Lee Child - Night School

“But the containers could be empty or something.”

“Got to be one or the other. Either the count hasn’t happened yet, or he fooled them somehow. Those are the only two possibilities.”

“No, I think there’s a third,” Reacher said. “Maybe whatever he stole was never on an inventory. Maybe no one knew it was there, so no one knows it’s gone.”

“Like what?”

“Like my pants.”

“What about them?”

“You like them?”

“They’re pants.”

“They’re U.S. Marine Corps khakis manufactured in 1962 and shipped in 1965. At some point they were delivered by mistake to a U.S. Army warehouse in Maryland. They stayed there thirty years. Never counted, never audited, never on any guy’s list.”

“You think someone just bought a hundred million dollars’ worth of pants?”

“Not specifically pants.”

“Shirts?”

“Something that got lost in the back of a warehouse. As a third possibility.”

“Like what?” Neagley said again.

“We were going to fight the Red Army here. We had all kinds of stuff. And people screw up. If they can randomly send a bale of jarhead pants to an army base, they can randomly send anything anywhere.”

“OK,” Neagley said. “It’s a third possibility.”

Then the phone rang.

Griezman.

Who said, “Something weird happened.”

Reacher put the call on speaker, and all seven people gathered around, and Griezman said, “A local police station just got a telephone call from the manager of a car rental franchise. Near your hotel, as a matter of fact. A man who spoke in English and sounded American just rented a large panel van. Despite the fact he spoke only in English, his ID was German. The clerk at the desk did the deal. But the manager was in the back office and overheard the conversation. He recognized the customer’s voice. The guy had rented there before, not long ago. Afterward for some reason the manager checked the deal in the computer and saw the guy had used a completely different name than the last time. He had used a whole different set of ID.”

“When was this?” Reacher said.

“Twenty minutes ago.”

“Description?”

“Vague, but it could be Wiley. That’s why I’m calling you. I already sent a car with a copy of the sketch. We’ll know in a minute or two.”

“Was the name German the last time?”

“Yes, but different. Last time it was Ernst, and this time it’s Gebhardt.”

“OK, thanks,” Reacher said. “Get back to us when the rental people have seen the sketch.”

He killed the call.

Sinclair said, “This is the endgame. Starting now. The van is for the delivery.”

“And then he’s getting the hell out,” Waterman said. “He’s burning through his spare ID. He’s keeping his Sunday best for the airport.”

“Twenty minutes,” Landry said. “He could be ten miles out of town by now. Griezman has no more jurisdiction. We need to go federal.”

The phone rang.

Griezman.

Who said, “Now we have a positive ID on the sketch. It was Wiley who rented the truck. Confidence level is a hundred percent. I already put out an APB on the plate number. The traffic division will handle it. They can liaise out of town. They do it all the time. We’re assuming a fifteen-kilometer radius by now. About ten miles. It’s coming up on twenty-five minutes. Almost certainly he’s moving south or east. Unless he’s going to Denmark or Holland. We have cars on the main roads and the autobahns. Rest assured we’ll have a lot of eyeballs on it. It’s a large vehicle. And slow.”

“What address did he use?” Reacher asked.

“It was phony. Nothing but a hole in the ground. For another new apartment building on the other side of town.”

“Anything else?” Reacher said.

“Just that the clerk at the rental franchise said Wiley was concerned about the height of the load floor, and that he needed a roll-up rear door, not hinged, because he said he intended to back the truck up to another truck and transfer a load across.”

“Thanks,” Reacher said.

He killed the call.

Sinclair said, “At least now we know what kind of thing it is. It’s not a document. It’s not intelligence. It needs a large panel van with a roll-up door.”

“To back up to a similar vehicle,” Neagley said. “Why? If the load is already in a truck, why get another truck?”

“Maybe the first truck was stolen,” Reacher said. “Maybe he’s worried about getting pulled over.”

Neagley turned and leafed through the telex concertina. Cold-case property crimes in Germany, near military installations, during Wiley’s deployment. She traced her finger down the faint gray list.

Her finger stopped.

She said, “Seven months ago a delivery truck with a roll-up door was stolen from a mom-and-pop furniture store on the outskirts of Frankfurt. Local and then national police were given the number, but the vehicle was never found.”

Her finger started again. She licked her thumb and turned the pages.

She said, “Nothing else. Plenty of cars, but no more roll-up doors.”

Reacher said, “That was three months before he went AWOL.”

“It was a long game.”

“Did he steal the thing the same night he stole the truck?”

“Almost certainly. Which begins to define a location. If he’s the kind of guy who worries about getting pulled over, he would steal the truck close by, drive it the minimum, steal the thing, drive the minimum again, and hide the truck as soon as possible. In a barn, or something. With the thing still inside. A triangular route, fast and focused. Minimum mileage. Minimum risk. We could be looking at a fairly small area, somewhere near Frankfurt.”

“But then he returned to his unit. For three months. Why?”

“He was laying low. Waiting for a reaction. Hiding in plain sight. Which was a smart move. We’d have been looking at AWOLs and outside bad guys. Not grunts on the post. But the thing was never missed. The alarm was never raised. There was no reaction. So as soon as he felt sure of that, he left, at the next opportunity. He holed up in Hamburg. It took him four months to sell the thing. Now he’s headed back to pick it up.”

“Those are big conclusions,” Sinclair said. “Aren’t they? Anyone could have stolen that furniture truck.”

Reacher said, “We need to know where Wiley was seven months ago. We need his movement orders.”

“They’re coming,” Neagley said.

And right then the telex machine burst into chattering life.

–

Wiley had driven the big new van back toward the center of town, slowly, carefully, inching through the city traffic, waiting at lights, checking his mirrors. He looped around the Ausenalster lake, and crawled through St. Georg, curving west, heading toward where he lived, but long before he got there he turned left and rumbled over a boxy metal bridge, into the old docks, where the piers were too small for modern freighters, which meant the warehouses were also too small, which made them cheap to rent.

He parked in front of a dull green double door, and slid down from the high seat. The double door had padlocked bolts top and bottom, and a padlocked hasp in the middle. He had all three keys. He opened the right-hand door, and propped it, and then he walked back and opened the left-hand door, and propped it.

The space inside was about thirty feet by forty, by more than fifteen feet tall. Like a double garage in a nice suburban house in Sugar Land, but swollen up some. The right-hand slot was empty. The left-hand slot had the old furniture truck. He had driven it from Frankfurt seven months before, the same night he stole it. The same night he loaded its precious cargo. The crazy sprint was not strictly necessary, because he had changed the plates, to be on the safe side. He could have taken his time. But he had wanted to get where he was going. He wanted to hunker down. He only just made it. It was an old truck. A piece of shit, basically. The oil light was on the whole way. The engine was making noises. It was close to dying when he parked it, nose in, thankful to have gotten it there. Thankful to have avoided a tow truck. Some things would have been hard to explain. He shut it down and it never started again. Seized solid. Hence the rental. He parked it next to its predecessor, and he closed the dull green doors, and padlocked the bolts again, and the hasp, and he put the keys in his pocket. He crossed an old iron footbridge to a different pier, and then the new footbridges took over, soaring teak and steel, carrying him from one pier to the next, to the rear of his development, where he walked between two buildings and past another, to his lobby, and his elevator, and his apartment door.