by Lee Child
Duncan asked, “Did you ever meet a man named Reacher?”
Dorothy Coe didn’t answer. She just glanced to her left, out to the hallway. A stubborn woman, hung up on quaint old notions of objectivity.
Duncan said, “That’s a very strong basement door. I know, because I installed the same one myself, when we remodeled. It has a steel core, and it fits into a steel frame, and it has oversized hinges and a burst-proof lock. It’s rated for a category five storm. It can withstand a three-hundred-mile-an-hour gust. It carries a FEMA seal of approval. So if, just hypothetically, there was a person in the basement right now, you may rest assured that he’s staying there. Such a person could not possibly escape. Such a person might as well not exist at all.”
Dorothy Coe asked, “If the door is so good, why do you have a football player leaning on it?”
“He has to be somewhere,” Duncan said. Then he smiled. “Would you prefer it if he was in the bedroom? Maybe he could kill some time in there, with your little friend, while you answer my questions.”
Dorothy Coe glanced the other way, at the doctor’s wife.
Duncan asked, “Did you ever meet a man named Reacher?”
Dorothy Coe didn’t answer.
Duncan said, “The calendar rolls on. It will be spring before you know it. You’ll be plowing and planting. With a bit of luck the rains will be right and you’ll have a good harvest. But then what? Do you want it hauled? Or do you want to stick a gun in your mouth, like your worthless husband?”
Dorothy Coe said nothing.
Duncan asked, “Did you ever meet a man named Reacher?”
Dorothy Coe said, “No.”
“Did you ever hear of a man named Reacher?”
“No.”
“Was he ever at your house?”
“No.”
“Did you ever give him breakfast?”
“No.”
“Was he here when you arrived tonight?”
“No.”
Out in the hallway, three inches from the second Cornhusker’s hip, the handle on the basement door turned, a quarter circle, and paused a beat, and turned back.
No one noticed.
In the dining room, Duncan asked, “Did any kind of stranger come here this winter?”
Dorothy Coe said, “No.”
“Anyone at all?”
“No.”
“Any local troubles here?”
“No.”
“Did anything change?”
“No.”
“Do you want anything to change?”
“No.”
“That’s good,” Duncan said. “I like the status quo, very much, and I’m glad you do too. It benefits all of us. No reason why we can’t all get along.” He got up, leaving the bag of peas on the table, a little melt water beading on the wax. He said, “You three stay here. My boys will look after you. Don’t attempt to leave the house, and don’t attempt to use the phone. Don’t even answer it. The phone tree is off-limits tonight. You’re out of the loop. Punishments for noncompliance will be swift and severe.”
Then Duncan put his parka on, awkwardly, leading with his left hand, and he stepped past the guy with the Remington and headed for the front door. The others heard it open and close and a minute later they heard the Mazda drive away, the sound of its exhaust ripping the night air behind it.
Mahmeini’s man drove the Cadillac south on the two-lane, five gentle miles, and then he turned the lights off and slowed to a walk. The big engine whispered and the soft tires rustled over the pavement. He saw the three old houses on his right. There was a light burning in one of the downstairs windows. Beyond that, there were no signs of life. There were three vehicles parked out front, vague moonlit shapes, all of them old, all of them rustic and utilitarian pick-up trucks, none of them a new blue Chevrolet. But the Chevrolet would come. Mahmeini’s man was absolutely sure of that. Half of Rossi’s attention was fixed on leapfrogging Safir and Mahmeini himself, which meant the other half was fixed on securing his rear. His relationship with the Duncans had to be protected. Which meant his boys would be checking in with them often, calming them, stroking them, reassuring them, and above all making sure no one else was getting close to them. Standard commonsense precautions, straight out of the textbook.
Mahmeini’s man rolled past the end of the Duncans’ driveway and U-turned and parked a hundred yards south on the opposite shoulder, half on the blacktop, half on the dirt, his lights off, the big black car nestled in a slight natural dip, about as invisible as it was possible to get without a camouflage net. There would be a dull moonlit glow from some of the chrome, he figured, but there was mist in the air, and anyway Rossi’s boys would be looking at the mouth of the driveway ahead of their turn, not at anything else. Drivers always did that. Human nature. Steering a car was as much a mental as a physical process. Heads turned, eyes sought their target, and the hands followed automatically.
Mahmeini’s man waited. He was facing north, because on balance he expected Rossi’s boys to come from the north, but it was always possible they would come from the south, so he adjusted his mirror to get a view in that direction. The mist that was helping to hide him was fogging his rear window a little. Nothing serious, but an approaching car with its lights off might be difficult to see. But then, why would Rossi’s boys be driving with their lights off? They were three-for-three on the night, and therefore probably very confident.
Five miles north the orange glow of the gasoline fire was still visible, but it was dying down a little. Nothing burns forever. Above the glow the moon was smudged with smoke. Apart from that the nighttime landscape lay dark and quiet and still and uneventful, like it must have done for a century or more. Mahmeini’s man stared at the road ahead, and saw nothing.
He waited.
Then he saw something.
Way ahead and off to his left he saw a blue glow in the mist, a high round bubble of light, moving fast from west to east. A car, coming in at him at a right angle, aiming to hit the two-lane a mile or two north of him, aiming to turn either left and away from him, or right and toward him. He took his gun from his pocket and laid it on the passenger seat next to him. The moving bubble of light slowed, and stopped, and started again, and flared bright. The car had turned right, toward him. Immediately he knew it was not the Chevrolet. The way the light moved told him it was too small, too low, too nimble. Porsches and Ferraris in Vegas moved the same way at night, their front ends rigidly connected to the pavement, their headlights jittering and hopping. Big dumb domestic sedans looked anesthetized in comparison. They moved like lumps, swaying, dull and damped and padded and disconnected.
He watched and waited, and he saw the bubble of light resolve itself into twin nervous beams and then twin oval shapes close together and low to the ground. He saw the car slow two hundred yards away and then he saw it turn one hundred yards away, straight into the mouth of the driveway. It was the tiny red Mazda Miata he had seen parked at the restored Duncan farmhouse. The daughter-in-law’s car. She was visiting. Not a social occasion, presumably. Not so late at night. She had called ahead on the phone, probably. She had reported the encounter with the strange Iranian man, and she had been told to come on in, for safety’s sake. Probably the Duncans knew certain things were due to be settled before dawn, and they didn’t want one of their own caught in the crossfire.
Mahmeini’s man watched the Mazda bump and bounce down the driveway. He watched it park alongside the old pick-up trucks. He saw its lights go off. Ten seconds later he saw a doorway flare bright in the distance as a figure went inside, and then the scene went dark again.
Mahmeini’s man watched the road, and waited. The night mist was getting worse. It was becoming a problem. The Cadillac’s windshield was going opaque. He fumbled around and found the wiper stalk and flicked the blades right, left, right, left, and cleared it. Which made the rear screen all the worse in comparison. It was completely dewed over. Even a car with its headlights on would be hard to recog
nize. Its lights would be atomized into a million separate shards, into a single blinding mess. Worse than useless.
Mahmeini’s man kept one eye on the road ahead and groped around for the rear defogger button. It was hard to find. With the lights off outside, the dash and all the consoles were unlit inside. And there were a lot of buttons. It was a luxury car, fully equipped. He ducked his head and found a button with zigzag symbols on it. It looked like something to do with heating. And it had a red warning lens laid into it. He pressed it, and waited. Nothing happened to the rear window, but his ass got hot. It was the seat warmer, not the defogger. He turned it off and found another button, one eye on the console, one eye on the road ahead. He pressed the button. The radio came on, very loud. He shut it down in a hurry and tried again, another button close by, a satisfying tactile click under his fingertip.
The trunk lid clunked and popped and raised itself up, slowly and smoothly, damped and hydraulic, all the way open, completely vertical.
Now he had no view at all out the back.
Not good.
And presumably there was a courtesy light in the trunk, in reality quite weak and yellow, but no doubt looking like a million-watt searchlight in the dark of the night.
Not good at all.
He pressed the button again, not really thinking. Afterward he realized he had half-expected the trunk lid to close again, slowly and obediently, like the seat warmer and the radio had gone off again. But of course the trunk lid didn’t close again. The release mechanism merely clicked and whirred one more time, and the trunk lid stayed exactly where it was.
Wide open.
Blocking his view.
He was going to have to get out and close it by hand.
Chapter 45
Roberto Cassano and Angelo Mancini had been in the area three whole days, and they figured their one real solid-gold advantage over Mahmeini’s crew was their local knowledge. They knew the lay of the land, literally. Most of all, they knew it was flat and empty. Like a gigantic pool table, with brown felt. Big fields, for efficiency’s sake, no ditches, no hedges, no other natural obstacles, the ground frozen firm and hard. So even though their car was a regular street sedan, they could drive it cross-country without a major problem, pretty much like sailing a small boat on a calm open sea. And they had seen the Duncan compound up close. They had been in it. They knew it well. They could loop around behind it in the car, slow and quiet, lights off, inky blue and invisible in the dark, and then they could get out and climb the crappy post-and-rail fence, and storm the place from the rear. Surprise was everything. There might be eyeballs to the front, but in back there would be nothing at all except the Duncans and Mahmeini’s guys all sitting around in one of the kitchens, probably toasting each other with cheap bourbon and sniggering about their newly streamlined commercial arrangements.
Two handgun rounds would take care of that happy conversation.
Cassano came south on the two-lane and switched off his lights level with the motel. The Ford was still burning in the lot, but only just. The remains of the tires were still giving off coils of greasy rubber smoke, and small flames were licking out of the gravel all around where oil had spilled. Safir’s boys were dark shrunken shapes about half their original size, both fused to the zigzag springs that were all that was left of the seats, their mouths forced open like awful shrieks, their heads burned smooth, their hands up like talons. Mancini smiled and Cassano rolled slowly past them and headed on down the road, cautiously, navigating by the light of the moon.
Four miles south of the motel and one mile north of the Duncan place he slowed some more and turned the wheel and bumped across the shoulder and struck out across the open land. The car lurched and pattered. In a geological sense the ground was dead flat, but down there where the rubber met the dirt it was rutted and lumpy. The springs creaked and bounced and the wheel jumped and chattered in Cassano’s hands. But he made steady progress. He kept it to about twenty miles an hour and held a wide curve, aiming to arrive about half a mile behind the compound. Two minutes, he figured. At one point he had to brake hard and steer around a bramble thicket. Just beyond it they saw the burned-out shell of an SUV. It loomed up at them out of the dark, all black and ashen gray. Reacher’s work, from earlier in the day. But after that it was easy all the way. They could see a pool of faint yellow light ahead, like a homing beacon. A kitchen window, almost certainly, spilling warmth. The southernmost house, probably. Jacob Duncan’s place. The big cheese.
Mahmeini’s man climbed out of the Cadillac and stood for a second in the nighttime cold. He looked all around, east, west, north, south, and he saw nothing stirring. He closed his door, to kill the interior light. He took a step, toward the trunk. He had been right. There was a light in the trunk. It was throwing a pale sphere of yellow glow into the mist. Not serious from the front, but a problem from behind. The human eye was very sensitive.
He took another step, past the rear passenger door, and he raised his left hand, palm flat, somehow already feeling the familiar sensations associated with an action he had performed a thousand times before, his palm on the metal maybe a foot from the edge of the lid, so that the force of his push would act on both hinges equally, so that the panel would not buckle, so that both calibrated springs would stretch together with soft creaks, whereupon the lid would go down smooth and easy until the upmarket mechanism grabbed at it and sucked it all the way shut.
He got as far as putting his palm on the panel.
Subconsciously he leaned into the motion, not really intending to slam the lid, not at all bad-tempered, just seeking a little physical leverage, and his change of position hunched his shoulders a little, which brought his head forward a little, which changed his eye line a little, which meant he had to look somewhere, and given the choice of the lit interior of a previously closed space or a featureless length of dark blacktop, well, any human eye would opt for the former over the latter.
Asghar Arad Sepehr stared back at him.
His sightless eyes were wide open. His olive skin was pale with death and yellow in the light. Forces from braking and accelerating and turning had jammed him awkwardly into the far rear corner of the trunk. His limbs were in disarray. His neck was bent. His look was quizzical.
Mahmeini’s man stood absolutely still, his hand on the cold metal, his mouth open, not really breathing, his heart hardly beating. He forced himself to look away. Then he looked back. He wasn’t hallucinating. Nothing had changed. He started breathing again. Then he started panting. His heart started thumping. He started to shake and shiver.
Asghar Arad Sepehr stared up at him.
Mahmeini’s man took his hand off the trunk lid and shuffled all the way around to the rear of the car. He stood there with the idling exhaust pooling around his knees and with his fingers steepled against his forehead, looking down, not understanding. Asghar was stone dead, but there was no blood. No gunshot wound between the eyes. No blunt-force trauma, no caved-in skull, no signs of strangulation or suffocation, no knife wounds, no defensive injuries. Nothing at all, except his friend, dead in the trunk, all slack and undignified, all thrown about and jumbled up.
Mahmeini’s man walked away, ten feet, then twenty, and then he turned back and raised his head and raised his arms and howled silently at the moon, his eyes screwed tight shut, his mouth wide open in a desperate snarl, his feet stamping alternately like he was running in place, all alone in the vast empty darkness.
Then he stopped and swiped his hands over his face, one after the other, and he started thinking. But the subtleties were almost completely beyond him. His friend had been killed sixty miles away, by an unknown person and an unknown method with no visible signs, and then locked in the trunk of a car that could have absolutely nothing at all to do with either Rossi’s boys, or Safir’s. Then his own rental had been taken away, so that he had been forced to steal the very same car, the only possible choice in an entire town, inevitably and inexorably, like a puppet being manipula
ted from afar by a grinning intelligence much greater than his own.
It was incomprehensible.
But facts were facts. He walked back to the trunk and steeled himself to investigate further. He pushed and pulled and hauled Asghar into the center of the space and began a detailed examination, like a pathologist leaning over a mortuary table. The trunk light burned bright and hot, but it revealed nothing. Asghar had no broken bones, and no bruises. His neck was intact. He had no wounds, no cuts, no scrapes, no scratches, and there was nothing under his fingernails. His gun and his knife and his money were missing, which was interesting. And all around him in the trunk were the usual kinds of things a person might expect to find in a trunk, which was odd. No attempt had been made to clean it up. No incriminating evidence had been removed. There was an empty grocery bag with a week-old register receipt inside, and a month-old local newspaper never read and still neatly folded, and some browned and curled leaves and some crumbs of dirt as if items had been hauled home from a plant nursery. Clearly the car belonged to someone who used it in a fairly normal manner, and who had not prepared it in any special way for its current gruesome task.
So, whose car was it? That was the first question. The license plates would reveal the answer, of course, assuming they were genuine. But there might be a faster way to find out, given the fact that nothing seemed to have been sanitized. Mahmeini’s man stepped away to the front passenger door, and opened it, and leaned in, and opened the glove box. He found a black leather wallet the size of a hardcover book, stamped on the front with the Cadillac shield in gold. Inside it he found two instruction books, one thick, one thin, one for the car and one for the radio, and a salesman’s business card clipped into four angled slots, and a registration document, and an insurance document. He pulled out both documents and dropped the wallet in the footwell and held the documents close to the light inside the glove box.