TWENTY-ONE
REACHER RAN THIRTY YARDS ACROSS THE WINTER DIRT AND stopped. Inside the truck the driver was twisted around in his seat, staring back at him, pawing and fumbling blindly at the wheel and the gearshift. The truck backed up, straining, still locked in low-range, the engine revving fast and the ground speed grinding slow. Reacher had no idea how long it would take for a hard-worked engine with no oil in it to seize up and die.
Not long, he hoped.
He danced sideways, left, and left, and left, and the truck tracked him all the way, coming on slow, the crushed bumper plastered across the front like an ugly afterthought, the axles locked up for maximum traction, the tyres squirming and hopping and grinding out new ruts all their own. The driver hit the gas and jerked the wheel to his left, aiming to decode Reacher’s decoy dance and hit him after the inevitable sudden change of direction at its end, but Reacher double-bluffed him and jumped to his own left, and the truck missed him by ten whole feet.
The truck stopped dead and Reacher saw the guy tugging on levers and heard the transmission change back to normal-speed road duty. The truck made a big forty-foot loop out on the dirt and headed back in. Reacher stood still and watched it and sidestepped right, and right, and right, and then he triple-bluffed and jumped right again while the truck slammed left and missed him again. The truck ended up with its battered nose deep in the thicket. All kinds of unpleasant noises were coming out of it. Deep banging sounds, like tuneless church bells. Bearings, Reacher thought. The big ends. He knew some terminology. He had heard car guys talking, on military bases. He saw the driver glance down in alarm, as if red warning lights were blazing on the dash. There was steam in the air. And blue smoke.
The truck backed up, one more time.
Then it died.
It swung through a short backward arc and stopped, ready for a change of gear, which happened, but it didn’t move on again. It just bounced forward a foot against the slack in its suspension and seized up solid. The engine noise shut off and Reacher heard wheezing and hissing and ticking and saw steam jetting out and a final fine black spray from underneath, like a cough, like a death rattle.
The driver stayed where he was, in his seat, behind locked doors.
Reacher looked again for a rock, and couldn’t find one.
Impasse.
But not for long.
Reacher saw them first. He had a better vantage point. Flames, coming out of the seams between the hood and the fenders, low down at the front of the vehicle. The flames were small and colourless at first, boiling the air above them, spreading fast, blistering the paint around them. Then they got bigger and turned blue and yellow and started spilling black smoke from their edges. The hood was a big square pressing and within a minute all four seams surrounding it were alive with flame and the paint all over it was cooking and bubbling and splitting from the heat underneath.
The driver just sat there.
Reacher ran over and tried his door. Still locked. He banged on the window glass, dull padded thumps from his fist, and he pointed urgently at the hood. But it was impossible that the guy didn’t already know he was on fire. His wiper blades were alight. Black smoke was rolling off them and swirling up the windshield in coils. The guy was looking right at them, then looking at Reacher, back and forth, panic in his eyes.
He was as worried about Reacher as he was about the fire.
So Reacher backed off ten feet and the door opened up and the guy jumped out, a big slabby white boy, very young, maybe six-six, close to three hundred pounds. He ran five feet and stopped dead. His hands bunched into fists. Behind him the flames started shooting out of the wheel wells at the front of the truck, starting downward, curling back up around the sheet metal, burning hard. The front tyres were smoking. The guy just stood there, rooted. So Reacher ran in again, and the guy swung at him, and missed. Reacher ducked under the blow and popped the guy in the gut and then grabbed him by the collar. The guy went straight down in a crouch and cradled his head, defensively. Reacher pulled him back to his feet and hauled him away across the field, fast, thirty feet, forty, then fifty. He stopped and the guy swung again and missed again. Reacher feinted with a left jab and threw in a huge right hook that caught the guy on the ear. The guy wobbled for a second and then went down on his butt. Just sat there, blinking, in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere. Twenty yards away the truck was burning fiercely, all the way back to the windshield pillars. The front tyres were alight and the hood was buckled.
Reacher asked, ‘How much gas is in the tank?’
The guy said, ‘Don’t hit me again.’
‘Answer my question.’
‘I filled it this morning.’
So Reacher grabbed him again and pulled him up and hauled him further away, another thirty feet, then ten more. The guy stumbled all the way and eventually resisted and said, ‘Please don’t hit me again.’
‘Why shouldn’t I? You just tried to kill me with a truck.’
‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘You’re sorry about that?’
‘I had to do it.’
‘Just following orders?’
‘I’m surrendering, OK? I’m out of the fight now. Like a POW.’
‘You’re bigger than me. And younger.’
‘But you’re a crazy man.’
‘Says who?’
‘We were told. About last night. You put three of us in the hospital.’
Reacher asked, ‘What’s your name?’
The guy said, ‘Brett.’
‘What is this, the Twilight Zone? You’ve all got the same name?’
‘Only three of us.’
‘Out of ten, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thirty per cent. What are the odds?’
The guy didn’t answer.
Reacher asked, ‘Who’s in charge here?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Who told you to come out this morning and kill me with a truck?’
‘Jacob Duncan.’
‘Seth Duncan’s father?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know where he lives?’
The guy nodded and pointed into the distance, south and east, beyond the burning vehicle. The flames had moved inside it. The glass had shattered and the seats were on fire. There was a column of black smoke in the air, thick and dirty. It was going straight up and then hitting a low atmospheric layer and spreading sideways. Like a miniature mushroom cloud.
Then the gas tank exploded.
An orange fireball kicked the rear of the truck clear off the ground and a split second later a dull boom rolled across the dirt on a pressure wave hard enough to make Reacher stagger a step and hot enough to make him flinch away. Flames leapt fifty feet in the air and died instantly and the truck crashed back to earth, now all black and skeletal inside a hot new fire that roiled the air a hundred feet above it.
Reacher watched for a second. Then he said, ‘OK, Brett, this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to jog over to Jacob Duncan’s place, and you’re going to tell him three things. You listening to me?’
The big guy looked away from the fire and said, ‘Yes.’
‘OK, first, if Duncan wants to, he can send his six remaining boys after me, and each one will delay me a couple of minutes, but then I’ll come right over and kick his ass. Got that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Second, if he prefers, he can skip getting the six boys hurt, and he can come out and meet with me face to face, right away. Got that?’
‘Yes.’
‘And third, if I see those two out-of-towners again, they’ll be going home in a bucket. Is that clear? Got all that?’
‘Yes.’
‘You got a cell phone?’
‘Yes,’ the guy said.
‘Give it to me.’
The guy dug in a pocket and came back with a phone, black and tiny in his giant red paw. He handed it over and Reacher pulled it apart. He had seen cel
l phones dropped on sidewalks, and he knew what was in there. A battery, and a SIM card. He pulled off the cover and clipped out the battery and tossed it twenty feet in one direction, and he took out the SIM card and threw the rest of the phone twenty feet in the other direction. He balanced the SIM card on his palm and held it out, a tiny silicon wafer with gold tracks on it.
‘Eat it,’ he said.
The guy said, ‘What?’
‘Eat it. That’s your forfeit. For being a useless tub of lard.’
The guy paused a second and then he took it, delicately, finger and thumb, and he opened his mouth and placed it on his tongue. He closed his mouth and worked up some saliva and swallowed.
‘Show me,’ Reacher said.
The guy opened his mouth again and stuck out his tongue. Like a kid at the clinic. The card was gone.
‘Now sit down,’ Reacher said.
‘What?’
‘Like you were before.’
‘I thought you wanted me to head for the Duncans’ place.’
‘I do,’ Reacher said. ‘But not yet. Not while I’m still in the neighbourhood.’
The guy sat down, a little worried, facing south, his legs straight out and his hands on his knees and his upper body curled forward a little.
‘Arms behind you,’ Reacher said. ‘Lean back on your hands.’
‘Why?’
Enemy ordnance.
‘Just do it,’ Reacher said.
The guy got his arms behind him and put his weight on his hands. Reacher stepped behind him and crashed the sole of his boot through the guy’s right elbow. The guy went down flat and shrieked and rolled and whimpered. Then he sat up again and cradled his broken arm and stared at Reacher accusingly. Reacher stepped around behind him again and kicked him hard in the back of the head. The guy toppled slowly, forward at first, and then he twisted sideways as his gut got in the way of further progress. He sprawled out and landed softly on one shoulder and lay still, like a large letter L on a dirty brown page. Reacher turned away and slogged on north, towards the two wooden buildings on the horizon.
TWENTY-TWO
THE CANADIAN SEMI TRUCK WITH THE DUNCANS’ SHIPMENT aboard was making good time, heading due east on Route 3 in British Columbia, driving mostly parallel to the die-straight international border, with Alberta up ahead. Route 3 was a lonely road, mountainous, with steep grades and tight turns. Not ideal for a large vehicle. Most drivers took Route 1, which looped north out of Vancouver before turning east later. A better road, all things considered. Route 3 was quiet by comparison. It had long stretches of nothing but asphalt ribbon and wild scenery. And very little traffic. And occasional gravel turnouts, for rest and recuperation.
One of the gravel turn-outs was located a mile or so before the Waterton Lakes National Park. In U.S. terms it was directly above the Washington–Idaho state line, about halfway between Spokane and Coeur d’Alene, about a hundred miles north of both. The turn-out had an amazing view. Endless forest to the south, the snowy bulk of the Rockies to the east, magnificent lakes to the north. The truck driver pulled off and parked there, but not for the view. He parked there because it was a prearranged location, and because a white panel van was waiting there for him. The Duncans had been in business a long time, because of luck and caution, and one of their cautionary principles was to transfer their cargo between vehicles as soon as possible after import. Shipping containers could be tracked. Indeed they were designed to be tracked, by the BIC code. Better not to risk a delayed alert from a suspicious Customs agent. Better to move the goods within hours, into something anonymous and forgettable and untraceable, and white panel vans were the most anonymous and forgettable and untraceable vehicles on earth.
The semi truck parked and the panel van K-turned on the gravel and backed up to it and stopped rear to rear with it. Both drivers got out. They didn’t speak. They just stepped out into the roadway and craned their necks and checked what was coming, one east, one west. Nothing was coming, which was not unusual for Route 3, so they jogged back to their vehicles and got to work. The van driver opened his rear doors, and the truck driver climbed up on his flatbed and cut the plastic security seal and smacked the bolts and levers out of their brackets and opened the container’s doors.
One minute later the cargo was transferred, all 1,260 pounds of it, and another minute after that the white van had K-turned again and was heading east, and the semi truck was trailing behind it for a spell, its driver intending to turn north on 95 and then loop back west on Route 1, a better road, back to Vancouver for his next job, which was likely to be legitimate, and therefore better for his blood pressure but worse for his wallet.
In Las Vegas the Lebanese man named Safir selected his two best guys and dispatched them to babysit the Italian man named Rossi. An unwise decision, as it turned out. Its unwisdom was made clear within the hour. Safir’s phone rang and he answered it, and found himself talking to an Iranian man named Mahmeini. Mahmeini was Safir’s customer, but there was no transactional equality in their business relationship. Mahmeini was Safir’s customer in the same way a king might have been a boot maker’s customer. Much more powerful, imperious, superior, dismissive, and likely to be lethally angry if the boots were defective.
Or late.
Mahmeini said, ‘I should have received my items a week ago.’
Safir couldn’t speak. His mouth was dry.
Mahmeini said, ‘Please look at it from my point of view. Those items are already allocated, to certain people in certain places, for certain date-specific uses. If they are not delivered in time, I’ll take a loss.’
‘I’ll make good,’ Safir said.
‘I know you will. That’s the purpose of my call. We have much to discuss. Because my loss won’t be a one-time thing. It will be ongoing. My reputation will be ruined. Why would my contacts trust me again? I’ll lose their business for ever. Which means you’ll have to compensate me for ever. In effect I will own you for the rest of your life. Do you see my point?’
All Safir could say was, ‘I believe the shipment is actually on its way, as of right now.’
‘A week late.’
‘I’m suffering too. And I’m trying to do something about it. I made my contact send two of his men up there. And then I sent two of my men over to him, to make sure he concentrates.’
‘Men?’ Mahmeini said. ‘You employ men? Or boys?’
‘They’re good people.’
‘You’re about to find out what men are. I’m sending two of mine. To you. To make sure you concentrate.’
Then the phone went dead, and Safir was left sitting there, awaiting the arrival of two Iranian tough guys in an office that had, just an hour ago, been stripped of the better half of its security.
Reacher made it to the two wooden buildings without further trouble, which was no big surprise to him. Six remaining football players and two out-of-towners made a total of just eight warm bodies, and he guessed the out-of-towners would be riding together, which made a total of just seven roving vehicles loose in a county that must have covered many hundreds of square miles. One random encounter had been fortuitous in the extreme. Two would be incalculably unlikely.
The old barn was still locked and listing, and the pick-up truck was still hidden in the smaller shelter. Undiscovered and undisturbed, as far as Reacher could tell. It was cold and inert. The air in the shelter was dry, and it smelled of dust and mouse droppings. The countryside all around was empty and silent.
Reacher opened up the tool locker in the pick-up’s load bed and took a look at the contents. The biggest thing left in there was an adjustable wrench about a foot long. Some kind of polished steel alloy. It weighed about a pound and a half. Made in the U.S.A. Not the greatest weapon in the world, but better than nothing. Reacher put it in his coat pocket and rooted around for more. He came up with two screwdrivers, one a stubby Phillips cross-head design with a rubber handle, and one a long slender thing with a regular blade for a regular slotted screw. He
put them in his other pocket and closed the locker and climbed in the cab. He started up and backed out and then he followed the deep tractor ruts all the way east to the road, where he turned north and headed for the motel.
Safir’s two tough guys arrived in Rossi’s office carrying guns in shoulder holsters and black nylon bags in their hands. They unpacked the bags on Rossi’s desk, right in front of him. The first bag carried just one item, and the second bag carried two items. From the first bag came a belt sander, already loaded with a fresh loop of coarse-grain abrasive. From the second bag came a propane blowtorch and a roll of duct tape.
Tools of the trade.
And therefore an unmistakable message, to a guy in Rossi’s world. In Rossi’s world victims were taped naked to chairs, and belt sanders were fired up and applied to tender areas like knees or elbows or chests. Or faces, even. Then blowtorches were sparked to life for a little extra fun.
Nobody spoke.
Rossi dialled his phone. Three rings, and Roberto Cassano answered, in Nebraska. Rossi said, ‘What the hell is happening up there? This thing really can’t wait.’
Cassano said, ‘We’re chasing shadows.’
‘Chase them harder.’
‘What’s the point? Who knows whether this guy has anything to do with anything? You told us you figure he’s an excuse. So whatever happens to him isn’t going to make the shipment show up any faster.’
‘Have you ever told a lie?’
‘Not to you, boss.’
‘To anyone else?’
‘Sure.’
‘Then you know how it goes. You arrange things to make sure you don’t get caught out. And I think that’s what those Duncan bastards are going to do. They’re going to hold the shipment somewhere until the guy gets caught. To make it look like they were telling the truth all along. Like cause and effect. So whether we want to or not, we’re going to have to play their game their way. So find this asshole, will you? And fast. This thing can’t wait.’
Rossi clicked off the call. One of the Lebanese guys had been unrolling the belt sander’s cord. Now he bent down and plugged it in. He flicked the switch, just a blip, just a second, and the machine started and whirred and stopped.
Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16] Page 569
