Lee Child - A Wanted Man

‘Not possible,’ Reacher said. ‘Those trailers aren’t going anywhere. Not now, not soon, not ever. They haven’t moved for twenty years. Their tyres are rotted and I bet their axles are rusted solid. It would take the Corps of Engineers a year just to get them out of the tunnel.’

‘Why are they in there at all? That place wasn’t built to house that kind of stuff.’

‘They had to put it somewhere. No one wants it in their own back yard. It was probably just temporary. But they never figured out a permanent solution. So I guess they just forgot about it. Out of sight, out of mind.’

‘But why would Wadiah want it, if it can’t be moved? If it can’t be moved, it can’t be used.’

‘They were never going to use it. It’s strictly window dressing. It’s purely for show.’

‘What show?’

‘I’m not saying another word,’ Reacher said. ‘Quantico will say I’m not allowed to know. They’ll call me a security risk. They’ll try to keep me in that motel in Kansas for the rest of my life. Which would drive me crazy. Which would give everyone a problem.’

‘Privately, then,’ Delfuenso said. ‘Strictly between us.’

Reacher said nothing.

‘You owe me,’ Delfuenso said.

‘Then I get a ride to the cloverleaf?’

‘Deal.’

‘It’s the law of unintended consequences,’ Reacher said.

‘In what way?’

‘It’s a bank,’ Reacher said.

‘Wadiah is a banking organization,’ Reacher said. ‘The United States has done a pretty good job of shutting down terrorist banking, all over the world. The bad guys can’t move money anywhere, and they can’t keep money anywhere. So they had to invent an alternative. A parallel system. I guess a bunch of entrepreneurs spotted an opening. Some Americans, some Syrians. Wadiah is the Arabic word for safekeeping. It also means a type of Islamic bank account. As in, you put money in it, and they keep that money safe for you.’

‘There’s money in that building?’ Delfuenso said. ‘Where?’

‘There’s no money in any bank. Not in yours, not in mine. Not really, apart from a few bucks in a drawer. Most money is purely theoretical. It’s all in computers, backed by trust and confidence. Sometimes they have gold in a vault downstairs, to make themselves look serious. You know, to suggest capital reserves, like in the Fed in New York, or Fort Knox.’

‘The nuclear waste?’ Delfuenso said. ‘It’s a capital reserve? Their version of the gold in Fort Knox? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Exactly,’ Reacher said. ‘It sits there and backs their currency. Which they invented. They don’t deal in dollars or pounds or euros or yen. Remember the on-line chatter? They were talking about gallons. That’s what they call their currency unit. They buy and sell in gallons. This bomb costs a hundred gallons, that bomb costs five hundred gallons. Wadiah keeps track of the deals. They take deposits, they process payments, they shuffle balances from one account to another, they make a profit from their fees. Like any bank. Except they don’t use computers, because we can hack computers. It’s all on paper. Which is why McQueen wouldn’t let me burn the place down. Because you guys need names and addresses. It’s like a regular terrorist encyclopedia in there.’

Delfuenso looked at McQueen. She said, ‘Is he right?’

McQueen said, ‘Apart from one minor point.’

‘Which is?’

‘Those tanks are empty. They’re completely harmless. They were built but never used. They’re surplus. That’s why they’re in there. Surplus equipment in a surplus building.’

‘Did Wadiah know they were empty?’

‘Sure,’ McQueen said. ‘Not that they ever admitted it to their clients.’

Delfuenso smiled, just briefly.

‘I’m living the dream,’ she said. ‘I just shot a couple of crooked bankers.’

Delfuenso started the car again and rolled slowly south. Reacher sprawled in the back. Delfuenso and McQueen talked in the front, professionally, one agent to another, assessing the operation, evaluating the result. They ran through all the details, from the inside perspective, and from the outside. She told him about Sorenson. They agreed her fate was the only item in the debit column. Other than that they agreed the outcome was more than satisfactory. Spectacular, even. A major score. A treasure trove of information, and a complex system dismantled. Then McQueen told her the only remaining loose end was the identity of the big boss. Not Peter King, as previously thought. Delfuenso blinked and stopped the car on a lonely kerb in the middle of nowhere.

She said, ‘I got some news from Quantico. When I called them about Whiteman. We heard from the State Department again. But not from their PR people this time. I think this one is genuine.’

‘What did they say?’

‘They have no staffer named Lester L. Lester, Jr. Never did. They never heard of him.’

‘CIA?’

‘Likewise. Never heard of him. And we can believe them. Because right now all their cards are on the table. They’re depending on us to keep quiet about the guy in the old pumping station.’

‘Who was he?’

‘He had worked in Pakistan and all over the Middle East. Except he wasn’t running agents. They were running him. He had gone native. He was Wadiah’s mole inside Langley.’

Delfuenso moved off the kerb and started south again.

McQueen said, ‘Why did he attack us?’

‘He attacked you personally. He had your name. Kansas City’s security is poor, and the CIA watches what we do. They knew we had a mole inside Wadiah. Their mole reported back. The big boss told him to deal with you. So he lured you to a remote location for a meaningless meeting. Simple as that.’

‘You did well,’ Reacher said, from the back seat. ‘Fast reactions. The smart money would have been on the other guy.’

McQueen said, ‘Thank you.’

‘The forehead thing was a bit retro, though.’

‘It was the way it came out. That’s all. I bent his arm and grabbed the knife, and the blade ended up pretty high, so I thought, why the hell not? Just for old times’ sake.’

They came off Route 65 where it turned east, onto the small rural road, ready to cut the corner back to the Interstate exit. They passed the Civil War battlefield site, where Americans had fired cannons at Americans for nine long hours. McQueen turned in his seat and looked at Reacher and said, ‘One last thing.’

Reacher said, ‘What?’

‘Tell me how you talk for a minute without using the letter A.’

Delfuenso said, ‘You were asleep.’

McQueen said, ‘I haven’t slept for seven months.’

Reacher said, ‘Easy. Just start counting. One, two, three, four, five, six. And so on. You don’t hit a letter A until you get to a hundred and one. You can even do it real fast and still get nowhere near ninety-nine inside a minute.’

Delfuenso eased to a stop next to a ragged grassy shoulder. No one spoke. No doubt the FBI had appropriate banter for the occasion. The army sure did. But private jokes are private. So they all sat quiet for a minute. Then Reacher got out and walked away, without looking back, past the first ramp west towards Independence and Kansas City, and onward over the bridge to the eastbound ramp. He put one foot on the shoulder and one in the traffic lane, and he stuck out his thumb, and he smiled and tried to look friendly.

Lee Childis one of the world’s leading thriller writers. His novels consistently achieve the number-one slot in hardback and paperback on bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic, and are translated into over forty languages. Born in Coventry, he now lives in America.