by Lee Child
13
“WE NEED TO talk,” Holly said.
“So talk,” Reacher replied.
They were sprawled out on the mattresses in the gloom inside the truck, rocking and bouncing, but not much. It was pretty clear they were heading down a highway. After fifteen minutes of a slow straight road, there had been a deceleration, a momentary stop, and a left turn followed by steady acceleration up a ramp. Then a slight sway as the truck nudged left onto the pavement. Then a steady droning cruise, maybe sixty miles an hour, which had continued ever since and was feeling like it would continue forever.
The temperature inside the dark space had slowly climbed higher. Now it was pretty warm. Reacher had taken his shirt off. But the truck had started to cool, from the night in the cow barn, and Reacher felt as long as it kept moving through the air, it was going to be tolerable. The problem would come if they stopped for any length of time. Then the truck would heat up like a pizza oven and it would get as bad as it had gotten the day before.
The twin-sized mattress had been standing upright on its long edge, up against the forward bulkhead, and the queen-size had been flat on the floor, jammed up against it, making a crude sofa. But the ninety-degree angle between the seat and the back had made the whole thing uncomfortable. So Reacher had slid the queen-size backward, with Holly riding on it like a sled, and laid the twin flat next to it. Now they had an eight-foot by six-six flat padded area. They were lying down on their backs, heads together so they could talk, bodies apart in a decorous V shape, rocking gently with the motion of the ride.
“You should do what I tell you,” Holly said. “You should have gotten out.”
He made no reply.
“You’re a burden to me,” she said. “You understand that? I’ve got enough on my hands here without having to worry about you.”
He didn’t reply. They lay rocking in silence. He could smell yesterday morning’s shampoo in her hair.
“So you’ve got to do what I tell you from now on,” she said. “Are you listening to me? I just can’t afford to be worrying about you.”
He turned his head to look at her, close up. She was worrying about him. It came as a big surprise, out of nowhere. A shock. Like being on a train, stopped next to another train in a busy railroad station. Your train begins to move. It picks up speed. And then all of a sudden it’s not your train moving. It’s the other train. Your train was stationary all the time. Your frame of reference was wrong. He thought his train was moving. She thought hers was.
“I don’t need your help,” she said. “I’ve already got all the help I need. You know how the Bureau works? You know what the biggest crime in the world is? Not bombing, not terrorism, not racketeering. The biggest crime in the world is messing with Bureau personnel. The Bureau looks after its own.”
Reacher stayed quiet for a spell. Then he smiled.
“So then we’re both OK,” he said. “We just lay back here, and pretty soon a bunch of agents is going to come bursting in to rescue us.”
“I trust my people,” Holly said to him.
There was silence again. The truck droned on for a couple of minutes. Reacher ticked off the distance in his head. About four hundred fifty miles from Chicago, maybe. East, west, north, or south. Holly gasped and used both hands to shift her leg.
“Hurting?” Reacher said.
“When it gets out of line,” she said. “When it’s straight, it’s OK.”
“Which direction are we headed?” he asked.
“Are you going to do what I tell you?” she asked.
“Is it getting hotter or colder?” he said. “Or staying the same?”
She shrugged.
“Can’t tell,” she said. “Why?”
“North or south, it should be getting hotter or colder,” he said. “East or west, it should be staying more or less the same.”
“Feels the same to me,” she said. “But inside here, you can’t really tell.”
“Highway feels fairly empty,” Reacher said. “We’re not pulling out to pass people. We’re not getting slowed down by anybody. We’re just cruising.”
“So?” Holly said.
“Might mean we’re not going east,” he said. “There’s a kind of barrier, right? Cleveland to Pittsburgh to Baltimore. Like a frontier. Gets much busier. We’d be hitting more traffic. What is it, Tuesday? About eleven o’clock in the morning? Roads feel too empty for the East.”
Holly nodded.
“So we’re going north or west or south,” she said.
“In a stolen truck,” he said. “Vulnerable.”
“Stolen?” she said. “How do you know that?”
“Because the car was stolen too,” he said.
“How do you know that?” she repeated.
“Because they burned it,” he said.
Holly rolled her head and looked straight at him.
“Think about it,” he said. “Think about their plan. They came to Chicago in their own vehicle. Maybe some time ago. Could have taken them a couple of weeks to stake you out. Maybe three.”
“Three weeks?” she said. “You think they were watching me three weeks?”
“Probably three,” he said. “You went to the cleaners every Monday, right? Once a week? Must have taken them a while to confirm that pattern. But they couldn’t grab you in their own vehicle. Too easy to trace, and it probably had windows and all, not suitable for long-distance transport of a kidnap victim. So I figure they stole this truck, in Chicago, probably yesterday morning. Painted over whatever writing was on the side. You notice the patch of white paint? Fresh, didn’t match the rest? They disguised it, maybe changed the plates. But it was still a hot truck, right?> And it was their getaway vehicle. So they didn’t want to risk it on the street. And people getting into the back of a truck looks weird. A car is better. So they stole the black sedan and used that instead. Switched vehicles in that vacant lot, burned the black car, and they’re away.”
Holly shrugged. Made a face.
“Doesn’t prove they stole anything,” she said.
“Yes it does,” Reacher said. “Who buys a new car with leather seats, knowing they’re going to burn it? They’d have bought some old clunker instead.”
She nodded, reluctantly.
“Who are these people?” she said, more to herself than to Reacher.
“Amateurs,” Reacher said. “They’re making one mistake after another.”
“Like what?” she said.
“Burning is dumb,” he said. “Attracts attention. They think they’ve been smart, but they haven’t. Probability is they burned their original car, as well. I bet they burned it right near where they stole the black sedan.”
“Sounds smart enough to me,” Holly said.
“Cops notice burning cars,” Reacher said. “They’ll find the black sedan, they’ll find out where it was stolen from, they’ll go up there and find their original vehicle, probably still smoldering. They’re leaving a trail, Holly. They should have parked both cars in the long-term lot at O’Hare. They would have been there a year before anybody noticed. Or just left them both down on the South Side somewhere, doors open, keys in. Two minutes later, two residents down there got themselves a new motor each. Those cars would never have been seen again. That’s how to cover your tracks. Burning feels good, feels like it’s real final, but it’s dumb as hell.”
Holly turned her face back and stared up at the hot metal roof. She was asking herself: Just who the hell is this guy?
14
THIS TIME, MCGRATH did not make the tech chief come down to the third floor. He led the charge himself up to his lab on the sixth, with the videocassette in his hand. He burst in through the door and cleared a space on the nearest table. Laid the cassette in the space like it was made of solid gold. The guy hurried over and looked at it.
“I need photographs made,” McGrath told him.
The guy picked up the cassette and took it across to a bank of video machines in the corner. Flic
ked a couple of switches. Three screens lit up with white snow.
“You tell absolutely nobody what you’re seeing, OK?” McGrath said.
“OK,” the guy said. “What am I looking for?”
“The last five frames,” McGrath said. “That should just about cover it.”
The tech chief didn’t use a remote. He stabbed at buttons on the machine’s own control panel. The tape rolled backward and the story of Holly Johnson’s kidnap unfolded in reverse.
“Christ,” he said.
He stopped on the frame showing Holly turning away from the counter. Then he inched the tape forward. He jumped Holly to the door, then face-to-face with the tall guy, then into the muzzles of the guns, then to the car. He rolled back and did it for a second time. Then a third.
“Christ,” he said again.
“Don’t wear the damn tape out,” McGrath said. “I want big photographs of those five frames. Lots of copies.”
The tech chief nodded slowly.
“I can give you laser prints right now,” he said.
He punched a couple of buttons and flicked a couple of switches. Then he ducked away and booted up a computer on a desk across the room. The monitor came up with Holly leaving the dry cleaner’s counter. He clicked on a couple of menus.
“OK,” he said. “I’m copying it to the hard disk. As a graphics file.”
He darted back to the video bank and nudged the tape forward one frame. Came back to the desk and the computer captured the image of Holly making to push open the exit door. He repeated the process three more times. Then he printed all five graphics files on the fastest laser he had. McGrath stood and caught each sheet as it flopped into the output bin.
“Not bad,” he said. “I like paper better than video. Like it really exists.”
The tech chief gave him a look and peered over his shoulder.
“Definition’s OK,” he said.
“I want blowups,” McGrath told him.
“No problem, now it’s in the computer,” the tech said. “That’s why the computer is better than paper.”
He sat down and opened the fourth file. The picture of Holly and the three kidnappers in a tight knot on the sidewalk scrolled onto the screen. He clicked the mouse and pulled a tight square around the heads. Clicked again. The monitor redrew into a large blowup. The tall guy was staring straight out of the screen. The two new guys were caught at an angle, staring at Holly.
The tech hit the print button and then he opened the fifth file. He zoomed in with the mouse and put a tight rectangle around the driver, inside the car. He printed that out, too. McGrath picked up the new sheets of paper.
“Good,” he said. “Good as we’re going to get, anyway. Shame your damn computer can’t make them all look right at the camera.”
“It can,” the tech chief said.
“It can?” McGrath said. “How?”
“In a manner of speaking,” the guy said. He touched the blowup of Holly’s face with his finger. “Suppose we wanted a face-front picture of her, right? We’d ask her to move around right in front of the camera and look right up at it. But suppose for some reason she can’t move at all. What would we do? We could move the camera, right?> Suppose you climbed up on the counter and unbolted the camera off the wall and moved it down and around a certain distance until it was right in front of her. Then you’d be seeing a face-front picture, correct?”
“OK,” McGrath said.
“So what we do is we calculate,” the tech said. “We calculate that if we did hypothetically move that camera right in front of her, we’d have to move it what? Say six feet downward, say ten feet to the left, and turn it through about forty degrees, and then it would be plumb face-on to her. So we get those numbers and we enter them into the program and the computer will do a kind of backward simulation, and draw us a picture, just the same as if we’d really moved the actual camera right around in front of her.”
“You can do that?” McGrath said. “Does it work?”
“Within its limitations,” the tech chief said. He touched the image of the nearer gunman. “This guy, for instance, he’s pretty much side-on. The computer will give us a full-face picture, no problem at all, but it’s going to be just guessing what the other side of his face looks like, right? > It’s programmed to assume the other side looks pretty much like the side it can see, with a little bit of asymmetry built in. But if the guy’s got one ear missing or something, or a big scar, it can’t tell us that.”
“OK,” McGrath said. “So what do you need?”
The chief tech picked up the wide shot of the group. Pointed here and there on it with a stubby forefinger.
“Measurements,” he said. “Make them as exact as possible. I need to know the camera position relative to the doorway and the sidewalk level. I need to know the focal length of the camera lens. I need Holly’s file photograph for calibration. We know exactly what she looks like, right? I can use her for a test run. I’ll get it set up so she comes out right, then the other guys will come out right as well, assuming they’ve all got two ears and so on, like I said. And bring me a square of tile off the store’s floor and one of those smocks the counter woman was wearing.”
“What for?” McGrath said.
“So I can use them to decode the grays in the video,” the tech said. “Then I can give you your mug shots in color.”
THE COMMANDER SELECTED six women from that morning’s punishment detail. He used the ones with the most demerits, because the task was going to be hard and unpleasant. He stood them at attention and drew his huge bulk up to its full height in front of them. He waited to see which of them would be the first to glance away from his face. When he was satisfied none of them dared to, he explained their duties. The blood had sprayed all over the room, hurled around by the savage centrifugal force of the blade. Chips of bone had spattered everywhere. He told them to heat water in the cookhouse and carry it over in buckets. He told them to draw scrubbing brushes and rags and disinfectant from the stores. He told them they had two hours to get the room looking pristine again. Any longer than that, they would earn more demerits.
IT TOOK TWO hours to get the data. Milosevic and Brogan went out to the dry-cleaning establishment. They closed the place down and swarmed all over it like surveyors. They drew a plan with measurements accurate to the nearest quarter-inch. They took the camera off the wall and brought it back with them. They tore up the floor and took the tiles. They took two smocks from the woman and two posters off the wall, because they thought they might help with the colorizing process. Back on the sixth floor of the Federal Building, the chief tech took another two hours to input the data. Then he ran the test, using Holly Johnson to calibrate the program.
“What do you think?” he asked McGrath.
McGrath looked hard at the full-face picture of Holly. Then he passed it around. Milosevic got it last and stared at it hardest. Covered some parts with his hand and frowned.
“Makes her look too thin,” he said. “I think the bottom right quarter is wrong. Not enough width there, somehow.”
“I agree,” McGrath said. “Makes her jaw look weird.”
The chief tech exited to a menu screen and adjusted a couple of numbers. Ran the test again. The laser printer whirred. The sheet of stiff paper came out.
“That’s better,” McGrath said. “Just about on the nose.”
“Color OK?” the tech asked.
“Should be a darker peach,” Milosevic said. “On her dress. I know that dress. Some kind of an Italian thing.”
The tech exited to a color palette.
“Show me,” he said.
Milosevic pointed to a particular shade.
“More like that,” he said.
They ran the test again. The hard disk chattered and the laser printer whirred.
“That’s better,” Milosevic said. “Dress is right. Hair color is better as well.”
“OK,” the tech said. He saved all the parameters to disk. “Let�
�s go to work here.”
The FBI never uses latest-generation equipment. The feeling is it’s better to use stuff that has been proven in the field. So the tech chief’s computer was actually a little slower than the computers in the rich kids’ bedrooms up and down the North Shore. But not much slower. It gave McGrath five prints within forty minutes. Four mug shots of the four kidnappers, and a close-up side view of the front half of their car. All in glowing color, all with the grain enhanced and smoothed away. McGrath thought they were the best damn pictures he had ever seen.
“Thanks, chief,” he said. “These are brilliant. Best work anybody has done around here for a long time. But don’t say a word. Big secret, right?”
He clapped the tech on the shoulder and left him feeling like the most important guy in the whole building.
THE SIX WOMEN worked hard and finished just before their two hours were up. The tiny cracks between the boards were their biggest problem. The cracks were tight, but not tight enough to stop the blood seeping in. But they were too tight to get a brush down in there. They had to sluice them out with water and rag them dry. The boards were turning a wet brown color. The women were praying they wouldn’t warp as they dried. Two of them were throwing up. It was adding to their workload. But they finished in time for the commander’s inspection. They stood rigidly at attention on the damp floor and waited. He checked everywhere, with the wet boards creaking under his bulk. But he was satisfied with their work and gave them another two hours to clean the smears off the corridor and the staircase, where the body had been dragged away.
THE CAR WAS easy. It was quickly identified as a Lexus. Four-door. Late-model. The pattern of the alloy wheel dated it exactly. Color was either black or dark gray. Impossible to be certain. The computer process was good, but not good enough to be definitive about dark automotive paint standing in bright sunshine.
“Stolen?” Milosevic said.
McGrath nodded.
“Almost certainly,” he said. “You do the checking, OK?”
