Lee Child - A Wanted Man

No pulse.

He wiped his hand in the dirt and patted around for her pistol. He couldn’t find it. It could have been anywhere. Black polycarbonate, in the dead of night. He gave up on it. He found her shoulder again, and the small of her back, and he slipped his hand under her sweater and moved it around and took the spare magazine off her belt. Her hip was still warm. A cotton shirt, and her body under it, somewhere between hard and soft . He lay on his belly and stuffed the magazine in his pocket. Then he backed away, elbows and knees, and he turned like a crab and crawled over to Delfuenso’s position. A long way. Thirty or forty yards.

Delfuenso whispered, ‘Is she dead?’

He said, ‘Instantaneous.’

There was a long, long pause.

Then Delfuenso said, ‘Shit, I really liked her.’

‘Me too,’ Reacher said.

‘A person like that is the best of the Bureau.’

Something wild in her voice.

‘Shit happens,’ Reacher said. ‘Get over it.’

‘Is that how you army people react to things?’

‘How do you FBI people react to things?’

She didn’t answer.

She said, ‘So what now?’

‘You should go back to the car,’ Reacher said. ‘Keep low all the way. Call Quantico and update them. Remember, tell them Whiteman Air Force Base is their best shot. Maybe you should call Omaha, too. Her SAC is a guy called Tony Perry. I talked to him once. And I think the night duty agent was a friend of hers. So break it gently. Also her tech guy. He should hear it personally.’

‘Aren’t you coming with me?’

‘No,’ Reacher said. ‘I’m going to find that sniper.’

‘You can’t do that alone.’

‘You can’t come with me. You have a kid.’

‘I can’t let you. I’m ordering you to withdraw.’

‘That’s not going to happen.’

‘Let Quantico take care of it.’

‘McQueen can’t wait that long.’

‘You’ll be killed. There could be hundreds of them in there.’

‘You said two dozen.’

‘Even so. Two dozen men. They’re trained for this kind of thing.’

‘And now we’re about to find out how well they’re trained. Maybe they were great in high school, but let’s see if they can hit a major league fastball.’

‘They could be vicious.’

‘They don’t know the meaning of the word. Not yet.’

‘I can’t let you do it. You won’t survive. I might as well shoot you now.’

‘You can’t stop me. I’m a civilian.’

‘Therefore McQueen and Sorenson are nothing to you. Let us look after our own.’

‘I would,’ Reacher said. ‘But I don’t hear any SWAT planes in the air.’

‘They’re close.’

‘They’re over Ohio. Maybe Indiana. That’s not close.’

‘How does it help if you get shot too?’

‘It doesn’t. But I might not.’

‘There’s a number of possible outcomes, right?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There is.’

‘And that’s definitely one of them.’

‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘It is.’

‘So why?’

‘Because I liked Sorenson. I liked her a lot. She was fair and decent to me.’

‘So come to her memorial service. Write to the newspaper. Start a fund for a statue. You don’t have to go into battle for her.’

‘Battle offers me better odds.’

‘In what way?’

‘It gives me some kind of a chance to survive the night.’

‘How are those better odds? If you come back with me, you’re guaranteed to survive the night.’

‘No,’ Reacher said. ‘If I come back with you, I’m guaranteed to die of shame.’

There was no more conversation. No more argument. No more back and forth. Just an awkward silence. No doubt the FBI had appropriate banter for the occasion. The army sure did. But private jokes are private. So neither Reacher nor Delfuenso said anything. She just looked at his face. He wasn’t sure why. It was all smeared with dirt. With cowshit, probably. Maybe it was just as well his nose wasn’t working.

Delfuenso said, ‘Good luck.’

Then she backed away, elbows and knees, and she crabbed through a turn and set off back the way they had come, towards Lacey’s store. Reacher watched her until she was lost to sight. He waited a minute more, to be sure she wasn’t going to break her word and double back. He knew she wanted to. But she didn’t. Because of Lucy, presumably. You have a kid . It was about the only line she hadn’t argued with, in all of their long conversation.

He waited a minute more, to be doubly sure, and then he turned around the other way and crawled forward into the darkness.

WEST POINT HAD talked for hundreds of hours about tactics and strategy, and Reacher had paid attention, in a theoretical way. But in a practical way he preferred his own methods. Which were based entirely on the other guys. No point in thinking about himself all the time. He knew his own strengths, which were few, and his own weaknesses, which were many. It was the other guys that mattered. What were their strengths?

Well, they were good shooters. Or at least one of them was. That was clear. A head shot at four hundred yards in the dark of night was by no means extraordinary, but it was thoroughly competent.

But apart from that, they wouldn’t have much. And their weaknesses would be significant. Mostly caused by fear. They would be so accustomed to secrecy and paranoia their perceptions would be permanently altered. As in: Reacher was betting that right then they were making two very bad decisions. First, they were overthinking his approach. They were assuming anyone originally with Sorenson would now either quit or track around ninety or more degrees and come at them from a different direction. They were briefly considering a double bluff from such a person, but paranoia prefers triple bluffs to doubles, so they were focusing their main attentions on the three new angles, not the one old angle. The southeast approach was now considered sterile, as far as they were concerned. No doubt they would post a guy or two anyway, but they wouldn’t be their best guys, and they would be spending most of their time craning over their shoulders towards where they thought the real action was.

And therefore second, they were about to send out a party into that safe and sterile corridor, to haul away Sorenson’s body. Because they were worried about who she was. And because they couldn’t leave her lying out there. It wasn’t their land. Some farmer’s granddaddy had given it up to the DoD, way back in the day, and then these many years later the granddaddy’s grandson had gotten it back again, and he was working it, starting early every morning, like farmers do. So for secrecy’s sake the body had to go. And real soon. Paranoia waits for no man. Five or ten minutes, Reacher thought. They would come out one of the larger doors on the north side. Two of them, probably. In a vehicle. They would drive straight over.

They would stop ten feet from where Reacher had dug himself into the dirt.

It was eight minutes, and they did exactly what Reacher was expecting. A pick-up truck came looping around out of the north, on the same trajectory but at a tighter angle than McQueen’s upside-down-J-shape GPS tracks. It was a grey truck. Primer, maybe. Hard to see in the moonlight. But there. Not a crew cab. Just a regular pick-up. It headed straight over, bouncing on the dirt. It was showing no lights. Secrecy, and paranoia. The cab was dark and shadowed. No detail to be seen inside. But there would be two guys minimum. Maximum of three. More likely two.

The truck slowed and two guys hung their heads out the windows, looking for what they had come for. Sorenson’s hair was clotting black by then, but there was still enough white skin to guide them in. Still enough of a gleam in the pale moonlight. They acquired their target and rolled through the last twenty yards and backed up with their tailgate near where she lay. They got out together and stood still for a moment.