by Child, Lee
Turner said, ‘I wish we knew who they were.’
‘They’re on a plane this time,’ Reacher said. ‘Not in a car. Which implies two major certainties. This time they have IDs in their pockets. And no weapons.’
‘How far up the chain of command would you have to go before you found someone with unfettered 24/7 access to every national security system this country has?’
‘I assume everything changed after 9/11. I was gone four years before that. But I would guess an O8 in Intelligence might have that capability. Although not unfettered. They’re a paranoid bunch. They have all kinds of checks and balances. To do a little private snooping on an airline’s passenger manifest at five o’clock in the morning would be something else entirely.’
‘So who?’
‘Think about it the other way around. How far down the chain of command would you have to go? The president could do it. Or the National Security Adviser. Or anyone who gets in the Situation Room on a regular basis. The Chiefs of Staff, in other words. Except this is a round-the-clock responsibility, and it’s been running for more than a dozen years now. So there must be a separate desk. A Deputy Chief of Staff. Some kind of a go-to guy, tasked to be on top of everything, all the time. He could dip in and out any old time he wanted to. No checks and balances for him, because he’s the guy the checks and balances get reported to.’
‘So we’re dealing with a Deputy Chief of Staff?’
‘The bigger they are, the harder they fall.’
‘Conspiring with someone in Afghanistan?’
‘Those guys all know each other. They’re very social. Probably classmates.’
‘So who are these guys on the plane? They don’t look like Pentagon staffers.’
Reacher didn’t answer. He just watched and waited.
And then ten minutes later his patience was rewarded.
The woman in the fancy business suit got up and headed for the bathroom.
FORTY-FIVE
REACHER WAITED FOR the woman in the suit to pass by, and then he unclipped his belt and got up and headed forward, one row, two, three, four. He dropped into the woman’s vacated seat, and the makeweight from the second day reared back against the white-haired old guy with the cane, who was fast asleep with his head against the window.
Reacher said, ‘Let me see your ID.’
Which the guy didn’t. He just sat there, completely disconcerted, pressed up against his quarry like a sardine in a can. He was wearing some kind of nylon cargo pants, and a black sweatshirt under a black pea coat. He had a Hamilton watch on his left wrist, which meant he was probably right-handed. How long do women take in the bathroom? In Reacher’s experience they were not lightning fast. Four minutes, possibly.
Which was about three more than he needed.
He leaned forward, like he was going to head-butt the seat in front of him, and he rocked to his right, and he leaned back again, all one continuous fluid motion, so the guy ended up half trapped behind his right shoulder and his upper arm, and he reached over with his right hand and grabbed the guy’s right wrist, and he dragged the guy’s hand over towards him, twisting the wrist so the knuckles came first, with the palm facing away, and with his left hand he grabbed the guy’s right index finger, and he said, ‘Now you’ve got a choice. You can take it like a man, or you can scream like a little girl.’
And he broke the guy’s finger, by wrenching it down ninety degrees and snapping the first knuckle, and then he popped the second knuckle with the ball of his thumb. The guy jumped and squirmed and gasped in shock and pain, but he didn’t scream. Not like a little girl. Not with a hundred other people there.
Next Reacher broke his middle finger, in the same way, in the same two places, and then the guy started trying to get his trapped left arm free, which Reacher allowed, but only so he could swap hands and attend to the same two fingers on the other side.
Then he said, ‘ID?’
The guy didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He was too busy whimpering and grimacing and staring down at his ruined hands. His fingers were all over the place, sticking out at odd angles, bent into L shapes. Reacher patted him down, at close quarters, pushing him and pulling him to get at all his pockets. Nothing exciting in most of them, but he felt a characteristic lump in the right hip pocket. A tri-fold wallet, for sure. He pulled it out and stood up. Across the aisle and one row back the other guy was half on his feet. The woman in the suit was out of the bathroom and coming towards him. She hung back to let him sit, and then she continued on her way.
Reacher dumped the wallet in Turner’s lap and re-clipped his belt. She said, ‘What did you do to him?’
‘He won’t be pulling any triggers for a week or two. Or hitting anything. Or driving. Or buttoning his pants. He’s off the table. Prevention is better than cure. Get your retaliation in first.’
Turner didn’t answer.
‘I know,’ Reacher said. ‘Feral. What you see is what you get.’
‘No, it was good work.’
‘How did it look?’
‘He was hopping around a bit. I knew something was happening.’
‘What’s in the wallet?’
Turner opened it up. It was a fat old item, made of decent leather that had moulded itself around its contents. Which were numerous. The back part had cash in two sections, a healthy quarter-inch wad of twenties, but nothing larger, and then a thinner selection of ones and tens and fives. The front part had three pockets sized to carry credit cards. On the top of the deck in the centre was a North Carolina driver’s licence, with the guy’s face in the picture, and the name Peter Paul Lozano. Behind the DL was a stack of credit cards, Visa and MasterCard and Discover and American Express, with more in the slots on the left and the right, all of them current, in-date and unexpired, all of them in the name of Peter P. Lozano.
There was no military ID.
‘Is he a civilian?’ Turner said. ‘Or sanitized?’
‘I’m guessing sanitized,’ Reacher said. ‘But Captain Edmonds can tell us. I’ll give her the name. She’s working with HRC.’
‘Are you going to get the other guy’s name?’
‘Two would triangulate better than one.’
‘How are you going to do it?’
‘I’ll think of something.’
Four rows ahead the guy named Lozano was hunched over and rocking back and forth in his seat, as if he had his hands clamped up under his arms to manage the pain. A stewardess came by, and he glanced at her, as if he wanted to speak, but then he looked away again. Because what was he going to say? A bad man came by and hurt me? Like a little girl? Like a snitch in the principal’s office? Clearly not his style. Not in front of a hundred other people.
‘Military,’ Reacher said. ‘Don’t you think? Boot camp taught him to keep his mouth shut.’
Then the other guy squeezed out past the old lady next to him. The guy from the first night, with all the verbal chit-chat. He stepped forward a row and bent down to talk to his buddy. It turned into a regular little conference. There was discussion, there was exhibition of injuries, there were hostile glances over the shoulder. The woman in the business suit looked away, her face blank and frozen.
Turner said, ‘It won’t work twice. Forewarned is forearmed. The guy is getting a damn play by play.’
‘And hoping his seatmate has a strong bladder.’
‘Do you really think Edmonds will get us the file on 3435?’
‘She either will or she won’t. It’s about fifty-fifty. Like the toss of a coin.’
‘And either way is OK with you, right?’
‘I’d prefer to have the file.’
‘But you’re not going to be heartbroken if you don’t get it. Because just asking for it was enough. Asking for it was like telling them we’re one step away. Like our breath on their necks.’
‘I’d prefer to have the file,’ Reacher said again.
‘Like these guys on the plane. You’re sending them back walking wounded. You’re s
ending a message, aren’t you?’
Reacher said nothing.
Reacher kept one eye on the guy from the first night, three rows ahead on the left. The woman next to him at the window seemed to be asleep. From behind she looked young, and she was dressed like a homeless person. Definitely no summer frock, and no gloves. But she was clean. A movie person, probably. Junior, to be flying coach. Not an A-lister. Maybe an intern, or an assistant to an assistant. Perhaps she had been scouting locations, or organizing office space. The older woman on the aisle looked like a grandma. Maybe she was heading out to visit her grandkids. Maybe her ancestors had worked for Carnegie and Frick, in their brutal mills, and then when the city hit hard times maybe her children had joined the rustbelt diaspora and headed for sunnier climes. Maybe they were living the dream, in the warmth of southern California.
Reacher waited.
And in the end it was the guy himself who proved to have a bladder issue. Too much morning coffee, perhaps. Or orange juice. Or water. But whichever, the guy stood up and squeezed out past grandma, and oriented himself in the aisle, and locked eyes with Reacher, and took hesitant steps towards the back of the plane, watching Reacher all the way, one row, two, three, and then as he came alongside he turned and walked backward the rest of the way, his eyes still on Reacher’s, exaggerated, as if to say no way you’re getting a jump on me, and he fumbled behind himself for the door, and he backed ass-first into the bathroom, his eyes still locked on Reacher’s until the last possible second, and then the door closed and the bolt shot home.
How long do men take in the bathroom?
Not as long as women, generally.
Reacher unclipped his belt and stood up.
FORTY-SIX
REACHER WAITED OUTSIDE the bathroom, patiently, lik a regular passenger, like the next man in line. The door was a standard bi-fold contraption, hinged on the right, cream in colour, and a little grimy. No surprises. Then he heard the sudden muted suck of the flush, and then there was a pause, for hand washing, he hoped, and then the red Occupied changed to a green Vacant, and the centre of the door pulled back, and its left-hand edge slid along its track, and as soon as it was three-quarters of the way home Reacher wheeled around and slammed the heel of his left hand through the widening gap and caught the guy in the chest and smashed him back into the bulkhead behind the toilet.
Reacher crammed in after him and closed the door again with a jerk of his hips. The space was tiny. Barely big enough for Reacher on his own. He was jammed hard up against the guy, chest to chest, face to face. He turned half left, so he was hip to hip, so he wouldn’t get kneed in the balls, and he jammed his right forearm horizontally into the guy’s throat, to pin him against the back wall, and the guy started wriggling and struggling, but uselessly, because he couldn’t move more than an inch or two. No swing, no momentum. Reacher leaned in hard and turned his own left hand backward and caught the guy’s right wrist, and rotated it like a doorknob, which meant that as the twist in Reacher’s arm unwound the exact same twist went into the other guy’s arm, more and more, harder and harder, relentlessly, until the guy really needed to do a pirouette or a cartwheel to relieve the agonizing pressure, which obviously he couldn’t, due to the complete lack of space. Reacher kept it going until the point of the guy’s elbow was facing directly towards him, and then he raised the guy’s arm, up and up, still twisting, until it was horizontal, an inch from the side wall, and then he took his forearm out of the guy’s throat and smashed his own elbow down through the guy’s elbow, shattering it, the guy’s arm suddenly folding the way no arm is designed to fold.
The guy screamed, which Reacher hoped would be muffled by the door, or lost in the sound of rushing air, and then the guy collapsed into a sitting position on the commode, and then Reacher broke his other arm, the same way, twist, twist, smash, and then he hauled him upright again by the collar and checked his pockets, an inch away, up close and personal, the guy still struggling, his thighs going like he was riding an imaginary bicycle, but generating no force at all because of the extreme proximity, Reacher feeling nothing more than a ripple.
The guy’s wallet was in his right hip pocket, the same as the previous guy. Reacher took it and turned to his left and jabbed the guy with his elbow, hard, in the centre of his chest, and the guy went back down on the toilet, and Reacher extricated himself from the tangle of flopping limbs, and shouldered out the door. He closed it behind him as much as he could, and then he walked the short distance back to his seat.
The second wallet was loaded more or less the same as the first. A healthy wad of twenties, and some leathery small bills the guy had gotten in change, and a deck of credit cards, and a North Carolina driver’s licence with the guy’s picture and the name Ronald David Baldacci.
There was no military ID.
Reacher said, ‘If one is sanitized, they all are.’
‘Or they’re all civilians.’
‘Suppose they aren’t.’
‘Then they’re lifers at Fort Bragg. To have North Carolina DLs.’
‘Who’s at Fort Bragg these days?’
‘Nearly forty thousand people. More than two hundred and fifty square miles. It was a city all its own at the last census. There’s a lot of airborne, including the 82nd. And Special Forces, and psy-ops, and the Kennedy Special Warfare Center, and the 16th MP, and a lot of sustainment and logistics.’
‘A lot of people in and out of Afghanistan, in other words.’
‘Including the logistics people. They brought stuff in, and now they’re taking it out again. Or not.’
‘You still think this is a repeat of the Big Dog scam?’
‘Except bigger and better. And I don’t think they’re selling it here at home. I think they’re selling it to the native population.’
‘We’ll find out,’ Reacher said. ‘We’re one step away, after all.’
‘Back burner again,’ Turner said. ‘You took care of what you had to. Now you’re going to meet your daughter.’
About five minutes after that the guy came out of the bathroom, pale, sweating, seemingly smaller, much diminished, only his lower body moving, his upper body held rigid, like a robot only half working. He stumbled down the aisle and squeezed past the grandma and dumped himself back in his seat.
Reacher said, ‘He should ask the stewardess for an aspirin.’
Then the flight reverted to normal, and became like most flights Reacher had taken. No food was served. Not in coach. There was stuff to buy, mostly small chemical pellets artfully disguised as various natural products, but neither Reacher nor Turner bought any. They figured they would eat in California. Which would make them hungry, but Reacher didn’t mind being hungry. He believed hunger kept him sharp. He believed it stimulated creativity in the brain. Another old evolutionary legacy. If you’re hungry, you work out a smarter way to get the next woolly mammoth, today, not tomorrow.
He figured he was owed about three hours’ sleep, after being woken by Leach at four in the morning, so he closed his eyes. He wasn’t worried about the two guys. What were they going to do? They could spit peanuts at him, he guessed, but that was about all. Beside him he felt Turner arrive at the same conclusion. She rested her head on his shoulder. He slept bolt upright, waking with a start every time his head tipped forward.
Romeo called Juliet and said, ‘We have a serious problem.’
Juliet said, ‘In what way?’
‘Turner must have remembered the number after all. Reacher’s lawyer just made an application to see the full bio on A.M. 3435.’
‘Why Reacher’s lawyer?’
‘They’re trying to slip it by. They assume we’re watching her lawyer, but maybe not his. It’s not even his main lawyer. It’s the newbie doing his paternity case.’
‘Then we can get it thrown out, surely. It’s got nothing to do with his paternity case.’
‘It’s an application, like any other. The process is what it is. We’d have to show good reason. And we can’t, be
cause there’s nothing demonstrably special about the guy. Except to us. We can’t afford that kind of attention. Everyone would think we’d lost our minds. They’d say, who the hell is redacting that guy? He’s just a run-of-the-mill peasant.’
‘So how long have we got?’
‘A day, perhaps.’
‘Did you cancel their credit cards?’
‘I cancelled his. Easy enough, because it was the army’s to start with. But I can’t touch hers without a paper trail. Margaret Vega is a real person.’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘We’re going to finish it in California. They’ll be on the ground soon, four against two.’
Reacher and Turner slept most of three hours, and woke up with the plane on approach into Long Beach, and with the steward on the PA again, talking about seat backs and tray tables and upright positions and portable electronic equipment. None of which interested Reacher, because he hadn’t moved his seat back, hadn’t used his tray table, and had no electronic equipment, portable or otherwise. Out the window he could see the brown desert hills. He liked California. He figured he could live there, if he lived anywhere. It was warm, and no one knew him. He could have a dog. They could have a dog. He pictured Turner, maybe in a back yard somewhere, pruning a rose or planting a tree.
She said, ‘We shouldn’t use Hertz or Avis. To rent the car, I mean. Or any of the big franchises. Just in case their computers are hooked up with the government.’
He said, ‘You’re getting paranoid in your old age.’
‘Doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get me.’
He smiled.
She said, ‘What would that leave us with?’
‘Local guys. Rent-a-Wrecks, or four-year-old Lamborghinis.’
‘Will they take cash?’
‘We have credit cards.’
‘They might have cancelled them. They seem able to do that kind of thing.’
‘They can’t have. Not yet. They don’t even know we’ve got them.’
