The Essential Jack Reacher 10-Book Bundle

by Lee Child

  I rolled off the bed and stepped to the window. The afternoon had already happened. Full dark was on its way. Day fourteen, a Friday, nearly over. I went downstairs, thinking about the Saab. Beck was walking through the hallway. He was in a hurry. Preoccupied. He went into the kitchen and picked up the phone. Listened to it for a second and then held it out to me.

  “The phones are all dead,” he said.

  I put the receiver to my ear and listened. There was nothing there. No dial tone, no scratchy hiss from open circuits. Just dull inert silence, and the sound of blood rushing in my head. Like a seashell.

  “Go try yours,” he said.

  I went back upstairs to Duke’s room. The internal phone worked OK. Paulie answered on the third ring. I hung up on him. But the outside line was stone dead. I held the receiver like it would make a difference and Beck appeared in the doorway.

  “I can speak to the gate,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “That’s a completely separate circuit,” he said. “We put it in ourselves. What about the outside line?”

  “Dead,” I said.

  “Weird,” he said.

  I put the receiver down. Glanced at the window.

  “Could be the weather,” I said.

  “No,” he said. He held up his cell phone. It was a tiny silver Nokia. “This is out too.”

  He handed it to me. There was a tiny screen on the front. A bar chart on the right showed that the battery was fully charged. But the signal meter was all the way down. No service was displayed, big and black and obvious. I handed it back.

  “I need to use the bathroom,” I said. “I’ll be right down.”

  I locked myself in. Pulled off my shoe. Opened the heel. Pressed power. The screen came up: No service. I turned it off and nailed it back in. Flushed the toilet for form’s sake and sat there on the lid. I was no kind of a telecommunications expert. I knew phone lines came down, now and then. I knew cell phone technology was sometimes unreliable. But what were the chances that one location’s land lines would fail at the exact same time its nearest cell tower went down? Pretty small, I guessed. Pretty damn small. So it had to be a deliberate outage. But who had requested it? Not the phone company. They wouldn’t do disruptive maintenance at commuting time on a Friday. Early on a Sunday morning, maybe. And they wouldn’t have the land lines down at the same time as the cell towers, anyway. They would stagger the two jobs, surely.

  So who had organized it? A heavy-duty government agency, maybe. Like the DEA, perhaps. Maybe the DEA was coming for the maid. Maybe its SWAT team was rolling up the harbor operation first and it didn’t want Beck to know before it was ready to come on out to the house.

  But that was unlikely. The DEA would have more than one SWAT team available. It would go for simultaneous operations. And even if it didn’t, it would be the easiest thing in the world to close the road between the house and the first turning. They could seal it forever. There was a twelve-mile stretch of unlimited opportunity. Beck was a sitting duck, phones or no phones.

  So who?

  Maybe Duffy, off the books. Duffy’s status might just get her a major once-in-a-lifetime favor, one-on-one with a phone company manager. Especially a favor that was limited geographically. One minor land line spur. And one cell tower, probably somewhere out near I-95. It would give a thirty-mile dead spot for people to drive through, but she might have been able to swing it. Maybe. Especially if the favor was strictly limited in duration. Not open-ended. Four or five hours, say.

  And why would Duffy suddenly be afraid of phones for four or five hours? Only one possible answer. She was afraid for me.

  The bodyguards were loose.

  CHAPTER 10

  Time. Distance divided by speed adjusted for direction equals time. Either I had enough, or I had none at all. I didn’t know which it would be. The bodyguards had been held in the Massachusetts motel where we planned the original eight-second sting. Which was less than two hundred miles south. That much, I knew for sure. Those were facts. The rest was pure speculation. But I could put together some kind of a likely scenario. They had broken out of the motel and stolen a government Taurus. Then they had driven like hell for maybe an hour, breathless with panic. They had wanted to get well clear before they did another thing. They might have even gotten a little lost, way out there in the wilds. Then they had gotten their bearings and hit the highway. Accelerated north. Then they had calmed down, checked the view behind, slowed up, stayed legal, and started looking for a phone. But by then Duffy had already killed the lines. She had acted fast. So their first stop represented a waste of time. Ten minutes, maybe, to allow for slowing down, parking, calling the house, calling the cell, starting up again, rejoining the highway traffic. Then they would have done it all again a second time at the next rest area. They would have blamed the first failure on a random technical hitch. Another ten minutes. After that, either they would have seen the pattern, or they would have figured they were getting close enough just to press on regardless. Or both.

  Beginning to end, a total of four hours, maybe. But when did those four hours start? I had no idea. That was clear. Obviously somewhere between four hours ago and, say, thirty minutes ago. So either I had enough time or no time at all.

  I came out of the bathroom fast and checked the window. The rain had stopped. It was night outside. The lights along the wall were on. They were haloed with mist. Beyond them was absolute darkness. No headlights in the distance. I headed downstairs. Found Beck in the hallway. He was still prodding at his Nokia, trying to get it to work.

  “I’m going out,” I said. “Up the road a little.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t like this thing with the phones. Could be nothing, could be something.”

  “Something like what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe somebody’s coming. You just got through telling me how many people you got on your back.”

  “We’ve got a wall and a gate.”

  “You got a boat?”

  “No,” he said. “Why?”

  “If they get as far as the gate, you’re going to need a boat. They could sit there and starve you out.”

  He said nothing.

  “I’ll take the Saab,” I said.

  “Why?”

  Because it’s lighter than the Cadillac.

  “Because I want to leave the Cadillac for you,” I said. “It’s bigger.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Whatever I need to,” I said. “I’m your head of security now. Maybe nothing’s happening, but if it is, then I’m going to try to take care of it for you.”

  “What do I do?”

  “You keep a window open and listen,” I said. “At night with all this water around, you’ll hear me from a couple miles away if I’m shooting. If you do, put everybody in the Cadillac and get the hell out. Drive fast. Don’t stop. I’ll hold them off long enough for you to get past. Have you got someplace else to go?”

  He nodded. Didn’t tell me where.

  “So go there,” I said. “If I make it, I’ll get to the office. I’ll wait there, in the car. You can check there later.”

  “OK,” he said.

  “Now call Paulie on the internal phone and tell him to stand by to let me through the gate.”

  “OK,” he said again.

  I left him there in the hallway. Walked out into the night. I detoured around the courtyard wall and retrieved my bundle from its hole. Carried it back to the Saab and put it on the rear seat. Then I slid into the front and fired up the engine and backed out. Drove slow around the carriage circle and accelerated down the drive. The lights on the wall were bright in the distance. I could see Paulie at the gate. I slowed a little and timed it so I didn’t have to stop. I went straight through. Drove west, staring through the windshield, looking for headlight beams coming toward me.

  I drove four miles, and then I saw a government Taurus. It was parked on the shoulder. Facing toward me. No l
ights. The old guy was sitting behind the wheel. I killed my lights and slowed and stopped window to window with him. Wound down my glass. He did the same. Aimed a flashlight and a gun at my face until he saw who I was. Then he put them both away.

  “The bodyguards are out,” he said.

  I nodded. “I figured. When?”

  “Close to four hours ago.”

  I glanced ahead, involuntarily. No time.

  “We got two men down,” he said.

  “Killed?”

  He nodded. Said nothing.

  “Did Duffy report it?”

  “She can’t,” he said. “Not yet. We’re off the books. This whole situation isn’t even happening.”

  “She’ll have to report it,” I said. “It’s two guys.”

  “She will,” he said. “Later. After you deliver. Because the objectives are right back in place again. She needs Beck for justification, now more than ever.”

  “How did it go down?”

  He shrugged. “They bided their time. Two of them, four of us. Should have been easy. But our boys got sloppy, I guess. It’s tough, locking people down in a motel.”

  “Which two got it?”

  “The kids who were in the Toyota.”

  I said nothing. It had lasted roughly eighty-four hours. Three and a half days. Actually a little better than I had expected, at the start.

  “Where is Duffy now?” I asked.

  “We’re all fanned out,” he said. “She’s up in Portland with Eliot.”

  “She did good with the phones.”

  He nodded. “Real good. She cares about you.”

  “How long are they off?”

  “Four hours. That’s all she could get. So they’ll be back on soon.”

  “I think they’ll come straight here.”

  “Me too,” he said. “That’s why I came straight here.”

  “Close to four hours, they’ll be off the highway by now. So I guess the phones don’t matter anymore.”

  “That’s how I figure it.”

  “Got a plan?” I said.

  “I was waiting for you. We figured you’d make the connection.”

  “Did they get guns?”

  “Two Glocks,” he said. “Full mags.”

  Then he paused a beat. Looked away.

  “Less four shots fired at the scene,” he said. “That’s how it was described to us. Four shots, two guys. They were all head shots.”

  “Won’t be easy.”

  “It never is,” he said.

  “We need to find a place.”

  I told him to leave his car where it was and get in with me. He came around and slid into the passenger seat. He was wearing the same raincoat Duffy had been wearing in the coffee shop. He had reclaimed it. We drove another mile, and then I started looking for a place. I found one where the road narrowed sharply and went into a long gentle curve. The blacktop was built up a little, like a shallow causeway. The shoulders were less than a foot wide and fell away fast into rocky ground. I stopped the car and then turned it sharply and backed it up and pulled forward again until it was square across the road. We got out and checked. It was a good roadblock. There was no room to get around it. But it was a very obvious roadblock, like I knew it would be. The two guys would come tearing around the curve and jam on the brakes and then start backing up and shooting.

  “We need to roll it over,” I said. “Like a bad accident.”

  I took my bundle out of the back seat. Put it down on the shoulder, just in case. Then I made the old guy put his coat down on the road. I emptied my pockets and put mine beyond his. I wanted to roll the Saab onto the coats. I needed to bring it back relatively undamaged. Then we stood shoulder to shoulder with our backs to the car and started rocking it. It’s easy enough to turn a car over. I’ve seen it done all over the world. You let the tires and the suspension help you. You rock it, and then you bounce it, and then you keep it going until it’s coming right up in the air, and then you time it just right and flip it all the way over. The old guy was strong. He did his part. We got it bouncing through about forty-five degrees and then we spun around together and hooked our hands under the sill and heaved it all the way onto its side. Then we kept the momentum going and tipped it right onto its roof.

  The coats meant it slid around easily enough without scratching, so we positioned it just right. Then I opened the upside-down driver’s door and told the old guy to get in and play dead for the second time in three days. He threaded his way inside and lay down on his front, half-in and half-out, with his arms thrown up above his head. In the dark, he looked pretty convincing. In the harsh shadows of bright headlights he would look no worse. The coats weren’t visible, unless you really looked for them. I moved away and retrieved my bundle and climbed down the rocks beyond the shoulder and crouched low.

  Then we waited.

  It seemed like a long wait. Five minutes, six, seven. I collected rocks, three of them, each a little larger than my palm. I watched the horizon to the west. The sky was still full of low clouds and I figured headlight beams would reflect off them as they bounced and dipped. But the horizon stayed black. And quiet. I could hear nothing at all except the distant surf and the old guy breathing.

  “They got to be coming,” he called.

  “They’ll come,” I said.

  We waited. The night stayed dark and quiet.

  “What’s your name?” I called.

  “Why?” he called back.

  “I just want to know,” I said. “Doesn’t seem right that I’ve killed you twice and I don’t even know your name.”

  “Terry Villanueva,” he called.

  “Is that Spanish?”

  “Sure is.”

  “You don’t look Spanish.”

  “I know,” he said. “My mom was Irish, my dad was Spanish. But my brother and I took after our mom. My brother changed his name to Newton. Like the old scientist, or the suburb. Because that’s what Villanueva means, new town. But I stuck with the Spanish. Out of respect for the old guy.”

  “Where was this?”

  “South Boston,” he said. “Wasn’t easy, years ago, a mixed marriage and all.”

  We went quiet again. I watched and listened. Nothing. Villanueva shifted his position. He didn’t look comfortable.

  “You’re a trooper, Terry,” I called.

  “Old school,” he called back.

  Then I heard a car.

  And Villanueva’s cell phone rang.

  The car was maybe a mile away. I could hear the faint feathery sound of a faraway V-6 motor revving fast. I could see the distant glow of headlights trapped between the road and the clouds. Villanueva’s phone was set to ring with an insane speeded-up version of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D. He stopped playing dead and scrambled halfway up to knees and dragged it out of his pocket. Thumbed a button and killed the music and answered it. It was a tiny thing, lost in his hand. He held it to his ear. He listened for a second. I heard him say, “OK.” Then, “We’re doing it right now.” Then, “OK.” Then he said “OK” again and clicked the phone off and lay back down. His cheek was on the blacktop. The phone was half-in and half-out of his hand.

  “Service was just restored,” he called to me.

  And a new clock started ticking. I glanced to my right into the east. Beck would keep trying the lines. I guessed as soon as he got a dial tone he would come out to find me and tell me the panic was over. I glanced to my left into the west. I could hear the car, loud and clear. The headlight beams bounced and swung, bright in the darkness.

  “Thirty seconds,” I called.

  The sound got louder. I could hear the tires and the automatic gearbox and the engine all as separate noises. I ducked lower. Ten seconds, eight, five. The car raced around the corner and its lights whipped across my hunched back. Then I heard the thump of hydraulics and the squeal of brake rotors and the howl of locked rubber grinding on the blacktop and the car came to a complete stop, slightly off line, twenty feet from the S
aab.

  I looked up. It was a Taurus, plain blue paint, gray in the cloudy moonlight. A cone of white light ahead of it. Brake lights flaring red behind. Two guys in it. Their faces were lit by their lights bouncing back off the Saab. They held still for a second. Stared forward. They recognized the Saab. They must have seen it a hundred times. I saw the driver move. Heard him shove the gearshift forward into Park. The brake lights died. The engine idled. I could smell exhaust fumes and the heat from under the hood.

  The two guys opened their doors in unison. Got out and stood up, behind the doors. They had the Glocks in their hands. They waited. They came out from behind the doors. Walked forward, slowly, with the guns held low. The headlight beams lit them brightly from the waist down. Their upper bodies were harder to see. But I could make out their features. Their shapes. They were the bodyguards. No doubt about it. They were young and heavy, tense and wary. They were dressed in dark suits, creased and crumpled and stained. They had no ties. Their shirts had turned from white to gray.

  They squatted next to Villanueva. He was in their shadow. They moved a little and turned his face into the light. I knew they had seen him before. Just a brief glimpse as they passed him, outside the college gate, eighty-four hours ago. I didn’t expect them to remember him. And I don’t think they did. But they had been fooled once, and they didn’t want to get fooled again. They were very cautious. They didn’t start in with immediate first aid. They just squatted there and did nothing. Then the one nearest me stood up.

  By then I was five feet from him. I had my right hand cupped around a rock. It was a little bigger than a softball. I swung my arm, wide and flat and fast, like I was going to slap him in the face. The momentum would have taken my arm off at the shoulder if I had missed. But I didn’t miss. The rock hit him square on the temple and he went straight down like a weight had fallen on him from above. The other guy was faster. He scrambled away and twisted to his feet. Villanueva flailed at his legs and missed them. The guy danced away and whipped around. His Glock came up toward me. All I wanted to do was stop him firing it so I hurled the rock straight at his head. He spun away again and took it square in the back of his neck, right where his cranium curved in to meet his spine. It was like a ferocious punch. It pitched him straight forward. He dropped the Glock and went down on his face like a tree and lay still.