Ли Чайлд - The Sentinel

‘Do they work on their own?’ Reacher said. ‘Or in pairs? Or teams?’

‘For the bigger stuff it’s two men to a truck,’ the guy said. ‘Thomassino’s is smaller. He works alone. You don’t need two men to toss in a bunch of iPhones or whatever.’

‘Where’s the depot?’ Sands said.

‘Next to the office,’ the guy said.

‘Where’s the office? And don’t say next to the depot or we’re going to have a problem.’

‘I’ll write the address for you.’

‘Write Thomassino’s cell number as well.’

‘I can’t. I don’t know it.’

‘Good,’ Sands said. ‘Make sure it stays that way. Because if Thomassino doesn’t show up at the depot for any reason, I’ll be coming back. And you’ll be spending whatever time you have left on this earth in a federal penitentiary.’

Reacher, Rutherford and Sands left the guy with his clipboards and trudged back up the slope. They climbed into the minivan. Sands fired up the engine. She cranked the air all the way up and set off slowly, following the curve around and down and off the dirt and through the exit gate and back out on to the blacktop. No one spoke. Reacher sprawled out in the back. He was thinking about the servers. About what might have happened to them. He had two plausible theories. Option A was that they’d been trashed. He pictured the guy, Thomassino, going to collect them. Thomassino worked alone. Which was probably fine when he was picking up small things like cell phones. But there were eight servers. They were housed in a cabinet. It was six feet tall. Heavy. Hard to manoeuvre. Stuck on some kind of irregularity in the floor. And its door was broken. Glass shards would be sticking out. Making it dangerous to handle, as well as difficult. The log showed that Thomassino arrived at the recycling centre after 5:00 p.m. on each occasion. Probably his last job on both days. Would he have bothered to wrestle with the cabinet on his own, so close to the end of his shift? Or would he have slipped the guys on the regular garbage duty a couple of crisp twenties to take care of the problem for him?

Option B assumed Thomassino would have made the effort to remove the cabinet. Or at least its contents. It was only Rutherford’s experimental software that had failed. The servers themselves were in working order. Maybe Thomassino kept an eye out for such things. Maybe he had a regular buyer on standby. Reacher had no idea what second-hand computer equipment was worth. Maybe a lot. Maybe not very much. The reward may not have been high. But the risk was virtually non-existent. How would the theft ever come to light, under normal circumstances? The town guys would be happy because their unwanted items had been removed. The recycling guys would never know to expect them, because nothing was itemized.

So, laziness or greed? Even money in Reacher’s experience. Impossible to pick between them without knowing more about Thomassino. And most likely irrelevant, anyway. The servers could have been crushed or incinerated or sent to a landfill. They could have been wiped and restored to factory settings and sold. Either way the data would be lost. The identity of the Russian spy would remain a secret. And Rutherford would still be in danger. Reacher would have to decide what to do about that. Staying in town to babysit him indefinitely was out of the question. So was leaving him alone and vulnerable. The best option would be to persuade him to get out of town, but Reacher had tried that. He saw little hope of getting Rutherford to change his mind. Not without divulging dangerous information. Maybe Sands could help, he thought. She was ex-Bureau. He could talk to her. Hint at the source of the problem. Obliquely enough to avoid compromising Fisher. Directly enough to stress the urgency. That might work. Unless Thomassino rendered the problem moot. Maybe he would serve up a miracle. Maybe the servers were sitting safely at his house, untouched, contents intact.

Hope for the best .

Given a free hand Reacher would have proceeded directly to the depot. The site log showed Thomassino working past 5:00 p.m. on the days he delivered electronics to the recycling facility but there was no guarantee those were his regular hours. The safest course would be to locate the truck drivers’ personal vehicles as quickly as possible and wait. An hour. Two hours. Five. As long as necessary. It was all the same to Reacher. He could wait all day. But he could see it wasn’t the same for Sands and Rutherford. They were cranky after failing to find their equipment. Probably worried about their prospects of ever recovering it. And definitely uncomfortable after rooting around inside the hot metal cabin. He was going to have to cut them some slack. Unless he went to find Thomassino on his own. Which was a possibility. The risk should be minimal. Fisher’s cell was stood down to surveillance only.

Reacher decided they should stick together. There was another factor to take into account. Suppose their luck changed and Thomassino came clean immediately. Admitted to stealing all the serviceable equipment he came across and took Reacher to his stash. Reacher didn’t know what a server looked like. He needed Rutherford with him to handle the identification. And Sands had proved herself more than valuable, finding the location of the recycling plant and then duping the guy with the shotgun. A little downtime wouldn’t kill them, Reacher figured. As long as they were at the depot by 4:00 p.m.

Sands leaned across and hit some buttons on the minivan’s GPS screen which caused it to display the locations of the five nearest gas stations. The closest was the truck stop Reacher had visited twice before. They continued in silence, and when they arrived Sands pulled up at the pump Reacher had used the previous night. Rutherford stayed in the car. Sands climbed out and pumped the gas. She used her credit card to avoid having to go inside the main building. Reacher went in anyway. He was hungry. He rounded up the ingredients for four hot dogs, assembled them, loaded them with extra cheese and onions, then grabbed a bunch of newspapers. A disposable razor. A can of shaving cream. And a pack of bottled water, figuring the others could probably use some hydration.

Sands dropped Reacher and Rutherford two blocks from the apartment building and went to find a random spot to leave the minivan. She got back to Mitch’s place ten minutes after the others, fired up the coffee machine, then went to take a shower. Rutherford stayed in the kitchen, hunched over his computer. Reacher stretched out on the couch and made a start on the newspapers. Neither of them moved for half an hour. Neither said a word. Then Sands came out of the bathroom and Rutherford went in. She poured two mugs of coffee, carried them to the living room, and took a seat opposite Reacher.

‘Can I ask you something?’ Sands said. ‘You were in the army. You were an MP. You investigated things. And people. Yes?’

‘That was the general idea,’ Reacher said.

‘You must have had resources. Records. Databases. Other soldiers who could make calls. Verify information. Find out if people had been telling the truth?’

‘All of the above.’

‘Do you miss that, now that you’re on your own?’

‘Life in the army was pretty good, overall,’ Reacher said. ‘I worked with some outstanding people. Aside from the time I wasted dealing with bullshit from senior officers. Other than that I left with very few regrets.’

‘No,’ Sands said. ‘I mean the support you had. The ability to get facts checked. If you found yourself in a particular situation, for example, and you were given a plausible account for it. Then you realized there might be an alternative explanation. A much less favourable one, from a certain individual’s point of view. What would you do now?’