Ли Чайлд - The Sentinel

‘Excuse me, sir.’ The guy sounded even more nervous than he looked. ‘Do you know the way to I40? I need to go west.’ He gestured at a screen on his dashboard. ‘The GPS in this thing hates me. It keeps trying to send me down streets that don’t exist.’

‘Sure,’ Reacher said. ‘But it’s hard to explain. It would be easier to show you.’

The guy hesitated and looked Reacher up and down as if only just taking in his height. The breadth of his chest. His unwashed hair. His unshaved face. The web of scars around the knuckles of his enormous hands.

‘Unless you’d prefer to keep driving aimlessly around?’ Reacher attempted a concerned expression.

The guy swallowed. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Anywhere. I40 is as good a place to start as any.’

‘Well, OK.’ The guy paused. ‘I’ll take you to the highway. But I’m not going far after that. No place you’d want to go, I’m sure.’

‘How much further?’

‘Seventy-five miles, maybe. Some small town near a place named Pleasantville. Sounds inspiring, huh?’

‘Do they have a coffee shop in this town?’

The guy shrugged. ‘Probably. I can’t say for sure. I’ve never been there before.’

‘Probably’s good enough for me,’ Reacher said. ‘Let’s go.’

Rutherford picked up the cup and realized he had another unfamiliar dilemma to face. Where should he sit? Deciding wasn’t a problem, normally. He didn’t stay. And he didn’t have a dozen angry eyes probing him while he searched for an answer. He fought the urge to skulk at the back of the store. That would be the least uncomfortable option, for sure, but it would hardly serve his purpose. He didn’t want a window seat either – he wasn’t ready to put himself on display quite so prominently – so he opted for a small, square table in the centre. It had two chairs covered in red vinyl and its top had writing scrawled across every square inch of its surface. By previous customers, he guessed. There were song lyrics. Poems. Uplifting sayings. He scanned the words, found none he felt any connection to, then forced himself to look up. He attempted to make eye contact with the people at the other tables. And failed. Except with a toddler, whose parents got up and left when they realized what was going on. Rusty sipped at his coffee. He wanted to make it last at least an hour. He worked his way down to the dregs. And still achieved no interaction with anyone but the barista, who missed no opportunity to shoot him hostile glares. He refilled his cup and changed tables. Neither thing brought a change of luck. He stuck it out for another forty minutes, and then the barista approached and told him to either order some food or leave.

‘I won’t order any food,’ Rusty told her. ‘I’ll leave. But I’ll come back tomorrow. And the next day. And every day after that until everyone believes I’m innocent.’

The barista gave him a blank look and retreated to the counter.

Rusty stood up. ‘Listen to me,’ he said.

No one paid any attention.

‘Listen to me!’ Rusty raised his voice. ‘What happened to the town totally sucks. I get that. But it was not my fault. None of it. The truth is I tried to stop it from happening. And I was the only one who did.’

No one paid any attention.

The barista leaned across the counter with a to-go cup in her hand. ‘Take this and leave, Mr Rutherford. No one believes you. And no one ever will.’

The same time Rusty Rutherford was leaving the coffee shop, Jack Reacher was arriving in his town. Getting out of Nashville hadn’t been a problem. Reacher had navigated using his instinct plus the landmarks he remembered from Saturday night’s bus ride and had found the highway without getting them lost. Not so lost that the driver noticed, anyway. Once they were out of the city Reacher persuaded him to tune the radio to a local blues channel, then reclined his seat and closed his eyes. The music was half decent but despite that the guy wouldn’t stop talking. About New York. The insurance company he worked for. How this was his first case after getting a promotion to Negotiator. Flying out that morning for a meeting at their field office. Getting lost on his way to whichever town had whatever kind of problem he was supposed to help solve. Something to do with computers. And foreign governments. And keys and portals and all kinds of other things Reacher had no interest in. He let the words wash over him and settled into a comfortable doze, only opening his eyes when he felt the car slow and they turned on to a state highway heading south. The half mile beyond the cloverleaf was teeming with restaurants and drive-throughs and car dealers and chain hotels. After that the terrain opened out. There were farmers’ fields where the land was flat, stretched and warped into all kinds of irregular shapes by the sweeping contours, and groves of tall mature trees where the land was steep. After ten minutes they swung west again and continued along a steeper, twistier road for the best part of an hour until they entered the outskirts of the town. The guy kept driving until they found what Reacher guessed was the main street, then pulled over.

Reacher climbed out and took stock of his new surroundings. The place was unobjectionable, he thought. A late nineteenth-century core supplemented by an influx of cash in the fifties, judging by the buildings. Some old ones weeded out. Some newer ones to fill the gaps, now showing their own age. The overall layout unchanged. A standard grid. Compact enough to require traffic signals at one intersection only. They were out that day, which was causing consternation among some of the passing drivers. But aside from that things were fine. Good enough for a pit stop, anyway. Reacher figured he could pass a half hour there. There was no ancestral connection. No intriguing name. No military significance. No interesting signs or structures. No link to any of his musical heroes. No reason to stay. No longer than it took to get coffee, anyway. Priorities were priorities.

Reacher was half a block from the intersection with the broken signals at the west end of what he figured was the town’s main drag. There was a coffee shop diagonally opposite. There may have been others elsewhere in the town but Reacher saw no reason to check. He wasn’t fussy. So he took advantage of the traffic chaos and started out across the street.

Reacher was heading for the coffee shop. Rutherford was leaving it. Reacher didn’t pay him much attention at first. He was just a guy, small and unremarkable, holding his to-go cup, going about his business. Whatever that may be. But a moment later Reacher’s interest ratcheted all the way up. He felt a chill at the base of his neck. A signal from some ancient warning system hardwired into the back of his brain. An instinctive recognition. Pattern and movement. Predators circling. Moving in on their prey. Two men and a woman. Spread out. Carefully positioned. Coordinated. Ready to spring their trap.

Three against one. Not the kind of odds to worry Reacher. But Reacher was not their target. That was clear.

The men were positioned at each end of the block. One was pretending to look in a store window at the west end, right before the intersection with the broken signals. The other was at the east end, where the block ended at an alleyway, pretending to do something with his phone. An envelope of maybe 130 feet. The woman was stationed on the other side of the alleyway, at the start of the next block. Another ten feet away. There was a solid row of buildings to the north of the sidewalk. The street to the south. Store entrances to bolt into, if the timing was right. Asphalt to run across, if no traffic was coming.

Rutherford was heading east. Not hurrying. Not dawdling. Just drifting along in his own little bubble. Not aimless, Reacher thought. More like preoccupied. Following a familiar route. Comfortable with his surroundings. Not paying attention. Not looking for store entrances. Not checking the traffic.