by Lee Child
‘The fabric is thin, the colour is cream rather than white, the collar points are long and narrow, the design of the checks is purely graphic rather than imitative of a traditional weave. I would say the shirt was bought in Pakistan, or possibly the Middle East.’
TWENTY-FOUR
ALAN KING JACKED himself upright and craned to his left. He took a good long look at the fuel gauge. He said, ‘I think we’ll be OK for a spell more. Let me know when it hits the three-quarter mark.’
‘Won’t be long,’ Reacher said. ‘It seems to be going down awful fast.’
‘That’s because you’re driving awful fast.’
‘No faster than Mr McQueen was.’
‘Then maybe the fault has corrected itself. Maybe it was only intermittent.’
‘We don’t want to run out of gas. Not out here. It’s pretty lonely. Can’t count on getting help. The cops are all back at that roadblock.’
‘Give it another thirty minutes,’ King said. ‘Then perhaps we’ll start to think about it.’
‘OK,’ Reacher said.
‘Tell me about that thing with the letter A.’
‘Later.’
‘No, now.’
‘I said later. What part of that is hard to understand?’
‘You don’t like to be pushed around, do you, Mr Reacher?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never been pushed around. If it ever happens, you’ll be the first to find out whether I like it or not.’
King turned his head away and gazed forward into the darkness for a full minute more, completely silent, and then he slid down in his seat and tucked his chin back down and closed his eyes again. Reacher checked the mirror. McQueen was still out cold. Delfuenso was still awake.
And she was blinking again.
Backward seven, forward eight, forward five, backward two.
T-H-E-Y, they.
Forward eight, forward one, backward five, forward five.
H-A-V-E, have.
Forward seven, backward six, backward thirteen, backward eight.
G-U-N-S, guns.
They have guns.
Reacher nodded in the mirror, and drove on.
The scene behind the cocktail lounge stayed quiet for five more minutes. The lab guys took a long sequence of close-up photographs inside the Mazda, using strobes. The car’s misty glass lit up from within with irregular flashes, like a thunderstorm viewed from a great distance, or a battle on the other side of a hill. Goodman’s deputies searched the ground and found nothing of significance. Sorenson interrogated federal and state databases by phone, looking for large men with recent facial injuries. She came up empty.
Then came the sounds of a whispering V-8 engine and tyres on crushed stone, and the dip and bounce of headlight beams in the mist, and a dark sedan nosed its way north towards them. It was a navy blue Crown Vic, identical to Sorenson’s own, same specification, same needle antennas on the back deck, but with Missouri plates. It came to a stop at a respectful distance and two men got out. They were wearing dark suits. They stood in the lee of their open doors and struggled into heavy down parkas. Then they closed their doors and moved closer, scanning the scene as they walked, noticing and dismissing the county deputies, noticing and dismissing Sheriff Goodman, noticing and dismissing the crime scene technicians, before settling their attention on Sorenson. They stopped six feet from her and pulled IDs from their pockets.
The same IDs as hers.
FBI.
The agent on the right said, ‘We’re from Counterterrorism, central region, out of Kansas City.’
Sorenson said, ‘I didn’t call you.’
‘Your field office’s duty log triggered an automatic alert.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the crime scene location is sensitive.’
‘Is it? It’s an abandoned pumping station.’
‘No, it’s an open and uncapped well head with direct vertical access to the largest groundwater reserves in the United States.’
‘It’s a dry hole.’
The guy nodded. ‘But only because the water table fell below the bottom of the bore. Dry or not, if you poured something down that pipe, it would find its way into the aquifer. That’s inevitable. Gravity alone would make sure of it. Like dripping ink on a sponge.’
‘Poured what?’
‘There’s a number of things we wouldn’t want to go down there.’
‘But it would be a drop in a bucket. Literally. A very tiny drop and a very big bucket. I mean, there’s a lot down there. They use two and a half trillion gallons every year. And even one of those big road tankers is what, five thousand gallons? That’s nothing in comparison.’
The guy nodded again. ‘But terrorism is an asymmetrical business. As a matter of fact, you’re right. Five thousand gallons of poisonous chemicals or viruses or germs or whatever wouldn’t do much harm. Not scientifically. But can you see a way of convincing people of that? There’d be mass panic. There’d be a mass stampede out of here. Total chaos throughout a large part of the nation. And that’s exactly what terrorists like. Plus we’d have severe disruption to agriculture, for years. And there are military installations here.’
‘Are you serious? That’s chemical and biological warfare.’
‘We’re completely serious.’
‘So why hasn’t that pipe been capped?’
‘There are ten thousand holes like that one. We’re working as fast as we can.’
Sorenson said, ‘This is a homicide. I don’t see a terrorist angle.’
‘Really? Did you get a call from State? About the victim?’
‘Yes.’
‘And CIA?’
‘Yes.’
‘So there’s some kind of overseas issue here. Don’t you think?’
Sorenson heard her technician’s voice in her head: I would say the shirt was bought in Pakistan, or possibly the Middle East.
She said, ‘So are you taking over from me?’
The guy on the right shook his head and said, ‘No, it’s still your case. But we’re going to be looking over your shoulder. Night and day. Just until we’re sure. Nothing personal. We hope you don’t mind.’
Reacher heard McQueen wake up behind him. He looked in the mirror and saw the guy staring out his window, at the empty traffic lanes alongside him. Then he saw him look the other way, beyond Delfuenso, at the shoulder of the road.
They passed an exit sign. They passed three blue boards, one of them blank. Gas and accommodations, but no food. There were no lights on the horizon. No welcoming glow. A deceptive exit, in Reacher’s opinion. Fifteen or twenty miles of dark rural roads, and then places that would be shut when they finally got there.
‘Take this one,’ McQueen said.
‘What?’ Reacher said.
‘Exit here.’
‘You sure? Looks pretty dead.’
‘Just do it.’
Reacher glanced sideways at Alan King. McQueen saw him do it. McQueen said, ‘Don’t look at him. He’s not in charge here. I am. And I’m telling you to take this exit.’
TWENTY-FIVE
THE TWO COUNTERTERRORISM agents from Kansas City did not look over Sorenson’s shoulder. Not literally. They just stood with her, sometimes one on either side, sometimes in a tight collegial triangle. They introduced themselves as Robert Dawson and Andrew Mitchell, equal rank, both of them with more than fifteen years in. Dawson was a little taller than Mitchell, and Mitchell was a little heavier than Dawson, but otherwise they were very similar. Fair-haired, pink-faced, early forties, dressed in navy blue suits under their parkas, with white shirts and blue ties. Neither one of them seemed particularly tired or stressed, which Sorenson found impressive, given the night-time hour and the pressures of their assignment.
But equally neither one of them had much to offer in terms of procedural suggestions. By that point the investigation was essentially stalled, and Sorenson was well aware of it. The perpetrators were somewhere east of Des Moines, and the hostage was a
lready dead or close to it, and therefore a little ten-year-old girl was already a motherless child, or close to it.
Further progress would depend on luck and forensics, and resolution would be painstakingly slow and uncertain.
Not one for the show reel.
Front and centre on no one’s résumé.
Sorenson said, ‘We should alert Chicago, I guess.’
Dawson said, ‘Or Milwaukee, or Madison, or Indianapolis, or Cincinnati, or Louisville.’
Mitchell said, ‘Or Interpol. Or NASA, maybe. By now they could be anywhere in the known universe.’
‘I’m wide open to ideas, Agent Mitchell.’
‘Nothing personal,’ Dawson said.
Then the same sights and sounds happened all over again: the whisper of a V-8 engine, and the crunch of tyres over crushed stone, and the flicker of headlight beams in the mist, and another plain sedan nosed its way north towards them. It was another Ford Crown Victoria, another government car, but not quite identical to Sorenson’s, or Dawson and Mitchell’s. It was built to the same specification, but it had different needle antennas on the trunk lid, and it was light in colour, not dark, and it had official U.S. plates.
It came to a stop thirty feet away and the driver got out. He was wearing chino pants and a sweater and a coat. He moved closer, scanning the scene as he walked, ignoring the deputies, ignoring Goodman, ignoring the crime scene technicians, aiming straight for Sorenson and Dawson and Mitchell. Up close he looked like the kind of guy who would be more comfortable in a grey three-piece suit, but who had gotten a panic call in the middle of the night and grabbed the nearest things to hand, like a banker woken by his elderly dog whining at the bedroom door.
He stopped six feet away and pulled ID from his pocket.
Different ID.
The State Department.
The name on the ID was Lester L. Lester, Jr. The photograph showed the guy’s face below neatly combed hair and above a neatly rolled button-down collar Sorenson would have bet good money came from Brooks Brothers.
She asked, ‘What can I do for you, Mr Lester?’
Mitchell asked, ‘Is your middle name Lester too?’
The man called Lester looked at him.
He said, ‘As a matter of fact it is.’
‘Outstanding,’ Mitchell said.
‘What can I do for you?’ Sorenson asked again.
‘I’m here to observe,’ Lester said.
‘Because the victim was known to you?’
‘Not to me personally.’
‘But known to the Department of State?’
‘That’s the gist of it.’
‘Who was he?’
‘I’m not at liberty to say.’
‘Then turn yourself around and go back wherever the hell you came from. Because you’re not helping here.’
Lester said, ‘I have to stay.’
Sorenson asked, ‘Do you have a cell phone?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Then take it out and call home and get clearance to tell me what I need to know.’
Lester showed no signs of doing that.
Mitchell asked, ‘Are your CIA pals here too?’
Lester made a big show of looking all around, very carefully. ‘I don’t see anyone else,’ he said. ‘Do you?’
Mitchell said, ‘Maybe they’re hanging back in the shadows. That’s what they’re good at, right?’
Lester didn’t reply. Then Sorenson’s phone started ringing. The plain electronic sound. She answered and listened. She said, ‘OK, got that, thank you, sir.’ She clicked off the call. She looked straight at Lester and smiled. She said, ‘You must have driven out here pretty fast.’
Lester said, ‘Must I have?’
Sorenson nodded. ‘That was my SAC on the phone. He told me you were on your way. The grapevine is still working, apparently. He told me to expect you within the next ten or so minutes.’
Lester said, ‘There wasn’t much traffic on the roads.’
‘And my SAC told me who the dead guy was.’
Lester didn’t reply.
Dawson asked Sorenson, ‘So who was the dead guy?’
‘An embassy worker, apparently.’
‘One of ours?’
‘Yes.’
‘Like a diplomat?’
‘An attaché of some kind.’
‘Senior?’
‘I didn’t get that impression. But probably not junior either, either. Judging by the tone of voice.’
‘Age?’
‘Forty-two.’
‘Important?’
‘My SAC didn’t specify.’
Mitchell said, ‘If a special agent in charge is wide awake and on the telephone in the middle of the night, then the guy was important. Wouldn’t you say?’
Dawson asked, ‘Where did he serve? What region? What responsibilities?’
‘My SAC didn’t specify. I don’t think he’s been told. Which might mean somewhere and something sensitive.’
The shirt was bought in Pakistan, or possibly the Middle East.
Dawson asked, ‘Why was he here?’
‘I don’t know.’
Dawson looked at Lester, and asked the same question.
Lester said, ‘I don’t know why he was here.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. That’s why I’m here. Because we don’t know.’
Then twenty feet away Sheriff Goodman’s phone started ringing, muffled in his pocket but still loud in the silent night. All four people in the impromptu cluster turned towards the sound. Goodman answered and listened and his eyes sought Sorenson’s and he started walking towards her, as if instinctively, as if compelled, finishing his call and folding his phone when he was ten feet away, and not speaking until he was another five feet closer.
‘That was my dispatcher,’ he said. ‘The eyewitness is missing. The guy you talked to tonight. He never made it home.’
The short discussion with McQueen had eaten up some time and distance, so Reacher had to take the ramp pretty fast. Then he had to brake pretty hard ahead of a tight curve. For a split second he considered hitting Alan King in the throat. He was fairly well braced in his seat, with his right foot hard on the pedal and his left hand tight on the wheel. King was waking up because of the abrupt turn and the sudden deceleration. Chances were good his neck would be in the right place at the right time.
But McQueen was still a problem, even at twenty miles an hour. Theoretically Reacher could find the lever and jam the seat back into him, and maybe swing an elbow, but the headrest was in the way, and there was collateral damage just waiting to happen, right there next to the guy on the rear bench.
A mother, separated from her child.
Two feet from McQueen, on his right. And the guy was probably right-handed. Most people were.
