Blue Moon (Jack Reacher #24)(51)



“Starting when?”

“Now,” Reacher said. “Keep on walking. Don’t slow down.”

“What do you want to whisper about?”

“I guess whatever is on your mind.”

“Are you serious? We could be walking into a dangerous situation here. That’s what’s on my mind.”

“You said you want to do one thing every day that scares you.”

“I’m already way over quota.”

“And you survived every time.”

“We could be walking into a hail of gunfire.”

“They won’t shoot me. They want to ask me questions.”

“You absolutely sure?”

“It’s a psychological dynamic. Like in the theater. It’s not necessarily the kind of thing that has a yes or no answer.”

The mailbox was coming up.

“Get ready to stop,” Reacher whispered.

“And give them a stationary target?”

“Only as long as it takes to make a big imaginary statement. Then we move on again. But very quietly, OK?”

Reacher stopped.

Abby stopped.

She said, “What kind of big imaginary statement?”

“Whatever is on your mind.”

She was quiet a beat.

Then she said, “No. What’s on my mind is I don’t want to make a statement about what’s on my mind. Not yet. That’s my statement.”

“Go,” he said.

They moved on. As quiet as they could. Three paces. Four.

“OK,” Reacher said.

Abby said, “OK what?”

“No one here.”

“And we know this how?”

“You tell me.”

She was quiet another beat, and then she said, “We were quiet because we were listening.”

“And what did we hear?”

“Nothing.”

“Exactly. We paused right by the target, and we heard no one stepping out or tensing up, and then we moved on, and we heard no one stepping back and relaxing, or scuffling around, waiting for word on plan B. Therefore there’s no one here.”

“That’s great.”

“So far,” Reacher said. “But who knows how long these things take? Not my area of expertise. They could be here any minute.”

“So what should we do?”

“I guess we should take the phones someplace else. We should make them start the search all over again.”

Two blocks south they saw headlight beams coming out of a cross street. Like a distant early warning. Seconds later a car made the left and drove up toward them. Slowly. Maybe searching. Or maybe just a regular nighttime driver worried about a ticket or a DUI. Hard to tell. The headlights were low and wide spaced. A big sedan. It kept on coming.

“Stand by,” Reacher said.

Nothing. The car drove past, same steady speed, same decided direction. An old Cadillac. The driver looked neither left nor right. An old lady, peering out from underneath the rim of the steering wheel.

Abby said, “Whatever, we better be quick about this. Because like you said, we don’t know how long these things take.”

They walked back, four fast paces, and Reacher pulled his rolled-up jacket out of the rusty mailbox.



* * *





Abby carried the phones. She insisted. They walked another three blocks on another roundabout route and found a bodega open late. No man in a suit on the door. No suits anywhere, as a matter of fact. The clerk at the register was wearing a white T-shirt. There were no other customers. The space was crowded with humming chiller cabinets and bright with fluorescent light. There was a two-top table in back, unoccupied.

Reacher got two cardboard cups of coffee and carried them back to the table. Abby had the phones laid out side by side. She was looking at them, conflicted, as if half eager to get started on them, and half worried about them, as if they were pulsing secret SOS signals out into the ether. Find me, find me.

Which they were.

She said, “Can you remember which was which?”

“No,” he said. “They all look the same to me.”

She clicked one to life. No password required. For speed, and arrogance, and easy internal review. She dabbed and swiped through a bunch of screens. Reacher saw a vertical array of green message bubbles. Texts. Unreadable foreign words, but mostly regular letters, the same as English. Some were doubled up. Some had strange accents above or below. Umlauts and cedillas.

“Albanian,” Reacher said.

Out on the street a car drove by. Slowly. Its headlight wash scoured a thin blue blade of light across the room. All the way along the back wall, and then all the way along the end wall, and then it was gone. Abby clicked the second phone to life. No password. She found another long sequence of text messages, to and from. Green bubbles, one after the other. All in the Cyrillic alphabet. Named for Saint Cyril, who worked on alphabets in the ninth century.

“Ukrainian,” Reacher said.

“There are hundreds of texts here,” Abby said. “Literally hundreds. Maybe thousands.”

Another car drove by outside, faster.

Reacher said, “Can you make out the dates?”

Abby scrolled and said, “There are at least fifty since yesterday. Your picture is in some of them.”

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