Lee Child - A Wanted Man

He stepped slow and quiet on the carpet and carried the bag to the bathroom. He spread a folded bath towel on the vanity counter, one handed, patting it into place directly under the dim glow from the light switch. He emptied the bag on the towel. A precaution against noise, which worked to some extent, but not completely. There was no loud clattering, but there were plenty of sharp thumps.

He waited. And listened. Lucy slept on, breathing low and quiet.

He raked through the things on the towel. There was all kinds of stuff. Make-up, a hairbrush, two plastic combs. A slim glass bottle of scent. Two packs of gum, both half gone. A wallet, containing three dollars and no credit cards and a seven-month-old Nebraska driver’s licence. It was made out to Delfuenso at the address Reacher had visited. She was forty-one years old. There was an emery board for her fingernails, and a steakhouse toothpick still in its paper wrapper, and seventy-one cents in loose coins, and a ballpoint pen, and a house key on a chain with a crystal pendant.

He saw the pack of aspirins. There was no bottle of water. There was nothing large and heavy except a bible. A hardcover King James version, smaller than an encyclopedia, bigger than a novel. Fairly thick. Dark red cardboard on the front, dark red cardboard on the back. Gold printing on the spine, gold printing on the front. Holy Bible . It looked like it didn’t get much use. It looked like it hadn’t been opened very often.

In fact it was impossible to open. The pages were all crinkled and gummed together, by some kind of yellowish fluid, dried long ago. A spillage, possibly. Inside the bag. Pineapple juice, maybe, or orange. Or grapefruit. Something like that. Something sugary. A small carton with a straw, or a drinking cup for the kid, dumped in there and overturned.

So why keep the bible? Was there a taboo against trashing damaged bibles and replacing them? Reacher didn’t know. He was no kind of a theologian.

It was very heavy, for a book.

He used his nails and tried to separate the front cover from the first endpaper page. Not possible. It was gummed solid. Evenly, and uniformly. Reacher pictured the spilled juice, pulsing out around the hole for the straw or through the spout of the cup, flooding the bag, soaking the good book evenly and uniformly.

Not possible.

Spilled juice would leave a random stain, probably large, but it wouldn’t cover the whole book equally. Some part of it would be untouched. What got wet would swell, and the rest would stay the same. Reacher had seen books in that condition. Frozen pipes, bloodstains. Damage was never uniform.

He used one of Delfuenso’s combs and forced it end-on between the pages. He slid it up and down and levered it back and forth until he had made two fingertip-sized recesses in the pulp. Then he put the book spine-down on the vanity counter and bent over and hooked his nails in the recesses and jerked left and right.

Paper tore and the book fell open.

Everything from Exodus to Jude had been hollowed out with a razor. A custom-shaped cavity had been created. Very neat work. The cavity was roughly rectangular, maybe seven inches by six, maybe two inches deep. Not much of the paper had been left at the top and the bottom and the sides of the book. Hence the glue. Walls had been built, thin but solid. The whole thing was like a jewellery box with its lid stuck shut.

But it contained no jewellery.

The cavity was shaped and sized and contoured specifically for its current contents, which were a Glock 19 automatic pistol, and an Apple cellular telephone with matching charger, and a slim ID wallet.

The Glock 19 was a compact version of the familiar Glock 17. Four-inch barrel, smaller and lighter all around. Often considered a better fit for a woman’s hand.

Always considered easier to conceal.

It was loaded with eighteen nine-millimetre Parabellums, seventeen in the magazine and one in the chamber, ready to go. No manual safety on a Glock. Point and shoot.

The phone was switched off. Just a blank screen on the front, and a shiny black casing on the back, with a silver apple, partly bitten. Reacher had no idea how to turn the phone on. There would be a button somewhere, or a combination of buttons, to be pressed in sequence or held down for a certain small number of seconds. The charger was a neat white cube, very small, with blades for an outlet, and a long white wire tipped with a complex rectangular plug.

The ID wallet was made of fine black leather. Reacher flipped it open. It was like a tiny book in itself. The left-hand page was a coloured engraving of a shield. Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation . The right-hand page was a photo ID. Delfuenso’s face was on it. A little pale from the flash, a little green from fluorescent tubes overhead. But it was her. The picture was overlapped with an official seal. Department of Justice again. Holographic. The words Federal Bureau of Investigation ran side to side across the whole width of the card.

Special Agent Karen Delfuenso.

Reacher repacked the cavity and squeezed the covers down over the damage he had caused. He carried the book in his hand, slow and quiet past the sleeping girl, out through the door, towards the two women still huddled ten feet away. Sorenson was talking inanely, just burning time, and Delfuenso was looking a little exasperated and impatient with her. They both heard the scuff of Reacher’s boots on the concrete. They both turned towards him.

Reacher raised the bible and said, ‘Let us pray.’

THEY LEFT LUCY sleeping alone. Delfuenso thought it was safe enough. The whole place was secure, and she said the kid wasn’t the type who woke up in the night scared or disoriented. They went to Sorenson’s room, which was number nine. Closer than Reacher’s. Sorenson hadn’t been in it yet. She hadn’t gotten that far. She had been on her way to open it up when Reacher had called out to her in the dark.

She unlocked her door with her key and all three of them stepped inside. Reacher saw an identical version of his own billet. Two armchairs, a queen bed, two neat piles of clothing, but the feminine selection, the same as Delfuenso was wearing. No doubt the bathroom was equally provisioned with lotions and potions and towels.

Delfuenso sat down in an armchair and Reacher handed her the bible. She cradled it in her lap, with both hands on it, like it was a purse and she was afraid of bag snatchers. Sorenson sat on the bed. Her room, her entitlement. Reacher took the second armchair.

He said, ‘Obviously I have a million questions.’

Delfuenso said, ‘You’ve put us all in a very difficult situation. You should have left my bag alone. What you did was almost certainly illegal.’

Reacher said, ‘Grow up.’

Sorenson looked at Delfuenso and asked, ‘Didn’t they search you here? Or on the way here?’

Delfuenso said, ‘No, they didn’t.’

‘Me neither,’ Reacher said. ‘Not even a little bit.’

‘Then that’s a serious deficiency,’ Sorenson said. ‘Wouldn’t you agree? I thought Kansas City was supposed to be good at this stuff.’

Delfuenso shrugged. ‘I was playing the part of the random helpless victim, so I’m not surprised they gave me a pass. They should have searched Reacher, though. His position was never very clear.’

‘Kansas City doesn’t know who you are?’ Reacher asked.

‘Of course they don’t,’ Delfuenso said. ‘Or I wouldn’t be here in their damn prison camp, would I?’

‘So who are you?’

‘That’s not something I’m willing to discuss.’

‘Did King and McQueen come in south from the Interstate? To the old pumping station?’

‘Why do you want to know?’