by Lee Child
They inched forward, deep under the Hudson River. His backyard was sixty miles upstream. He sat there and traced its contours in his mind, testing his decision. It was a nice enough yard, as yards go. Certainly it was fertile. You turned your head, the grass was a foot high when you turned it back. It had a lot of trees. Maples, which had been cute in the early fall. Cedars, which Leon must have planted himself, because they were placed in artful groups. Leaves came off the maples and little purple berries came off the cedars. When the leaves were down, there was a wide view of the opposite bank of the river. West Point was right there, and West Point had been an important part of Reacher’s life.
But he was not a nostalgic guy. Part of being a drifter means you look forward, not backward. You concentrate on what’s ahead. And he felt in his gut that a big part of looking ahead was looking for newness. Looking for places you hadn’t been and things you hadn’t seen. And the irony of his life was that although he had covered most of the earth’s surface, one time or another, he felt he hadn’t seen much. A lifetime in the service was like rushing down a narrow corridor, eyes fixed firmly to the front. There was all kinds of enticing stuff off to the sides, which you rushed past and ignored. Now he wanted to take the side trips. He wanted a crazy zigzag, any direction he felt like, any old time he wanted.
And returning to the same place every night wouldn’t do it. So his decision was the right one. He said the words to himself. Sell the house. The house is on the market. The house is for sale. The house is sold. He said the words and a weight came up off of him. It wasn’t just the practical weight, although that was important. No more fretting about leaks in the pipes and bills in the mail and oil deliveries and insurance coverage. It was the release. Like he was back in the world, unburdened. He was free and ready to go. It was like a door opening and sunlight flooding in. He smiled to himself in the thrumming darkness of the tunnel, Harper at his side.
“You actually enjoying this?” she said.
“Best mile of my life,” he answered.
YOU WAIT ANDand you watch, hour after hour. Perfectionism like that, you don’t find everywhere. But you are perfect, and you have to stay perfect. You have to stay sure. And by now you’re sure the cop is a permanent fixture. He eats in his car, he uses her bathroom from time to time, and that’s it. So you think about hijacking the cop, maybe tomorrow morning, just before eight o’clock, and impersonating him. Replacing him on duty. You think about sitting in his car for a spell and then walking up to Scimeca’s door and knocking, like you were ready to relieve yourself. You think about that for around a second and a half, and then you reject it, of course. His uniform wouldn’t fit. And you’d be expected to chat with the Bureau guy at the eight o’clock handover. He’d know you were a fake, straight off the bat. It’s not like he’s dealing with a big anonymous police department like he’d get in New York or L.A.
So either the cop has to be moved, or you have to go in right past him. At first you toy with the idea of a diversion. What would it take to get him out of there? A major automobile accident at the crossroads, maybe. A fire in the school, perhaps. But as far as you know the village doesn’t have a school. You’ve seen yellow buses on the road, heading in and out toward Portland. The school is probably in another jurisdiction. And an automobile accident would be hard to stage. Certainly you’re not about to involve yourself in one. And how do you induce two other drivers to get in a crash?
Maybe a bomb threat. But where? At the station house? That would be no good. The cop would be told to stay where he was, safely out of the way, until it was checked out. So where else? Some spot where people are gathered, maybe. Somewhere the whole police department would be needed to handle the evacuation. But this is a tiny place. Where do people gather? The church, maybe. You can see a spire, down near the through road. But you can’t wait until next Sunday. The library? Probably nobody in there. Two old dears at most, sitting there doing their needlepoint, ignoring the books. Evacuation could be handled by the other cop on his own in about three and a half seconds.
And a bomb threat would mean a phone call. You start to think about that. Where from? Calls can be traced. You could head back to the airport in Portland and call from there. Tracing a call to an airport pay phone is the same thing as not tracing it at all. But then you’re miles out of position at the critical time. A safe call, but a useless call. Catch-22. And there are no pay phones within a million miles of where you’re crouched, not in the middle of the damn Rocky Mountains or whatever the hell they call them. And you can’t use your mobile, because eventually the call would appear on your bill, which ultimately is the same thing as a confession in open court. And who can you call? You can’t allow anybody to hear your voice. It’s too distinctive. Too dangerous.
But the more you think about it, the more your strategy centers around the phone. There’s one person you can safely let hear your voice. But it’s a geometric problem. Four dimensional. Time and space. You have to call from right here, in the open, within sight of the house, but you can’t use your mobile. Impasse.
THEY DROVE OUT of the tunnel and streamed west with the traffic. Route 3 angled slightly north toward the Turnpike. It was a shiny night in New Jersey, damp asphalt everywhere, sodium lights with evening fog haloes strung like necklaces. There were lit billboards and neon signs left and right. Establishments of every nature behind lumpy blacktop yards.
The roadhouse they were looking for was in the back of a leftover lot where three roads met. It was labeled with a beer company’s neon sign which said Mac-Stiophan’s , which as far as Reacher understood Gaelic meant Stevenson’s. It was a low building with a flat roof. Its walls were faced with brown boards and there was a green neon shamrock in every window. Its parking lot was badly lit and three-quarters empty. Reacher put the Maxima at a casual angle across two spaces near the door. Slid out and looked around. The air was cold. He turned a full circle in the dark, scanning the lot against the lights from the street.
"No Cadillac DeVille,” he said. "He’s not here yet.”
Harper looked at the door, cautiously.
“We’re a little early,” she said. “I guess we’ll wait.”
“You can wait out here,” he said. “If you prefer.”
She shook her head.
“I’ve been in worse places,” she said.
It was hard for Reacher to imagine where and when. The outer door led to a six-by-six lobby with a cigarette machine and a sisal mat worn smooth and greasy with use. The inner door led to a low dark space full of the stink of beer fumes and smoke. There was no ventilation running. The green shamrocks in the windows shone inward as well as outward and gave the place a pale ghostly glare. The walls were dark boards, dulled and sticky with fifty years of cigarettes. The bar was a long wooden structure with halved barrels stuck to the front. There were tall barstools with red vinyl seats and lower versions of the same thing scattered around the room near tables built of lacquered barrels with plywood circles nailed to their tops. The plywood was rubbed smooth and dirty from thousands of wrists and hands.
There was a bartender behind the bar and eight customers in the body of the room. All of them had glasses of beer set on the plywood in front of them. All of them were men. All of them were staring at the new-comers. None of them was a soldier. They were all wrong for the military. Some were too old, some were too soft, some had long dirty hair. Just ordinary workingmen. Or maybe unemployed. But they were all hostile. They were silent, like they had just stopped talking in the middle of low muttered sentences. They were staring, like they were trying to intimidate.
Reacher swept his gaze over all of them, pausing on each face, long enough to let them know he wasn’t impressed, and short enough to stop them thinking he was in any way interested. Then he stepped to the bar and rolled a stool out for Harper.
“What’s on draft?” he asked the bartender.
The guy was wearing an unwashed dress shirt with no collar. Pleats all the way down the front
. He had a dish towel squared over his shoulder. He was maybe fifty, gray-faced, paunchy. He didn’t answer.
“What have you got?” Reacher asked again.
No reply.
“Hey, are you deaf?” Harper called to the guy.
She was half on and half off the stool, one foot on the floor, the other on the rung. Her jacket was draped open and she was twisting around from the waist. Her hair was loose down her back.
“Let’s make a deal,” she said. “You give us beer, we give you money, take it from there. Maybe you could turn it into a business, you know, call it running a saloon.”
The guy turned to her.
“Haven’t seen you in here before,” he said.
Harper smiled. “No, we’re new customers. That’s what it’s all about, expanding your customer base, right? Do it well enough, and you’ll be the barroom king of the Garden State, no time at all.”
“What do you want?” the guy said.
“Two beers,” Reacher said.
“Apart from that?”
“Well, we’re already enjoying the ambiance and the friendly welcome.”
"People like you don’t come in a place like mine without wanting something.”
“We’re waiting for Bob,” Harper said.
“Bob who?”
“Bob with real short hair and an old Cadillac DeVille, ” Reacher said. “Bob from the Army, comes in here eight o’clock every night.”
“You’re waiting for him?”
“Yes, we’re waiting for him,” Harper said.
The guy smiled. Yellow teeth, some of them missing.
“Well, you’ve got a long wait, then,” he said.
“Why?”
“Buy a drink, and I’ll tell you.”
“We’ve been trying to buy a drink for the last five minutes,” Reacher said.
“What do you want?”
“Two beers,” Reacher said. “Whatever’s on tap.”
“Bud or Bud Light.”
“One of each, OK?”
The guy took two glasses down from an overhead rack and filled them. The room was still silent. Reacher could feel eight pairs of eyes on his back. The guy placed the beers on the bar. There was an inch of soapy foam on the top of each of them. The guy peeled two cocktail napkins from a stack and dealt them out like cards. Harper pulled a wallet from her pocket and dropped a ten between the glasses.
“Keep the change,” she said. “So why have we got a long wait for Bob?”
The guy smiled again and slid the ten backward. Folded it into his hand and put his hand in his pocket.
“Because Bob’s in jail, far as I know,” he said.
“What for?”
“Some Army thing,” the guy said. “I don’t know the details, and I don’t want to know the details. That’s how you do business in this part of the Garden State, miss, begging your damn pardon, your fancy ideas notwithstanding. ”
“What happened?” Reacher asked.
“Military policemen came in and grabbed him up right here, right in this room.”
“When?” Reacher asked.
“Took six of them to get him. They smashed a table. I just got a check from the Army. All the way from Washington, D.C. The Pentagon. In the mail.”
“When was this?” Reacher asked.
“When the check came? Couple days ago.”
“No, when did they arrest him?”
“I’m not sure,” the guy said. “They were still playing baseball, I remember that. Regular season, too. Couple months ago, I guess.”
24
THEY LEFT THE beer untouched on the bar and headed back to the parking lot. Unlocked the Nissan and slid inside.
“Couple months is no good,” Harper said. “Puts him right outside the picture.”
“He was never in the picture,” Reacher said. “But we’ll go talk to him anyway.”
“How can we do that? He’s in the Army system somewhere.”
He looked at her. “Harper, I was a military policeman for thirteen years. If I can’t find him, who can?”
“He could be anywhere.”
“No, he couldn’t. If this dump is his local bar, it means he was posted somewhere near here. Low-grade guy like that, a regional MP office will be handling him. Two-month time span, he’s not court-martialed yet, so he’s in a holding pattern at a regional MP HQ, which for this region is Fort Armstrong outside of Trenton, which is less than two hours away.”
“You sure?”
He shrugged. "Unless things have changed a hell of a lot in three years.”
“Some way you can check?” she asked.
“I don’t need to check.”
“We don’t want to waste time here,” she said.
He said nothing back and she smiled and opened her bag. Came out with a folded cellular phone the size of a cigarette packet.
“Use my mobile,” she said.
EVERYBODY USES MOBILES. They use them all the time, just constantly. It’s a phenomenon of the modern age. Everybody’s talk, talk, talking, all the time, little black telephones pressed up to their faces. Where does all that conversation come from? What happened to all that conversation before mobiles were invented? Was it all bottled up? Burning ulcers in people’s guts? Or did it just develop spontaneously because technology made it possible?
It’s a subject you’re interested in. Human impulses. Your guess is a small percentage of calls made represents useful exchange of information. But the vast majority must fall into one of two categories, either the fun aspect, the sheer delight of doing something simply because you can, or else the ego-building self-important bullshit aspect. And your observation is that it splits pretty much along gender lines. It’s not an opinion you’d care to voice in public, but privately you’re sure women talk because they enjoy it, and men talk because it builds them up. Hi, honey, I’m just getting off the plane, they say. So what? Like, who cares?
But you’re confident that men’s use of mobiles is more closely connected to their ego needs, so it’s necessarily a stronger attachment, and therefore a more frequent urge. So if you steal a phone from a man, it will be discovered earlier, and reacted to with a greater degree of upset. That’s your judgment. Therefore you’re sitting in the airport food court watching the women.
The other major advantage of women is that they have smaller pockets. Sometimes, no pockets at all. Therefore they carry bags, into which goes all their stuff. Their wallets, their keys, their makeup. And their mobile phones. They take them out to use them, maybe rest them on the table for a spell, and then put them right back in their bags. If they get up for a coffee refill, of course, they take their bags with them. That’s ingrained. Always keep your pocketbook with you. But some of them have other bags too. There are laptop cases, which these days are made with all kinds of extra compartments for the disks and the CD-ROM thing and the cables. And some of them have pockets for mobiles, little external leather rectangles the same shape as the cigarettes-and-lighter cases women carried back when people smoked. Those other cases, they don’t always take them with them. If they’re just stepping away to the beverage counter, they often leave them at the table, partly to keep their place claimed, partly because who can carry a pocketbook and a laptop case and a hot cup of coffee?
But you’re ignoring the women with the laptop cases. Because those expensive leather articles imply some kind of serious purpose. Their owners might get home in an hour and want to check their e-mail or finalize a pie chart or something, whereupon they open their laptop case and find their phone is gone. Police notified, account canceled, calls traced, all within an hour. No good at all.
So the women you’re watching are the nonbusiness travelers. The ones with the little nylon backpacks carried as cabin baggage. And you’re specifically watching the ones heading out of town, not in toward home. They’re going to make a last couple of calls from the airport and then stuff their phones into their backpacks and forget all about them, because they’re flyin
g out of the local coverage area and they don’t want to pay roaming charges. Maybe they’re vacationing overseas, in which case their phones are as useless to them as their house keys. Something they have to take along, but not something they ever think about.
The one particular target you’re watching most closely is a woman of about twenty-three or -four, maybe forty feet away. She’s dressed comfortably like she’s got a long flight ahead, and she’s leaning back in her chair with her head tilted left and her phone trapped in her shoulder. She’s smiling vacantly as she talks, and playing with her nails. Picking at them and turning her hands in the light to look at them. This is a lazy say-nothing chat with a girlfriend. No intensity in her face. She’s just talking for the sake of talking.
Her carry-on bag is on the floor near her feet. It’s a small designer backpack, all covered in little loops and catches and zippers. It’s clearly so complicated to close that she’s left it gaping open. She picks up her coffee cup and puts it down again. It’s empty. She talks and checks her watch and cranes to look at the beverage counter. She wraps up the chat. Flips her phone closed and drops it in her backpack. Picks up a matching pocketbook and stands up and wheels away to get more coffee.
You’re on your feet instantly. Car keys in your hand. You hustle straight across the court, ten feet, twenty, thirty. You’re swinging the keys. Looking busy. She’s in line. About to be served. You drop your keys and they skid across the tiles. You bend to retrieve them. Your hand skims her bag. You come back up with the keys and the phone together. You walk on. The keys go back in your pocket. The phone stays in your hand. Nothing more ordinary than somebody walking through an airport lounge holding a mobile.
You walk at normal pace. Stop and lean on a pillar. You flip the phone open and hold it at your face, pretending to make a call. Now you’re invisible. You’re a person leaning on a pillar making a call. There are a dozen of you within a twenty-foot radius. You look back. She’s back at her table, drinking her coffee. You wait, whispering nothing into the phone. She drinks. Three minutes. Four. Five. You press random buttons and start talking again. You’re on a new call. You’re busy. You’re one of the guys. She stands up. Yanks on the cords of her backpack to close it up. Picks it up by the cords and bounces it against its own weight to make them tight. She buckles the catches. Swings the pack onto one shoulder and picks up her pocketbook. Opens it to check her ticket is accessible. Closes it again. She looks around once and strides purposefully out of the food court. Straight toward you. She passes within five feet and disappears toward the departure gates. You flip the phone closed and slip it into the pocket of your suit and you walk out the other way. You smile to yourself as you go. Now the crucial call is going to end up on someone else’s bill.
