Past Tense (Jack Reacher #23)(58)

“That will be the county’s problem, not yours.”

“You shouldn’t stick around.”

“I don’t want to,” Reacher said. “Believe me. I like to keep moving. But on the other hand I don’t like to be chased away. Especially not by people who plan to throw me off a building. Which strikes me as ambitious. They seem awful sure of themselves. Like I’m just a detail.”

“Don’t let ego get in the way of a good decision.”

“You just trashed every general in our nation’s history.”

“You weren’t a general. Don’t make the same mistake.”

“I won’t,” Reacher said. “I doubt if I’ll get the chance. I doubt if our paths will ever cross. I’ll be gone in a day. Two days max. The kid will heal up. All will be forgotten by the holidays. Life will move on. Hopefully I’ll be somewhere warm.”

Amos didn’t answer.

Her door opened again, the same crack, and the same head stuck in, and said, “The black Chrysler is now cruising downtown, with no apparent destination in mind, so far obeying all traffic laws, and the squad car is still behind it.”

The head withdrew and the door closed.

“Decoy,” Reacher said.

“When will the real guy get here?”

He didn’t answer.

—

The second arrival had many more moving parts than the first. It was a whole big production. Peter drove his Mercedes SUV to a small airfield near Manchester. Not even executive aviation. More of a hobby field. No tower, no log, no reporting requirements at all. He parked inside the fence, level with the end of the runway. He waited, with his window down.

Five minutes later he heard the distant clatter of a propeller plane. In the far distance he saw winks of light in the pale dawn sky. A twin engine Cessna, that kind of thing, hopping and jumping, weightless on the wind. It came in low, and landed, and slowed immediately to a fussy, bustling land-bound scurry, like a nervous bird, roaring with noise. Peter flashed his lights, and it rolled on toward him.

It was an air taxi, out of Syracuse, New York, booked by a shell corporation owned by a nest of ten others, on behalf of a passenger who had an Illinois driver’s license in the name of Hogan. He had arrived in Syracuse moments earlier in a charter Gulfstream out of Houston, Texas, booked by a different shell corporation owned by a different nest of ten others, on behalf of a passenger with a California license in the name of Hourihane. Neither license was real, and no one knew where he had come in from, prior to the wheels-up in Houston.

He climbed down from the plane and Peter helped him put his stuff in the Mercedes. Three soft bags and two hard cases. The money was in one of the soft bags, Peter assumed. The contribution. A physical weight, even in hundreds.

The plane shuddered around in place, a deafening half circle, and then it blared away down the runway and into the air. Peter drove the other way, out the gate, left and right along the back roads. The new arrival sat beside him, in the front passenger seat. He looked excited. He was sweating a little. He wanted to say something. Peter could tell. But he didn’t. Not at first. He didn’t speak at all. He stared ahead through the windshield and rocked in his seat, small movements, sometimes back and forth, sometimes side to side.

But eventually he had to know.

He had to ask.

He said, “What are they like?”

“They’re perfect,” Peter said.





Chapter 24


Dawn came up bright and clear, and a patrolman came by to take breakfast orders, from a diner two blocks down the street. Reacher chose a fried egg sandwich. Ten minutes later it arrived, still hot in greasy aluminum foil. It tasted pretty good. Maybe a little rubbery. Nutritious, anyway. Protein, carbohydrate, grease. All the food groups. He got more coffee from the squad room pot. No one was in there. Day watch was an hour away.

There was a feed from the radio room playing softly through a speaker on someone’s empty desk. Reacher went closer and listened. There were slow blasts of static, like breathing, and call signs and code words and addresses that meant nothing, but he caught the drift. A dispatcher was talking to two separate squad cars. The dispatcher was probably down the hall, and the squad cars seemed to be circling the center of town. One of them seemed to be right behind the Chrysler, and the other seemed to be tracking them both, from a block away. Reacher figured the regular night watch would be just one car. They were spending overtime money.

A voice that could have been Davison’s broke in and said, “Now he’s in the drive-through lane for coffee.”

“That’s good,” the dispatcher said. “It means sooner rather than later he’ll need to take a leak. Maybe you can get a look at him.”

No need, Reacher thought. He would be about five-ten tall, and five-nine wide, in a dark cashmere overcoat and a pink button-down shirt, with greasy black hair slicked back, and aviator shades and a gold chain around his neck. Like central casting. Whatever caught the eye.

Then a new voice said, “The cameras at the highway cloverleaf show a Massachusetts plate heading our way. On a dark blue panel van. A Persian carpet cleaning company out of Boston. If it doesn’t turn off, it’s about ten minutes away.”

“Back burner,” the dispatcher said. “We’re going to get plenty of clutter. We’re going to get FedEx and UPS and all kinds of things.”