by Child, Lee
Turner asked, ‘What’s the kid’s name?’
‘Samantha,’ Reacher said. ‘Sam for short, presumably.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Fourteen. Nearly fifteen.’
‘How do you feel?’
‘Bad. If she’s mine, I should have been there for her.’
‘You really don’t remember her mother?’
‘No, I really don’t.’
‘Is that normal for you?’
‘You mean, exactly how feral am I?’
‘I suppose.’
‘I don’t think I forget people. I hope I don’t. Especially women I sleep with. But if I did, I would be unaware of it, by definition. You can’t be aware of forgetting.’
‘Is this why we’re going to Los Angeles?’
‘I have to know,’ Reacher said.
‘But it’s suicide. They’ll all be waiting for you there. It’s the one place they can be sure you’ll go.’
‘I have to know,’ Reacher said again.
Turner said nothing.
Reacher said, ‘Anyway, that’s the story. That’s what I had to tell you. In the interests of full disclosure. In case it had a bearing. On the rooms issue, for instance.’
Turner didn’t answer.
They finished up, and they got their check, which was for a total represented by a scrawled figure circled beneath three scribbled lines. How much was a cup of diner coffee? No one knew, because no one ever found out. Maybe it was free. Maybe it had to be, because the composite total was modest. Reacher had thirteen dollars and thirty-two cents in his pocket, which was Sullivan’s surviving eighty cents plus the change he had gotten in the gas station hut, and he left all of it on the table, thereby including a handsome tip. A guy who worked a hot griddle all night deserved no less.
The car was where they had left it, unmolested, not surrounded by searchlights and SWAT teams. Far to their left the state police barracks looked quiet. The cruisers out front had not moved. The warm lights were still showing in the windows.
‘Stay or go?’ Turner asked.
‘Stay,’ Reacher said. ‘This place is as good as any. As weird as that sounds, with the troopers right here. It’s not going to get better than this. Not until it’s over.’
‘Not until we win, you mean.’
‘Same thing.’
They eased themselves into the Corvette’s low seats, and Turner fired it up and drove back to the motel. She stopped outside the office.
‘I’ll wait here,’ she said. ‘You go do it.’
‘OK,’ he said.
He took a fistful of twenties from one of Billy Bob’s bricks.
‘Two rooms,’ she said.
The night clerk was asleep in his chair, but it didn’t take much to wake him up. The sound of the door did half the job, and a polite tap from Reacher’s knuckles on the counter did the rest. The guy was young. Maybe it was a family business. Maybe this was a son or a nephew.
‘Got two rooms?’ Reacher asked him.
The guy made a big show of checking on a computer screen, like many such guys do, which Reacher thought was dumb. They weren’t the worldwide heads of global operations for giant hotel corporations. They were in motels with rooms they could count on their fingers and toes. If they lost track, then surely all they had to do was turn around and check the keys hanging on the hooks behind them.
The guy looked up from the screen and said, ‘Yes, sir, I can do that.’
‘How much?’
‘Thirty dollars per room per night. With a voucher included, for breakfast at the café across the street.’
‘Deal,’ Reacher said, and he swapped three of Billy Bob’s twenties for two of the young guy’s keys. Rooms eleven and twelve. Adjacent. A kindness, on the young guy’s part. Easier for the maid in the morning. Less distance to push her heavy cart.
‘Thank you,’ Reacher said.
He went out to the car, and Turner drove around to the rear of the compound, where she found a patch of lumpy winter grass behind the last of the buildings. She eased the car up on to it, and they raised the top, and they locked it up for the night, and they left it there, not visible from the street.
They walked back together and found their rooms, which were on the second floor, up an exterior flight of concrete stairs. Reacher gave Turner the key to eleven, and kept twelve for himself. She said, ‘What time tomorrow?’
‘Noon,’ he said. ‘And I’ll drive some, if you like.’
‘We’ll see. Sleep well.’
‘You too.’
He waited until she was safely inside before he opened his door. The room behind it was a concrete box with a popcorn ceiling and vinyl wallpaper. Better than the place a mile from Rock Creek, but only by degrees. The heater was quieter, but far from silent. The carpet was cleaner, but not by much. As was the bedspread. The shower looked reasonable, and the towels were thin but not transparent. The soap and the shampoo were dressed up with a brand name that sounded like a firm of old Boston lawyers. The furniture was made of pale wood, and the television set was a small off-brand flat-screen, about the size of a carry-on suitcase. There was no telephone. No minibar refrigerator, no free bottle of water, no chocolate on the pillow.
He turned on the television and found CNN and watched the ticker at the bottom of the screen, all the way through a full cycle. There was no mention of two fugitives fleeing an army facility in Virginia. So he headed for the bathroom and started the shower and stood under it, aimlessly, long after the soap he had used was rinsed away. Fragments of the conversation over the scarred café table came back to him, unstoppably. You’re like something feral, she had said. You’re like a predator. Cold, and hard.
But in the end the line that stuck was from earlier in the exchange. Turner had asked about Morgan, and he had told her, Your guys in Afghanistan missed two consecutive radio checks, and he did nothing about it. He went over and over it, sounding the words in his head, moving his lips, saying it out loud, breaking it down, sputtering each phrase into the beating water, examining each separate clause in detail.
Your guys in Afghanistan.
Missed two consecutive radio checks.
And he did nothing about it.
He shut off the water and got out of the tub and grabbed a towel. Then, still damp, he put his pants back on, and one of his T-shirts, and he stepped out to the upstairs walkway. He padded barefoot through the cold night air, to room eleven’s door.
He knocked.
THIRTY-FOUR
REACHER WAITED IN the cold, because Turner didn’t open up right away. But he knew she was awake. He could see electric light through the spy hole in her door. Then it darkened briefly, as she put her eye to it, to check who was there. Then he was left to wait some more. She was hauling some clothes on, he guessed. She had showered, too, almost certainly. Then the door opened, and she stood there, with one hand on the handle and the other on the jamb, blocking his way, either consciously or subconsciously. Her hair was slick with water and finger-combed out of her eyes. She was wearing her army T-shirt and her new work pants. Her feet were bare.
Reacher said, ‘I would have called, but there’s no telephone in my room.’
‘Mine either,’ she said. ‘What’s up?’
‘Something I told you about Morgan. I just realized what it means.’
‘What did you tell me?’
‘I said your guys in Afghanistan missed two consecutive radio checks, and he did nothing about it.’
‘I was thinking about that too. I think it’s proof he’s one of them. He did nothing because he knew there was nothing to do. He knew they were dead. No point in organizing a search.’
‘Can I come in?’ Reacher asked. ‘It’s cold out here.’
No answer.
‘Or we could use my room,’ he said. ‘If you prefer.’
‘No, come in,’ she said. She took her hand off the jamb and moved aside. He stepped in, and she closed the door behind him. Her room was the same a
s his. His shirt was on the back of a chair. Her boots were under the chair, stowed neatly, side by side.
She said, ‘I guess I could afford some new shoes now.’
‘New everything, if you want,’ he said.
‘Do you agree?’ she said. ‘It’s proof he’s one of them?’
‘It could be proof he’s lazy and incompetent.’
‘No commander could be that dumb.’
‘How long have you been in the army?’
She smiled, briefly. ‘OK, plenty of commanders could be that dumb.’
He said, ‘I don’t think the important part is him doing nothing about it.’
She sat down on the bed. Left him standing near the window. Her pants were loose, and her shirt was tight. She was wearing nothing underneath it. That was clear. He could see ribs, and slender curves. On the phone from South Dakota he had pictured her as a blonde, with blue eyes, maybe from northern California, all of which had turned out to be completely wrong. She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, and from Montana. But he had been right about other things. Five-six or five-seven, he had guessed out loud, but thin. Your voice is all in your throat. She had laughed out loud and asked: You saying I’m flat-chested? He had laughed back and said, 34A at best. She had said, Damn.
But the reality was better than the telephone guesses. Live and in person she was something else entirely.
Totally worth it.
She said, ‘What was the important part of what Morgan said?’
‘The two missed radio checks.’
‘Because?’
‘Your guys checked in on the day you were arrested, but then they missed the next day, and the next.’
‘As did I, because I was in jail. You know that. It was a concerted plan. They shut us down, both ends, over there and over here, simultaneously.’
‘But it wasn’t simultaneous,’ Reacher said. ‘That’s my point. Afghanistan is nine hours ahead of Rock Creek. That’s practically a whole day’s worth of daylight in the winter. And no one walks on a goat trail in the Hindu Kush after dark. That would be a bad idea for a huge number of reasons, including falling down and accidentally breaking your leg. So your guys were out there getting shot in the head during daylight hours. That’s for damn sure. No question about it. And daylight hours end by about six o’clock local.’
‘OK.’
‘Six o’clock in the evening in Afghanistan is nine o’clock in the morning here.’
‘OK.’
‘But my lawyer said you opened your bank account in the Cayman Islands at ten o’clock in the morning, and the hundred grand arrived at eleven o’clock in the morning, and you were arrested at noon.’
‘I remember that last part.’
‘Which means your guys were dead at least an hour before they started messing with you. Many hours, most likely. Minimum of one, maximum of eight or nine.’
‘OK, so not exactly simultaneous. Not two things at once, but one thing after the other. Does that make a difference?’
‘I think it does,’ Reacher said. ‘But first we have to step back a day. You sent Weeks and Edwards into the hills, and the reaction was instantaneous. The whole thing was over by noon the next day. How did they react so fast?’
‘Luck?’
‘Suppose it was something else.’
‘You think they have a mole in the 110th?’
‘I doubt it. Not with our kind of people. It would have been impossible in my day, and I can only imagine things have gotten better.’
‘Then how?’
‘I think your comms were penetrated.’
‘A tap on the Rock Creek phones? I don’t think that’s possible. We have systems in place.’
‘Not Rock Creek,’ Reacher said. ‘It makes no sense to tap the local ends of the network. There are too many of them. Better to concentrate on the centre of the web. Where the spider lives. I think they’re reading everything that goes in and out of Bagram. Very senior staff officers, with access to anything they want. Which back at that point was everything. Which was exactly what they got. They sifted through all the chatter, and they got the original rumour, and your orders, and your guys’ reactions, and the whole back and forth.’
‘Possible,’ Turner said.
‘Which makes a difference.’
‘But only as a background detail.’
‘No, more than that,’ Reacher said. ‘They had already stopped Weeks and Edwards, between one and nine hours previously, so why did they still go ahead and come after you?’
‘You know why. They thought I knew something I actually didn’t.’
‘But they didn’t need to think anything. Or guess, or plan for the worst. Not if they were reading stuff in and out of Bagram. No speculation was required. They knew what Weeks and Edwards told you. They knew for sure. They had it in black and white. They knew what you knew, Susan.’
‘But I knew nothing. Because Weeks and Edwards told me nothing.’
‘If that’s true, then why did they go ahead and come after you? Why would they do that? Why would they go ahead with a very complex and very expensive scam for no reason at all? Why would they risk that hundred grand?’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘I’m saying Weeks and Edwards did tell you something. I’m saying you do know something. Maybe it didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, and maybe you don’t remember it now, but Weeks and Edwards gave you some little nugget, and as a result someone got his panties in a real big wad.’
THIRTY-FIVE
TURNER PUT HER bare feet up on the bed and leaned back on the pillow. She said, ‘I’m not senile, Reacher. I remember what they told me. We’re paying a Pashtun insider, and they met with the guy, and he told them an American officer had been seen heading north to meet with a tribal elder. But at that point the identity of the American officer was definitely not known, and the purpose of the meeting was definitely not known.’
Reacher asked, ‘Was there a description?’
‘No, other than American.’
‘Man or woman?’
‘Has to be a man. Pashtun elders don’t meet with women.’
‘Black or white?’
‘Didn’t say.’
‘Army? Marines? Air Force?’
‘We all look the same to them.’
‘Rank? Age?’
‘No details at all. An American officer. That’s all we knew.’
‘There has to be something else.’
‘I know what I know, Reacher. And I know what I don’t.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘What does that even mean? This is like you and that woman in Korea. No one is aware of forgetting. Except I’m not forgetting. I remember what they said.’
‘How much back and forth was there?’
‘There was what I just told you, about the rumour, and then there were my orders, which were to go chase it. And that was all. One signal out, and one signal back.’
‘What about their last radio check? Did you see it?’
‘It was the last thing I saw, before they came for me. It was pure routine. No progress. Nothing to see here, folks, so move right along. That kind of thing.’
‘So it was in the original message. About the rumour. You’re going to have to try to remember it, word for word.’
‘An unknown American officer was seen heading north to meet with a tribal elder. For an unspecified reason. That’s it, word for word. I already remember it.’
‘What part of that is worth a hundred thousand dollars? And your future, and mine, and Moorcroft’s? And a bruise on a schoolgirl’s arm, in Berryville, Virginia?’
‘I don’t know,’ Turner said.
They went quiet after that. No more talking. No more discussion. Turner lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling. Reacher leaned on the window sill, running her summary through his head, fourteen words, a perfect sentence, with a subject and an object and a verb, and a satisfying rhythm, and a pleasing cadence: An unknown American officer was see
n heading north to meet with a tribal elder. He went over and over it, and then he broke it into thirds, and stared it down, clause by clause.
An unknown American officer.
Was seen heading north.
To meet with a tribal elder.
Twenty-three syllables. Not a haiku. Or, a little less than a haiku and a half.
Meaning?
Uncertain, but he sensed a tiny inconsistency between the start of the sentence and its finish, like a grain of sand in an otherwise perfect mechanism.
An unknown American.
A tribal elder.
Meaning?
He didn’t know.
He said, ‘I’ll get going now. We’ll come back to it tomorrow. It might creep up on you in the night. That can happen. Something to do with the way the brain reacts to sleep. Memory processing, or a portal to the subconscious, or something like that. I read an article about it once, in a magazine I found on a bus.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t get going,’ she said. ‘Stay here.’
Reacher paused a beat.
He said, ‘Really?’
‘Do you want to?’
‘Does the Pope sleep in the woods?’
‘Then take your shirt off.’
‘Really?’
‘Take it off, Reacher.’
So he did. He hauled the thin stretchy cotton up over his shoulders, and then up over his head, and then he dropped it on the floor.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
And then he waited, like he always did, for her to count his scars.
‘I was wrong,’ she said. ‘You’re not just feral. You’re an actual animal.’
‘We’re all animals,’ he said. ‘That’s what makes things interesting.’
‘How much do you work out?’
‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘It’s genetic.’ Which it was. Puberty had brought him many things unbidden, including height and weight and an extreme mesomorph physique, with a six-pack like a cobbled city street, and a chest like a suit of NFL armour, and biceps like basketballs, and subcutaneous fat like a Kleenex tissue. He had never messed with any of it. No diets. No weights. No gym time. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, was his attitude.
