by Child, Lee
‘No, by taxi,’ Reacher said. ‘Taxis in this town are as invisible as it gets.’
Every significant tourist site along the Mall had a rank of two or three cabs waiting. The Wall was no exception. Behind the last souvenir booth were battered cars with dirty paint and taxi lights on their roofs. Reacher and Turner got in the first in line.
‘Arlington Cemetery,’ Reacher said. ‘Main gate.’
He read the printed notice on the door. The fare was going to be three bucks for the flag drop, plus two dollars and sixteen cents per mile thereafter. Plus tip. They were going to be down about seven bucks, total. Which was going to leave them about twenty-three. Which was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but was a long way short of what they were going to need.
They sat low in sagging seats and the cab crashed and bounced like its wheels were square. But it made the trip OK. Around the back of the Lincoln Memorial, and out over the water on the Memorial Bridge, and back into Arlington County. To the bus stop at the cemetery gate. Right where Reacher had started out, almost exactly twenty-four hours previously.
Which was a weird kind of progress.
The bus stop at the cemetery gate had a small crowd waiting, all small dark Hispanic men, all labourers, all tired, and patient, and resigned. Reacher and Turner took their places among them. Turner blended in fairly well. Reacher didn’t. He was more than a head taller and twice as wide as anyone else. And much paler. He looked like a lighthouse on a dark rocky shore. Therefore the wait was tense. And long. But no cop cars rolled past, and eventually the bus came. Reacher paid the fares, and Turner sat at a window, and Reacher sat next to her on the aisle and hunched down as low as he could go. The bus moved off, slow and ponderous, on the same route Reacher had taken the day before, past the stop where he had gotten off at the bottom of the three-lane hill, and onward up the steep incline towards the 110th HQ.
Turner said, ‘They’ll call the FBI, because they’ll assume we’re going interstate. The only question is who calls first. My money is on the Metro PD. The army will wait until morning, most likely.’
‘We’ll be OK,’ Reacher said. ‘The FBI won’t use roadblocks. Not here on the East Coast. In fact they probably won’t get off their asses at all. They’ll just put our IDs and our bank cards on their watch lists, which doesn’t matter anyway, because we don’t have IDs or bank cards.’
‘They might tell local PDs to watch their bus depots.’
‘We’ll keep an eye out.’
‘I still need clothes,’ Turner said. ‘Pants and a jacket at least.’
‘We’ve got nineteen dollars. You can have one or the other.’
‘Pants, then. And I’ll trade you your jacket back for your shirt.’
‘My shirt will look like a circus tent on you.’
‘I’ve seen women wear men’s shirts. Like wraps, all chic and baggy.’
‘You’ll be cold.’
‘I was born in Montana. I’m never cold.’
The bus laboured up the hill past the 110th HQ. The old stone building. The gates were open. The sentry was in his hutch. The day guy. Morgan’s car was still in the lot. The painted door was closed. Lights were on in all the windows. Turner swivelled all the way around in her seat, to keep the place in sight as long as she could. Until the last possible moment. Then she let it go and faced front again and said, ‘I hope I get back there.’
Reacher said, ‘You will.’
‘I worked so hard to get there in the first place. It’s a great command. But you know that already.’
‘Everyone else hates us.’
‘Only if we do our job properly.’
The bus made the turn at the top of the hill, on to the next three-lane, which led to Reacher’s motel. There was rain in the air. Just a little, but enough that the bus driver had his wipers going.
Turner said, ‘Tell me again how this is all my fault. Me and Afghanistan.’
The road levelled out and the bus picked up speed. It rattled straight past Reacher’s motel. The lot was empty. No car with dented doors.
He said, ‘It’s the only logical explanation. You put a fox in someone’s henhouse, and that someone wanted to shut you down. Which was easy enough to do. Because as it happened no one else in the unit knew what it was about. Your duty captain didn’t. Neither did Sergeant Leach. Or anyone else. So you were the only one. They set you up with the Cayman Islands bank account scam, and they busted you, which cut your lines of communication. Which stayed cut, when they beat on your lawyer Moorcroft, as soon as he showed the first sign of trying to get you out of jail. Problem solved, right there. You were isolated. You couldn’t talk to anyone. So everything was hunky dory. Except the records showed you had spent hours on the phone to South Dakota with some guy. And scuttlebutt around the building said the guy had been a previous 110th CO. Your duty captain knew that for sure, because I told him, first time I called. Maybe lots of people knew. Certainly I got a lot of name recognition when I showed up yesterday. And you and I could be assumed to share some common interests. We might have talked about the front burner. Either just shooting the shit, or maybe you were even asking me for a perspective.’
‘But I didn’t mention Afghanistan to you at all.’
‘But they didn’t know that. The phone log shows duration, not content. They didn’t have a recording. So I was a theoretical loose end. Maybe I knew what you knew. Not much of a problem, because I wasn’t likely to show up. They seem to have checked me out. They claim to know how I live. But just in case, they made some plans. They had the Big Dog thing standing by, for instance.’
‘I don’t see how that would help them any. You’d have been in the system, with plenty of time to talk.’
‘I was supposed to run,’ Reacher said. ‘I was supposed to disappear and never come near the army again, the whole rest of my life. That was the plan. That was the whole point. They even showed up at the motel to make sure I understood. And the Big Dog thing was a great choice for that. The guy is dead, and there’s an affidavit. There’s no real way to fight it. Running would have been entirely rational. Sergeant Leach thought if she could find a way of warning me, I’d head for the hills.’
‘Why didn’t you run?’
‘I wanted to ask you out to dinner.’
‘No, really?’
‘Not my style. I figured it out when I was about five years old. A person either runs or he fights. It’s a binary choice, and I’m a fighter. Plus, they had something else in their back pocket.’
‘Which was?’
‘Something else designed to make me run, which didn’t, either.’
‘Which was?’
Samantha Dayton.
Sam.
Fourteen years old.
I’ll get to it.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ Reacher said. ‘It’s a complicated story.’
The bus ground onward, all low gears and loud diesel, past the strip mall Reacher knew, with the hardware store, and the pharmacy, and the picture-framing shop, and the gun store, and the dentist, and the Greek restaurant. Then it moved out into territory he hadn’t seen before. Onward, and away.
He said, ‘Look on the bright side. Your problem ain’t exactly brain surgery. Whatever rabbit you were chasing in Afghanistan is behind all this shit. So we need to work backward from him. We need to find out who his friends are, and we need to find out who did what, and when, and how, and why, and then we need to bring the hammer down.’
Turner said, ‘There’s a problem with that.’
Reacher nodded.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It won’t be easy. Not from the outside. It’s like we’ve got one hand tied behind our back. But we’ll give it our best shot.’
‘Unfortunately that’s not the problem I’m talking about.’
‘So what is?’
‘Someone thinks I know something I don’t. That’s the problem.’
‘What don’t you know?’
‘I don’t know who the r
abbit is,’ Turner said. ‘Or what the hell he’s doing, or where, or why. Or how. In fact I don’t know what’s happening in Afghanistan at all.’
‘But you sent two guys there.’
‘Much earlier. For a completely different reason. In Kandahar. Pure routine. Entirely unconnected. But along the way they picked up on a whisper from a Pashtun informer, that an American officer had been seen heading north to meet with a tribal leader. The identity of the American was not known, and his purpose was not known, but the feeling was it can’t have been anything good. We’re drawing down. We’re supposed to be heading south, not north, towards Bagram and Kabul, prior to getting the hell out. We’re not supposed to be way up in-country, having secret meetings with towelheads. So I sent my guys to chase the rumour. That was all.’
‘When?’
‘The day before I was busted. So I won’t even have a name until they report back to me. Which they won’t be able to, not until I’m back on the inside.’
Reacher said nothing.
Turner said, ‘What?’
‘It’s worse than that.’
‘How can it be?’
‘They won’t be able to report back ever,’ Reacher said. ‘Because they’re dead.’
TWENTY-FOUR
REACHER TOLD TURNER about the missed radio checks, and the agitation in the old stone building, and the semi-authorized air search out of Bagram, and the two dead bodies on the goat trail. Turner went still and quiet. She said, ‘They were good men. Natty Weeks and Duncan Edwards. Weeks was an old hand and Edwards was a good prospect. I shouldn’t have let them go. The Hindu Kush is too dangerous for two men on their own.’
‘It wasn’t tribesmen who got them,’ Reacher said. ‘They were shot in the head with nine-millimetre rounds. U.S. Army side-arms, most likely. Beretta M9s, almost certainly. The tribesmen would have cut their heads off. Or used AK47s. Different kind of hole altogether.’
‘So they must have gotten close to the wrong American.’
‘Without even knowing it,’ Reacher said. ‘Don’t you think? A handgun to the head is an up-close-and-personal kind of a thing. Which they wouldn’t have allowed, surely, if they had the slightest suspicion.’
‘Very neat,’ Turner said. ‘They shut me down, at both ends. Here, and there. Before I got anything at all. As in, right now I have nothing. Not a thing. So I’m totally screwed. I’m going down, Reacher. I don’t see a way out of this now.’
Reacher said nothing.
They got off the bus in Berryville, Virginia, which was one town short of its ultimate destination. Better that way, they thought. A driver might remember a pair of atypical passengers who stayed on board until the very end of the line. Especially if it came to radio or TV appeals, or routine police interviews, or public-enemy photographs in the post office.
The rain had stopped, but the air was still damp and cold. Berryville’s downtown area was pleasant enough, but they backtracked on foot, back the way the bus had come, across a railroad track, past a pizza restaurant, to a hardware store they had seen from the window. The store was about to close, which was not ideal, because clerks tend to remember the first and last customers of the day. But they judged yet more time in ACU pants was worse. So they went in and Turner found a pair of canvas work pants similar to Reacher’s. The smallest size the store carried was going to be loose in the waist and long in the leg. Not perfect. But Turner figured the discrepancy was going to be a good thing. A feature, not a bug, was how she put it. Because the pant legs would pool down over her army boots, thereby hiding them to some extent, and making them less obvious.
They bought the pants and three pairs of boot laces, one for Reacher’s boots, and one for Turner’s, and one for her to double up and use as a belt. They conducted their business in as unmemorable a manner as they could. Neither polite nor impolite, neither rushing nor stalling, not really saying much of anything. Turner didn’t use the restroom. She wanted to change, but they figured for the last customer of the day to go in wearing ACU pants and come out in a new purchase would likely stick in the clerk’s memory.
But the store had a big parking lot on one side, and it was empty and dark, so Turner changed her pants in the shadows and dumped her army issue in a trash container at the rear of the building. Then she came out, and they traded jacket for shirt, and they sat down on a kerb together and tied their boots.
Good to go, with four dollars left in Reacher’s pocket.
Four bucks was a week’s wage in some countries of the world, but it wasn’t worth much of a damn in Berryville, Virginia. It wouldn’t buy transportation out of the state, and it wouldn’t buy a night in a motel, and it wouldn’t buy a proper sit-down meal for two, not in any kind of restaurant or diner known to man.
Turner said, ‘You told me there’s more than one kind of ATM.’
‘There is,’ Reacher said. ‘Fifty miles ahead, or fifty miles back. But not here.’
‘I’m hungry.’
‘Me too.’
‘There’s no point in holding on to four dollars.’
‘I agree,’ Reacher said. ‘Let’s go crazy.’
They walked back towards the railroad track, fast and newly confident in their newly laced boots, to the pizza restaurant they had seen. Not a gourmet place, which was just as well. They bought a single slice each, to go, pepperoni for Reacher, plain cheese for Turner, and a can of soda to share between them. Which left them eighty cents in change. They ate and drank sitting side by side on a rail at the train crossing.
Turner asked, ‘Did you lose guys when you were CO?’
‘Four,’ Reacher said. ‘One of them was a woman.’
‘Did you feel bad?’
‘I wasn’t turning cartwheels. But it’s all part of the game. We all know what we’re signing up for.’
‘I wish I’d gone myself.’
Reacher asked, ‘Have you ever been to the Cayman Islands?’
‘No.’
‘Ever had a foreign bank account?’
‘Are you kidding? Why would I? I’m an O4. I make less than some high-school teachers.’
‘Why did you take a day to pass on the name of the Hood guy’s contact?’
‘What is this, the third degree?’
‘I’m thinking,’ Reacher said. ‘That’s all.’
‘You know why. I wanted to bust him myself. To make sure it was done properly. I gave myself twenty-four hours. But I couldn’t find him. So I told the FBI. They should think themselves lucky. I could have given myself a week.’
‘I might have,’ Reacher said. ‘Or a month.’
They finished their pizza slices, and drained the shared can of soda. Reacher wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and then wiped the back of his hand on his pants. Turner said, ‘What are we going to do now?’
‘We’re going to walk through town and hitch a ride west.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Better than sleeping under a bush.’
‘How far west?’
‘All the way west,’ Reacher said. ‘We’re going to Los Angeles.’
‘Why?’
Samantha Dayton.
Sam.
Fourteen years old.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ Reacher said. ‘It’s complicated.’
They walked through the downtown area, on a street called East Main, which became a street called West Main after a central crossroads. All the store windows were dark. All the doors were shuttered. Berryville was no doubt a fine American town, matter-of-fact and unpretentious, but it was no kind of hub. That was for damn sure. It was all closed up and slumbering, even though it was only the middle of the evening.
They walked on. Turner looked good in the shirt, even though she could have gotten herself and her sister in it together. But she had rolled the sleeves, and she had shrugged and wriggled like women do, and it had draped and fallen into some kind of a coherent shape. Somehow its hugeness emphasized how slender she was. Her hair was still down. She moved with lit
he, elastic energy, a wary, quizzical look never leaving her eyes, but there was no fear there. No tension. Just some kind of an appetite. For what, Reacher wasn’t entirely sure.
Totally worth the wait, he thought.
They walked on.
And then on the west edge of town they came to a motel.
And in its lot was the car with the dented doors.
TWENTY-FIVE
THE MOTEL WAS a neat and tidy place, entirely in keeping with what they had seen in the rest of the town. It had some red brick, and some white paint, and a flag, and an eagle above the office door. There was a Coke machine, and an ice machine, and probably twenty rooms in two lines, both of them running back from the road and facing each other across a broad courtyard.
The car with the dented doors was parked at an angle in front of the office, carelessly and temporarily, as if someone had ducked inside with a brief enquiry.
‘Are you sure?’ Turner asked, quietly.
‘No question,’ Reacher said. ‘That’s their car.’
‘How is that even possible?’
‘Whoever is running these guys is deep in the loop, and he’s pretty smart. That’s how it’s possible. There’s no other explanation. He heard we broke out, and he heard we took thirty bucks with us, and he heard about that Metro cop finding us on Constitution Avenue. And then he sat down to think. Where can you go with thirty bucks? There are only four possibilities. Either you hole up in town and sleep in a park, or you head for Union Station, or the big bus depot right behind it, and you go to Baltimore or Philly or Richmond, or else you head the other way, west, on the little municipal bus. And whoever is doing the thinking here figured the little municipal bus was the favourite. Because the fare is cheaper, and because Union Station and the big bus depot are far too easy for the cops to watch, as are the stations and the depots at the other end, in Baltimore and Philly and Richmond, and because sleeping in the park really only gets you busted tomorrow instead of today. And on top of all that they claim to know how I live, and I don’t spend much time on the East Coast. I was always more likely to head west.’
