Past Tense (Jack Reacher #23)(105)

He stopped in the center of the meadow.

Robert zoomed in from the right side, a wide curve out of the woods, flailing the seed heads, flattening the meadow grass under four fat tires. He bumped up on the edge of the blacktop and maneuvered next to the passenger side. Mark buzzed the far window down. Robert looked in. Mark shot him in the face.

Mark buzzed the window back up. Peter was approaching on the left-hand side. The same wide swooping curve through the meadow. Exactly symmetrical. Aiming to arrive at the driver’s window, not the passenger’s. Which meant the Mercedes itself was between him and Robert’s empty bike, and the slumped figure on the ground.

Mark buzzed his window down.

Peter maneuvered alongside.

Face to face.

The gun was too long. Because of the suppressor. Mark couldn’t maneuver it. It snagged on the door.

Peter stopped his engine.

He said, “How bad is it?”

Mark paused a beat.

“Really couldn’t be worse,” he said. “The motel burned down. Now the house and the barn are on fire. And four customers are dead.”

Peter paused in turn.

Then he said, “That’s a whole new ball game.”

“I agree.”

“I mean it’s the end of everything. You understand that, right? This is going to be no stone unturned.”

“No doubt.”

“We should get out,” Peter said. “Right this minute. Just you and me. We need to do it, Mark. The pressure will be heavy duty. We might not survive it if we stay.”

“Just you and me?”

“Robert and Steven are useless. They’re a burden. You know that.”

“I need to open my door,” Mark said. “I need to stretch my legs.”

Peter checked.

“You have plenty of room,” he said.

Mark opened his door. But he didn’t get out. Instead he stopped the door as soon as the handle moldings were clear of the suppressor, and where Peter was still nicely framed in the now-angled window. He shot him once in chest, once in the throat, and once in the face.

Then he closed his door again, and buzzed his window up, and turned off his hazard flashers, and drove on, down the track, toward the woods.





Chapter 40


Reacher got through the next section of forest pretty quick, because of the night vision. He stayed six feet off the track. He made no attempt to be stealthy or quiet. He relied on the mathematical randomness of tree distribution to save him from arrows. A clear shot from distance was always going to be a hundred to one.

At one point way far away he heard four separated pops. Two groups, a one and a three. Tiny hollow pinpricks of sound. Maybe thirty seconds apart. The back of his brain said, those were suppressed nine-millimeter rounds, fired in the open air, about a mile away. The front said, or maybe they were something cooking off, possibly aerosol cans, in the fire. Which was getting brighter again. It had flared up once, when he figured the roof fell in, and then it had faded away a little. But now the glow was back, and wider, as if more than one thing was burning.

He stopped. Up ahead on the left he saw two quad-bikes parked side by side, front end in, at an angle, half in and half out of the trees. Like outside a country roadhouse. The night vision showed no riders nearby. Presumably they were up ahead. On foot. Closer to the action. Like the last two. These were the next two. They were operating a multilayered defense. One pair after another. Which was why Reacher had avoided the infantry. He didn’t enjoy slogging through endless terrain.

He moved on, quieter than before.

He stopped again.

He saw a guy up ahead. On the other side of the track, about thirty feet in the trees. Small in the distance, but lit up evenhandedly, like everything else. Delineated with exquisite care, in fine gray and green lines. Clothes like a scuba diver, a bow, a Cyclops eye.

No sign of his partner. Some signs of anxiety. Mostly about the glow in the sky, Reacher thought. The guy kept looking toward it, and ducking away. Maybe a crude measure of how bright it was getting. How soon he had to flinch away. The guy was tall and substantial, and his head was up, and his shoulders were square. But he wasn’t comfortable. Reacher had seen his type before. Not just in the army. No doubt the guy was a big-deal alpha male at whatever it was he was good at. But right then he was out of his depth. He was twitching with confusion. Or resentment. As if deep down he couldn’t understand why his staff officers or his executive assistants hadn’t taken care of things for him a damn sight better.

Reacher moved up through the trees, on the other side of the track. He moved slowly and quietly. All the way to where he was exactly level with the guy. Reacher was six feet in the trees. Then came the track. The guy was thirty feet in on the other side. A straight line on a plan. But not a clear shot in a forest. The guy was too deep. He had boxed himself in. Too defensive. He had no natural avenue of attack.

Reacher walked across the track, dead on line, a hundred random trees between him and the guy. He stepped back into the woods on the other side, and he worked his way through, now twenty feet from the guy, still dead on line. The glow in the sky was amplified twenty thousand times, and it winked and danced through the leaves, like camera flashes, like a movie star stepping out of a car. Up ahead the guy was looking down. Maybe the sparkle bothered him.

Now he was ten feet away. Reacher eased his speed back to nothing. He took a good look around. A full 360. He studied the picture, section by section. Highly detailed, fine-grained, monochrome, slightly gray, mostly green, a little cool, a little wispy. A little fluid and ghostly. Not quite reality. In some ways better.