They saw nothing.
There was no cell coverage.
“Higher,” Reacher said.
“Can’t do it,” the pilot said. “Look at the dial.”
Reacher found the fuel gauge. The needle was riding the end stop. Officially the tanks were empty. He closed his eyes again and pictured the map. Berenson had said Dean had complained about the commute from hell. To Highland Park he had only two choices. Either Route 138 on the east flank of Mount San Antonio, or Route 2, to the west, past the Mount Wilson Observatory. Route 2 was probably smaller and twistier. And it joined the 210 at Glendale. Which probably made it more hellish than the eastern approach. No reason to choose it unless it was a total no-brainer. Which meant Dean was starting from somewhere due south of Palmdale, not east of south. Reacher looked straight ahead and waited until the distant grid of lights slid back into view.
“Now pull a one-eighty and head back,” he said.
“We’re out of fuel.”
“Just do it.”
The craft turned in its own length. Dipped its nose and clattered onward.
Sixty seconds later they found Neagley.
A mile in front and four hundred feet down they saw a cone of blue light turning and pulsing like a beacon. It looked like Neagley had the Civic on maximum lock and was driving a thirty-foot circle and flashing between dipped and brights as she went. The effect was spectacular. The beams swept and leapt and threw moving shadows and cleared a couple of hundred feet where there were no obstructions. Like a lighthouse on a rocky shore. There were small buttes and mesas and gullies, thrown into dramatic relief. To the north, low buildings. Power lines to the east. To the west the fractured land fell away into a shallow arroyo maybe forty feet wide and twenty deep.
“Land there,” Reacher said. “In the ditch. And keep the wheels up.”
The pilot said, “Why?”
“Because that’s the way I want it.”
The pilot drifted west a little and dropped a couple of hundred feet and turned to line up with the arroyo. Then he took the Bell down like an elevator. A siren went off to warn that he was landing with the undercarriage up. He ignored it and kept on going. He slowed twenty feet off the ground and eased on down and pancaked gently on the arroyo’s rocky bed. Stones crunched and metal grated and the floor tipped a foot from horizontal. Out the windows Reacher could see Neagley’s lights coming toward them through a sandstorm kicked up by the rotor wash.
Then the fuel ran out.
The engines died and the rotor shuddered to a stop.
The cabin went quiet.
Reacher was first out the door. He batted his way through clouds of warm dust and sent Dixon and O’Donnell ahead to meet with Neagley and then turned back to the Bell. He opened the cockpit door and looked in at the pilot. The guy was still strapped to his seat. He was flicking the face of the fuel gauge with his fingernail.
“Nice landing,” Reacher said. “You’re a good pilot.”
The guy said, “Thanks.”
“That thing with the rotation,” Reacher said. “The way it kept the door open up there. Smart move.”
“Basic aerodynamics.”
“But then, you had plenty of practice.”
The pilot said nothing.
“Four times,” Reacher said. “That I know about, at least.”
The pilot said nothing.
“Those men were my friends,” Reacher said.
“Lamaison told me I had to do it.”
“Or?”
“I would lose my job.”
“That’s all? You let them throw four live human beings out of your helicopter to save your job?”
“I’m paid to follow instructions.”
“You ever heard about a trial at Nuremberg? That excuse really doesn’t cut it anymore.”
The pilot said, “It was wrong, I know.”
“But you did it anyway.”
“What choice did I have?”
“Lots of choices,” Reacher said. Then he smiled. The pilot relaxed a little. Reacher shook his head like he was bemused by it all and leaned in and patted the guy on the cheek. Left his hand there, far side of the guy’s face, a friendly gesture. He worked his thumb up toward the guy’s eye socket, pressed his index finger on the guy’s temple, worked his other three fingers behind the guy’s ear, into his hair. Then he broke the guy’s neck, one-handed, with a single convulsive twist. Then he bounced the guy’s head around, front to back, side to side, to make sure the spinal cord was properly severed. He didn’t want the guy to wake up a paraplegic. He didn’t want the guy to wake up at all.
He walked away and left him there, still strapped in his seat. Turned back after fifty feet and checked. A helicopter in a ditch, slightly tilted, wheels up, tanks empty. A crash. The pilot still on board, impact injuries, an unfortunate accident. Not perfect, but reasonable.
Neagley had parked a hundred feet from the arroyo, which was about half the distance to Edward Dean’s front door. Her lights were still on bright. When Reacher got to the car he turned and looked back and checked again. The Bell was hidden pretty well. The crown of the rotor was visible, but only just. The blades themselves drooped out of sight under their own weight. The dust was settling. Neagley and Dixon and O’Donnell were standing together in a tight group of three.
“We OK?” Reacher asked.
Dixon and O’Donnell nodded. Neagley didn’t.
“You mad with me?” Reacher asked her.
“Not really,” she said. “I would have been if you’d screwed up.”
“I needed you to work out where the missiles were headed.”
“You already knew.”
“I wanted a second opinion. And the address.”
“Well, here we are. No missiles.”
“They’re still in transit.”
“We hope.”
“Let’s go see Mr. Dean.”
They piled into the tiny Civic and Neagley drove the hundred feet to Dean’s door. Dean opened up on the first knock. Clearly he had been rousted by the helicopter drone and the flashing lights. He didn’t look much like a rocket scientist. More like a coach at a third-rate high school. He was tall and loose-limbed and had a shock of sandy hair. He was maybe forty years old. He was barefoot and dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt. Night attire. It was close to midnight.
“Who are you people?” he asked.
Reacher explained who they were, and why they were there.
Dean had no idea what he was talking about.
84
Reacher had been expecting some kind of a denial. Lamaison had warned Berenson to stay quiet, and clearly he would have done the same or more with Dean. But Dean’s denial seemed genuine. The guy was puzzled, not evasive.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” Reacher said. “We know what you did with the electronics packs, and we know why you had to do it.”
Suddenly there was something in Dean’s face. Just like with Margaret Berenson.
Reacher said, “We know about the threat against your daughter.”
“What threat?”
“Where is she?”
“Away. Her mother, too.”
“School’s not out.”
“An urgent family matter.”
Reacher nodded. “You sent them away. That was smart. “
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Reacher said, “Lamaison is dead.”
There was a flash of hope in Dean’s eyes, just for a split second, hard to see in the darkness.
“I threw him out of the helicopter,” Reacher said.
Dean said nothing.
“You like bird watching? Wait a day and drive a mile or two south and get up on the roof of your car. Two buzzards circling, it’s probably a snake-bit coyote. More than two, it’s Lamaison. Or Parker, or Lennox. They’re all out there somewhere.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Reacher said, “Show him, Karla.”
Dixon pulle
d out the wallet she had taken from Lamaison’s pocket. Dean took it from her and turned to the light burning in his hallway. He spilled the contents into his palm and shuffled through them. Lamaison’s driver’s license, his credit cards, a New Age photo ID, his Social Security card.
“Lamaison is dead,” Reacher said again.
Dean put the stuff back in the wallet and handed it back to Dixon.
“You got his wallet,” he said. “Doesn’t prove you got him.”
“I can show you the pilot,” Reacher said. “He’s dead, too.”
“He just landed.”
“I just killed him.”
“You’re crazy.”
“And you’re off the hook.”
Dean said nothing.
“Take your time,” Reacher said. “Get used to it. But we need to know who’s coming, and when.”
“Nobody’s coming.”
“Someone has to be.”
“That was never the deal.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“Tell me again,” Dean said. “Lamaison’s dead?”
“He killed four of my friends,” Reacher said. “If he wasn’t dead, I sure as hell wouldn’t be standing here wasting time with you.”
Dean nodded, slowly. He was getting used to it.
“But I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “OK, I signed off on phony paperwork, I admit that, six hundred and fifty times, which is terrible, but that was all I did. There was never anything about me assembling units or showing anyone else how to do it.”
“Who else knows how?”
“It’s not difficult. It’s plug and play. It’s simple. It has to be. Soldiers are going to do it. No offense. I mean, in the field, at night, under stress.”
“Simple for you.”
“Relatively simple for anyone.”
“Soldiers never do anything until they’re shown how.”
“Sure, they’ll have training.”
“From who?”
“We’ll set up a course at Fort Irwin. I guess I’ll teach the first class.”
“Lamaison knew that?”
“It’s standard practice.”
“So he pimped you out for a preview.”
Dean just shook his head. “He didn’t. He didn’t say anything about a preview. And he could have. It wasn’t like I was in a position to refuse him anything.”
“Nine hours,” Neagley said.
“Another hundred and thirty thousand square miles,” Dixon said.
A hundred thirty-three thousand five hundred thirty-five, Reacher thought, automatically. The increase alone was as big as most of California and more than half of Texas. The area of a circle was equal to pi times the radius squared, and it was the squared part that made it increase so fast.
“They’re coming here,” he said. “They have to be.”
Nobody answered.
Dean led them inside. His house was a long low shack built from concrete and timber. The concrete had been left raw and was fading to a yellowed patina. The timber was stained dark brown. There was a big living room with Navajo rugs and worn furniture and a fireplace heaped with last winter’s ash. There were plenty of books in the room. CDs were piled everywhere. There was a stereo with vacuum tube amplifiers and horn speakers. Altogether the place looked exactly like a city refugee’s dream.
Dean went to make coffee in the kitchen and Dixon said, “Nine hours twenty-six minutes.” Neagley and O’Donnell didn’t get the point, but Reacher did. Assuming three decimal places for pi and a speed of fifty for the truck, then nine hours and twenty-six minutes made the potential search area exactly seven hundred thousand square miles.
“Mahmoud is cautious,” Reacher said. “He’s not going to buy a pig in a poke. Either it’s his money and he doesn’t want to waste it, or it’s someone else’s money and he doesn’t want to get his head cut off for screwing up. He’s coming.”
“Dean says not.”
“Dean says he wasn’t told in advance. There’s a difference.”
Dean came back and served the coffee and nobody spoke for a quarter of an hour. Then Reacher turned to Dean and asked, “Did you do your own electrical work here?”
Dean said, “Some of it.”
“Got any plastic cable ties?”
“Lots of them. Workshop out back.”
“You should drive north,” Reacher said. “Head for Palmdale, get some breakfast.”
“Now?”
“Now. Stay for lunch. Don’t come back until the afternoon.”
“Why? What’s going to happen here?”
“I’m not sure yet. But whatever, you shouldn’t be around.”
Dean sat still for a moment. Then he got up and found his keys and left. They heard his car start up. Heard the crunch of power steering on gravel. Then the noise faded to nothing and the house went quiet again.
Dixon said, “Nine hours forty-six minutes.” Reacher nodded. The circle was now three-quarters of a million square miles in size.
“He’s coming,” Reacher said.
The circle reached a million square miles at seventeen minutes past one in the morning. Reacher found an atlas in a bookcase and traced a likely route and worked out that Denver was eighteen hours away, which made six in the morning a likely rendezvous time. Ideal, from Mahmoud’s point of view. Lamaison would have told him about the threat against the daughter, and he would figure under any circumstances the kid would be home at six in the morning. And therefore a perfect reminder of Dean’s vulnerability. Maybe Mahmoud was dropping by unannounced, but there was no doubt he expected to get what he wanted.
Reacher got up and went for a stroll, first outside, and then inside. The property consisted of the house and a garage block and the workshop that Dean had mentioned. Beyond that, there was nothing. It was pitch dark but Reacher could feel vast silent emptiness all around. Inside, the house was simple. Three bedrooms, a den, a kitchen, the living room. One of the bedrooms was the daughter’s. There were inkjet prints of photographs pinned up on a board. Groups of teenage girls, three or four at a time. The kid and her friends, presumably. By a process of elimination Reacher worked out which girl appeared in every picture. Dean’s daughter, he assumed. Her camera, her room. She was a tall blonde girl, maybe fourteen, still a little awkward, braces on her teeth. But a year or two into the future she was going to be spectacular, and she was going to stay that way for thirty years. A hostage to fortune. Reacher understood Dean’s distress, and wished Lamaison had screamed a little more on the way down.
People say the darkest hour is just before dawn, but people are wrong. By definition the darkest hour is in the middle of the night. By five in the morning the sky in the east was lightening. By five-thirty visibility was pretty good. Reacher took another walk. Dean had no neighbors. He was living in the middle of thousands of empty acres. The view was clear to every horizon. Worthless, sunblasted land. The power lines ran south to north and disappeared in the haze. A stony driveway came in from the southeast. It was at least a mile long, maybe more. Reacher walked a little ways down it and turned around and checked what Mahmoud would see when he arrived. The helicopter was out of sight. By chance a lone mesquite bush blocked the rotor crown from view. Reacher moved Neagley’s Civic behind the garage block and checked again. Perfect. A somnolent group of three buildings, low and dusty, almost part of the landscape. A hundred yards out he saw a flat broken fragment of rock the size and shape of a coffin. He walked over there and took Tony Swan’s lump of concrete out of his pocket and rested it on the slab, like a monument. He walked back and ducked into the workshop. The door was unlocked. The place was laid out neatly and smelled of machine oil heated by the sun. He found a tray of black plastic cable ties and took eight of the biggest. They were about two feet long, thick and stiff. For strapping heavy cable into perforated conduit boxes.
Then he went back inside the house to wait.
Six o’clock arrived, and Mahmoud didn’t. Now the circle measured mo
re than two and a half million square miles. Six-fifteen came and went, two-point-six million square miles. Six-thirty, two-point-seven million.
Then, at exactly six thirty-two, the telephone bell dinged, just once, brief and soft and muted.
“Here we go,” Reacher said. “Someone just cut the phone line.”
They moved to the windows. They waited. Then five miles south and east they saw a tiny white dot winking in the early sun. A vehicle, closing fast, trailing a cloud of khaki dust that was backlit by the dawn like a halo.
85
They moved away from the windows and waited in the living room, tense and silent. Five minutes later they heard the crunch of stones under tires and the wet muffled beat of a worn Detroit V-8. The crunching stopped and the engine died and they heard a parking brake ratchet on. A minute after that they heard a tinny door slam and the sound of random footsteps on gravel. The driver, stumbling around, yawning and stretching.
A minute after that, they heard a knock at the door.
Reacher waited.
The knock came again.
Reacher counted to twenty and walked down the hall. Opened the door. Saw a man standing on the step, framed against the light, with a mid-sized panel truck parked behind him. The truck was a rented U-Haul, white and red, top-heavy, a little ungainly. Reacher felt like he had seen it before. He had never seen the man before. He was medium height, medium weight, expensively dressed but a little rumpled. He was maybe forty years old. He had thick black hair, shiny, beautifully cut, and the kind of mid-brown skin and regular features that could have made him Indian, or Pakistani, or Iranian, or Syrian, or Lebanese, or Algerian, or even Israeli or Italian.
In turn Azhari Mahmoud saw a disheveled giant of a white man. Two meters tall, easily, a hundred and ten kilos, maybe a hundred and twenty, shaved head, wrists as wide and hard as two-by-fours, hands like shovels, dressed in dusty gray denims and work boots. A crazy scientist, he thought. Right at home in a desert shack.
“Edward Dean?” he said.
“Yes,” Reacher said. “Who are you?”
“No cell coverage here, I notice.”
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