Therefore the pipes of various diameters were for water and the sewer and heating. The green metal boxes with the mineral stains were the furnace and the water heater. There was an electrical panel, presumably full of circuit breakers. The stairs came down and the door at the top would open outward into the hallway. Not inward. No one let doors open inward at the top of a staircase. Careless residents would go tumbling down like a slapstick movie. And tornadoes could blow at three hundred miles an hour. Better that a shelter door be pressed more firmly shut, not blown wide open.
Reacher sat up. Evidently he had come to rest in the angle of wall and floor, with his head bent. His neck was a little sore, which he took to be a very good sign. It meant the pain from his nose was relegated to background noise. He raised his hand and checked. His nose was still very tender, and there were open cuts on it, and big pillowy swellings, but the chip of bone was back in the right place. Basically. Almost. More or less. Not pretty, presumably, but then, he hadn’t been pretty to start with. He spat in his palm and tried to wipe dried blood off his mouth and his chin.
Then he got to his feet. There was nothing stored in the basement. No crowded shelves, no piles of dusty boxes, no workbench, no peg boards full of tools. Reacher figured all that stuff was in the garage. It had to be somewhere. Every household had stuff like that. But the basement was a tornado shelter, pure and simple. Nothing else. Not even a rec room. There was no battered sofa, no last-generation TV, no old refrigerator, no pool table, no hidden bottles of bourbon. There was nothing down there at all, except the house’s essential mechanical systems. The furnace was running hard, and it was making noise. It was a little too loud to hear anything else over. So Reacher crept up the stairs and put his ear to the door. He heard voices, low and indistinct, first one and then another, in a fixed and regular rhythm. Call and response. A man and a woman. Seth Duncan, he thought, asking questions, and either Dorothy Coe or the doctor’s wife answering them, with short syllables and no sibilants. Negative answers. No real stress. No pain or panic. Just resignation. Either Dorothy Coe or the doctor’s wife was saying No, quite calmly and patiently and resolutely, over and over again, to each new question. And whichever one of them it was, she had an audience. Reacher could sense the low physical vibe of other people in the house, breathing, stirring, moving their feet. The doctor himself, he thought, and two of the football players.
Reacher tried the door handle, slowly and carefully. It turned, but the door didn’t open. It was locked, as expected. The door was a stout item, set tight and square in a wall that felt very firm and solid. Because of tornadoes, and laws and standards and requirements, and conscientious architects. He let go of the handle and crept back downstairs. For a moment he wondered if the laws and the standards and the requirements and the conscientious architects had mandated a second way in. Maybe a trapdoor, from the master bedroom. He figured such a thing would make a lot of sense. Storms moved fast, and a sleeping couple might not have time to get along the hallway to the stairs. So he walked the whole floor, looking up, his sore neck protesting, but he saw no trapdoors. No second way in, and therefore no second way out. Just solid unbroken floorboards, laid neatly over the strong multi-ply joists.
He came to rest in the middle of the space. He had a number of options, none of them guaranteed to succeed, some of them complete non-starters. He could turn off the hot water, but that would be a slow-motion provocation. Presumably no one was intending to take a shower in the next few hours. Equally he could turn off the heat, which would be more serious, given the season, but response time would still be slow, and he would be victimizing the innocent as well as the guilty. He could kill all the lights, at the electrical panel, one click of a circuit breaker, but there was at least one shotgun upstairs, and maybe flashlights too. He was on the wrong side of a locked door, unarmed, attacking from the low ground.
Not good.
Not good at all.
FORTY-FOUR
SETH DUNCAN HAD HIS RIGHT HAND FLAT ON THE DOCTOR’S DINING table, with a bag of peas from the freezer laid over it. The icy cold was numbing the pain, but not very effectively. He needed another shot of his uncle Jasper’s pig anaesthetic, and he was about to go get one, but before he attended to himself he was determined to attend to his plan, which was working pretty well at that point. So well, in fact, that he had permitted himself to think ahead to the endgame. His long experience in the county had taught him that reality was whatever people said it was. If no one ever mentioned an event, then it had never happened. If no one ever mentioned a person, then that person had never existed.
Duncan was alone on one side of the table, with the dark window behind him and the doctor and his wife and Dorothy Coe opposite him, lined up on three hard chairs, upright and attentive. He was leading them one by one through a series of questions, listening to their answers, judging their sincerity, establishing the foundations of the story as it would be told in the future. He had finished with the doctor, and he had finished with the doctor’s wife, and he was about to start in on Dorothy Coe. He had a Cornhusker standing mute and menacing in the doorway, holding the old Remington pump, and he had another out in the hallway, leaning on the basement door. The other three were out somewhere in their cars, driving around in the dark, pretending to hunt for Reacher. The illusion had to be maintained, for the sake of Rossi’s boys. Reacher’s capture was scheduled for much later in the day. Reality was what people said it was.
Duncan asked, ‘Did you ever meet a man named Reacher?’
Dorothy Coe didn’t answer. She just glanced to her left, out to the hallway. A stubborn woman, hung up on quaint old notions of objectivity.
Duncan said, ‘That’s a very strong basement door. I know, because I installed the same one myself, when we remodelled. It has a steel core, and it fits into a steel frame, and it has oversized hinges and a burst-proof lock. It’s rated for a category five storm. It can withstand a three-hundred-mile-an-hour gust. It carries a FEMA seal of approval. So if, just hypothetically, there was a person in the basement right now, you may rest assured that he’s staying there. Such a person could not possibly escape. Such a person might as well not exist at all.’
Dorothy Coe asked, ‘If the door is so good, why do you have a football player leaning on it?’
‘He has to be somewhere,’ Duncan said. Then he smiled. ‘Would you prefer it if he was in the bedroom? Maybe he could kill some time in there, with your little friend, while you answer my questions.’
Dorothy Coe glanced the other way, at the doctor’s wife.
Duncan asked, ‘Did you ever meet a man named Reacher?’
Dorothy Coe didn’t answer.
Duncan said, ‘The calendar rolls on. It will be spring before you know it. You’ll be ploughing and planting. With a bit of luck the rains will be right and you’ll have a good harvest. But then what? Do you want it hauled? Or do you want to put a gun in your mouth, like your worthless husband?’
Dorothy Coe said nothing.
Duncan asked, ‘Did you ever meet a man named Reacher?’
Dorothy Coe said, ‘No.’
‘Did you ever hear of a man named Reacher?’
‘No.’
‘Was he ever at your house?’
‘No.’
‘Did you ever give him breakfast?’
‘No.’
‘Was he here when you arrived tonight?’
‘No.’
Out in the hallway, three inches from the second Cornhusker’s hip, the handle on the basement door turned, a quarter circle, and paused a beat, and turned back.
No one noticed.
In the dining room, Duncan asked, ‘Did any kind of stranger come here this winter?’
Dorothy Coe said, ‘No.’
‘Anyone at all?’
‘No.’
‘Any local troubles here?’
‘No.’
‘Did anything change?’
‘No.’
‘Do you want anything to chan
ge?’
‘No.’
‘That’s good,’ Duncan said. ‘I like the status quo, very much, and I’m glad you do too. It benefits all of us. No reason why we can’t all get along.’ He got up, leaving the bag of peas on the table, a little meltwater beading on the wax. He said, ‘You three stay here. My boys will look after you. Don’t attempt to leave the house, and don’t attempt to use the phone. Don’t even answer it. The phone tree is off-limits tonight. You’re out of the loop. Punishments for non-compliance will be swift and severe.’
Then Duncan put his parka on, awkwardly, leading with his left hand, and he stepped past the guy with the Remington and headed for the front door. The others heard it open and close and a minute later they heard the Mazda drive away, the sound of its exhaust ripping the night air behind it.
* * *
Mahmeini’s man drove the Cadillac south on the two-lane, five gentle miles, and then he turned the lights off and slowed to a walk. The big engine whispered and the soft tyres rustled over the pavement. He saw the three old houses on his right. There was a light burning in one of the downstairs windows. Beyond that, there were no signs of life. There were three vehicles parked out front, vague moonlit shapes, all of them old, all of them rustic and utilitarian pick-up trucks, none of them a new blue Chevrolet. But the Chevrolet would come. Mahmeini’s man was absolutely sure of that. Half of Rossi’s attention was fixed on leapfrogging Safir and Mahmeini himself, which meant the other half was fixed on securing his rear. His relationship with the Duncans had to be protected. Which meant his boys would be checking in with them often, calming them, stroking them, reassuring them, and above all making sure no one else was getting close to them. Standard commonsense precautions, straight out of the textbook.
Mahmeini’s man rolled past the end of the Duncans’ driveway and U-turned and parked a hundred yards south on the opposite shoulder, half on the blacktop, half on the dirt, his lights off, the big black car nestled in a slight natural dip, about as invisible as it was possible to get without a camouflage net. There would be a dull moonlit glow from some of the chrome, he figured, but there was mist in the air, and anyway Rossi’s boys would be looking at the mouth of the driveway ahead of their turn, not at anything else. Drivers always did that. Human nature. Steering a car was as much a mental as a physical process. Heads turned, eyes sought their target, and the hands followed automatically.
Mahmeini’s man waited. He was facing north, because on balance he expected Rossi’s boys to come from the north, but it was always possible they would come from the south, so he adjusted his mirror to get a view in that direction. The mist that was helping to hide him was fogging his rear window a little. Nothing serious, but an approaching car with its lights off might be difficult to see. But then, why would Rossi’s boys be driving with their lights off? They were three-for-three on the night, and therefore probably very confident.
Five miles north the orange glow of the gasoline fire was still visible, but it was dying back a little. Nothing burns for ever. Above the glow the moon was smudged with smoke. Apart from that the night-time landscape lay dark and quiet and still and uneventful, like it must have done for a century or more. Mahmeini’s man stared at the road ahead, and saw nothing.
He waited.
Then he saw something.
Way ahead and off to his left he saw a blue glow in the mist, a high round bubble of light, moving fast from west to east. A car, coming in at him at a right angle, aiming to hit the two-lane a mile or two north of him, aiming to turn either left and away from him, or right and towards him. He took his gun from his pocket and laid it on the passenger seat next to him. The moving bubble of light slowed, and stopped, and started again, and flared bright. The car had turned right, towards him. Immediately he knew it was not the Chevrolet. The way the light moved told him it was too small, too low, too nimble. Porsches and Ferraris in Vegas moved the same way at night, their front ends rigidly connected to the pavement, their headlights jittering and hopping. Big dumb domestic sedans looked anaesthetized in comparison. They moved like lumps, swaying, dull and damped and padded and disconnected.
He watched and waited, and he saw the bubble of light resolve itself to twin nervous beams and then twin oval shapes close together and low to the ground. He saw the car slow two hundred yards away and then he saw it turn one hundred yards away, straight into the mouth of the driveway. It was the tiny red Mazda Miata he had seen parked at the restored Duncan farmhouse. The daughter-in-law’s car. She was visiting. Not a social occasion, presumably. Not so late at night. She had called ahead on the phone, probably. She had reported the encounter with the strange Iranian man, and she had been told to come on in, for safety’s sake. Probably the Duncans knew certain things were due to be settled before dawn, and they didn’t want one of their own caught in the crossfire.
Mahmeini’s man watched the Mazda bump and bounce down the driveway. He watched it park alongside the old pick-up trucks. He saw its lights go off. Ten seconds later he saw a doorway flare bright in the distance as a figure went inside, and then the scene went dark again.
Mahmeini’s man watched the road, and waited. The night mist was getting worse. It was becoming a problem. The Cadillac’s windshield was going opaque. He fumbled around and found the wiper stalk and flicked the blades right, left, right, left, and cleared it. Which made the rear screen all the worse in comparison. It was completely dewed over. Even a car with its headlights on would be hard to recognize. Its lights would be atomized into a million separate shards, into a single blinding mess. Worse than useless.
Mahmeini’s man kept one eye on the road ahead and groped around for the rear defogger button. It was hard to find. With the lights off outside, the dash and all the consoles were unlit inside. And there were a lot of buttons. It was a luxury car, fully equipped. He ducked his head and found a button with zigzag symbols on it. It looked like something to do with heating. And it had a red warning lens laid into it. He pressed it, and waited. Nothing happened to the rear window, but his ass got hot. It was the seat warmer, not the defogger. He turned it off and found another button, one eye on the console, one eye on the road ahead. He pressed the button. The radio came on, very loud. He shut it down in a hurry and tried again, another button close by, a satisfying tactile click under his fingertip.
The trunk lid clunked and popped and raised itself up, slowly and smoothly, damped and hydraulic, all the way open, completely vertical.
Now he had no view at all out the back.
Not good.
And presumably there was a courtesy light in the trunk, in reality quite weak and yellow, but no doubt looking like a million-watt searchlight in the dark of the night.
Not good at all.
He pressed the button again, not really thinking. Afterwards he realized he had half expected the trunk lid to close again, slowly and obediently, like the seat warmer and the radio had gone off again. But of course the trunk lid didn’t close again. The release mechanism merely clicked and whirred one more time, and the trunk lid stayed exactly where it was.
Wide open.
Blocking his view.
He was going to have to get out and close it by hand.
FORTY-FIVE
ROBERTO CASSANO AND ANGELO MANCINI HAD BEEN IN THE AREA three whole days, and they figured their one real solid-gold advantage over Mahmeini’s crew was their local knowledge. They knew the lie of the land, literally. Most of all, they knew it was flat and empty. Like a gigantic pool table, with brown felt. Big fields, for efficiency’s sake, no ditches, no hedges, no other natural obstacles, the ground frozen firm and hard. So even though their car was a regular street sedan, they could drive it cross-country without a major problem, pretty much like sailing a small boat on a calm open sea. And they had seen the Duncan compound up close. They had been in it. They knew it well. They could loop around behind it in the car, slow and quiet, lights off, inky blue and invisible in the dark, and then they could get out and climb the crappy post-
and-rail fence, and storm the place from the rear. Surprise was everything. There might be eyeballs to the front, but in back there would be nothing at all except the Duncans and Mahmeini’s guys all sitting around in one of the kitchens, probably toasting each other with cheap bourbon and sniggering about their newly streamlined commercial arrangements.
Two handgun rounds would take care of that happy conversation.
Cassano came south on the two-lane and switched off his lights level with the motel. The Ford was still burning in the lot, but only just. The remains of the tyres were still giving off coils of greasy rubber smoke, and small flames were licking out of the gravel all around where oil had spilled. Safir’s boys were dark shrunken shapes about half their original size, both fused to the zigzag springs that were all that was left of the seats, their mouths forced open like awful shrieks, their heads burned smooth, their hands up like talons. Mancini smiled and Cassano rolled slowly past them and headed on down the road, cautiously, navigating by the light of the moon.
Four miles south of the motel and one mile north of the Duncan place he slowed some more and turned the wheel and bumped across the shoulder and struck out across the open land. The car lurched and pattered. In a geological sense the ground was dead flat, but down there where the rubber met the dirt it was rutted and lumpy. The springs creaked and bounced and the wheel jumped and chattered in Cassano’s hands. But he made steady progress. He kept it to about twenty miles an hour and held a wide curve, aiming to arrive about half a mile behind the compound. Two minutes, he figured. At one point he had to brake hard and steer around a bramble thicket. Just beyond it they saw the burned-out shell of an SUV. It loomed up at them out of the dark, all black and ashen grey. Reacher’s work, from earlier in the day. But after that it was easy all the way. They could see a pool of faint yellow light ahead, like a homing beacon. A kitchen window, almost certainly, spilling warmth. The southernmost house, probably. Jacob Duncan’s place. The big cheese.
Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16] Page 584
