by Lee Child
“Now it sounds like you who’s been watching movies.”
“Nothing happens in the movies that doesn’t happen in real life. That’s one thing I’ve learned. You can’t make this stuff up.”
“Speculation,” Reacher said.
“Is it impossible there’s a database somewhere, with a hundred or two hundred or a thousand names in it, of people the military wants to keep track of, just in case?”
“I guess that’s not impossible.”
“It would be a very secret database. For a number of obvious reasons. Which means that if these guys have seen it, thereby knowing how you live, they’re not just senior staff officers. They’re very senior staff officers. You said so yourself. They have access to files in any branch of the service they want.”
“Speculation,” Reacher said again.
“But logical.”
“Maybe.”
“Very senior staff officers,” Turner said again.
Reacher nodded. Like flipping a coin. Fifty-fifty. Either true, or not true.
* * *
The first turn they came to was Route 220, which was subtly wider than the road they were on, and flatter, and better surfaced, and straighter, and altogether more important in every way. In comparison it felt like a major artery. Not exactly a highway, but because of their heightened sensitivities it looked like a whole different proposition.
“No,” Turner said.
“Agreed,” Reacher said. There would be gas and coffee, probably, and diners and motels, but there could be police, too, either state or local. Or federal. Because it was the kind of road that showed up well on a map. Reacher pictured a hasty conference somewhere, with impatient fingers jabbing paper, with urgent voices saying roadblocks here, and here, and here.
“We’ll take the next one,” he said.
Which gave them seven more tense minutes. The road stayed empty. Trees to the left, trees to the right, nothing ahead, nothing behind. No lights, no sound. But nothing happened. And the next turn was better. On a map it would be just an insignificant gray trace, or more likely not there at all. It was a high hill road, very like the one they had already tried, narrow, lumpy, twisting and turning, with ragged shoulders and shallow rainwater ditches on both sides. They took it gratefully, and its darkness swallowed them up. Turner got her small-road rhythm going, keeping her speed appropriate, keeping her movements efficient. Reacher relaxed and watched her. She was leaning back in her seat, her arms straight out, her fingers on the wheel, sensitive to the tiny quivering messages coming up from the road. Her hair was hooked behind her ears, and he could see slim muscles in her thigh, as she worked first one pedal and then the other.
She asked, “How much money did the Big Dog make?”
“Plenty,” Reacher said. “But not enough to drop a hundred grand on a defensive scam, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“But he was right at the end of the chain. He wasn’t the top boy. He wasn’t a mass wholesaler. He would be seeing only a small part of the profit. And it was sixteen years ago. Things have changed.”
“You think this is about stolen ordnance?”
“It could be. The Desert Storm drawdown then, the Afghanistan drawdown now. Similar circumstances. Similar opportunities. But different stuff. What was the Big Dog selling?”
“Eleven crates of SAWs, when we heard about him.”
“On the streets of LA? That’s bad.”
“That was the LAPD’s problem, not mine. All I wanted was a name.”
“You could sell SAWs to the Taliban.”
“But for how much?”
“Drones, then. Or surface-to-air missiles. Extremely high-value items. Or MOABs. Did you have them in your day?”
“You make it sound like we had bows and arrows.”
“So you didn’t.”
“No, but I know what they are. Massive ordnance air burst. The mother of all bombs.”
“Thermobaric devices more powerful than anything except nuclear weapons. Plenty of buyers in the Middle East for things like those. No doubt about that. And those buyers have plenty of money. No doubt about that, either.”
“They’re thirty feet long. Kind of hard to slip in your coat pocket.”
“Stranger things have happened.”
Then she went quiet, for a whole mile.
Reacher said, “What?”
“Suppose this is government policy. We might be arming one faction against another. We do that all the time.”
Reacher said nothing.
Turner said, “You don’t see it that way?”
“I can’t make it work deep down. The government can do whatever it wants. So why scam you with a hundred grand? Why didn’t you just disappear? And me? And Moorcroft? Why aren’t we in Guantanamo right now? Or dead? And why were the guys who came to the motel the first night so crap? That was no kind of government wet team. I barely had to break a sweat. And why would it get to that point in the first place? They could have backed you down some other way. They could have ordered you to pull Weeks and Edwards out of there. They could have ordered you to cease and desist.”
“Not without automatically raising my suspicions. It would have put a big spotlight on the whole thing. That’s a risk they wouldn’t want to take.”
“Then they’d have found a better way. They would have ordered a whole countrywide strategic pull-back, all the way to the Green Zone. For some made-up political reason. To respect the Afghans’ sovereignty, or some such thing. It would have been a tsunami of bullshit. Your guys would have been caught up in it along with everyone else, and you wouldn’t have thought twice about it. It would have been just one of those things. Same old shit.”
“So you’re not convinced.”
“This all feels amateur to me,” Reacher said. “Correct, uptight, slightly timid people, somewhat out of their depth now, and therefore relying on somewhat undistinguished muscle to cover their collective asses. Which gives us one small problem and one big opportunity. The small problem being, those four guys know they have to get to us first, before the MPs or the FBI, because we’re in deep shit now, technically, with the escape and all, so the assumption is we’ll say anything to help with our situations. And even if no one believes us, it would all be out there as a possibility or a rumor, and these guys can’t afford any kind of extra scrutiny, even if it was half-assed and by the book. So that’s the small problem. Those four guys are going to stay hard on our tails. That’s for damn sure.”
“And what’s the big opportunity?”
“Those same four guys,” Reacher said. “Their bosses will be lost without them. They’ll be cut off at the knees. They’ll be helpless and isolated. They’ll be ours for the taking.”
“So that’s the plan?” Turner said. “We’re going to let the four guys find us, and we’re going to bust them, and then we’re going to move on up from there?”
“Except we’re not going to bust them,” Reacher said. “We’re going to do to them what they were going to do to us.”
“Which is what?”
“We’re going to put them in the ground. And then we’re going to listen out for their bosses howling in the void. And then we’re going to explain to them carefully why it’s a very bad idea to mess with the 110th.”
Chapter 31
They crossed the line into Grant County, and the lonely hill road ran on unchanging, mile after mile. The speedometer was drifting between fifty and sixty, up and down, but the gas gauge was moving one way only, and fast. Then a sign on the shoulder announced the Grant County Airport twenty miles ahead, and a town named Petersburg.
Turner said, “A place with an airport has to have a gas station, right? And a motel. And a place with an airport and a gas station and a motel has to have a diner.”
Reacher said, “And a police department.”
“Hope for the best.”
“I always do,” Reacher said.
They hit the town before the airport. It was mostly asleep. B
ut not completely. They came out of the hills and merged left onto a state road that became North Main Street a hundred yards later, with built-up blocks on the left and the right. In the center of town there was a crossroads with Route 220, which was the road they had avoided earlier. After the crossroads North Main Street became South Main Street. The airport lay to the west, not far away. There was no traffic, but some windows had lights behind them.
Turner went south, across the narrow Potomac again, and she took a right, toward the airport, which was a small place for light planes only, and which was all closed up and dark. So she U-turned, curb to curb, and she headed back, across the river again, toward the downtown crossroads.
Reacher said, “Go right on 220. I bet that’s where the good stuff is.”
East of the crossroads 220 was called Virginia Avenue, and for the first two hundred yards it was close-but-no-cigar. There was a sandwich shop, closed, and a pizza place, also closed. There was an out-of-business Chevron station, and two fast food franchises, both closed for the night. There was an ancient motor court inn, boarded up, falling down, its lot choked with weeds.
“No good stuff yet,” Turner said.
“Free market,” Reacher said. “Someone put that Chevron out of business. And that motel. All we have to do is find out who.”
They drove on, another block, and another, past the city limit, and then they scored a perfect trifecta on the cheaper land beyond. First came a country cafe, open all night, on the left side of the road, behind a wide gravel lot with three trucks in it. Then there was a motel, a hundred yards later, on the right side of the road, a modern two-story place on the edge of a field. And beyond the motel in the far distance was the red glow of an Exxon station.
All good. Except that halfway between the cafe and the motel was a state police barracks.
It was a pale building, long and low, made from glazed tan brick, with dishes and whip antennas on its roof. It had two cruisers parked out front, and lights behind two of its windows. A dispatcher and a desk sergeant, Reacher figured, doing their night duty in warmth and comfort.
Turner said, “Do they know about this car yet?”
Reacher looked at the motel. “Or will they before we wake up in the morning?”
“We have to get gas, at least.”
“OK, let’s go do that. We’ll try to get a feel for the place.”
So Turner eased on down the road, as discreet as she could be in a bright red convertible with six hundred brake horsepower, and she pulled in at the Exxon, which was a two-island, four-pump affair, with a pay hut made of crisp, white boards. It looked like a tiny house. Except that it had antennas on its roof, too.
Turner parked near a pump, and Reacher studied the instructions, which said that without a credit card to dip, he was going to have to pre-pay in cash. He asked, “How many gallons?”
Turner said, “I don’t know how big the tank is.”
“Pretty big, probably.”
“Let’s say fifteen, then.”
Which was going to cost fifty-nine dollars and eighty-five cents, at the posted rate. Reacher peeled three twenties out of one of Billy Bob’s bricks and headed for the hut. Inside was a woman of about forty behind a bulletproof screen. There was a half moon shape at counter height, for passing money through. Coming out of it were the sweet nasal melodies of an AM radio tuned to a country station, and the chatter and noise of a police scanner tuned to the emergency band.
Reacher slid his money through and the woman did something he guessed permitted the pump to serve up sixty bucks of gas, and not a drop more. One country song ended, and another started, separated only by a muted blast of static from the scanner. Reacher glanced at it and tried a weary-traveler expression and asked, “Anything happening tonight?”
“All quiet so far,” the woman said.
Reacher glanced the other way, at the AM radio. “Country music not enough for you?”
“My brother owns a tow truck. And that business is all about being first on the scene. He gives me ten dollars for every wreck I get him to.”
“So no wrecks tonight?”
“Not a one.”
“No excitement at all?”
The woman said, “That’s a nice car you’re riding in.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I always wanted a Corvette.”
“Did you hear about us on the scanner?”
“Been speeding?”
“Hard not to.”
“Then you’ve been lucky. You got away with it.”
Reacher said, “Long may it continue,” and he smiled what he hoped was a conspiratorial little smile, and he headed back to the car. Turner was already pumping the gas. She had the nozzle hooked into the filler neck, and she was turned three-quarters away from him, with the back of one thigh against the flank of the car, and the other foot up on the curb of the island. She had her hands behind her, and her back was arched, as if she was easing an ache. Her face was turned up to the night sky. Reacher imagined her shape, like a slender S under the big shirt.
Totally worth it.
He said, “The clerk is listening in on a scanner. We’re clean so far.”
“You asked her? She’ll remember us now.”
“She will anyway. She always wanted a Corvette.”
“We should trade with her. We should take whatever she’s got.”
“Then she’d remember us forever.”
“Maybe those hillbillies won’t call it in. Maybe their trucks were stolen, too. Maybe they just vanished into the woods.”
“Possible,” Reacher said. “I don’t see why they would wait so long.”
“We could park way in the back of the motel. Right out of sight. I think we should risk it. We really need to eat and sleep.”
The pump clicked off, just short of twelve gallons. Either the tank was smaller than they had guessed, or the gauge was pessimistic.
Turner said, “Now she knows it’s not our car. We’re not familiar with how much gas it takes.”
“Will she give us the change?”
“Maybe we should leave it.”
“It’s twelve bucks. This is West Virginia. We’d stick out like sore thumbs.”
“Tell her we’re heading south on 220. Tell her we’ve got a long way to go before daybreak. Then when she hears about us on the scanner she’ll call it in wrong.”
Reacher collected twelve dollars and fifty-two cents in change, and said something about trying to make it to I-64 before dawn. The AM radio murmured its tunes, and the police scanner stayed quiet. The woman looked out the window and smiled a little sadly, as if it was going to be a long time before she saw a Corvette again.
Turner picked Reacher up at the pay hut door, and they drove back toward town, and pulled in again three hundred yards later, at the motel.
She said, “Check in first, and then hit the cafe?”
Reacher said, “Sure.”
She paused a long beat, and looked straight at him.
She said, “How many rooms are we going to get?”
He paused a long beat in turn, and said, “Let’s eat first. Then check in.”
“Why?”
“There’s something I have to tell you.”
“What?”
Samantha Dayton.
Sam.
Fourteen years old.
“After we order,” he said. “It’s a long story.”
Chapter 32
The cafe was a rural greasy spoon as perfect as anything Reacher had ever seen. It had a black guy in a white undershirt next to a lard-slick griddle three feet deep and six feet wide. It had battered pine tables and mismatched chairs. It smelled of old grease and fresh coffee. It had two ancient white men in seed caps, one of them sitting way to the left of the door, the other way to the right. Maybe they didn’t get along. Maybe they were victims of a feud three hundred years old.
Turner chose a table in the middle of the room, and they rattled the chairs out over th
e board floor, and they sat down. There were no menus. No chalkboards with handwritten lists of daily specials. It wasn’t that kind of a place. Ordering was clearly telepathic between the cook and his regular customers. For new customers, it was going to be a matter of asking out loud, plain and simple. Which the cook confirmed, by raising his chin and rotating his head a little, so that his right ear was presented to the room.
“Omelet,” Turner said. “Mushrooms, spring onions, and cheddar cheese.”
No reaction from the cook.
None at all.
Turner said it again, a little louder.
Still no reaction. No movement. Just total stillness, and a raised chin, and an averted gaze, and a dignified and implacable silence, like a veteran salesman insulted by a counteroffer. Turner looked at Reacher and whispered, “What’s with this place?”
“You’re a detective,” Reacher said. “You see any sign of an omelet pan up there?”
“No, I guess not. All I see is a griddle.”
“So probably the best way to get some enthusiasm out of this guy would be to order something griddle-related.”
Turner paused a beat.
Then she said, “Two eggs over easy on a fried biscuit with bacon on the side.”
The cook said, “Yes, ma’am.”
“Same for me,” Reacher said. “And coffee.”
“Yes, sir.” And immediately the guy turned away and got to work with a wedge of new lard and a blade, planing the metal surface, smoothing it, three feet out and three feet back, and six feet side to side. Which made him a griddle man at heart. In Reacher’s experience such guys were either griddle men or owners, but never really both. A griddle man’s first instinct was to tend the metal, working it until it was glassy down at a molecular level, so slick it would make Teflon feel like sandpaper. Whereas an owner’s first instinct would have been to bring the coffee. Because the first cup of coffee seals the deal. A customer isn’t committed until he has consumed something. He can still get up and walk away, if he’s dissatisfied with the wait, or if he remembers an urgent appointment. But not if he’s already started in on his first cup of coffee. Because then he would have to throw some money down, and who really knows what a cup of diner coffee costs? Fifty cents? A dollar? Two dollars?
