Past Tense (Jack Reacher #23)(70)

“Neither should you. Not there, of all places. They’ll be waiting.”

“I would hope,” Reacher said again. “I more or less promised I would come. I like to be taken as a man of his word.”

“The highway would be better.”

“I’m guessing you didn’t always think so. A couple times, at least. Maybe more. At various points in your life. Starting maybe forty years ago.”

Burke didn’t answer. He started the car and pulled out in the traffic. He made a turn that Reacher thought was right for Ryantown. He settled in. He felt the snap of new paper in his back pants pocket. The note from the librarian. The ornithologist. His name and number. From the university, down in Durham.

He fished around and pulled it out.

He said, “Do you have a cell phone?”

“It’s an old one,” Burke said.

“Does it work?”

“Most of the time.”

“May I borrow it?”

Burke found it in his pocket, and handed it over, blind, his eyes on the road. Reacher took it. It was an old one for sure. Not like a tiny flat screen TV. It had real buttons. It was shaped like a miniature coffin, and it was as thick as a candy bar. He got it working. The signal was good. They were still in town. He dialed the ornithologist’s number. Down in Durham. It rang and rang, and then an assistant answered. The guy was in a meeting. Couldn’t be disturbed. Reacher left a message. Ryantown, the hawk, the rat poison theory, and how the S. of S. and W. Reacher was his father. He said the number he was on might be good for another hour or two. After that, maybe they could catch up some other time.

He clicked off, and gave the phone back to Burke.

Who said, “It might have been tin causing the problem, you know, not rat poison.”

“The birds came back at the height of production. During the war. When the mill was running full blast night and day.”

“Exactly. When the government was the customer. Quality was carefully monitored. Impurities were not allowed. The process was cleaned up considerably. And efficiency was encouraged, too. There was much less waste.”

“I think it was the rat poison.”

“Because your dad wrote it.”

“Because it makes sense.”

“Why would the government take all the rat poison in the first place?”

“I know the end of the movie,” Reacher said. “The military foresaw sooner or later it would require immense storage facilities, literally hundreds of square miles in hundreds of countries, full of food and bales of clothing, all the things that rodents like, so someone ordered ahead, plus hundreds of thousands of other weird items they thought they could or might possibly, conceivably one day need. That’s what the military does. That’s what it’s good at. Some of that stuff is still there today, all around the world.”

They drove on, out of the woods, past the first of the horse fields.

—

The fourth arrival was as complex as the second. Once again it involved private air transportation. Which at a certain level was still as anonymous as hailing a cab. Ironically not at the top, with the glossy Gulfstreams and Learjets and executive airports, but down on the grimy bottom rung, with grass fields and short-hop prop-driven puddle-jumpers, as battered as city taxis, resprayed just as many times, but which flew below a certain altitude, literally, where there were no logs or reports or flight plans or manifests. Everything was visual. No reason to talk to a tower. No requirement to have a radio, even.

Two or three or four such rides could be daisy-chained together, to cover unfeasible distances in total secrecy. Which was the strategy the fourth arrival had employed. He landed for the last time at a flying club near Plymouth, New Hampshire. From where originally, no one knew. Steven had tried to trace his home ISP. But he couldn’t. One moment it seemed to be inside NASA, in Houston, Texas, and then the next moment inside the Kremlin, in Moscow, Russia. And then Buckingham Palace, in London, England. An ingenious piece of software, made for a guy who valued his privacy, and could pay the price for the very best. Which obviously this guy could. Steven drove out to meet him, and the first thing he saw was the bag with his money.

It was a soft leather duffel. Maybe not the best quality. Certainly not monogrammed. It was anonymous. Therefore disposable. Steven figured there would be two main ways to do it. He figured some guys would prefer to count it out, one solid brick of bills after another, handed over, one by one, more real that way. Others would just drop a bag and leave it there. A dull dusty thump, and then they would walk away. Without a word. Without a backward glance. Playing it cool. Hence disposable bags.

The guy had two more pieces of soft luggage, matching, better quality, and then two hard cases. Steven helped him unload. The guy insisted on moving the big pieces himself. He was a rangy character, tall and solid, maybe sixty years old, with snow white hair and a brick-red face. He was in jeans and battered boots. From somewhere out west, Steven thought. Montana, Wyoming, Colorado. For sure. Not Houston or Moscow or London.

They packed the stuff in the Mercedes, and Steven drove south, on a road that stayed mostly in the trees. The guy didn’t talk. Thirty minutes later they turned in at the mouth of the track. Between the frost-heaved posts, minus their signs. They ran over the bell wire. They drove on through the tunnel. Two miles and ten minutes later the guy was putting his bags in his room. Then he stepped back out, to the boardwalk, to the parking lot, to cast an eye over a small group of other guys, who seemed to be gathering nearby, forming up like a welcome committee, shuffling closer, casually, getting ready to say hi. The first guys in. The early birds.