by Lee Child
“Well, that’s an honest answer, at least. But then, they tell me you’re an expert. You were in the army. A commanding officer, I believe.”
“For a spell.”
“Of an elite unit.”
“So we told ourselves.”
“Do you think I am wise?” she asked. “Or foolish?”
“Ma’am, in what respect?”
“In agreeing to testify at the trial.”
“It depends on what you saw.”
“In what way?”
“If you saw enough to nail the guy, then I think you’re doing the right thing. But if what you saw was inconclusive, then I think it’s an unnecessary risk.”
“I saw what I saw. I am assured by all concerned that it was sufficient to secure a conviction. Or to nail the guy, as you put it. I saw the conversation, I saw the inspection of the goods, I saw the counting and transfer of money.”
“At what distance?”
“Perhaps twenty yards.”
“Through a window?”
“From inside the restaurant, yes.”
“Was the glass clean? Steamed up?”
“Yes and no.”
“Direct line of sight?”
“Yes.”
“Weather?”
“Cool and clear.”
“Time?”
“It was the middle of the evening.”
“Was the lot lit up?”
“Brightly.”
“Is your eyesight OK?”
“I’m a little farsighted. I sometimes wear spectacles to read. But never otherwise.”
“What were the goods?”
“A brick of white powder sealed tight in a wax paper wrap. The paper was slightly yellowed with age. There was a pictorial device stenciled on it, in the form of a crown, a headband with three points, and each point had a ball on it, presumably to represent a jewel.”
“You saw that from twenty yards?”
“It’s a benefit of being farsighted. And the device was large.”
“No doubts whatsoever? No interpretation, no gaps, no guesswork?”
“None.”
“I think you’ll make a great witness.”
She brought lunch to the table. It was a salad in a wooden bowl. The bowl was dark with age and oil, and the salad was made of leaves and vegetables of various kinds, plus tuna from a can, and hard boiled eggs that were still faintly warm. Janet Salter’s hands were small. Pale, papery skin. Trimmed nails, no jewelry at all.
Reacher asked her, “How many other people were in the restaurant at the time?”
She said, “Five, plus the waitress.”
“Did anyone else see what was happening?”
“I think they all did.”
“But?”
“Afterward they pretended not to have seen. Those who dwell in the community to our west are well known here. They frighten people. Simply by being there, I think, and by being different. They are the other. Which is inherently disturbing, apparently. In practice, they do us no overt harm. We exist together in an uneasy standoff. But I can’t deny an undercurrent of menace.”
Reacher asked, “Do you remember the army camp being built out there?”
Janet Salter shook her head. “Chief Holland and Mr. Peterson have asked me the same question endlessly. But I know no more than they do. I was away in school when it was built.”
“People say it took months to build. Longer than a semester, probably. Didn’t you hear anything when you were back in town?”
“I went to school overseas. International travel was expensive. I didn’t return during the vacations. In fact I didn’t return for thirty years.”
“Where overseas?”
“Oxford University, in England.”
Reacher said nothing.
Janet Salter asked, “Have I surprised you?”
Reacher shrugged. “Peterson said you were a teacher and a librarian. I guess I pictured a local school.”
“Mr. Peterson has any South Dakotan’s aversion to grandeur. And he’s quite right, anyway. I was a teacher and a librarian. I was Professor of Library Science at Oxford, and then I helped run the Bodleian Library there, and then I came back to the United States to run the library at Yale, and then I retired and came home to Bolton.”
“What’s your favorite book?”
“I don’t have one. What’s yours?”
“I don’t have one, either.”
Janet Salter said, “I know all about the crisis plan at the prison.”
“They tell me it has never been used.”
“But as with all things, one imagines there will be a first time, and that it will come sooner or later.”
Plato skipped lunch, which was unusual for him. Normally he liked the ritual and ceremony of three meals a day. His staff duly prepared a dish, but he didn’t show up to eat it. Instead he walked on a serpentine path through the scrub on his property, moving fast, talking on his cell phone, his shirt going dark with sweat. His guy in the American DEA had made a routine scan through all their wiretap transcripts and had called with a warning. Plato didn’t like warnings. He liked solutions, not problems. His DEA guy knew that, and had already reached out to a colleague. No way to stop the hapless Russian getting busted, but things could be delayed until after the deal was done, so that the money could disappear safely into the ether and Plato could walk away enriched and unscathed. All it would cost was four years of college tuition. The colleague had a sixteen-year-old and no savings. Plato had asked how much college cost, and had been mildly shocked at the answer. A person could buy a decent car for that kind of money.
Plato had only one remaining problem. The place in South Dakota was a multi-purpose facility. Most of its contents could be sold, but not all of them. Some of them had to be moved out first. Like selling a house. You left the stove, you took the sofa.
He trusted no one. Which helped, most of the time. But at other times it gave him difficulties. Like now. Who could he ask to pack and ship? He couldn’t call Allied Van Lines. FedEx and UPS were no good.
His reluctant conclusion was that if you wanted something done properly, you had to do it yourself.
Janet Salter patted the air to make Reacher stay where he was and started to clear the table around him. She asked, “How much do you know about methamphetamine?”
Reacher said, “Less than you, probably.”
“I’m not that kind of girl.”
“But you’re that kind of librarian. I’m sure you’ve researched it extensively.”
“You first.”
“I was in the military.”
“Which implies?”
“Certain situations and certain operations called for what the field manuals described as alertness, focus, motivation, and mental clarity, for extended periods. The doctors had all kinds of pep pills available. Straight meth was on its way out when I came on the job, but it had been around before that, for decades.”
Janet Salter nodded. “It was called Pervitin. A German refinement of a Japanese discovery. It was in widespread use during World War Two. It was baked into candy bars. Fliegerschokolade, which means flyers’ chocolate, and Panzerschokolade, which means tankers’ chocolate. The Allies had it, also. Just as much, actually. Maybe more. They called it Desoxyn. I’m surprised anyone ever slept.”
“They had morphine for sleeping.”
“But now it’s controlled. Because it causes terrible damage to those who abuse it. So it has to be manufactured illegally. Which is relatively easy to do, in small home laboratories. But the manufacture of anything requires raw materials. For methamphetamine you need ephedrine or pseudoephedrine. You can buy it in bulk, if you can get past the regulations. Or you can extract it from over-the-counter decongestant medicines. To do that you need red phosphorus and iodine. Or lithium, from certain types of batteries. That’s an alternative method, called the Birch reduction.”
“You can get it direct from acacia trees in West Texas,” Reacher said. “Plus mesc
aline and nicotine. A wonderful tree, the acacia.”
“But this is not West Texas,” Janet Salter said. “This is South Dakota. My point is, you can’t make bricks without straw. If they’re shipping out vast quantities of finished product, they must be shipping in vast quantities of raw materials. Which must be visible. There must be truckloads involved. Why can’t Chief Holland get at them that way, without involving me?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think Chief Holland has gotten lazy.”
“Peterson claimed they gave you the option of backing out.”
“But don’t you see? That’s no option at all. I couldn’t live with myself. It’s a matter of principle.”
“Peterson claims you were offered federal protection.”
“And perhaps I should have accepted it. But I much preferred to stay in my own home. The justice system is supposed to penalize perpetrators, not witnesses. That’s a matter of principle, too.”
Reacher glanced at the kitchen door. A cop in the hallway, a cop at the rear window, two more sleeping upstairs ready for the night watch, a car outside, another car one block over, a third at the end of the street. Plus alert townsfolk, and a paranoid police HQ. Plus snow all over the place.
All good, unless the siren sounded.
Reacher asked, “Are you a grandmother?”
Janet Salter shook her head. “We didn’t have children. We waited, and then my husband died. He was English, and much older than me. Why do you ask?”
“Peterson was talking about your credibility on the stand. He said you look like a storybook grandma.”
“Do I?”
“I don’t know. I guess I didn’t have those storybooks.”
“Where were you raised?”
“On Marine Corps bases.”
“Which ones?”
“It felt like all of them.”
“I was raised here in South Dakota. My father was the last in a long line of robber barons. We traded, we bought land from the native inhabitants at twelve cents an acre, we bought thousands of government stakes through surrogates, we mined gold, we invested in the railroad. At insider rates, of course.”
Reacher said, “Hence this house.”
Janet Salter smiled. “No, this is where we came when we hit hard times.”
Out in the hallway the bell chimed once, quiet and civilized. Reacher stood up and stepped to the door and watched. The policewoman on duty was sitting on the bottom stair. She got up and crossed the dim space and opened the front door. Chief Holland came in, with a soft flurry of snow and a cloud of cold air. He stamped his feet on the mat and shivered as the warmth hit him. He took off his parka. The policewoman hung it up for him, right on top of Reacher’s borrowed coat.
Holland crossed the hallway and nodded to Reacher and pushed past him to the kitchen door. He told Janet Salter that he had no significant news for her, and that he was dropping by merely to pay his respects. She asked him to wait in the library. She said she would make coffee and bring it in. Reacher watched her fill an old percolator made of thick dull aluminum. It had a cord insulated with fabric. It was practically an antique. It could have been melted down from a surplus B-24 Liberator after World War Two. Reacher stood ready to help, but she waved him away and said, “Go and wait with the chief in the library.” So Reacher joined Holland in the book-lined room and asked, “How are things?”
Holland said, “What things?”
“The car out on the eastern town limit. With the dead guy in it.”
“We’re not sure if our initial assumption was correct. About breaking the chain, I mean. It could have been a simple robbery gone wrong.”
“How so?”
“The guy was a lawyer, but there was no briefcase in the car. You ever heard of that? A lawyer without a briefcase? Maybe someone took it.”
“Was there a wallet in his pocket?”
“Yes.”
“A watch on his wrist?”
“Yes.”
“Was he expected up at the jail?”
“Not according to the visitor lists. His client made no request. But his office claims he got a call.”
“Then it wasn’t a simple robbery. He was decoyed out there. He had no briefcase because he wasn’t planning on writing anything down. Not in his current line of work.”
“Maybe. We’ll keep the line of inquiry open.”
“Who made the call to his office?”
“A male voice. Same as the first five times. From a cell phone we can’t trace.”
“Who was the client he saw at the jail?”
“Some deadbeat simpleton we’ll never get anything out of. We arrested him eight weeks ago for setting fire to a house. We’re still waiting for a psychological evaluation. Because he won’t speak to anyone he doesn’t want to. Not a word.”
“Sounds like your biker friend chose well.”
The percolator started burping and gulping out in the kitchen. It was loud. Reacher could hear it quite clearly. The smell of brewing coffee drifted in and filled the air. Colombian, Reacher figured, ground coarse, reasonably fresh. He said, “Mrs. Salter and I were talking about raw material supply to the lab you figure they’ve got out there.”
“You think we’re negligent? You think we’re putting her at risk when we have a viable alternative?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“We’ve tried, believe me. Nothing comes through Bolton. We’re damn sure of that. Therefore they’re being supplied from the west. The Highway Patrol is responsible for the highway. We have no jurisdiction there. All we control is the county two-lane that runs north to the camp. We put cars there on a random basis. Literally random. I roll actual dice on my desk.”
Reacher said, “I saw them there.”
Holland nodded. “I do it like that because we can’t afford for the pattern to be predictable in any way at all. But so far we haven’t been lucky. They watch us pretty carefully, I suppose.”
“OK.”
“The trial will do it for us. Or the plea bargain the night before. It won’t come any earlier than that. One more month, that’s all.”
“Peterson told me there’s no way to fudge the crisis plan.”
“He’s right. We objected, of course, but the deal was done by the mayor. Lots of money, lots of strings attached. We’d have Justice Department monitors all over us forever.”
“A gift horse.”
“More trouble than it’s worth,” Holland said. “But then, I don’t own a motel.”
Plato’s walled compound extended across a hundred acres. His walking path through the scrub was more than three miles long. He got his next idea at the farthest point from the house. It was characteristically bold. The DEA was going to bust the Russian. That was a given. Plato wasn’t going to stand in their way. The agents had to see the guy take possession. But possession of what, exactly? Enough to make the charges stick, for sure. But not necessarily everything the guy was about to pay for. That would be excessively generous, under the circumstances. A small margin could be retained. A large margin, in fact. Possibly most of the agreed amount. Because what the hell could the Russian guy do? Rant and rave in a supermax cell somewhere, about the unfairness of life? He would be doing that, anyway. So Plato could take the guy’s money, and then sell the stuff all over again to someone else. Like selling a house, except this time you take the stove and the lightbulbs and the glass from the windows.
The scheme would more than double his transportation problem, but he could deal with that. He was sure a solution would present itself. The details would fall into place.
Because he was Plato, and they weren’t.
Janet Salter brought the coffee to the library on a silver tray. A china pot, some cream, some sugar, three tiny cups, three saucers, three spoons. Clearly the on-duty policewomen were not included. Probably there had been prior discussion about separation of professional and social obligations. Probably the policewomen were happy with the final outcome. Reacher had
been in their situation many times. Always better to compartmentalize and focus.
Janet Salter poured the coffee. The cup was far too small for Reacher’s hand, but the coffee was good. He sniffed the steam and took a sip. Then Chief Holland’s cell phone rang. Holland balanced his cup and dragged the phone from his pocket and checked the window. He opened the phone one-handed and answered. He listened to the caller for eight seconds. Then he hung up and smiled, widely and gratefully and happily.
He said, “We just caught the guy who shot the lawyer.”
Five minutes to two in the afternoon.
Thirty-eight hours to go.
Chapter 15
Reacher rode back to the station with Holland. The unmarked Crown Vic churned its way out of the side street and locked into the established ruts and headed home smooth and easy. Peterson was waiting in the squad room. He was smiling too, just as widely and gratefully and happily as Holland was. Reacher wasn’t smiling. He had serious doubts. Based in bitter experience. A fast and easy resolution to a major problem was too good to be true. And things that were too good to be true usually weren’t. A basic law of nature.
He asked, “So who was the shooter?”
Peterson said, “Jay Knox. The bus driver.”
Reacher got the story secondhand by standing off to one side and listening as Peterson briefed Holland. Forty minutes earlier a cop in a patrol car had seen a pedestrian floundering through deep snow alongside a rural road a mile out of town. Peterson named the cop in the car and called him one of ours. An old hand, presumably. From the good half of the department. Maybe someone Holland actually knew. As instructed the cop in the car was operating at a level of high alert, but even so he thought the guy on foot was more likely a stranded driver than a murderer. He stopped and offered the guy a ride. There was something off about the guy’s response. He was surly, and uncooperative, and evasive. The cop therefore cuffed him and searched him.
And found a Glock 17 nine-millimeter pistol in his pocket. It smelled like it had been recently fired and its magazine was one round short of full.