Lee Child - A Wanted Man

And the aspirin episode had not been about concern for a stranger’s health. By that point Alan King had already decided he wanted Reacher driving later. And he had not monitored Delfuenso’s search through her bag out of innocent eagerness or excitement. He had been making sure she didn’t find some way of signalling for help.

Reality.

Reacher was no one’s first choice of night-time companion.

King and McQueen had offered the ride for one reason only.

They were defending themselves against a three-person APB.

But the actual APB had been for two people.

Why?

Only one possible answer: the FBI had known there were two guys on the run, but they hadn’t known the two guys had jacked a car and taken a hostage.

In which case: did the FBI know now?

And therefore: the roadblocks had not been for the carjacking. Not in and of itself. Not if the FBI didn’t even know about the carjacking.

The roadblocks had been for the primary crime.

Which must therefore have been pretty bad.

Blood on their clothes .

Reacher drove on, eighty miles an hour through the Iowa darkness, breathing slow and steady.

Goodman and Sorenson walked back to the red Mazda. Sorenson’s FBI crime scene team had moved up from the pumping station and were all over it. They had already found blood and fingerprints, and hairs and fibres. The two men had taken no forensic precautions. That was clear.

Sorenson said, ‘They were very disorganized.’

Goodman said, ‘Most criminals are.’

‘But these guys are not like most criminals in any other way. This was not a mugging or a robbery gone wrong. They wore suits. The State Department is involved. But they were completely unprepared. They didn’t plan. They’re improvising all the way. They even had to hijack their getaway vehicle, for God’s sake. Why?’

‘Maybe they didn’t plan because they didn’t know they needed to plan.’

‘You come all the way to Nebraska to kill a guy, you know you need to plan.’

‘Maybe they didn’t come to kill the guy. Or not yet, anyway. Maybe something got out of hand all of a sudden. Most homicides are spontaneous.’

‘I agree,’ Sorenson said. ‘But nothing else about this case feels spontaneous.’

Goodman sent a deputy to check the dumpsters behind the convenience store. Then the head crime scene technician backed butt-first out of the Mazda and walked over to Sorenson with two photographs in his hand. The first was a colour Polaroid of the dead guy’s face, cleaned up, eyes opened, blood wiped away, arranged to look as close to a live guy as a dead guy can get. He had dark eyes, shaped like almonds, tipped up a little at the outside corners. He had a small circular mole low down on his right cheek, south and west of his mouth. On a woman it would have been called a beauty spot. On a man it just looked like a mole.

The second photograph was a monochrome blow-up of the same face. From a video still. From a surveillance camera, almost certainly. It was of poor quality, very grainy, smeared a little by movement and a cheap CCD camera and fluorescent light and a low-bit digital recording. But the eyes were clearly recognizable. And the mole was there, in the same place, perfectly positioned, as unique as a barcode or a fingerprint, and as definitive as a DNA sample.

‘From where?’ Sorenson asked.

‘The rental counter at the Denver airport,’ the technician said. ‘The victim rented the Mazda himself, just after nine o’clock this morning. Now yesterday morning, technically. The mileage on the car indicates he drove straight here with no significant detours.’

‘That’s a long way.’

‘A little over seven hundred miles. Ten or eleven hours, probably. One stop for gas. The tank is low now.’

‘Did he drive all that way alone?’

‘I don’t know,’ the technician said. ‘I wasn’t there.’

A cautious guy, old school, data driven, and possibly a little bad-tempered. Night duty, in the winter, in the middle of nowhere.

Sorenson asked, ‘What’s your best guess?’

‘I’m a scientist,’ the guy said. ‘I don’t guess.’

‘Then speculate.’

The guy made a face.

‘There’s no trace evidence in the back of the car,’ he said. ‘But both front seats show signs of occupation. So he might have had a single passenger from Denver. Or he might have driven in alone, in which case the passenger seat trace would come from the two perpetrators using the car to get from the crime scene to this location.’

‘Yes or no?’

‘I would say he probably drove in alone. There’s more trace on the driver’s seat than the passenger’s seat.’

‘Like the difference between a seven-hundred-mile drive and a three-mile drive?’

‘I can’t specify a ratio. It doesn’t happen that way. Most trace gets rubbed in over the first minute or two.’

‘Yes or no? Real world?’

‘Probably yes. The driver’s seat shows heavy use, the passenger’s seat doesn’t.’

‘So how did the two guys get here? Wearing suits and no winter coats?’

‘Ma’am, I have no idea,’ the technician said, and walked back to the car.

‘I have no idea either,’ Goodman said. ‘My guys have seen no abandoned cars. That was one of the things I told them to look for.’

Sorenson said, ‘Obviously they didn’t abandon a car. If they had their own car, they wouldn’t have had to hijack a cocktail waitress. And we need to know where the fourth guy came from, too. And we need to figure out where he was while his pals were busy in the bunker.’

‘He sounds distinctive.’

Sorenson nodded. ‘A gorilla with its face smashed in. Anyone should remember a guy like that.’

Then her phone rang, and she answered it, and Goodman saw her back go straight and her face change. She listened for thirty seconds, and she said, ‘OK,’ and then she said it again, and then she said, ‘No, I’ll make sure it happens,’ and then she clicked off.

A straight back, but she had said OK , not Yes, sir .

Not a superior from her FBI field office, therefore, or from D.C.

Goodman asked, ‘Who was that?’

Sorenson said, ‘That was a duty officer in a room in Langley, Virginia.’

‘Langley?’

Sorenson nodded.

She said, ‘Now the CIA has got its nose in this thing too. I’m supposed to provide progress reports all through the night.’

IT WAS TECHNICALLY challenging to take out a guy in the front passenger seat while driving at eighty miles an hour. It required simultaneous movement and stillness. The driver’s foot had to stay steady on the pedal, which meant his legs had to stay still. His torso had to stay still. Above all his left shoulder had to stay still. Only his right arm could move, which would dictate a backhand scythe to the passenger’s head.

But it would be a relatively weak blow. It would be easy enough to fake a lazy cross-body scratch of the left shoulder, and then launch the right fist through a long half-circle, like a backward right hook, but the top edge of the Chevy’s dash roll was fairly high, and the bottom edge of its mirror was fairly low, so the swing would have to be carefully aimed through the available gap, and then it would have to be kicked upward for the last part of its travel.

And Reacher’s arms were long, which meant he would have to keep his elbow tucked in to stop his knuckles fouling against the windshield glass. Which would dictate an upward kick and a snap of the elbow in the final inches, which together would be very hard to calibrate in order to avoid an action-and-reaction jerk to the left shoulder. And any movement of the left shoulder would be a very bad idea at that point. A minor slalom at eighty miles an hour on a straight wide road would be easily recoverable in theory, but there was no point in announcing hostile intent and then spending the next five seconds with both hands on the wheel fighting a skid. That would give the initiative straight back to the passenger, no question about it.