The Sentinel (Jack Reacher #25)(59)

‘I’ll tell Rutherford to search quickly. And anyway, how many trash heaps can there be in a town this size?’

‘Finding the server’s not the only problem. You said you care about keeping Rutherford safe.’

‘And?’

‘The original plan was for us to snatch Rutherford. He’d give up the item – the server, as we now believe – or its location and then, overcome by shame and depression after losing his job and bearing the blame for the ransomware attack, he would kill himself. I’m the senior operative so it would have been me who staged it. Obviously I’d have made sure Rutherford walked away. Only before that could happen you arrived and put half the team on the disabled list. The rest of us have been switched to surveillance only. A new guy is being brought in to finish the job. A specialist, from Moscow. He’ll outrank me. So if you leave and he gets his hands on Rutherford, there may be nothing I can do about it.’





SEVENTEEN





Reacher drove the six miles from the factory to the town with six words on his mind.

Forty eight hours. And Need to know.

The issue of timing was the more straightforward, in a conceptual sense. They had a two-day window to operate with relatively little interference while Fisher’s cell was restricted to surveillance. After that things would get more difficult. The offensive would resume. Reinforcements would arrive. A specialist. From Moscow. Outranking Fisher. With unknown capabilities. But certainly unsympathetic to Rutherford. Which meant that if they were going to retrieve the server and turn it over to the FBI it would be advantageous to do so before the new guy got his feet on the street.

The issue of secrecy was more difficult to resolve. It brought practical considerations into play. Back when Reacher had run the 110th MP Special Investigation Unit he had tended to be open with his people. Sometimes more open than he should have been. More open than his superior officers would have liked, anyway. If they’d known. But Reacher trusted his team. He had hand-picked each of them. He had worked with them. He could predict how each of them would respond in any given situation. And besides, when you were dealing with the likes of Frances Neagley, trying to keep anything hidden was a fool’s errand. Reacher liked Rutherford. He had no wish to keep him in the dark. Not just for the sake of it. But he didn’t know him in the same way. Rutherford had already expressed a reluctance to let the authorities have the server. His eye was on the prize he thought his Cerberus system could win for him. Reacher was fairly certain he would change his mind if he understood the full implications. The Sentinel. The integrity of the election. The Russians. Discord and division. But there was no way to bring him into the picture without revealing that there was an agent in place in one of the Russian cells. Or at least implying it. And if something went wrong and Rutherford fell into the Russians’ hands there would be no way he could avoid spilling that information. Either now, or later if they came back to run some kind of post-mortem into what went wrong with their operation. When Reacher wouldn’t be around to watch out for him.

When Reacher got back to Mitch’s apartment he realized that he needn’t have worried about instilling any sense of urgency into the other two. The lure of the almighty dollar had taken care of that for him. Sands had started digging first thing that morning but she’d turned up nothing useful, so Rutherford had taken up the baton. He had started trawling through the files on his laptop the moment Reacher left for the factory. He found the minutes of a Heads of Department meeting he must have dozed through the previous month. One of the agenda items had been the town’s refuse contract, and a follow-up note confirmed it had been renewed for another year with a local company. Warhurst’s Waste-Away Express. He Googled their contact information and Sands called their office. She said she was writing a story about responsible refuse management for The Tennessean. She had to try four different people before she found someone who believed her. But she did finally manage to finesse the information they needed. The town’s surplus or obsolete electronic equipment was separated from the regular trash. Then it was sent for recycling at a facility eleven miles west of town. She and Rutherford were on the verge of leaving to investigate the place when Reacher arrived at the door.

Reacher didn’t like the sound of a recycling plant. It conjured visions of equipment being dismantled and harvested for parts. Or melted down. Or crushed. Or pulped. Or otherwise rendered useless. He sensed the prospect of retrieving the server in serviceable condition receding into the distance, which at least made his second decision easier. He figured there was no need to mention what he had learned about its contents, or who needed to see it. Not at this stage. Not until they found out for sure whether the thing still existed.

‘There’s dirt on your shoes,’ Sands said when Reacher joined her and Rutherford in the elevator. ‘And on your pants legs. So you must have showed up at the factory. But it’s not noon yet. So you didn’t wait. What happened? What brought you to your senses?’

‘Nothing happened,’ Reacher said. ‘I got there early, as planned. The opposition showed up, as expected. But only one of them this time. And she didn’t hang around very long.’

‘Why only one of them?’ Sands said. ‘And why didn’t she wait? At least until the appointed time, to see if you even took the bait. It makes no sense.’

‘Maybe she got a message calling her away,’ Rutherford said. ‘Like yesterday. Maybe the doorman thought he saw me leaving and texted in a wrong report.’