maybe the shows weren’t going so well, and she wanted to quit the tour, but it was two against one. Or three, if the manager guy had a stake. It was late, but she was wide awake, like she had something on her mind. That was my impression, anyway.’

  Sorenson said nothing.

  The sergeant said, ‘They were the targets, right?’

  Sorenson said, ‘The two men in the shirts, yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not your fault.’

  Then the captain came back on. He said, ‘Ma’am, you told us to look for two fugitives, not some family psychodrama involving a car full of vaudeville players.’

  ‘Not your fault,’ Sorenson said again.

  ‘Can I break down this roadblock now?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sorenson said. ‘And I need an APB on that plate number, all points east of you.’

  ‘I have no units on the road east of me, lady. I had to bring them all here. Face it, ma’am, whoever those guys are, they’re long gone now.’

  Reacher could wink, but only with his left eye. A childhood inheritance. As a kid he had slept mostly on his left side, and on waking would keep his left eye closed against the pillow and open only his right, to peer around whatever darkened bedroom he happened to be in. And he wasn’t sure Delfuenso could see his left eye. Not from the back seat, with the mirror set the way it was. And to mess with his vision was not a good idea at eighty miles an hour, anyway. So he raised his right hand off the shifter, so she could see it, and then he dropped it back.

  He jabbed his thumb to the left. No mirror involved. They were both facing the same way. Left was left. He tapped his index finger three times. Then left again, one tap. Then right, nine, his pale finger fast but clear in the low light, and then left, ten, and left, one, and left, three, and finally left, eleven.

  He looked in the mirror and raised his eyebrows, to supply the question mark.

  Carjack?

  Delfuenso nodded back at him, eagerly.

  A definite yes.

  Which explained a lot of things.

  But not the matching outfits.

  Reacher took his hand off the shifter and plucked at the shoulder of his coat, finger and thumb, and he looked quizzically in the mirror and mouthed, ‘Shirts?’

  Delfuenso glanced left, glanced right, frustrated, as if unable to find a quick way to explain. Then she looked hard to her left, as if checking on McQueen, and she started to unbutton her shirt. Reacher watched the road with one eye and the mirror with the other. Three buttons, four, five. Then Delfuenso pulled her shirt wide open and Reacher saw a tiny black and silver garment under it, like fancy underwear, like a bodice, laced tight against her stomach, her breasts resting high and proud on a fabric shelf made from two vestigial cups.

  Reacher nodded in the mirror. He had seen similar outfits. Most men had. Every soldier had. She was a roadhouse waitress, maybe a bartender. She had been coming off her shift, maybe getting into her car, maybe waiting at a light, and the two guys had pounced. They had stopped somewhere and bought her a shirt, to eliminate an APB’s inevitable headline description: a dark-haired woman wearing practically nothing.

  Delfuenso started buttoning up again. Reacher jabbed his finger in Alan King’s direction and his thumb in Don McQueen’s, and then he opened his hand and raised it uncertainly, questioningly, like a universal semaphore: Why them too?

  Delfuenso opened her mouth and closed it, and then she started blinking again, a long and laborious sequence.

  Forward two, forward twelve, backward twelve, backward twelve, forward four.

  B-L-O-O-D, blood.

  Backward twelve, backward thirteen.

  O-N, on.

  Backward seven, forward eight, forward five, forward nine, backward nine.

  T-H-E-I-R, their.

  ‘Blood on their clothes?’ Reacher mouthed.

  Delfuenso nodded.

  Reacher drove on through the darkness, with the white Dodge’s tail lights still a mile ahead, past quiet lonely exits spaced miles apart, with questions in his head spinning like plates on sticks.

  TWENTY-TWO

  SHERIFF GOODMAN HUNCHED deeper into his coat against the cold and turned a full circle in the convenience store’s back lot. He said, ‘I assume they parked here. Therefore they probably changed here too. Maybe they trashed their old jackets. The knife too, possibly. We should check the trash cans.’

  Sorenson said, ‘You volunteering?’

  ‘I have deputies with nothing better to do.’

  ‘OK,’ Sorenson said. ‘But it’s probably a waste of time. A buck gets ten they pitched the jackets in Delfuenso’s trunk. And they probably dropped the knife down one of the water pipes in the bunker.’

  ‘Are you going to try a third roadblock?’

  ‘Iowa doesn’t have the manpower.’

  ‘Illinois, then. If they’re staying on the Interstate, they’re most likely going all the way to Chicago. You could have the Illinois cops waiting for them, right on the state line.’

  ‘They have to know they’re pushing their luck. They’ve survived twice. They won’t risk a third time. They’re going to take back roads now. Or go to ground somewhere.’

  ‘So we’re done with roadblocks?’

  ‘I think there’s nothing more to be gained.’

  ‘Will their thinking match yours?’

  ‘I’m trying to make mine match theirs.’

  ‘Then that’s bad news for Karen Delfuenso,’ Goodman said. ‘They don’t need the smokescreen any more. They’ll dump her out in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘They won’t,’ Sorenson said. ‘She’s seen their faces. They’ll kill her.’

  The first question in Reacher’s mind was: would they call out roadblocks in two separate states for a carjacking? And the answer was: yes, probably. Almost certainly, in fact. Because carjacking where the owner was forced to stay on board was kidnapping, and kidnapping was a big, big deal. A federal case, literally, handled by the FBI, which was the only agency capable of coordinating a multi-state response.

  And the local terrain was huge and empty. Blocking the roads was about the only option for any kind of law enforcement in that part of the country.

  That, and helicopters.

  And Reacher had seen a helicopter, a thousand feet up, with a searchlight.

  Second question: what were the odds against two sets of roadblock-worthy and helicopter-worthy and FBI-worthy fugitives being on the loose on the same winter night in the same lonely place? Answer: very long odds indeed. Very unlikely. Coincidences happened, but to be there to witness one was a coincidence in itself, and two simultaneous coincidences was one too many.

  Therefore: the roadblocks had been for King and McQueen.

  Two guys, not one.

  Almost certainly.

  Which made no sense, initially.

  Becau
se: the first roadblock in Nebraska had been looking hard at lone drivers. Which was explicable, in a way. Obviously a lone guy could disguise himself by picking up a second guy, and two guys could disguise themselves by picking up a third guy, and so on, and so on, for ever. An addition method. But subtraction could work too. As in: two guys could disguise themselves by one of them hiding out of sight. And the Nebraska cops had been smart enough to anticipate that manoeuvre. Lone drivers had had their trunks searched, not for drugs or guns or bombs or stolen goods, but for a second guy curled up and hiding.

  But: the Nebraska cops shouldn’t have been looking for two people. They should have been looking for three people. The two perpetrators, plus the carjack victim, a more or less topless roadhouse bartender.

  Which introduced an incongruity.

  As in: King and McQueen clearly believed the APB would be for those three people. Themselves, and Delfuenso. Because they had given Delfuenso a shirt. To alter her appearance. The disguise method. And then they had gone the extra mile. They had given a hitchhiker a ride. Reacher himself, a fourth person. The addition method.

  Four people, not three. A smokescreen. A deception, starting with the bland shirts, and continuing even to the extent of getting Reacher himself into the driver’s seat for the second roadblock. A smokescreen, a deception, and more than anything else a diversion. The busted nose. Any cop would have been distracted by it.

  And there had been no democratic discussion at the cloverleaf, right back at the beginning. That particular conversation had been of a different kind entirely. King and McQueen had twisted around in their seats and told Delfuenso they would hurt her bad if she betrayed them. They had spelled it out: Keep your mouth shut. Then they had pressed her: Are we clear on that? Do you understand? Reacher had seen her nod, say yes, quiet and scared and timid, just before he got in the car.

  And the aspirin episode had not been about concern for a stranger’s health. By that point Alan King had already decided he wanted Reacher driving later. And he had not monitored Delfuenso’s search through her bag out of innocent eagerness or excitement. He had been making sure she didn’t find some way of signalling for help.

  Reality.

  Reacher was no one’s first choice of night-time companion.

  King and McQueen had offered the ride for one reason only.

  They were defending themselves against a three-person APB.

  But the actual APB had been for two people.

  Why?

  Only one possible answer: the FBI had known there were two guys on the run, but they hadn’t known the two guys had jacked a car and taken a hostage.

  In which case: did the FBI know now?

  And therefore: the roadblocks had not been for the carjacking. Not in and of itself. Not if the FBI didn’t even know about the carjacking.

  The roadblocks had been for the primary crime.

  Which must therefore have been pretty bad.

  Blood on their clothes.

  Reacher drove on, eighty miles an hour through the Iowa darkness, breathing slow and steady.

  Goodman and Sorenson walked back to the red Mazda. Sorenson’s FBI crime scene team had moved up from the pumping station and were all over it. They had already found blood and fingerprints, and hairs and fibres. The two men had taken no forensic precautions. That was clear.

  Sorenson said, ‘They were very disorganized.’

  Goodman said, ‘Most criminals are.’

  ‘But these guys are not like most criminals in any other way. This was not a mugging or a robbery gone wrong. They wore suits. The State Department is involved. But they were completely unprepared. They didn’t plan. They’re improvising all the way. They even had to hijack their getaway vehicle, for God’s sake. Why?’

  ‘Maybe they didn’t plan because they didn’t know they needed to plan.’

  ‘You come all the way to Nebraska to kill a guy, you know you need to plan.’

  ‘Maybe they didn’t come to kill the guy. Or not yet, anyway. Maybe something got out of hand all of a sudden. Most homicides are spontaneous.’

  ‘I agree,’ Sorenson said. ‘But nothing else about this case feels spontaneous.’

  Goodman sent a deputy to check the dumpsters behind the convenience store. Then the head crime scene technician backed butt-first out of the Mazda and walked over to Sorenson with two photographs in his hand. The first was a colour Polaroid of the dead guy’s face, cleaned up, eyes opened, blood wiped away, arranged to look as close to a live guy as a dead guy can get. He had dark eyes, shaped like almonds, tipped up a little at the outside corners. He had a small circular mole low down on his right cheek, south and west of his mouth. On a woman it would have been called a beauty spot. On a man it just looked like a mole.

  The second photograph was a monochrome blow-up of the same face. From a video still. From a surveillance camera, almost certainly. It was of poor quality, very grainy, smeared a little by movement and a cheap CCD camera and fluorescent light and a low-bit digital recording. But the eyes were clearly recognizable. And the mole was there, in the same place, perfectly positioned, as unique as a barcode or a fingerprint, and as definitive as a DNA sample.

  ‘From where?’ Sorenson asked.

  ‘The rental counter at the Denver airport,’ the technician said. ‘The victim rented the Mazda himself, just after nine o’clock this morning. Now yesterday morning, technically. The mileage on the car indicates he drove straight here with no significant detours.’

  ‘That’s a long way.’

  ‘A little over seven hundred miles. Ten or eleven hours, probably. One stop for gas. The tank is low now.’

  ‘Did he drive all that way alone?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the technician said. ‘I wasn’t there.’

  A cautious guy, old school, data driven, and possibly a little bad-tempered. Night duty, in the winter, in the middle of nowhere.

  Sorenson asked, ‘What’s your best guess?’

  ‘I’m a scientist,’ the guy said. ‘I don’t guess.’

  ‘Then speculate.’

  The guy made a face.

  ‘There’s no trace evidence in the back of the car,’ he said. ‘But both front seats show signs of occupation. So he might have had a single passenger from Denver. Or he might have driven in alone, in which case the passenger seat trace would come from the two perpetrators using the car to get from the crime scene to this location.’

  ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘I would say he probably drove in alone. There’s more trace on the driver’s seat than the passenger’s seat.’

  ‘Like the difference between a seven-hundred-mile drive and a three-mile drive?’

  ‘I can’t specify a ratio. It doesn’t happen that way. Most trace gets rubbed in over the first minute or two.’

  ‘Yes or no? Real world?’

  ‘Probably yes. The driver’s seat shows heavy use, the passenger’s seat doesn’t.’

  ‘So how did the two guys get here? Wearing suits and no winter coats?’

  ‘Ma’am, I have no idea,’ the technician said, and walked back to the car.

  ‘I have no idea either,’ Goodman said. ‘My guys have seen no abandoned cars. That was one of the things I told them to look for.’

  Sorenson said, ‘Obviously they didn’t abandon a car. If they had their own car, they wouldn’t have had to hijack a cocktail waitress. And we need to know where the fourth guy came from, too. And we need to figure out where he was while his pals were busy in the bunker.’

  ‘He sounds distinctive.’

  Sorenson nodded. ‘A gorilla with its face smashed in. Anyone should remember a guy like that.’

  Then her phone rang, and she answered it, and Goodman saw her back go straight and her face change. She listened for thirty seconds, and she said, ‘OK,’ and then she said it again, and then she said, ‘No, I’ll make sure it happens,’ and then she clicked off.

  A straight back, but she had said OK, not Yes, sir.

 
Not a superior from her FBI field office, therefore, or from D.C.

  Goodman asked, ‘Who was that?’

  Sorenson said, ‘That was a duty officer in a room in Langley, Virginia.’

  ‘Langley?’

  Sorenson nodded.

  She said, ‘Now the CIA has got its nose in this thing too. I’m supposed to provide progress reports all through the night.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  IT WAS TECHNICALLY challenging to take out a guy in the front passenger seat while driving at eighty miles an hour. It required simultaneous movement and stillness. The driver’s foot had to stay steady on the pedal, which meant his legs had to stay still. His torso had to stay still. Above all his left shoulder had to stay still. Only his right arm could move, which would dictate a backhand scythe to the passenger’s head.

  But it would be a relatively weak blow. It would be easy enough to fake a lazy cross-body scratch of the left shoulder, and then launch the right fist through a long half-circle, like a backward right hook, but the top edge of the Chevy’s dash roll was fairly high, and the bottom edge of its mirror was fairly low, so the swing would have to be carefully aimed through the available gap, and then it would have to be kicked upward for the last part of its travel.

  And Reacher’s arms were long, which meant he would have to keep his elbow tucked in to stop his knuckles fouling against the windshield glass. Which would dictate an upward kick and a snap of the elbow in the final inches, which together would be very hard to calibrate in order to avoid an action-and-reaction jerk to the left shoulder. And any movement of the left shoulder would be a very bad idea at that point. A minor slalom at eighty miles an hour on a straight wide road would be easily recoverable in theory, but there was no point in announcing hostile intent and then spending the next five seconds with both hands on the wheel fighting a skid. That would give the initiative straight back to the passenger, no question about it.

  So all in all it would be better to settle for a light tap, not a heavy blow, which meant the exact choice of target would be important, which meant the larynx would come top of the list. An open hand held horizontally, like a karate chop, and a light smack in the throat. That would get the job done. Disabling, but not fatal. Except that Alan King was asleep, with his face turned away and his chin tucked down to his chest. His throat was concealed. He would have to be woken up first. Maybe a poke in the shoulder. He would straighten up, he would face forward, he would blink and yawn and stare.