by Lee Child
Reacher had been fighting since he was five years old, and he had never had his nose broken. Not even once. Partly good luck, and partly good management. Plenty of people had tried, over the years, either deliberately or in a flurry of savage unaimed blows, but none had ever succeeded. Not one. Not ever. Not even close. It was a fact Reacher was proud of, in a peculiar way. It was a symbol. A talisman. A badge of honor. He had all kinds of nicks and cuts and scars on his face and his arms and his body, but he felt that the distinctive but intact bone in his nose made up for them.
It said: I’m still standing.
The blow came in exactly as he expected it to, a clenched fist, a straight right, hard and heavy, riding up a little, aiming high, as if Duncan subconsciously expected Reacher to flinch up and back, like his wife Eleanor probably did every single time. But Reacher didn’t flinch up and back. He started with his head up and back, his eyes open, watching down his nose, timing it, then jerking forward from the neck, smashing a perfect improvised head butt straight into Duncan’s knuckles, an instant high-speed high-impact collision between the thick ridge in Reacher’s brow and the delicate bones in Duncan’s hand. No contest. No contest at all. Reacher had a skull like concrete, and an arch was the strongest structure known to man, and hands were the most fragile parts of the body. Duncan screamed and snatched his hand away and cradled it limp against his chest and hopped a whole yowling circle, looking up, looking down, stunned and whimpering. He had three or four busted phalanges, Reacher figured, certainly a couple of proximals, and maybe a couple of cracked distals too, from the fingers folding much tighter than nature intended, under the force of the sudden massive compression.
“Asshole,” Reacher said.
Duncan clamped his right wrist under his left armpit and huffed and blew and stomped around. He came to rest a whole minute later, a little cramped and crouched and bent, and he glowered up and out from either side of his splint, hurt and angry and humiliated, looking first at Reacher, and then at his fourth guy, who was standing there stock-still, holding the shotgun. Duncan jerked his head, from the guy, to Reacher, a gesture full of silent fury and impatience.
Get him.
The fourth guy stepped up. Reacher was pretty sure he wasn’t going to shoot. No one fires a shotgun at a group of four people, three of which are his friends.
Reacher was pretty sure it was going to be worse than shooting.
The guy reversed the gun. Right hand on the barrel, left hand on the stock.
The guy behind Reacher moved. He wrapped his left forearm tight around Reacher’s throat, and he clamped his right palm tight on Reacher’s forehead.
Immobile.
The fourth guy raised the gun horizontal, butt first, two-handed, and cocked it back over his right shoulder, ready to go, lining it up like a spear, and then he rocked forward and took a step and aimed carefully and jabbed the butt straight at the center of Reacher’s face and
CRACK
BLACK
Chapter 42
Jacob Duncan convened an unscheduled middle-of-the-night meeting with his brothers, in his own kitchen, not Jonas’s or Jasper’s, with Wild Turkey, not Knob Creek, and plenty of it, because his mood was celebratory.
“I just got off the phone,” he said. “You’ll be pleased to hear my boy has redeemed himself.”
Jasper asked, “How?”
“He captured Jack Reacher.”
Jonas asked, “How?”
Jacob Duncan leaned back in his chair and shot his feet straight out in front of him, relaxed, expansive, a man at ease, a man with a story to tell. He said, “I drove Seth home, as you know, but I let him out at the end of his road, because he was a little down, and he wanted to walk a spell in the night air. He got within a hundred yards of his house, and he was nearly run over by a car. His car, as it happens. His own Cadillac, going like a bat out of hell. Naturally he hurried home. His wife was induced to reveal all the details. It turns out Reacher stole the Cadillac earlier in the afternoon. It turns out the doctor was with him. Misguided, of course, but it seems the poor fellow has formed an alliance of sorts with our Mr. Reacher. So Seth took his old Remington pump and set off in Eleanor’s car and, sure enough, Reacher was indeed at the doctor’s house, large as life and twice as natural.”
“Where is he now?”
“In a safe place. It seems like the capture was mostly uneventful.”
“Is he alive?”
“So far,” Jacob Duncan said. “But how long he stays alive is what we need to discuss.”
The room went quiet. The others sat and waited, as they had so many times before, for their brother Jacob, the eldest, a contemplative man, always ready with a pronouncement, or a decision, or a nugget of wisdom, or an analysis, or a proposal.
Jacob said, “Seth wants to finesse the whole thing, right down to the wire, and frankly I’m tempted to let him try. He wants to rebuild his credibility with us, which of course I told him isn’t necessary, but it remains true that all of us need to pay some attention to our own credibility, in a collective sense, with Mr. Rossi, our good friend to the south.”
Jasper asked, “What does Seth want to do?”
“He wants to stage things so that our prior hedging is shown to have been entirely justified. He wants to wait until our shipment is about an hour away, whereupon he wants to unveil Reacher to Mr. Rossi’s boys, whereupon he wants to fake a phone call and have the truck arrive within the next sixty minutes, as if what we’ve been saying all along about the delay was indeed true and legitimate.”
“Too risky,” Jonas said. “Reacher is a dangerous man. We shouldn’t keep him around a minute longer than we have to. That’s just asking for trouble.”
“As I said, Reacher’s in a safe place. Plus, in the end, if we do it Seth’s way, we’ll have been seen to have solved our own problems with our own hands, without any outside assistance at all, and therefore whatever small shred of vulnerability we displayed will evaporate completely.”
“Even so. It’s still risky.”
“There are other factors,” Jacob said.
The room went quiet again.
Jacob said, “We’ve never really known or cared what happens to our shipments once they’re in Mr. Rossi’s hands, except that I imagine we always vaguely supposed they pass down a lengthy chain of commerce, sale and resale, to an ultimate destination. And now that chain, or at least a large part of it, has become visible. As of tonight, it seems that three separate participants have representation here. Probably they’re all desperate. It’s clear to me they have agreed to work together to break up the logjam. And once that is done, it’s equally clear to me they will be under instructions to eliminate one another, so that the last man standing triples his profit.”
Jonas said, “That’s not relevant to us.”
“Except that Mr. Rossi’s boys seem to be jumping the gun. It was inevitable that one of them would seize the initiative. Our stooges on the phone tree tell me that two men are already dead. Mr. Rossi’s boys killed them outside Mr. Vincent’s motel. So my idea is to give Mr. Rossi’s boys enough time to shorten the chain a little more, so that by the end of tomorrow Mr. Rossi himself will be the last man standing, whereupon he and we can have a little talk about splitting the extra profit equally. The way it works mathematically is that we’ll all double our shares. Mr. Rossi will be happy to live with that, I imagine, and so will we, I’m sure.”
“Still risky.”
“You don’t like money, brother?”
“I don’t like risk.”
“Everything’s a risk. We know that, don’t we? We’ve lived with risk for a long time. It’s part of the thrill.”
A long silence.
Jonas said, “The doctor lied to us. He told us Reacher hitched a ride in a white sedan.”
Jacob nodded. “The doctor has apologized for that, most sincerely. I’m told he’s being a model of cooperation now. His wife is with him, of course. I’m sure that’s a factor. He also claim
s Reacher left Seth’s Cadillac sixty miles south of here, and that it was restolen quite independently by an operative from further up the chain. A small Middle Eastern person, according to reports on the phone tree. It appears he was the one who nearly ran Seth over.”
“Anything else?”
“The doctor says Reacher saw the police files.”
Silence in the room.
Then Jonas said, “And?”
“Inconclusive, the doctor says.”
“Conclusive enough to come back.”
“The doctor says he came back because of the men in the cars.”
Nobody spoke.
Jacob said, “But in the interests of full disclosure, the doctor also claims Reacher asked Mrs. Coe if she really wants to be told what happened to her daughter.”
“Reacher can’t possibly know. Not yet.”
“I agree. But he might be beginning to pull on threads.”
“Then we have to kill him now. We have to.”
“It’s just one more day. He’s locked up. Escape is impossible.”
More silence.
Nobody spoke.
Then Jonas asked, “Anything else?”
“Eleanor helped Reacher get past the sentry,” Jacob said. “She defied her husband and left his house, quite brazenly. She and Reacher conspired together to decoy the boy away from his post. He didn’t perform well. We’ll have to fire him, of course. We’ll leave Seth to decide what happens to his wife. And it seems that Seth has broken his hand. He’ll need some attention. It appears Reacher has a very hard head. And that’s all the news I have.”
Nobody spoke.
Jacob said, “We need to make a decision about the immediate matter at hand. Life and death. Always the ultimate choice.”
No reply.
Jacob asked, “Who wants to go first?”
Nobody spoke.
Jacob said, “Then I’ll go first. I vote to let my boy do it his way. I vote to keep Reacher concealed until our truck is close by. It’s a minor increase in risk. One more day, that’s all. Overall, it’s insignificant. And I like finesse. I like a measure of elegance in a solution.”
A long pause.
Then Jasper said, “I’m in.”
And Jonas said, “OK,” a little reluctantly.
Reacher woke up in a concrete room full of bright light. He was on his back on the floor, at the foot of a flight of steep stairs. He had been carried down, he figured, not thrown or fallen. Because the back of his skull was OK. He had no sprains or bruises. His limbs were intact, all four of them. He could see and hear and move. His face hurt like hell, but that was to be expected.
The lights were regular incandescent household bulbs, six or eight of them, randomly placed, maybe a hundred watts each. No shades. The concrete was smooth and pale gray. Very fine. Not dusty. It was like an engineering product. High-strength. It had been poured with great precision. There were no seams. The angles where the walls met each other and the floor were chamfered and radiused, just slightly. Like a swimming pool, ready for tiling. Reacher had dug swimming pools once. Temporary employment, many years ago. He had seen them in all their different stages of completion.
His face hurt like hell.
Was he in a half-finished swimming pool? Unlikely. Unless it had a temporary roof. The roof was boards laid over heavy joists. The joists were made of multi-ply wood. Manufactured articles. Very strong. Layers of exotic hardwoods, probably glued together with resins, under enormous pressure, in a giant press in a factory. Probably cut with computer-controlled saws. Delivered on a flat-bed truck. Craned into place. Each one probably weighed a lot.
His face hurt.
He felt confused. He had no idea what time it was. The clock in his head had stopped. He was breathing through his mouth. His nose was jammed solid with blood and swellings. He could feel blood on his lips and his chin. It was thick and almost dry. A nosebleed. Not surprising. Maybe thirty minutes old. Not like Eleanor Duncan’s. His own blood clotted fast. It always had. He was the exact opposite of a hemophiliac. A good thing, from time to time. An evolutionary trait, no doubt bred into him through many generations of natural-born survivors.
His face hurt.
There were other things in the concrete room. There were pipes of all different diameters. There were green metal boxes a little crusted with mineral stains. Some wires, some in steel conduit, some loose. There were no windows. Just the walls. And the stairs, with a closed door at the top.
He was underground.
Was he in a bunker of some sort?
He didn’t know. He hoped not. His recent experience with underground bunkers was not good.
His face hurt like hell. And it was getting worse. Much, much worse. Huge waves of pain were pulsing out between his eyes, behind his nose, boring straight back into his head, one with every heartbeat, bumping and grinding, lapping out into his skull and bouncing around and then fading and receding just in time to be replaced by the next. Bad pain. But he could fight it. He could fight anything. He had been fighting since he was five years old. If there was nothing to fight, he would fight himself. Not that there had ever been a shortage of targets. He had fought his own battles, and his brother’s. A family responsibility. Not that his brother had been a coward. Far from it. Nor weak. His brother had been big too. But he had been a rational boy. Gentle, even. Always a disadvantage. Someone would start something, and Joe would waste the first precious second thinking Why? Reacher never did that. Never. He used the first precious second landing the first precious blow. Fight, and win. Fight, and win.
His face hurt like hell. He looked at the pain, and he set himself apart from it. He saw it, examined it, identified it, corralled it. He isolated it. He challenged it. You against me? Dream on, pal. He built borders for it. Then walls. He built walls and forced the pain behind them and then he moved the walls inward, compressing the pain, crushing it, boxing it in, limiting it, beating it.
Not beating it.
It was beating him.
It was exploding, like bombs on timers, one, two, three. Relentlessly. Everlastingly, with every beat of his heart. It was never going to stop, until his heart stopped. It was insane. In the past he had been wounded with shrapnel and shot in the chest and cut with knives. This was worse. Much worse. This was worse than all of his previous sufferings put together.
Which made no sense. No sense at all. Something was wrong. He had seen busted noses before. Many times. No fun, but nobody made a gigantic fuss about them. Nobody looked like grenades were going off in his head. Not even Seth Duncan. People got up, maybe spat a little, winced, walked it off.
He raised his hand to his face. Slowly. He knew it would be like shooting himself in the head. But he had to know. Because something was wrong. He touched his nose. He gasped, loud and sudden, like an explosive curse, pain and fury and disgust.
The ridge of bone on the front of his nose was broken clean off. It had been driven around under the tight web of skin and cartilage to the side. It was pinned there, like a mountaintop sliced off and reattached to a lower slope.
It hurt like hell.
Maybe the Remington’s butt had a metal binding. Brass, or steel. Reinforcement against wear and tear. He hadn’t noticed. He knew he had turned his head at the last split second, as much as he could against the resistance of the sweaty palm clamped on his forehead. He had wanted as much of a side-on impact as he could get. Better than head-on. A head-on impact could drive shards of loose bone into the brain.
He closed his eyes.
He opened them again.
He knew what he had to do.
He had to reset the break. He knew that. He knew the costs and the benefits. The pain would lessen, and he would end up with a normal-looking nose. Almost. But he would pass out again. No question about that. Touching the injury with a gentle fingertip had nearly taken his head off at the neck. Like shooting himself. Fixing it would be like machine-gunning himself.
He closed his eyes. The p
ain battered at him. He laid his head gently on the concrete. No point in falling back and cracking his skull as well. He raised his hand. He grasped the knob of bone, finger and thumb. Atom bombs went off in his head. He pushed and pulled.
No result. The cartilage was clamping too hard. Like a web of miniature elastic straps, holding the damn thing in place. In completely the wrong place. He blinked water out of his eyes and tried again. He pushed and pulled. Thermonuclear devices exploded.
No result.
He knew what he had to do. Steady pressure was not working. He had to smack the knob of bone back into place with the heel of his hand. He had to think hard and set it up and be decisive. Like a chiropractor wrestling a spine, jerking suddenly, listening for the sudden click.
He rehearsed the move. He needed to hit low down on the angle of cheek and nose, with side of his hand, the lower part, opposite the ball of his thumb, like a karate chop, a semi-glancing blow, upward and sideways and outward. He needed to drive the peak back up the mountainside. It would settle OK. Once it arrived, the skin and the cartilage would keep it in place.
He opened his eyes. He couldn’t get an angle. Not down there on the floor. His elbow got in the way. He dragged himself across the smooth concrete, palms and heels pushing, five feet, ten, and he sat up against a wall, half-reclining, his neck bent, space for his elbows in the void under his angled back. He squared his shoulders and his hips and he got as settled and as stable as he could, so that he wouldn’t fall far, or even at all.
Showtime.
He touched the heel of his hand to where it had to go. He let it feel what it had to do. He practiced the move. The top of his palm would skim his eyebrow. Like a guide.
On three, he thought.
One.
Two.
CRACK
BLACK
Chapter 43
Mahmeini’s man was afraid. He had driven around for twenty minutes and he had seen nothing at all, and then he had come to a house with a white mailbox with Duncan written on it, all proud and spotlit. The house was a decent place, expensively restored. Their HQ, he had assumed. But no. All it contained was a woman who claimed she knew nothing. She was relatively young. She had been beaten recently. She said there were four Duncans, a father and a son and two uncles. She was married to the son. They were all currently elsewhere. She gave directions to a cluster of three houses that Mahmeini’s man had already seen and dismissed from his mind. They were unimpressive places, all meanly hemmed in by an old post-and-rail fence, unlikely homes for men of significance.
