Lee Child - Make Me

He turned his computer to face the bed.

He said, “And this is what I saw.”

What he saw was bright daylight, of course, even though it was dark outside. Satellite photographs were not live. Or up to date, necessarily. Things can change. Or not. Reacher guessed the things on the screen hadn’t changed in years. He was seeing a farm, surrounded by a sea of wheat. The farm had a dwelling and a bunch of outbuildings. As far as could be told from a vertical straight-down harshly-shadowed view, everything looked solid and squared away. The place was more or less self-sufficient. There were hogs and chickens and vegetable gardens. There was what looked like a generator building, for electricity. The house itself looked sturdy. It had a place to park cars at one end, and four satellite dishes at the other. And what looked like a well. And a phone line.

Westwood said, “I remembered the satellite dishes later. What are they for?”

Reacher said, “TV.”

“Two of them are. The other two are looking at different birds.”

“Foreign TV.”

“Or satellite internet, maybe. All the bandwidth they want to pay for. Very fast. Doubled up for safety. With their own electricity. That would be an internet powerhouse right there.”

“Can we tell by the way the dishes are set?”

“We’d need to know what day and time Google clicked the picture. To work out the angle of the shadows.”

“Then we need to look from the inside. We need the search engine. If they’re posting from there, we need to read what they’re saying.”

“All I can do is ask.”

“Tell him Merchenko is dead. Tell him you had him whacked, as a service to software developers everywhere. Tell him he owes you a favor.”

Westwood said nothing.

Reacher turned back to the screen.

He said, “Where is this place exactly?”

Westwood said, “Twenty miles south of Mother’s Rest,” and he leaned around from behind and pinched and swiped, making the farm smaller and the wheat bigger, no doubt intending to continue until Mother’s Rest itself slid into view above, to show the distant geographic relationship. But before that happened the picture was clipped across the bottom corner by a dead-straight line, and Reacher said, “What’s that?”

Westwood said, “The railroad track.”

“Show me.”

So Westwood came around from behind the screen and set it up properly. The farm and the railroad, centered, in their correct proportions. Maybe three-quarters of a mile apart. The middle distance, for most human eyes.

Reacher said, “I remember that farm. From when I arrived. It was the first human habitation the train passed in hours. Twenty miles before it finally got to Mother’s Rest. They were running a machine with lights. A tractor, maybe. At midnight.”

“Is that normal?”

“I have no idea.”

Chang said, “We figured the Cadillac drove twenty miles. Remember that? Twenty miles there, and twenty miles back. Now we know where it was going. There’s nowhere else it could go, twenty miles from Mother’s Rest. So that’s where the folks from the train went. The man and the woman, with their bags. But then where?”

No one answered.

Westwood said, “Do farmers use the Deep Web?”

“Someone does,” Reacher said. “We need the search engine.”

“The guy gets paid for his time.”

“No one likes to work for free. That’s something I learned.”

“He won’t come here. We’ll have to go to San Francisco.”

“Like it’s still 1967.”

“What?”

Reacher said, “Nothing.”

Ten minutes later he was alone with Chang, in the room with the weaker wifi.

They woke early the next morning, with open drapes and things on their minds, the same way they had the previous morning in Chicago, just twenty-four hours before. Reacher was revising his theory again, spellbound with the upward progression. It was beyond expectation. Maybe beyond comprehension. Whereas Chang was preoccupied with getting out of town. She was watching morning television on a local Phoenix affiliate, which had shoved recipes and fashion aside in favor of crime. One presenter was reporting on the fatal shooting of a suspected organized crime figure behind a downtown strip club, which involved much breathless speculation laid over meaningless pictures, mostly of the closed gate in the pink fence, above a ticker that said Moscow Comes to Phoenix, which Reacher figured would annoy Ukrainians everywhere, the two countries being entirely separate now, and proud of it, at least in one direction.

The other presenter had the bigger story. No longer a home invasion turned tragic tonight, because tonight was now yesterday, and tragic was now inspiring. Apparently a well-respected local doctor residing at the address in question had used a home-defense weapon and killed three intruders, thereby saving his family members from a fate worse than death. Evan Lair was seen on camera, in the far distance, at the limit of a shaky zoom, waving questions away. His reluctance to talk was seen as sturdy old-fashioned modesty. His legend was building. He was halfway to becoming the badass doc, buoyed up by grainy nighttime videotape of gurneys coming out of the house, bathed in flashing red light. There were distant live shots of Emily, now out of the shirt and bikini, now in jeans and a sweater, and Lydia, who was looking down at the ground.

Then a third presenter broke in to say she was hearing from the police department that the events might be linked, in that the three dead men from the house were known associates of the dead man at the strip club. And a fourth presenter broke in to say she had early word from the DA’s office, that the shootings at the house would likely be seen as justified, and that as far as the strip club incident was concerned, the murder weapon had been recovered from a nearby garbage receptacle, but there were no fingerprints on it, and therefore there were no suspects at this time, and the inquiry would continue.

Up next, ten things to do with chicken.

Chang said, “You OK?”

Reacher said, “Top of the world. Except my head still hurts.”

“No reaction?”

“To what?”

She pointed at the screen. “All that.”

“My ears are still ringing a bit.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I leave people alone if they leave me alone. Their risk, not mine.”

“You’re not upset?”

“Are you?”

“What was the machine you saw at the farm at midnight?”

“It was a dot in the distance. It had a light bar. Like a bull bar, but above the cab. Four rectangular lights, very bright. Could have been a jacked-up pick-up truck. More likely a tractor. It was working hard. I could see exhaust smoke in the lights.”

“Could it have been a backhoe?”

“Why?”

“That was the day Keever disappeared.”

Reacher said, “It could have been a backhoe.”

“That’s why I’m not upset. It could have been me, if things had been different. Suppose Michael had gone missing in Seattle. McCann would have called me, and then later I might have called Keever, for back-up. Right now you could be hanging out with him, looking for me.”

“Perish the thought.”

“Could have happened.”

“You would have handled it better.”

“Keever was a smart guy.”

“Was?”

“I guess I have to face it.”

“Smart, but not smart enough. He made a mistake. You might have avoided it.”

“What mistake?”

“Maybe the same mistake I’m about to make. He underestimated them. If they buried him on the farm with the backhoe, then Merchenko wasn’t involved. Not at that stage. That was all their own work. No help required. Maybe they’re better than we think.”