Echo Burning jr-5

by Lee Child

  He made it back to the Jeep at the four o'clock position. Found the fourth rifle propped against its door, full of factory shells. It was already soaked. He shook it off and aimed obliquely across the mesa toward the eleven. Pulled the trigger. It fired. It still worked fine. He fired four more spaced shots, at the twelve, the one, the two, the three. Fan fire. A gamble. The upside was he might get lucky and hit the woman. Downside was it would tell her he was on his own. One guy, more than one rifle. That was now an easy deduction. And it would tell her where he was. If she was counting it would suggest to her he was waiting there with the last two shells still in the magazine.

  So he slid the gun under the Jeep and waded west through the brush until he was forty feet from the edge of the rock. Pulled Alice's Heckler & Koch out of his pocket and knocked the safety off. Knelt down and smeared mud over his hands and arms and face and waited for lightning to strike. Summer storms he had witnessed before in hot parts of the world always featured lightning. Gigantic thunderheads rubbed and jostled overhead and the voltage built to an unbearable level. Five more minutes, he guessed. Then lightning would fire in bolts or sheets and the landscape would flash with brightness. He was in khaki clothes and had smeared khaki mud on his skin. He doubted that she had.

  He worked south, away from the Jeep, back toward the wrecked VW, keeping forty feet in the undergrowth. The darkness was total. The rain was building relentlessly. It built to the point where it was absolutely impossible that it could build any harder, and then it just kept on building. The limestone sinkholes were already full of water. Rain was lashing their surfaces. Small rivers were running around his feet, gurgling into bottomless crevasses all around. The noise was astonishing. The rain was roaring against the ground so hard that it was impossible to imagine a louder sound. Then it fell harder and the sound got louder.

  He realized the camouflage mud had rinsed straight off his skin. Impossible for it not to. Carmen's shower was like a grudging trickle in comparison. He began to worry about breathing. How could there be air to breathe, with so much water? It was running down his face in solid streams and running straight into his mouth. He put his hand over his jaw and sucked air through his fingers and spat and spluttered the rainwater away.

  He was opposite the two o'clock position and thirty feet from the ledge when the lightning started. Far to the south a ragged bolt exploded from the sky and hit the earth five miles away. It was pure intense white and shaped like a bare tree hurled upside down by a hurricane. He fell to a crouch and stared straight ahead, looking for peripheral vision. Saw nothing. The thunder followed the lightning five seconds later, a ragged tearing rumble. Where is she? Does she think she's smarter than she thinks I am? In which case she'll be behind me. But he didn't turn around. Life is always about guessing and gambling, and he had her pegged as a slick operator, for sure. In her world. Put her out on the street face-to-face with Al Eugene, and she's got the smarts to charm the birds out of the trees. But put her down all alone in open combat territory at night in a storm, and she's struggling. I'm good at this. She's not. She's in front of me, clinging to the edge of the mesa somewhere, scared like she's never been scared before. She's mine.

  The storm was moving. The second lightning strike came three minutes later and a mile north and east of the first one. It was a jagged sheet that flickered insanely for eight or ten seconds before dying into darkness. Reacher craned upward and scanned ahead and right. Saw nothing. Turned and scanned left. Saw the woman seventy feet away, crouched in the lee of the ledge. He could see the white writing on her cap. FBI. Big letters. She was looking straight at him and her gun was rigid in her hand and her arm was fully extended from the shoulder. He saw the muzzle flash as she fired at him. It was a tiny dull spark completely overwhelmed by the storm.

  * * *

  The storm drifted slowly north and east and pushed the leading edge of rain ahead of it. It reached the motel building and built steadily and quickly from a whisper to a patter to a hard relentless drumming on the roof. It was a metal roof and within thirty seconds the noise was very loud. It woke Ellie from a restless troubled sleep. She opened her eyes wide and saw the small dark man with hair on his arms. He was sitting very still in a chair near the bed, watching her.

  "Hi, kid," he said.

  Ellie said nothing.

  "Can't sleep?"

  Ellie looked up at the ceiling.

  "Raining," she said. "It's noisy."

  The man nodded, and checked his watch.

  * * *

  She missed him. Impossible to tell by how much. The lightning died and plunged the world back into absolute darkness. Reacher fired once at the remembered target and listened hard. Nothing. Probably a miss. Seventy feet in heavy rain, not an easy shot. Then the thunderclap came. It was a shuddering bass boom that rocked the ground and rolled slowly away. He crouched again. He had nine bullets left. Then he threw the double-bluff dice. She'll think I'll move, so I won't. He stayed right where he was. Waited for the next lightning bolt. It would tell him how good she was. An amateur would move away from him. A good pro would move closer. A really good pro would double-bluff the double-bluff and stay exactly where she was.

  By then the rain was as heavy as it was going to get. That was his guess. He had once been caught in a jungle storm in Central America and gotten wet faster than falling fully clothed into the sea. That was the hardest rain imaginable and this was easily comparable. He was completely soaked to the skin. Beyond soaked. Water was running in continuous torrents under his shirt. Pouring off him, not dripping. It sluiced out of his buttonholes like jets. He was cold. The temperature had plummeted twenty or thirty degrees in less than twenty minutes. As much water was bouncing upward around him as was lashing down. The noise was unbearable. Leaves and stalks were tearing off the bushes. They were flowing and eddying away and building tiny beaver dams against every rock on the ground. The hard hot grit had washed into slushy mud six inches deep. His feet were sinking in it. His gun was soaked. That's O.K. A Heckler & Koch will fire wet. But so will a Browning or a SIG.

  The next lightning flash was still well to the south, but it was nearer. And brighter. It was a gigantic lateral bolt that hissed and crackled across the sky. He scanned left. The woman had moved closer. She was sixty feet away from him, still tight against the mesa. Good, but not really good. She fired at him and missed by four feet. It was a hasty shot and her arm was still swinging in from the south. The south? She figured I'd moved away. He felt mildly insulted and leveled his arm and fired back. The incoming thunderclap buried the sound of the shot. Probably a miss. Eight left.

  Then it was back to the calculations. What will she do? What will she figure I'll do? She had been wrong the last time. So this time she'll gamble. She'll guess I'll move in closer. So she'll move in closer too. She'll go for the killing shot immediately.

  He stayed in a crouch, exactly where he was. Triple-bluff. He tracked his gun hand left-to-right along the theoretical direction she must be moving. Waited for the precious lightning. It came sooner than he expected. The storm was ripping in fast. It exploded not more than a half-mile away and was followed almost immediately by a bellow of thunder. The flash was brighter than the sun. He squinted ahead. The woman was gone. He jerked left and saw a smudge of vivid blue backtracking away in the opposite direction. He fired instinctively just ahead of it and the lightning died and darkness and noise and chaos collapsed around him. Seven left. He smiled. But now I only need one more.

  * * *

  The sound of thunder frightened her. It sounded like when Joshua and Billy had put a new roof on the motor barn. They had used big sheets of tin and they boomed and flexed when they were carrying them and made a horrible noise when they hammered the nails through. Thunder was like a hundred million billion sheets of roofing tin all flexing and booming in the sky. She ducked her head under the sheets and watched the room light up with bright wobbling flashes of lightning outside the window.

  "Are you scared?" the
man asked.

  She nodded, under the sheets. It scrubbed her hair, but she was sure the man could see her head moving.

  "Don't be scared," the man said. "It's only a storm. Big girls aren't scared of storms."

  She said nothing. He checked his watch again.

  * * *

  Her tactics were transparent. She was good, but not good enough to be unreadable. She was working close in to the rim of the mesa, because it offered an illusion of safety. She was working an in-out-in-in move. Double-bluffing, triple-bluffing, aiming to be unpredictable. Smart, but not smart enough. She had moved close, and then moved away. Now she would move close again, and then the next time not away again, but closer still. She figured he would begin to read the pattern and anticipate the yo-yo outward. But she would come inward instead. To wrong-foot him. And because she wanted to be close. She liked close. A head-shot artiste like her, he guessed her preferred range would be something less than ten feet.

  He jumped out of his crouch and ran as hard as he could, like a sprinter, backward and left, curving around in a fast wide circle. He crashed through the brush like a panicked animal, big leaping strides, hurdling mesquite, splashing through puddles, sliding through the mud. He didn't care how much noise he was making. He would be inaudible a yard away. All that mattered was how fast he was. He needed to outflank her before the next lightning bolt.

  He ran wildly in a big looping curve and then slowed and skidded and eased in close to the limestone ledge maybe twenty feet north of where he had first seen her. She had moved south, and then back, so now she would be on her way south again. She ought to be thirty feet ahead by now. Right in front of him. He walked after her, fast and easy, like he was on a sidewalk somewhere. Kept loose, trying to second-guess the rhythm of the lightning, staying ready to hit the wet dirt.

  * * *

  The small dark man checked his watch again. Ellie hid under the sheet.

  "Over three hours," the man said.

  Ellie said nothing.

  "Can you tell the time?"

  Ellie straightened up in the bed and pulled the sheet down slowly, all the way past her mouth.

  "I'm six and a half," she said.

  The man nodded.

  "Look," he said.

  He held out his arm and twisted his wrist.

  "One more hour," he said.

  "Then what?"

  The man looked away. Ellie watched him a long moment more. Then she pulled the sheet back over her head. The thunder boomed and the lightning flashed.

  * * *

  The flash lit up the whole landscape for miles ahead. The crash of thunder crowded in on top of it. Reacher dropped to a crouch and stared. She wasn't there. She was nowhere in front of him. The lightning died and the thunder rolled on. For a second he wondered whether he would hear her gun over it. Would he? Or would the first he knew be the sickening impact of the bullet? He dropped full length into the mud and lay still. Felt the rain lashing his body like a thousand tiny hammers. O.K., rethink. Had she outflanked him? She could have attempted an exact mirror-image of his own move. In which case they had each sprinted a wide fast circle in opposite directions and essentially exchanged positions. Or she could have found a sinkhole or a crevasse and gone to ground. She could have found the Jeep. If she'd glanced backward during a lightning strike she would have seen it. It was an easy conclusion that he'd have to get back to it eventually. How else was he going to get out of the desert? So maybe she was waiting there. Maybe she was inside it, crouching low. Maybe she was under it, in which case he had just presented her with a Winchester rifle with two factory rounds still in the magazine.

  He stayed down in the mud, thinking hard. He ignored the next lightning flash altogether. Just pressed himself into the landscape, calculating, deciding. He rejected the possibility of the flanking maneuver. That was military instinct. He was dealing with a street shooter, not an infantry soldier. No infantryman would aim for a guy's eye. Percentages were against it. So maybe she had gone for the Jeep. He swam himself through a stationary muddy circle and raised his head and waited.

  The next flash was a sheet, rippling madly and lighting the underside of the clouds like a battlefield flare. The Jeep was a long way away. Too far, surely. And if she had gone for it, she was no immediate threat. Not all the way back there, not at that distance. So he swiveled back around and crawled on south. Check and clear, zone by zone. He moved slowly, on his knees and elbows. Ten feet, twenty, twenty-five. It felt exactly like basic training. He crawled on and on, and then he smelled perfume.

  It was somehow intensified by the rain. He realized the whole desert smelled different. The rain had changed things entirely. He could smell plants and earth. They made a strong, pungent, natural odor. But mixed into it was a woman's perfume. Was it perfume? Or was it something from nature, like a night flower suddenly blooming in the storm? No, it was perfume. A woman's perfume. No question about it. He stopped moving and lay completely still.

  He could hear the mesquite moving, but it was only the wind. The rain was easing back toward torrential and a strong wet breeze was coming in from the south, teasing him with the smell of perfume. It was absolutely dark. He raised his gun and couldn't see it in his hand. Like he was a blind man.

  Which way is she facing? Not east. She had to be crouched low, so to the east there would be nothing to see except the blank two-foot wall that was the edge of the mesa. If she was looking south or west, no problem. If she's looking north, she's looking straight at me, except she can't see me. Too dark. She can't smell me either, because I'm upwind. He raised himself on his left forearm and pointed his gun straight from his right shoulder. If she was facing south or west, it would give him an easy shot into her back. But worst case, she's looking north and we're exactly facing each other. We could be five feet apart. So it's a gamble now. When the lightning flashes, who reacts first?

  He held his breath. Waited for the lightning. It was the longest wait of his life. The storm had changed. Thunder was rumbling long and loud, but it wasn't sharp anymore. The rain was still heavy. It kicked mud and grit up onto his face. Thrashed against the brush. Brand-new streams gurgled all around his prone body. He was half-submerged in water. He was very cold.

  Then there was a split-second tearing sound in the sky and a gigantic thunderclap crashed and a bolt of lightning fired absolutely simultaneously. It was impossibly white and harsh and the desert lit up brighter than day. The woman was three feet in front of him. She was slumped face down on the ground, already battered by rain and silted with mud. She looked small and collapsed and empty. Her legs were bent at the knees and her arms were folded under her. Her gun had fallen next to her shoulder. A Browning Hi-Power. It was half-submerged in the mud and a small thicket of twigs had already dammed against one side of it. He used the last of the lightning flash to scrabble for it and hurl it far away. Then the light died and he used the after-image retained in his eyes to find her neck.

  There was no pulse. She was already very cold.

  Deflection shooting. His third bullet, instinctively placed just ahead of her as she scrambled away from him. She had jumped straight into its path. He kept the fingers of his left hand on the still pulse in her neck, afraid to lose contact with her in the dark. He settled down to wait for the next lightning flash. His left arm started shaking. He told himself it was because he was holding it at an unnatural angle. Then he started laughing. It built quickly, like the rain. He had spent the last twenty minutes stalking a woman he had already shot dead. Accidentally. He laughed uncontrollably until the rain filled his mouth and set him coughing and spluttering wildly.

  * * *

  The man stood up and walked over to the credenza. Picked up his gun from where it was lying on the polished wood. Ducked down to the black nylon valise and took out a long black silencer. Fitted it carefully to the muzzle of the gun. Walked back to the chair and sat down again.

  "It's time," he said.

  He put his hand on her shoulder.
She felt it through the sheet. She wriggled away from him. Swam down in the bed and curled up. She needed to pee. Very badly.

  "It's time," the man said again.

  He folded the sheet back. She scrabbled away, holding the opposite hem tight between her knees. Looked straight at him.

  "You said one more hour," she said. "It hasn't been a hour yet. I'll tell that lady. She's your boss."

  The man's eyes went blank. He turned and looked at the door, just for a moment. Then he turned back.

  "O.K.," he said. "You tell me when you think it's been one more hour."

  He let go of the sheet and she wrapped herself up in it again. Ducked her head under it and put her hands over her ears to block the noise of the thunder. Then she closed her eyes, but she could still see the lightning flashes through the sheet and through her eyelids. They looked red.

  * * *

  The next flash was sheet lightning again, vague and diffuse and flickering. He rolled the body over, just to be sure. Tore open her jacket and shirt. He had hit her in the left armpit. It was through-and-through, exiting in the opposite wall of her chest. Probably got her heart, both lungs and her spine. A .40 bullet was not a subtle thing. It took a lot to stop one. The entry wound was small and neat. The exit wound wasn't. The rain flushed it clean. Diluted blood leaked all over the place and instantly disappeared. Her chest cavity was filling with water. It looked like a medical diagram. He could have sunk his whole hand in there.

  She was medium-sized. Blond hair, soaked and full of mud where it spilled out under the FBI cap. He pushed the bill of the cap upward so he could see her face. Her eyes were open and staring at the sky and filling with rain like tears. Her face was slightly familiar. He had seen her before. Where? The lightning died and he was left with the image of her face in his mind, harsh and white and reversed like a photograph's negative. The diner. The Coke floats. Friday, school quitting time, a Crown Victoria, three passengers. He had pegged them as a sales team. Wrong again.