Lee Child - Make Me

“Reacher, look at this,” Chang said.

He looked. Appearances had been deceptive. Evidently. The lone greasy fives and the rough bricks of tens and the loose rolls of twenties were real enough. But they weren’t the whole story. Not even most of it. They were an afterthought. They had been thrown in the bag as a thin extra layer on top of the main cargo. Which had been bricks of official bank-banded hundred dollar bills. All fresh and fragrant and crisp and new. And thick. A hundred bills in every brick.

A hundred hundreds was ten thousand bucks.

Per brick.

There were a lot of bricks.

He said, “How much?”

She said, “More than two hundred and thirty thousand dollars.”

He was quiet for a very long time.

Then he said, “Can I see the satellite pictures of that place again?”

Westwood’s computer was already wide awake and working, and the image was still in his internet history, so even though he said the wifi was slow, the picture was on the screen in seconds.

Reacher took a look.

As before, he saw a farm surrounded by a sea of wheat. Fences, beaten earth, hogs, chickens, and vegetable gardens. A house and six outbuildings. Parked cars, and satellite dishes. A generator shed. Faint traces of power lines looping between some of the buildings, and a phone line marching in on poles. The well head, and its shadow. Better than an architect’s drawing, because it was the actual as-built reality, not just the intention.

He did what he had seen the others do, and slid paired fingers around on the touchpad to make the picture move, and un-pinched it to make it bigger. He started where the cars were parked, and pretended one was moving. He followed it out of the farmyard, into the mouth of a dirt road, east toward the railroad track, and then north at the corner of a field. The field ran unbroken more than ten straight miles, and then the dirt road turned west at its far corner, and then north again, all the way up to Mother’s Rest itself, where it came in as a narrow and insignificant tributary at the dead end of the same wide plaza that later ran onward to the elevators. It was a private driveway, essentially, twenty miles long. It went nowhere else.

He drove the virtual trip in reverse, twenty miles back to the farm, and he parked where he had started. He unpinched the picture until the farm filled the screen, side to side and top to bottom. Nearest the railroad was the hog pen. It had a large shelter, probably made of wood, and a fenced area in front about six times as big, all churned up and pockmarked by heavy feet. All mud and slime. There was a barn a little bigger than the hog shelter. Those two structures had no power. The generator shed was easily identifiable. It had an intake snorkel through the wall, and a top-hat exhaust vent in the roof. Diesel, for a plant that big. Some immense installation. Thumb-thick cables spider-webbed out, sagging from eave to eave, to the house, and the other three buildings.

Reacher said, “Let’s assume the biggest structure is the house. With the cars and the satellite dishes. But which structure is the suicide suite?”

The others crouched next to him, shoulder to shoulder, one on each side.

Westwood said, “The suicide suite is probably the next biggest. Bedroom, living area, bathrooms, and so on.”

“With power, for heat and AC and dim ambient lighting. Maybe soft music. All the comforts of home.” Reacher pointed. “That one?”

“Almost certainly.”

“So where’s the small-block Chevy V-8?”

“In one of the other outbuildings. Remote and soundproofed.”

Reacher nodded. “I was in West Texas once, and I saw them being used to drive irrigation pumps. Back when gasoline was cheaper than water. Regular car engines, pulled out of wrecks, I guess. They poured a concrete pad, and bolted the thing down, like it was still under a hood somewhere. They painted them bright yellow, so they didn’t get hit by tractors or plows. But they were noisy, out in the open. So sure, you’d want to build walls around the concrete pad, and a roof. You could stuff the walls with something, and line the ceiling. Some kind of a sound-absorbing material.”

“And you’d need power,” Westwood said. “They don’t run it all the time. Just when needed. It would be embarrassing if it didn’t start. So you’d need a battery charger hooked up, permanently, on a trickle setting. Just to be sure.”

“So which building?”

Westwood pointed. “That one or that one.”

“Where’s the exhaust pipe?”

Silence, for a beat.

Westwood said, “Maybe we can’t see it.”

“We can see the power lines. We can see the phone line, just about. The power lines might be an inch thick. Probably a little less. A car exhaust is at least two inches. Maybe three. Take a look underneath sometime. Metal, because of the heat, and therefore welded in sections. But where is it? There’s no pipe running into the suicide suite. Not from any other building.”

“Maybe they buried it.”

“The damp would rust it out in weeks. It would leak exhaust. They’d be running to the muffler shop all the time. If they wanted to hide it they’d bring it in knee-high through a flower bed and grow climbing shrubs on it. Maybe roses. Which would make it even easier for us to see. But it isn’t there. It doesn’t exist. Their web site is a lie.”

Westwood leaned forward and made the picture bigger, and bigger, until it was crude and blurred and pixelated, as big as he could get it. He moved it around, carefully, slowly, and he followed all four walls of all seven buildings.

No exhaust pipe. No two structures were connected by anything more substantial than an electric cable.

Reacher said, “Two hundred and thirty thousand dollars to spend. This is like working for the Pentagon again. We can afford to make a new plan.”

The new plan was made slowly, with care, in depth and in detail, over the rest of that evening, and some of the night, and all the next morning. Computers helped. The plan had five moving parts, and all of them had to be synchronized exactly, and all of them were tricky, and all of them were vital. But because of technology what in the past would have taken days took merely hours. Both Westwood and Chang had laptops, and even Reacher got in the picture, with Chang’s phone. He was getting wifi. He was clicking and scrolling with the best of them. And when the time came to call people, when Westwood and Chang got busy on their cells, he used the land line on the night stand, and between them they got things done about ten times faster than back in the day.

The rest of the plan was a shopping list. At the top was a legitimate state resident. Not to be bought, as such, but merely rented. Or bribed, to be technical, to go buy the rest of the stuff on the list. Most of which couldn’t be done without an Oklahoma driver’s license. In the end the hotel concierge volunteered. He saw himself as a fixer, and a man of the world. He was no doubt attracted by the money on offer. He had no qualms. The cash was real. He was breaking no laws. He was protected by the Second Amendment.

He delivered in the late afternoon, by which time everything else was nailed down. They had rehearsed, and brainstormed, and gamed it all out. They had probed, and questioned, and sometimes started over. They had played it from the bad guys’ side, and scoped out their options. They had pondered the wild cards. What if it rained? What if a tornado blew in? All that remained was for Reacher to approve the purchases.

There were three main items. That was all. The temptation had been to go crazy, like kids in a candy store. Then logic had chipped away, and they had ended up where Reacher liked to be anyway, with everything they needed, and nothing they didn’t. All three selections were Heckler & Koch products. A P7 pistol for Westwood. Like Hackett’s back-up gun. Point and shoot. Nine millimeter. Smaller than an average handgun. To go in his hiking boot, in an ankle holster, also supplied.