Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “Oline Archer didn’t suspect anything?”

  “She did eventually,” Reacher said. “She sat on it two months and then presumably she pieced together enough to make some kind of sense out of it. Then she started to go public with it and all kinds of private alarm bells must have gone off, because a week later she was dead. Staged the way it was because to have a missing husband and then a murdered wife two months later would have raised too many flags. But as long as it looked random it was going to be seen as coincidental.”

  “Who had Oline taken it to? Emerson?”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “She took it to my father,” Helen Rodin said.

  There was silence for a long moment.

  “So what now?” Franklin said.

  “You need to hit that keyboard again,” Reacher said. “Whoever got the city contracts has pretty much defined himself as the bad guy here. So we need to know who he is. And where he’s based.”

  “Public record,” Franklin said.

  “So check it.”

  Franklin turned away in the silence and started his fingers pattering over the keys. He pointed and clicked for a minute. Then he came up with the answer.

  “Specialized Services of Indiana,” he said. “They own all the current city contracts for cement, concrete, and crushed stone. Many, many millions of dollars.”

  “Where are they?”

  “That was the good news.”

  “What’s the bad?”

  “There’s no paperwork. They’re a trust registered in Bermuda. They don’t have to file anything.”

  “What kind of a system is that?”

  Franklin didn’t answer.

  “A Bermuda trust needs a local lawyer.” Helen’s voice was low, quiet, resigned. Reacher recalled the plate outside A. A. Rodin’s office: the name, followed by the letters that denoted the law degree.

  Franklin clicked his way through two more screens.

  “There’s a phone number,” he said. “That’s all we’ve got.”

  “What is it?” Helen asked.

  Franklin read it out.

  “That’s not my father’s number,” Helen said.

  Franklin clicked his way into a reverse directory. Typed in the number and the screen changed and gave him a name and a business address.

  “John Mistrov,” he said.

  “Russian name,” Reacher said.

  “I guess so.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Vaguely. He’s a wills and trusts guy. One-man band. I’ve never worked for him.”

  Reacher checked his watch. “Can you find a home address?”

  Franklin went into a regular directory. Typed in the name and came up with a domestic listing.

  “Should I call him?” he said.

  Reacher shook his head. “We’ll pay him a visit. Face-to-face works better when time is short.”

  Vladimir made his way down to the ground-floor surveillance room. Sokolov was in a rolling chair in front of the long table that carried the four television monitors. From left to right they were labeled North, East, South, and West, which made sense if a person viewed the world from a clockwise perspective. Sokolov was scooting his chair slowly down the line, examining each picture, moving on, returning from West to North with a powerful push off the wall. All four screens were misty and green, because it was dark outside and the thermal imaging had kicked in. Occasionally a bright dot could be seen moving fast in the distance. An animal. Nocturnal. Fox, skunk, raccoon, or a pet cat or a lost dog far from home. The North monitor showed a glow from the crushing plant. It would fade as the idle machines cooled. Apart from that all the backgrounds were a deep olive color, because there was nothing out there except for miles of fields constantly misted with cold water from the always-turning irrigation booms.

  Vladimir pulled up a second wheeled chair and sat down on Sokolov’s left. He would watch North and East. Sokolov would concentrate on the South and West. That way they each had responsibility for one likely direction and one unlikely. It was a fair distribution of labor.

  Upstairs in the third-floor hallway Chenko loaded his own Super Match. Ten rounds, Lake City .308s. One thing Americans did right was ammunition. He opened all the bedroom doors to speed his access north, south, east, or west, as required. He walked to a window and turned his night scope on. Set it for seventy-five yards. He figured he would get the call when the soldier was about a hundred and fifty yards out. That was about the practical limit for the cameras. He would step to the right window and acquire the target when it was still more than a hundred yards distant. He would track its progress. He would let it come to him. When it was seventy-five yards out, he would kill it.

  He raised the rifle. Checked the image. It was bright and clear. He watched a fox cross the open ground east to west. Good hunting, my little friend. He walked back to the hallway and propped the gun against the wall and sat down in a straight-backed chair to wait.

  Helen Rodin insisted on staying behind in Franklin’s office. So Reacher and Yanni went out alone, in the Mustang. The streets were dark and quiet. Yanni drove. She knew her way around. The address they were looking for was a loft building carved out of an old warehouse halfway between the river wharf and the railhead. Yanni said it was a part of the new urban strategy. SoHo comes to the heartland. She said she had thought about buying in the same building.

  Then she said, “We should put Helen on suicide watch.”

  “She’ll be OK,” Reacher said.

  “You think?”

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “What if it was your old man?”

  Reacher didn’t answer that. Yanni slowed as the bulk of a large brick building loomed through the darkness.

  “You can ask first,” Reacher said. “If he doesn’t answer, I’ll ask second.”

  “He’ll answer,” Yanni said. “They all answer.”

  But John Mistrov didn’t. He was a thin guy of about forty-five. He was dressed like a post-divorce midlife-crisis victim. Acid-rinsed too-tight jeans, black T-shirt, no shoes. They found him all alone in a big white loft apartment eating Chinese food from paper cartons. Initially he was very pleased to see Ann Yanni. Maybe hanging out with celebrities was a part of the lifestyle glamour that the new development had promised. But his early enthusiasm faded fast. It disappeared completely when Yanni ran through her suspicions and then insisted on knowing the names behind the trust.

  “I can’t tell you,” he said. “Surely you understand there are confidentiality issues here. Surely you understand that.”

  “I understand that serious crimes have been committed,” Yanni said. “That’s what I understand. And you need to understand that, too. You need to choose up sides, right now, fast, before this thing goes public.”

  “No comment,” the guy said.

  “There’s no downside here,” Yanni said gently. “These names we want, they’ll all be in jail tomorrow. No comebacks.”

  “No comment,” the guy said again.

  “You want to go down with them?” Yanni asked. Sharply. “Like an accessory? Or do you want to get out from under? It’s your choice. But one way or the other you’re going to be on the news tomorrow night. Either doing the perp walk or standing there looking good, like, Oh my God, I had no idea, I was only too happy to help.”

  “No comment,” the guy said for the third time.

  Loud, clear, and smug.

  Yanni gave up. Shrugged, and glanced at Reacher. Reacher checked his watch. Time ticking away. He stepped up close.

  “You got medical insurance?” he asked.

  The guy nodded.

  “Dental plan?”

  The guy nodded again.

  Reacher hit him in the mouth. Right-handed, short swing, hard blow.

  “Get that fixed,” he said.

  The guy rocked back a step and doubled over and then came up coughing with blood all over his chin. Cut lips, loose teeth all rimed with red.

  “Names,
” Reacher said. “Now. Or I’ll take you apart a piece at a time.”

  The guy hesitated. Mistake. Reacher hit him again. Then the guy came up with names, six of them, and descriptions, and an address, all from a position flat on the floor and all in a voice thick and bubbly with mouthfuls of blood.

  Reacher glanced at Yanni.

  “They all answer,” he said.

  In the dark in the Mustang on the way back, Ann Yanni said, “He’ll call and warn them.”

  “He won’t,” Reacher said. “He just betrayed them. So my guess is he’ll be going on a long vacation tomorrow.”

  “You hope.”

  “Doesn’t matter anyway. They already know I’m coming for them. Another warning wouldn’t make a difference.”

  “You have a very direct style. One they don’t mention in Journalism 101.”

  “I could teach you. It’s about surprise, really. If you can surprise them you don’t have to hit them very hard.”

  Yanni dictated to Franklin the names that John Mistrov had given up. Four of them corresponded with names Reacher had already heard: Charlie Smith, Konstantin Raskin, Vladimir Shumilov, and Pavel Sokolov. The fifth was Grigor Linsky, which Reacher figured had to be the damaged man in the boxy suit, because the sixth name had been given simply as Zec Chelovek.

  “I thought you said zec was a word,” Franklin said.

  “It is,” Reacher said. “And so is Chelovek. It’s a transliteration of their word for human being. Zec Chelovek means prisoner–human being. Like Prisoner Man.”

  “The others aren’t using code names.”

  “Neither is the Zec, probably. Maybe that’s all he’s got left. Maybe he forgot his real name. Maybe we all would, in the Gulag.”

  “You sound sorry for him,” Yanni said.

  “I’m not sorry for him,” Reacher said. “I’m just trying to understand him.”

  “No mention of my father,” Helen said.

  Reacher nodded. “The Zec is the puppet master. He’s at the top of the tree.”

  “Which means my father is just an employee.”

  “Don’t worry about that now. Focus on Rosemary.”

  Franklin used an online map and figured out that the address John Mistrov had spilled related to a stone-crushing plant built next to a quarry eight miles north and west of the city. Then he searched the tax rolls and confirmed that Specialized Services of Indiana was its registered owner. Then he searched the rolls all over again and found that the only other real estate registered to the trust was a house on the lot adjacent to the stone-crushing plant. Yanni said she knew the area.

  “Anything else out there?” Reacher asked her.

  She shook her head. “Nothing but farmland for miles.”

  “OK,” Reacher said. “There you go. That’s where Rosemary is.”

  He checked his watch. Ten o’clock in the evening.

  “So what now?” Yanni said.

  “Now we wait,” Reacher said.

  “For what?”

  “For Cash to get here from Kentucky. And then we wait some more.”

  “For what?”

  Reacher smiled.

  “For the dead of night,” he said.

  ______

  Franklin made coffee. Yanni told TV stories, about people she had known, about things she had seen, about governors’ girlfriends, politicians’ wives’ lovers, rigged ballots, crooked unions, about acres of marijuana growing behind circular screens of tall corn on the edges of Indiana fields. Then Franklin talked about his years as a cop. Then Reacher talked about his years since the army, the wandering, the exploring, his rootless invisible life.

  Helen Rodin said nothing at all.

  At eleven o’clock exactly they heard the rattle of a big diesel engine beating off the brick outside. Reacher stepped to the window and saw Cash’s Humvee nosing onto the parking apron. Too noisy, he thought. We can’t use it.

  Or maybe we can.

  “The Marines are here,” he said.

  They heard Cash’s feet on the outside stairs. Heard his knock on the door. Reacher went out to the hallway to open up. Cash came in, brisk, solid, reassuring. He was dressed all in black. Black canvas pants, black canvas windbreaker. Reacher introduced him all around. Yanni, Franklin, Helen Rodin. Everyone shook hands and Cash took a seat. Inside twenty minutes he was up to speed and totally on board.

  “Do we have a plan?” he asked.

  “We’re about to make one,” Reacher said. Yanni went out to her car for the maps. Franklin cleared away the coffee cups and made space on the table. Yanni chose the right map. Spread it out flat.

  “It’s like a giant chessboard out there,” she said. “Every square is a field a hundred yards across. There are roads laid out in a grid, north to south, west to east, about twenty fields apart.” Then she pointed. Slim finger, painted nail. “But right here we’ve got two roads that meet, and southeast of the corner they make we’ve got an empty space three fields wide and five fields high. No agriculture there. The northern part is the stone-crushing plant and the house is south of it. I’ve seen it and it stands about two hundred yards off the road, all alone in the middle of absolutely nothing. No landscaping, no vegetation. But no fence, either.”

  “Flat?” Reacher asked.

  “As a pool table,” Yanni said.

  “Dark out there,” Cash said.

  “As the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat,” Reacher said. “And I guess if there’s no fence it means they’re using cameras. With some kind of thermal imaging at night. Some kind of infrared.”

  “How fast can you run two hundred yards?” Cash asked.

  “Me?” Reacher said. “Slow enough they could mail-order a rifle to shoot me with.”

  “What’s the best approach?”

  “Walk in from the north,” Reacher said. “Without a doubt. We could get into the stone place straight off the road and just hike through it. Then we could lie up as long as we wanted. Good concealment until the last minute.”

  “Can’t walk in from anywhere if they’ve got thermal cameras.”

  “We’ll worry about that later.”

  “OK, but they’ll anticipate the north.”

  Reacher nodded. “We’ll pass on the north. Too obvious.”

  “South or east would be next best. Because presumably the driveway comes in from the west. Probably too straight and too open.”

  “They’ll be thinking the same thing.”

  “Makes us both right.”

  “I kind of like the driveway,” Reacher said. “What will it be? Paved?”

  “Crushed limestone,” Yanni said. “They’ve got plenty to spare.”

  “Noisy,” Cash said.

  “It’ll have retained a little daytime heat,” Reacher said. “It’ll be warmer than the dirt. It’ll put a stripe of color down their thermal picture. If the contrast isn’t great it’ll give a shadow zone either side.”

  “Are you kidding?” Cash said. “You’re going to be forty or fifty degrees hotter than ambient temperature. You’re going to show up like a road flare.”

  “They’re going to be paying attention south and east.”

  “Not exclusively.”

  “You got a better idea?”

  “What about a full frontal assault? With vehicles?”

  Reacher smiled. “If it absolutely positively has to be destroyed by morning, call the United States Marine Corps.”

  “Roger that,” Cash said.

  “Too dangerous,” Reacher said. “We can’t give them a second’s warning and we can’t turn the place into a free-fire zone. We’ve got Rosemary to think about.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “I like the driveway,” Reacher said again.

  Cash glanced at Helen Rodin.

  “We could just call in the cops,” he said. “You know, if it’s the DA who’s the bad guy here. A couple of SWAT teams could do it.”

  “Same problem,” Reacher said. “Rosemary would be dead before they got near the door.”<
br />
  “Cut the power lines? Kill the cameras?”

  “Same problem. It’s an announcement ahead of time.”

  “Your call.”

  “The driveway,” Reacher said. “I like the driveway.”

  “But what about the cameras?”

  “I’ll think of something,” Reacher said. He stepped over to the table. Stared down at the map. Then he turned back to Cash. “Does your truck have a CD player?”

  Cash nodded. “Part of the comfort package.”

  “Do you mind if Franklin drives it?”

  “Franklin can have it. I’d prefer a sedan.”

  “OK, your Humvee is our approach vehicle. Franklin can drive us there, let us out, and then get straight back here.”

  “Us?” Yanni said. “Are we all going?”

  “You bet your ass,” Reacher said. “Four of us there, with Franklin back here as the comms center.”

  “Good,” Yanni said.

  “We need cell phones,” Reacher said.

  “I’ve got one,” Yanni said.

  “Me too,” Cash said.

  “Me too,” Helen said.

  “I don’t,” Reacher said.

  Franklin took a small Nokia out of his pocket.

  “Take mine,” he said.

  Reacher took it. “Can you set up a conference call? Four cell phones and your desk phone? As soon as you get back here?”

  Franklin nodded. “Give me your numbers.”

  “And turn the ringers off,” Reacher said.

  “When are we doing this?” Cash asked.

  “Four o’clock in the morning is my favorite time,” Reacher said. “But they’ll be expecting that. We learned it from them. Four in the morning is when the KGB went knocking on doors. Least resistance. It’s a biorhythm thing. So we’ll surprise them. We’ll do it at two-thirty.”

  “If you surprise them you don’t have to hit them very hard?” Yanni said.

  Reacher shook his head. “In this situation if we surprise them they won’t hit me very hard.”

  “Where am I going to be?” Cash asked.

  “Southwest corner of the gravel plant,” Reacher said. “Looking south and east at the house. You can cover the west and the north sides simultaneously. With your rifle.”