by Lee Child
They were looking for a lone individual.
Which was consistent with what had happened at the earlier roadblock. Reacher had gotten a better view back there, and he had seen men driving alone getting extra scrutiny.
But: Not you.
Which meant that the cops had at least a rough description of the guy they were looking for, and that Reacher categorically wasn’t that guy. Why not? There could be a million reasons. Right off the bat Reacher was tall, white, old, and heavy. And so on, and so forth. Therefore the target might be short, black, young, and skinny. And so on, and so forth.
But the sergeant had paused first, and thought, and smiled. The Not you had been emphatic, and a little wry. Maybe even a little rueful. As if the difference between Reacher and the description had been a total contrast. Or completely drastic. But it wasn’t possible to be drastically tall, unless they were looking for a dwarf or a midget, in which case the merest glance into the car would have sufficed. It wasn’t possible to be drastically white. White or black was an everyday difference. No one thought of degrees of blackness or whiteness. Not any more. Reacher wasn’t drastically old either, unless their target was a fetus. And Reacher wasn’t outstandingly heavy, unless their target was practically skeletal.
Not you. Said right after Reacher’s deliberate mistake about the guy’s rank, which would have been understood as a pro-forma compliment, just one regular guy to another, probably one veteran to another. Common ground.
Not you. Emphatic, wry, rueful, and good-natured. Just one regular guy to another, one vet to another, right back, equally. Still surfing on the earlier stuff about the busted nose. Referring back to it, in a way. A continuation of the banter. Common ground, established and repeated.
Therefore the guy they were looking for didn’t have a busted nose.
But then, most people didn’t have a busted nose.
Which meant the sergeant had been generalizing. As if to say: I’m pretty sure our description would have included that nose of yours, for instance.
Which meant they had been told their target didn’t have anything especially noticeable about him. No first-glance singularities. Nothing obvious. No scars, no tattoos, no missing ears, no glass eyes, no yard-long beard, no weird haircut.
Reacher had been a cop for thirteen years, and he remembered the rote expression very well: no distinguishing marks.
Sorenson and Goodman stepped over the muddy gutter again and climbed back into Goodman’s car and Sorenson said, ‘You should check in with your dispatcher. You should see if anyone reported a lone woman wandering about, maybe confused or disoriented. From now on our working hypothesis is that the two guys stole Delfuenso’s car. And they might have hit her over the head to get it.’
‘They might have killed her.’
‘We have to hope for the best. So you should get your deputies to check the area behind the lounge, too. Very carefully. She could be unconscious in the shadows somewhere.’
‘By now she’d be halfway frozen to death.’
‘So you should do it quickly.’
So Goodman got on the radio, and Sorenson got on her cell, to check in with the distant troopers in two separate states. They were both negative on a pair of men travelling together, with average appearance and no distinguishing marks, and they were negative on bloodstained clothing, and they were negative on bladed weapons. Sorenson did the math in her head. The two guys were almost certainly already through. Time and space said so. But she asked the troopers to stay in place for another hour. The two guys could have had a flat tyre. Or some other kind of unexpected delay. She didn’t want to have the roadblocks dismantled only for the guys to roll through the vacated space five minutes later.
Then she clicked off her call and Goodman told her his dispatcher hadn’t heard a thing, and that all his deputies were searching hard, behind the Sin City lounge and all over town.
EIGHTEEN
REACHER DROVE ON, with Alan King fast asleep next to him and Don McQueen fast asleep behind him. Karen Delfuenso was still awake, still upright and tense. Reacher could feel her gaze on his face in the mirror. He glanced up and made eye contact. She was staring at him. Staring hard, as if mutely willing him to understand something.
Understand what? Then numbers came back to him, this time specifically thirteen, and two, and three, and one, and nine. Delfuenso had blinked out those numbers, in five separate sequences, between emphatic shakes of her head.
Why?
Communication of some kind?
A simple alphabetical code? The thirteenth letter of the alphabet was M. The second was B. The third was C. The first was A. The ninth was I.
MBCAI.
Not a word. Not a Roman numeral. A corporation? An organization? An acronym, like SNAFU or FUBAR?
Reacher looked way ahead into the darkness and fixed the upcoming mile in his mind, all four dimensions, and then he met Delfuenso’s eyes in the mirror again and silently mouthed the letters, all lips and teeth and tongue and exaggerated enunciation: ‘M, B, C, A, I?’
Delfuenso glared back at him, eyes bright, half ecstatic that he was trying, half furious that he wasn’t getting it, like a thirsty woman who sees an offered drink snatched away.
She shook her head. No. She jerked her chin once to the left, and then once to the right. She stared hard at him, eyes wide, as if to say, ‘See?’
Reacher didn’t see. Not immediately. Except to grasp that maybe the jerk to the left signified one thing, and the jerk to the right signified another thing. Two different categories. Perhaps the blinks preceded by the jerks to the left were letters, and the blinks preceded by the jerks to the right were numbers. Or vice versa.
M-2-C-A-9?
13-B-3-1-I?
Then Alan King stirred and woke up and moved in his seat, and Reacher saw Delfuenso turn her face away and stare out her window.
King looked at Reacher and asked, ‘You OK?’
Reacher nodded but said nothing.
King said, ‘You need another aspirin?’
Reacher shook his head, no.
King said, ‘Karen, give this guy another aspirin.’
No answer from Delfuenso.
King said, ‘Karen?’
Reacher said, ‘I don’t need another aspirin.’
‘You look like you do. Karen, give him a couple.’
‘Maybe Karen needs her aspirins for herself.’
‘She can share.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘But you look zoned out.’
‘I’m just concentrating on the road ahead.’
‘No, you look like you’re thinking about something.’
‘I’m always thinking about something.’
‘Like what?’
‘Right now, a challenge,’ Reacher said.
‘What kind?’
‘Can you talk coherently and at normal speed for a whole minute?’
‘What?’
‘You heard.’
King paused.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course I can.’
‘Can you talk coherently and at normal speed for a whole minute without using a word that contains the letter A?’
‘That would be tougher,’ King said. ‘Impossible, probably. Lots of words contain the letter A.’
Reacher nodded. ‘You just used three of them. Total of eighteen since you woke up ten seconds ago.’
‘So it’s a stupid challenge.’
‘No, it’s an easy challenge,’ Reacher said.
‘How?’
‘I’ll tell you later,’ Reacher said. ‘Go back to sleep.’
‘No, tell me now.’
‘I’ll tell you later,’ Reacher said again. ‘Think of it as something to look forward to.’
So King shrugged and then stared into space for a minute, distracted, maybe a little disgruntled, maybe even a little angry, but then he turned away and closed his eyes again.
Reacher drove on, and started thinking about the twin roadbl
ocks they had passed through. Eight cars and eight officers in each location, with flashlights and plenty of time for close scrutiny. He imagined himself a wanted man of average appearance, travelling alone, suddenly at risk and vulnerable, perhaps anticipating those roadblocks up ahead. What could such a man do to prepare?
He could disguise one or other of those fatal tells, that’s what he could do.
He could alter his average appearance, with make-up or putty or wigs or fake piercings or fake tattoos or fake scars.
But that would not be easy, without skills and practice. And that would not be easy at short notice, either.
So he would have to address the other tell.
He would have to make himself no longer alone.
Which would be easy to do, even without skills or practice. Which would be easy to do even at short notice.
He could pick up a hitchhiker.
NINETEEN
SORENSON CALLED IN Delfuenso’s name and address, and less than a minute later she knew that Delfuenso’s car was a four-year-old Chevrolet Impala, dark blue in colour, and she knew its plate number. She passed on that information to the roadblock crews. Both said the plate number was not on their scribbled lists of cars carrying two men. Both said they would check their dashboard video to confirm. Both said that process could take some time.
So Sheriff Goodman drove Sorenson back to the cocktail lounge, where the search for a dead or unconscious woman had turned up negative results. The deputies had traced ever-widening circles from the lounge’s back door and had found nothing of interest. They had checked the shadows, the abandoned doorways, the weedy fence lines, the trash bins, and all the puddles and all the potholes.
Goodman said, ‘She could be further afield. She could have gotten up, and wandered off, and collapsed again. That kind of thing can happen, with bangs on the head.’
One of the deputies said, ‘Or they could have bundled her into the car and then rolled her out later. In the middle of nowhere. Safer for them that way. So she could be anywhere. She could be fifty miles away.’
Sorenson said, ‘Say that again.’
‘She could be fifty miles away.’
‘No, the first part.’
‘They could have bundled her into the car.’
Her plate number was not on their scribbled lists of cars carrying two men.
Sorenson said, ‘You know what? I think they did. And I think she’s still in the car. I think she’s a hostage. And a smokescreen. Three people. Not two. They’ve been getting a free pass all the way.’
No one spoke.
‘What was she wearing?’
No reply.
‘Come on, one of you has been in this lounge on your night off. Don’t pretend you haven’t.’
‘Black pants,’ Goodman said.
‘And?’
‘A black and silver top,’ Goodman said. ‘Kind of sparkly. Not much to it. Very low cut.’
‘Distinctive?’
‘Unless you’re legally blind. We’re talking about a major display here.’
‘Of what?’
‘Well, you know.’
‘I don’t.’
‘I mean, she would be practically falling out of it.’
‘And this is the respectable lounge? What do they wear in the others?’
‘Thong underwear.’
‘Is that all?’
‘And high-heeled shoes.’
Sorenson got back on her cell. Long distance traffic, through Nebraska and Iowa, in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter. Truckers, farmers, solid Bible-believing Midwestern citizens. A low cut sparkly cocktail-waitress outfit would have stood out like a beacon. Bored troopers would have spent extra time on that car, for sure.
But no Nebraska trooper had seen a low cut sparkly cocktail-waitress outfit.
And no Iowa trooper had seen a low cut sparkly cocktail-waitress outfit either.
Reacher drove on, his left hand resting on the bottom curve of the wheel, his right hand resting on the shifter, for variety, to stop his shoulders locking up and getting sore. He could feel a little vibration in the shifter. His right palm was registering a faint buzz. The linkage was transmitting some kind of internal commotion. He nudged the lever one way and the other, just fractionally, to make sure it was seated properly. He glanced down. It was squarely lined up on the D. The tiny vibration was still there. No big deal, probably. He hoped. He knew very little about cars. But army vehicles vibrated like crazy, and no one worried about it.
Next to the shifter the sequence P-R-N-D-L was lit up with a soft glow. Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive, and Low. Alphabetically the sixteenth letter, then the eighteenth, then the fourteenth, then the fourth, and finally the twelfth. An unlucky and cumbersome sequence, if you had to blink it out, for instance. Three of the five letters were beyond the halfway point. Better than WOOZY or ROOST or RUSTY or TRUST, but still. Blinking or tapping or flashing a light in a linear fashion was not an efficient transmission method for a twenty-six-letter alphabet. Too time-consuming, and too easy for either the transmitter or the receiver to lose count. Or both of them together. Old Sam Morse had figured all that out a long time ago.
Reacher glanced down again.
Reverse.
Karen Delfuenso had not blinked more than thirteen times. Which meant that all her letters were in the first half of the alphabet. Which was possible, but not statistically likely.
And an amateur who didn’t know Morse Code might still understand the same basic drawbacks Samuel Morse had foreseen. Especially an amateur who was for some reason tense and anxious and who had limited time for communication. Such an amateur might have improvised, and come up with a shortcut system.
Drive, and reverse.
Forward, and backward.
Maybe the jerk of the head to the left meant count forward from A, because in the Western nations people read from left to right, and therefore the jerk of the head to the right would mean count backward from Z.
Maybe.
Possibly.
Right thirteen, left two, right three, right one, left nine.
N-B-X-Z-I.
Which didn’t make a whole lot of sense. NB could be the standard Latin abbreviation for nota bene, which meant note well, or in other words pay attention, but what was XZI?
Gibberish, that’s what.
Reacher glanced in the mirror.
Delfuenso was staring at him again, willing him to understand.
In the mirror.
Her image was reversed.
Maybe she had anticipated that. Maybe left was right, and right was left.
Forward thirteen, back two, forward three, forward one, back nine.
M-Y-C-A-R.
