by Lee Child
Another thirty-five seconds. Total elapsed time, two minutes fifty-five. Getting there. Faster than fighting. And safer. He said, ‘Anything else you need to know?’
‘How did you break your nose?’
‘Someone hit me with the blunt end of a shotgun.’
‘In Nebraska?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Who can say? Some folks are just naturally aggressive.’
‘If you’re not who you say you are, I could lose my job. I could go to jail.’
‘I know that. But I am who I say I am. And you are who you are. You think Karen Delfuenso is the most important thing here. Not like your boss.’
Sorenson paused.
She nodded.
She said, ‘So where do we start?’
Bingo. Three minutes and twenty-one seconds. But then Sorenson’s cell phone rang, and it was all over before it had even begun.
THIRTY-SIX
INITIALLY FROM SORENSON’S point of view the ring tone was a nuisance and an interruption. It broke a spell. The big guy was well on the way to giving it all up. Who he was, what he was doing, why he was there. Every interrogation was different. Sometimes it paid to play along. Pretend to believe, pretend to cooperate, pretend to be convinced. Then his guard would drop and the truth would come. Another few minutes might have done it.
She took out her phone. It buzzed warmly against her palm. She knew it wouldn’t be Stony. Stony was typing and revising and spell-checking. It would be the night duty agent, in Omaha. With high-priority information. Maybe there was something back from her facial-injury inquiries. Maybe the big guy was wanted in a dozen states. Skowron, or Reacher, or whatever the hell his name really was. In which case the call wouldn’t be a nuisance or an interruption at all. It would be a short cut instead.
She answered.
It was the night duty agent. He said, ‘The Iowa troopers are reporting another 911. Some farmer called in a vehicle fire on the edge of his land.’
‘Where?’
‘About five miles south of you.’
‘What vehicle?’
‘He can’t tell. It’s some distance away. He’s got a big farm. A regular car, he thinks.’
‘Who is responding?’
‘Nobody. The nearest fire department is fifty miles away. They’ll let it burn out. I mean, it’s wintertime in Iowa. What could it set fire to?’
She clicked off. She looked at the big guy and said, ‘Vehicle fire, five miles south of here.’
The big guy stood up, one fast fluid movement. He crossed the motel’s lot and stepped out to the middle of the road. He said, ‘I can see it. I saw it before.’
She kept her gun in her hand. She joined him on the blacktop. She saw a light on the horizon. Miles away. A faint orange glow, like a distant bonfire.
He said, ‘Not good.’
She said, ‘You think it’s the Impala?’
‘It would be a coincidence if it wasn’t.’
‘We’re screwed if they switched vehicles again.’
He nodded.
‘It would be a setback,’ he said.
She said, ‘Are you telling me the truth?’
‘About what?’
‘Your name, for instance.’
‘Jack-none-Reacher,’ he said. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you.’
‘You got ID?’
‘I have an old passport.’
‘Under what name?’
‘Jack-none-Reacher.’
‘Does the photograph look like you?’
‘Younger and dumber.’
‘Get in the car.’
‘Front or back?’
‘Front,’ she said. ‘For now.’
The Crown Vic was transportation, nothing more. Not a mobile office, not a command centre. Reacher got in the front seat and saw no laptop computers, no powerful radios, no array of holstered weapons. Just a phone cradle bolted to the dash, and a single extra mismatched switch. For the strobes, presumably.
Sorenson slid in alongside him and rattled the selector into gear and took off, out from under the porte cochère, counterclockwise back to the road, the same way Alan King had driven, but slower. The car bounced and yawed and settled, and then Sorenson accelerated hard. The road was dead straight. The fire was dead ahead. They were heading straight for it. It looked bright and hot. Reacher remembered a line from an old song: Set the controls for the heart of the sun.
Halfway there it was obvious that gasoline was involved. There was blue in the orange, and a kind of raging fierceness at the centre of the fire. There would be black smoke above it, but the sky was still black in the south, so it didn’t show up. In the east there were the first faint streaks of dawn, low down on the horizon. Reacher thought briefly about Chicago, and the Greyhound depot on West Harrison, and the early buses, and then he dismissed them from his mind. Another time, another place. He watched Sorenson drive. She had her foot hard on the gas. Slim muscles in her right thigh were standing out.
She asked, ‘How long were you in the army?’
He said, ‘Thirteen years.’
‘Rank?’
‘I was terminal at major.’
‘Does your nose hurt?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You should see the other guy.’
‘Were you a good cop in the army?’
‘I was good enough.’
‘How good was that?’
‘I was like old Moose Skowron, I guess. Most years I hit over 300. When it mattered I could step it up to 375.’
‘Did you get medals?’
‘We all got medals.’
‘Why don’t you live anywhere?’
‘Do you have a house?’
‘Of course.’
‘Is it a pure unalloyed pleasure?’
‘Not entirely.’
‘So there’s your answer.’
‘How do we find these guys if they switched cars again?’
‘Lots of ways,’ Reacher said.
A mile out the fire took on a shape, wide at the base, narrow above. Half a mile out Reacher saw strange jets and fans and lobes of flame, pale blue and roaring and almost invisible. He figured the fuel line was failing, maybe at the seams or where the metal was stressed by folds and turns. He figured the tank itself was holding, but vapour was cooking off and boiling out through tiny cracks and fissures, sideways, upward, downward, like random and violent blowtorches, the tongues of flame as strong and straight as metal bars, some of them twenty or thirty feet long. Inside the fireball the car itself was a vague cherry-red shape, jerking and wriggling and dancing in the boiling air. Reacher buzzed his window down and heard the distant noise. He put his hand in the freezing slipstream and felt faint warmth on his palm.
‘Don’t get too close,’ he said.
Sorenson eased up and slowed down. She said, ‘Do you think the tank will blow?’
‘Probably not. The gas is boiling and bleeding off. There’s no big pressure build-up. Combustion is too vigorous to let any kind of blowback happen. So far, anyway.’
‘How much gas do you think is left?’
‘Now? I’m not sure. The tank was full less than forty miles ago.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘We wait. Until it either blows up or calms down enough for us to recognize what kind of car it was.’
Sorenson stopped three hundred yards from the fire, and like good cops everywhere she pulled off the road and on to the shoulder, at least a yard, and then she backed up and parallel-parked herself another whole foot into the weeds. A cautious woman. There was no chance of getting rear-ended, because there was no traffic. Reacher faced front and watched and waited. He expected a fast decision. The gas couldn’t last long. On the road the car had used plenty. And that was to produce just a few puny horsepower. A hundred at most, to haul a mid-size sedan down a completely flat highway. Now the same tank was feeding a fire as intense as a phosphorus bomb. A thousand time
s more powerful. Like a jet engine, literally.
He asked, ‘Where did they jack the car, right back at the beginning? At a light?’
Beside him Sorenson shook her head. ‘Behind the cocktail lounge where Delfuenso works. I think they tried to steal the car first. She came out, either because of the alarm, or she was leaving anyway.’
‘She had her bag,’ Reacher said.
‘Then she was leaving anyway. They stopped and bought shirts, and then they hit the road.’
‘And water.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘I drank some of it. It was still cold. What were they running from?’
‘They stabbed a guy to death.’
‘In the cocktail lounge?’
‘No, in an abandoned pumping station three miles away. Some kind of strange rendezvous.’
‘So how did they get three miles to the cocktail lounge? Did they walk?’
‘They used the victim’s car.’
‘Why didn’t they keep it?’
‘It was bright red and foreign. There was an eyewitness.’
‘To the stabbing itself?’
‘More or less. To the getaway, certainly.’
‘Who was the eyewitness?’
‘A farm worker, about fifty.’
‘Was he any good to you?’
‘No worse than usual. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Excuse the pun. He saw the dead guy go in, followed by the two perps. He saw the perps come out and drive away.’
‘Where was their own car? Didn’t they have one?’
‘No one knows.’
‘If they had their own car, they’d have used it, surely. They must have driven in with the guy they stabbed.’
‘My tech person thinks they didn’t.’
‘Who was the guy they stabbed?’
‘A trade attaché. Like a foreign service guy. He worked in our embassies overseas. He was an Arabic speaker, apparently.’
‘What did they stab him with?’
‘Not sure. Something big. An eight- or nine-inch blade. A hunting knife, probably.’
‘What was the foreign service guy doing in Nebraska?’
‘No one knows. They say he was between postings. The red car was rented in Denver. At the airport. So presumably the guy flew in from somewhere and drove the rest of the way. No one has mentioned a reason why he would do that. Or from where. But the State Department is worried about it. They sent a guy.’
‘Already?’
‘My tech team fingerprinted the dead guy, and it’s been fun and games ever since. Bureau counterterrorism showed up un-announced, and the State Department guy came, and my SAC has been up all night, and the eyewitness disappeared.’
‘Weird,’ Reacher said.
In the end the fire died just as fast as the sun came up. On the left the eastern skies cracked purple and pink and gold, and dead ahead the unspent gas ran out, and the smaller blaze ebbed, and the bigger blaze came over the horizon. Cold daylight lit the scene and gave heft and form to the blackened shell. The car was parked on the shoulder, facing south, as far off the road as Sorenson was. The tyres were burned away. All the glass was gone. The paint had vaporized. The sheet metal was scorched grey and purple in fantastic whorls. For twenty yards all around the winter stubble had burned and blackened. An arc of blacktop was bubbling and smoking. There were last licks of flame here and there, low and timid and hesitant compared to what had come before.
Sorenson bumped back on to the road and drove closer. Reacher looked at the shell. Ashes to ashes. It had started out that way, all bare and shiny in the factory, and it was ending up the same way, all gutted and empty.
It was an Impala. No question about it. Reacher knew the shape of its trunk, the flat of its flanks, the hump of its roof, the pitch of its hood. He was getting a three-quarters rear view, but he was totally sure. It was Delfuenso’s Chevy.
All gutted and empty.
My car.
Reacher stared.
It wasn’t empty.
THIRTY-SEVEN
REACHER WAS THE first to get out. He closed his door and stood next to the Crown Vic’s hood, with cold on his back and heat on his face. He was five feet closer than he had been before, and therefore his angle was five feet better.
All the glass was gone. All the rubber was gone, all the plastics, all the vinyl, all the high-tech space age materials. All that was left was metal, the parts designed to be visible still curved and moulded, the parts designed to be hidden all sharp and knifelike and exposed. In particular the rear parcel shelf had lost its padding and its loudspeakers and its soundproof mat and its mouse-fur covering. What was left was a stamped steel cross-member, corrugated here and there for strength, drilled here and there with holes, but otherwise as plain and brutal as a blade. Its front edge was perfectly straight.
Except it wasn’t.
Reacher took three more steps. The heat was astonishing. The front of the parcel shelf looked different on the right than the left. On the right its straight edge was compromised by a humped shape completely unrelated to engineering necessity. It was an organic shape, odd and random, in no way similar to the stamped angularity all around it.
It was a human head, burned smooth and tiny by the fire.
Sorenson got out of her car.
Reacher said, ‘Stay there, OK?’
He turned away and took a breath from the cold side, and another, until his lungs were full. He turned back and started walking. He kept his distance, looping wide, until he was level with the side of the shell. Then he darted in, until he felt the blacktop hot and sticky under the soles of his boots.
The Chevy’s rear seat was burned away completely. But the person on it wasn’t. Not completely. On the right, directly behind the blackened frame of the front passenger seat, fallen down through the missing cushions to the zigzag springs below, was a shape, like a sea creature, like a seal or a porpoise or a dolphin, black in colour, oozing and smooth and smoking, cooked down to half its original size. It had tiny vestigial arms, clawed up like twigs. It had no expression, because it had no face.
But it had died screaming.
That was for damn sure.
They retreated fifty yards north and stood silently, breathing hard, staring blankly at a spot a thousand miles beyond the far horizon. They stood like that for a whole minute, and then another, as still as statues.
Then Sorenson said, ‘Where are they now?’
Reacher said, ‘I don’t know.’
‘And what are they driving?’
‘They’re not driving anything. They’re being driven. They were picked up.’
‘By who?’
Reacher didn’t answer. But he moved, finally. He glanced up at the sky and looked at the light. It was still very early. But it would do. He found the Chevy’s tyre tracks easily enough. They bumped down on to the shoulder through a thin skim of mud on the edge of the road about a yard wide. The mud was neither wet nor dry, and it had captured the tread prints perfectly. Like the finest plaster. The drift off the road on to the shoulder had been long and cautious. The Chevy had come in like a jumbo jet on approach. More like McQueen’s driving than King’s.
Reacher walked out into the dormant field. Sorenson followed him. They looped around the wreck together, as close as the heat would let them get. Once beyond it they looped back to the road, and they found more tyre tracks.
A second car had driven on to the shoulder. This one at a much tighter angle. Its tread prints were captured in the skim of mud. Road tyres, solid, reliable, nothing radical, nothing fancy, probably on a big sedan. But they had come steering in pretty hard. That was clear. And some little time later they had steered out again just as hard, and bumped their way south. Taken together the tracks looked like the same bite out of a big circle.
Sorenson said, ‘Nothing came through between you and me, right? So this guy must have gotten here hours ago.’
‘No, he came north,’ Reacher said. ‘Not south.
He didn’t come past the motel. He U-turned right here, he picked them up, and he headed back where he came from. You can see all that from the tracks.’
‘Are you certain?’
‘What else can have happened? They didn’t jack another car. That’s for sure. There’s no traffic out here. You could wait for ever. And I doubt if they’re walking. So they were picked up. This was a rendezvous. They got here first. They were waiting. They know this place. Which is how they know that back road off the Interstate.’
‘Who picked them up?’
‘I don’t know,’ Reacher said again. ‘But this thing is starting to look like a big operation. Three coordinated crews, at least.’
‘Why three? There were only two here. King and McQueen, plus whoever picked them up.’
‘Plus whoever was simultaneously disappearing your eyewitness, all the way back in Nebraska. That’s what I mean by coordination. They’re cleaning house. They’re taking care of everyone who ever laid eyes on King and McQueen.’
The break of day brought with it a cold breeze out of the north. There was rain coming. And soon. Reacher hunched down in his coat. Sorenson’s pant legs flapped like sails. She walked twenty yards into a field. To get away from the smell on the wind, Reacher figured. He followed her, with stiff stalks crunching under his feet. Just to keep her company. He didn’t need to move. Right then he couldn’t smell anything at all. But he had smelled similar things before, from time to time in the past, back when his nose still worked. Oil, gas, plastic, charred meat. A chemical stink, plus rotting forgotten barbecue. Worse. Any sane person would want to get out of the way.
Sorenson called the Iowa troopers and claimed the scene for the FBI. She said it was not to be approached, and nothing was to be touched, and nothing was to be moved. Then she called her own tech team and told them to make the long trip over. She told them she wanted the best crime scene analysis ever attempted, and the best autopsy ever performed.
‘Waste of time,’ Reacher said, when she clicked off. ‘There’s virtually nothing to be found after a fire like that.’
‘I just need to know,’ she said.
‘Know what?’
‘That she was dead before the fire started. If I could know that, I might be able to carry on.’