23 Past Tense

by Lee Child

  But still, a blow. Were there alternatives? Suddenly he thought so. Suddenly he thought, why rebuild at all? The motel was a dump. It was nothing to him. It was a junk part of some weird old title passed down from a dead guy he never knew. He didn’t care about the motel. Then and there he decided to leave it in ruins. It would be much cheaper to convert a single room in the main house. It would be much cheaper to change the signs from MOTEL to B&B . Six new plastic letters, a little gold paint. A different kind of invitation. Should work fine. They didn’t need more than two guests at a time anyway. The customers could sleep in tents. Part of the whole rugged experience.

  But dead people were a whole different category. Mark prided himself on being realistic. He felt he wasn’t blinded by emotion or ruled by sentiment or misled by cognitive bias. He felt he made purely dispassionate judgments. He felt he was good at foreseeing consequences. Like speed chess in his mind. He felt he knew what would happen next. If this, then that, then the other thing. And right then he foresaw a whole lot of dominoes about to fall. The dead people would be missed, questions would be asked, data would be traced. If Robert could find people, so could the government. Probably faster.

  He thought, time for plan B.

  Unsentimental.

  He walked back to his bike and rode it slowly to the house. The motel had burned to the ground. Only the metal cage around room ten was still standing. It was glowing cherry red. The heat was fierce. He could feel it all the way across the lot. The embers rippled in the ghostly nighttime breeze, red and white and shimmering.

  He rode past the barn and made it to the house. He gunned the bike up the steps and parked it on the porch. He went in the front. Straight to the parlor. Steven said hello before he stepped in the door. Without looking up. He was watching the GPS. He knew Mark was in the house.

  Mark looked over Steven’s shoulder. At the GPS screen. Only one flashlight was showing. Peter and Robert were still static on the flanks.

  Steven said, “Four of the heart monitors failed.”

  “Four now?” Mark said.

  Steven switched screens and showed him the data. It was laid out as four separate graphs. Heart rate versus time. Each graph looked like a pencil sketch of mountainous terrain. All of them showed basically the same thing. First elevated and consistent excitement, then a brief plateau of extreme stress, then nothing.

  “Might be an equipment fault,” Steven said.

  “No,” Mark said. “I saw two of them dead already.”

  “What?”

  “Their heads were bashed in. By Patty and Shorty, I guess. Who are clearly better than we thought.”

  “Where was this?”

  “South of the track.”

  “What happened to the other two?”

  “I don’t know,” Mark said.

  Steven switched back to the GPS screen. The surviving flashlight was moving down the track, in the trees, close to the edge. Peter and Robert were still stationary. In a separate window the two surviving customers were showing elevated but consistent heartbeats. Excited. The thrill of the chase. But no sudden spikes. No contact yet.

  “Which ones are they?” Mark asked.

  “Karel and the Wall Street guy.”

  “Can we tell where they are?”

  “We know where their bikes are. They seem to have taken up a middle position.”

  “With the front two and the back two already gone. It’s up to them now.”

  “Who got the back two?”

  “I don’t know,” Mark said again.

  “This changes everything, you know. It’s not the same now.”

  “I agree.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Plan B,” Mark said. “Watch carefully where the flashlight goes.”

  Steven kept his eyes on the screen.

  Mark pulled a boxy black handgun up and out from under his jacket. His elbow went high, because the gun was long, because it had a suppressor attached. He shot Steven in the back of the head. And again, when the body came to rest. To be sure and certain. Plan B required a lot of both.

  He took the bags of cash from the closet, and set them down on the hallway floor. He opened the closet’s back wall and took out his escape kit. Cash, cards, a driver’s license, a passport, and a burner phone. A whole new person, zipped in a plastic bag.

  He threw Peter’s and Steven’s and Robert’s on the closet floor.

  He carried the bags of cash outside and set them down in the dirt a distance away. He came back to the porch and opened the front door wide. He sawed the quad-bike back and forth in front of it until it had room to fall over. He removed the gas cap and threw it away. He squatted down like a weightlifter and grabbed the frame. He jerked the bike up and toppled it over, on its side. Toward the house. Right next to the open door. Gas gurgled out of the open tank. It made a stain, then a miniature lake.

  Mark threw a match, and backed away, and grabbed the bags, and ran. To the barn. Halfway there he stopped and looked back. The house was already alight. All around the front door. The walls, the porch boards. The flames were creeping inside.

  He turned again and ran on forward. In the barn he put the bags in his Mercedes. He backed it out and parked it a distance away. He ran back to the barn. To his right the house was burning nicely. The flames were up to the second floor windows. In the barn he hustled over to where the lawn tractor was parked. To the shelf above it, where the gas cans were kept. Five of them, all lined up, filled every time someone drove the pick-up to town. Always ready. The grass had to look good. Curb appeal was important.

  Plan B. No more of that.

  He emptied the cans on the floor, under Peter’s Mercedes, under Steven’s, under Robert’s. He threw a match, and backed away, and turned and ran to his car. He set the hazard flashers going. For Peter and Robert to see. A panic signal. They already knew their radios were dead. They were looking at two brand new fires. They had no idea what was going on. They would come running.

  He drove toward the mouth of the track, at a stately speed, past the glowing ruins of the motel, through the meadow, flashing orange all the way.

  He stopped in the center of the meadow.

  Robert zoomed in from the right side, a wide curve out of the woods, flailing the seed heads, flattening the meadow grass under four fat tires. He bumped up on the edge of the blacktop and maneuvered next to the passenger side. Mark buzzed the far window down. Robert looked in. Mark shot him in the face.

  Mark buzzed the window back up. Peter was approaching on the left-hand side. The same wide swooping curve through the meadow. Exactly symmetrical. Aiming to arrive at the driver’s window, not the passenger’s. Which meant the Mercedes itself was between him and Robert’s empty bike, and the slumped figure on the ground.

  Mark buzzed his window down.

  Peter maneuvered alongside.

  Face to face.

  The gun was too long. Because of the suppressor. Mark couldn’t maneuver it. It snagged on the door.

  Peter stopped his engine.

  He said, “How bad is it?”

  Mark paused a beat.

  “Really couldn’t be worse,” he said. “The motel burned down. Now the house and the barn are on fire. And four customers are dead.”

  Peter paused in turn.

  Then he said, “That’s a whole new ball game.”

  “I agree.”

  “I mean it’s the end of everything. You understand that, right? This is going to be no stone unturned.”

  “No doubt.”

  “We should get out,” Peter said. “Right this minute. Just you and me. We need to do it, Mark. The pressure will be heavy duty. We might not survive it if we stay.”

  “Just you and me?”

  “Robert and Steven are useless. They’re a burden. You know that.”

  “I need to open my door,” Mark said. “I need to stretch my legs.”

  Peter checked.

  “You have plenty of room,” he said.
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  Mark opened his door. But he didn’t get out. Instead he stopped the door as soon as the handle moldings were clear of the suppressor, and where Peter was still nicely framed in the now-angled window. He shot him once in chest, once in the throat, and once in the face.

  Then he closed his door again, and buzzed his window up, and turned off his hazard flashers, and drove on, down the track, toward the woods.

  Chapter 40

  Reacher got through the next section of forest pretty quick, because of the night vision. He stayed six feet off the track. He made no attempt to be stealthy or quiet. He relied on the mathematical randomness of tree distribution to save him from arrows. A clear shot from distance was always going to be a hundred to one.

  At one point way far away he heard four separated pops. Two groups, a one and a three. Tiny hollow pinpricks of sound. Maybe thirty seconds apart. The back of his brain said, those were suppressed nine-millimeter rounds, fired in the open air, about a mile away. The front said, or maybe they were something cooking off, possibly aerosol cans, in the fire. Which was getting brighter again. It had flared up once, when he figured the roof fell in, and then it had faded away a little. But now the glow was back, and wider, as if more than one thing was burning.

  He stopped. Up ahead on the left he saw two quad-bikes parked side by side, front end in, at an angle, half in and half out of the trees. Like outside a country roadhouse. The night vision showed no riders nearby. Presumably they were up ahead. On foot. Closer to the action. Like the last two. These were the next two. They were operating a multilayered defense. One pair after another. Which was why Reacher had avoided the infantry. He didn’t enjoy slogging through endless terrain.

  He moved on, quieter than before.

  He stopped again.

  He saw a guy up ahead. On the other side of the track, about thirty feet in the trees. Small in the distance, but lit up evenhandedly, like everything else. Delineated with exquisite care, in fine gray and green lines. Clothes like a scuba diver, a bow, a Cyclops eye.

  No sign of his partner. Some signs of anxiety. Mostly about the glow in the sky, Reacher thought. The guy kept looking toward it, and ducking away. Maybe a crude measure of how bright it was getting. How soon he had to flinch away. The guy was tall and substantial, and his head was up, and his shoulders were square. But he wasn’t comfortable. Reacher had seen his type before. Not just in the army. No doubt the guy was a big-deal alpha male at whatever it was he was good at. But right then he was out of his depth. He was twitching with confusion. Or resentment. As if deep down he couldn’t understand why his staff officers or his executive assistants hadn’t taken care of things for him a damn sight better.

  Reacher moved up through the trees, on the other side of the track. He moved slowly and quietly. All the way to where he was exactly level with the guy. Reacher was six feet in the trees. Then came the track. The guy was thirty feet in on the other side. A straight line on a plan. But not a clear shot in a forest. The guy was too deep. He had boxed himself in. Too defensive. He had no natural avenue of attack.

  Reacher walked across the track, dead on line, a hundred random trees between him and the guy. He stepped back into the woods on the other side, and he worked his way through, now twenty feet from the guy, still dead on line. The glow in the sky was amplified twenty thousand times, and it winked and danced through the leaves, like camera flashes, like a movie star stepping out of a car. Up ahead the guy was looking down. Maybe the sparkle bothered him.

  Now he was ten feet away. Reacher eased his speed back to nothing. He took a good look around. A full 360. He studied the picture, section by section. Highly detailed, fine-grained, monochrome, slightly gray, mostly green, a little cool, a little wispy. A little fluid and ghostly. Not quite reality. In some ways better.

  No sign of a partner.

  Reacher moved on. As always he believed in staying flexible, but as always he also had a plan. Which in this case was to stab the guy in the neck with an arrow. Which would be easy enough. Because arm’s length was game over. But flexibility intervened. Up close, even in glimpsed slivers between trees, it was clear the guy was worried in a particular kind of way. An elemental way. Like a billionaire whose plane crashes on an uninhabited island. Or whose car gets in a fender bender in the wrong neighborhood. The food chain. Suddenly not as high as he thought. Maybe ready to make a deal.

  Reacher rushed him, and the guy reacted by jerking his bow up, probably nothing more than animal instinct, not a considered decision, which was a shame, because just in case Reacher had to scythe his arrow down, like a knife on a stick, to slash all four of the guy’s left-hand knuckles. The guy howled and dropped the bow, and Reacher stepped real close, their optical tubes colliding, and he kicked the guy behind the knees, so that he fell over on his back, whereupon Reacher flipped the guy’s night vision up with his foot, and then jammed the same foot on the guy’s throat, and forced the tip of the arrow between his lips, and tapped it on his teeth.

  “Want to talk?” he whispered.

  The guy couldn’t answer in words, because of the arrow jammed against his teeth, or in gestures either, because of the foot jammed against his throat. Instead he kind of nodded with his eyes. Some kind of desperate plea. Some kind of promise.

  Reacher withdrew the arrow.

  He asked, “Who are you hunting?”

  The guy said, “This is not what it seems.”

  “How so?”

  “I came here to hunt wild boar.”

  “And what are you hunting instead?”

  “I was deceived.”

  “What are you hunting?”

  “People,” the guy said. “Not what I came for.”

  “How many people?”

  “Two.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Canadians,” the guy said. “A young couple. Their names are Patty Sundstrom and Shorty Fleck. They got stranded here. I was tricked into it. I was told wild boar. They lied to me.”

  “Who lied to you?”

  “A man named Mark. He owns this place.”

  “Mark Reacher?”

  “I don’t know his last name.”

  “Why didn’t you call the cops?”

  “No cell service here. No phones in the room.”

  “Why haven’t you run away?”

  The guy didn’t answer.

  “Why didn’t you stay in your room tonight and refuse to participate?”

  No response.

  “Why are you nevertheless stalking around in the dark with your bow and arrow?”

  No answer.

  “Wait,” Reacher said.

  He heard a car up ahead. He saw bright jagged shards of amplified light coming through the trees. A big vehicle with its headlights on. He flipped up his tube. The world went dark, all except for the track, thirty feet to his right. It was all lit up, like the inside of a long low tunnel. Twin high beams were punching forward. A Mercedes rolled by. It was shiny black, a big SUV, shaped like a fist. Its tail lights showed red for a moment. Then it was gone.

  Reacher dropped his tube back in place. The world went green and highly detailed again. He shifted his foot on the guy’s neck. To make room. For the tip of the arrow. He steadied it against the welt of his shoe, and exerted modest downward pressure. The guy tried to scream, but Reacher trod harder and stopped him.

  The guy said, “I didn’t know what I was getting into. I swear. I’m a banker. I’m not like these other guys. I’m a victim too.”

  “You’re a banker?”

  “I run a hedge fund. These other guys are nothing to do with me.”

  “I guess the world has moved on,” Reacher said. “You seem to expect better treatment because you’re a banker. When did that become a thing? I guess I blinked and missed it.”

  “I didn’t know they were hunting people.”

  “I think you did,” Reacher said. “I think that’s why you came.”

  He leaned harder on the arrow, and harder, until it pierc
ed the skin, and drove down through the neck, clipping the spine, and out again the other side, pinning the guy like a dead butterfly against the forest floor. Against a tree root, by the feel of it. Gnarled and hard. But Reacher strained and leaned and pushed until the arrow was solidly rooted, and perfectly upright, like a monument.

  Then he moved on through the trees.

  —

  Mark stopped his Mercedes nose to nose with the tow truck. He had run the numbers. There was a maximum four people technically still unaccounted for. Who were Karel and the Wall Street guy, plus Patty and Shorty themselves. Plus hypothetically a fifth person, if the outside pair had been victims of a third party. Of the big guy, perhaps, come back again. Because he had spotted something. Because he had been unconvinced.

  Peter’s fault.

  Four people. Or five. All up ahead. Maybe a long way ahead. He needed three short minutes. That was all. Maybe less. He needed to reverse the tow truck out to the road, high speed, into a ditch if necessary, anything to get it out the way, and then he needed to sprint back, and hop in his car, and blast off. To anywhere. North, south, east or west. Three minutes, maybe less. That was all. But, five people, in locations unknown, each location being either more than three minutes away, which wasn’t a problem, or less than, which was.

  But it would be hard to be less than, he thought in the end. In practical terms. Even with bikes. He ran the scene in his mind. Like speed chess. First this, then that, then the other thing. He felt he knew what would happen. It was a loud diesel engine. Everyone would hear it in the distance. At first the customers would assume the perimeter was being loosened. An on-the-fly in-game adjustment. To keep the fun coming. Patty and Shorty would think a version of the same thing. They had done well so far, so they would assume now the goalposts were being moved against them. None of them would be suspicious. Three minutes didn’t matter. None of them would react at all.

  Except Karel. It was his truck. He would know some kind of weird shit was going on. He might let it go, because he thought he was more or less a semi-detached member of the team now, after the last couple of days, as reflected in the generous discount, and so on. He might feel a bit mi casa su casa about it. He might even take it as a courtesy, not to be dragged out of the game. He was there as a customer, after all, not an umpire. It wasn’t his job to make on-the-fly adjustments. He might let it go.