Lee Child - Never Go Back

Would have been.

Reacher knew it was coming, so he was moving a hair-trigger split second after Shrago was, matching Shrago’s twist with a twist of his own, like two dancers almost coordinated, with Reacher’s giant right fist hooking low to exactly where Shrago’s exposed kidney was about to arrive, because of his big turn, with Reacher all the time trying to parse the emotion, trying to judge how much of it was about the ears, and how much of it was about Scully and Montague, because the degree of passion in a cause’s defence was an indicator of its depth, and in the end he figured a lot of it was the ears, but some of it was defence, of something sweet and cosy and lucrative.

Then Shrago reached his point of equilibrium, all wound up like a spring, and he started to unwind the violent twist in the opposite direction, with his elbow coming up on target, but before he got even an inch into it Reacher’s right fist landed, a perfect hit, a paralysing blow to the kidney, a sick, stunning, spreading pain, and Shrago staggered, his coordination lost, his stance opening wide, and Reacher was left to unwind his own twist, all by himself in his own good time, which he did, with his left fist coming up low to high and finding the side of Shrago’s neck, below the corner of his jaw, a fast and heavy double tap, one, two, right, left, the kidney, the neck, which rocked Shrago the other way, leaving him upright but good for an eight count, which he didn’t get, because fighting in the dark on the edge of Lafayette Square was not a civilized sport with rules. Instead Reacher looked him over in the dim light and figured only one part of his body was harder than the bones of Shrago’s face, so he skipped in and head-butted him, right on the bridge of his nose, like a bowling ball swung fast, like there was a head on the floor at the end of the maple lane, right there at the point of release. Reacher danced back and Shrago stayed on his feet for a long second, and then his knees got the message that the lights were out upstairs, and he went down in a vertical heap, like he had jumped off a wall. Reacher rolled him on his front, with the sole of his boot, and then he bent down and got hold of a wrist, and twisted it until the arm was rigid and backward, and then he broke the elbow with the same boot sole. He went through the pockets, and found a wallet and a phone, but no gun, because the guy had come straight from the airport.

Then he stood up and breathed out and looked at Turner and said, ‘Call Espin and tell him to come pick this guy up. Tell him he’ll get what he needs for his warrant.’

They waited in the shadows at the far corner of the park. Shrago’s phone was the same cheap instrument as Rickard’s, a mission-specific pre-paid throwaway, and it was set up the same way, but with four numbers in the contacts list, not three, the first being Lozano, Baldacci, and Rickard, and the fourth entered simply as Home .

And the call register showed Shrago had phoned home two minutes before stepping out of the hotel.

‘From our empty room,’ Turner said. ‘You guessed right. Your plan survived contact with the enemy.’

Reacher nodded. He said, ‘They probably sent him searching elsewhere. In which case they won’t expect a call from him, not until he has news. And they won’t call him before morning, probably. Which we won’t answer anyway. Which will leave them a little confused and anxious. We might get twelve hours before they quit on him.’

‘We better tell Espin to keep it under the radar. Or Montague will see the arrest. He’s certain to be monitoring the 75th.’ So Turner did that, with a second call to Espin, and then she dialled Sergeant Leach’s cell. She started out with the same good-conscience preamble she had used the first time, advising Leach to hang up and report the call to Morgan, but for the second time Leach didn’t, so Turner gave her the number Shrago had been calling, and asked her to hit up anyone she knew who was capable of a little freelance signals intelligence. From Turner’s tone it was clear Leach was offering a cautiously optimistic outlook. Reacher smiled in the dark. U.S. Army sergeants. There was nothing they couldn’t do.

Then a car stopped at the other end of the park, a battered sedan like the thing that had dumped Reacher at the motel on the first night, and two big guys got out, in boots and ACUs, and they hauled Shrago out of the bushes and laid him on the rear seat. Not without a little difficulty. Shrago was no lightweight.

Then the guys got back in their car and drove away. Reacher and Turner paused a decent interval, like a funeral, and then they crossed the street again, and stepped in through the hotel door, and rode up to their room in the elevator.

SIXTY-SEVEN

THEY SHOWERED AGAIN, purely as a piece of cleansing symbolism, and to use some more towels, of which there were about forty in the bathroom, most of them big enough and thick enough to sleep under. Then they waited for Leach to call back, which they figured would happen either soon or never, because either her network had the right kind of people in it, or it didn’t. But the first phone to ring was Reacher’s, with information from Edmonds. She said, ‘Seven years ago Crew Scully had just made Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff, for personnel. He hasn’t changed his billet since. Back then he was based in Alexandria. Now all of HRC is at Fort Knox, in Kentucky. Except for the Deputy Chief’s office, which stayed in the Pentagon. Which is why Scully is still able to live in Georgetown.’

Reacher said, ‘He sounds like a very boring guy.’

‘But Montague doesn’t. Seven years ago Montague was in Afghanistan. He commanded our in-country intelligence effort. All of it. Not just the army’s.’

‘Big job.’

‘You bet.’

‘And?’

‘I can’t prove anything. There’s no surviving paperwork.’

‘But?’

‘He must have signed off on Zadran. That’s the way the protocol works. No way did a suspected grenade smuggler go home to the mountains without a say-so from Intelligence. So that question you asked before, about why didn’t they just shoot him anyway? Basically because Montague told them not to, that’s why. So Zadran owed Montague, big time.’

‘Or Zadran had something on Montague, big time.’

‘Whichever, we can trace the relationship back at least seven years.’

Reacher said, ‘I should have asked you to look at Morgan seven years ago.’

Edmonds said, ‘I was surprised you didn’t. So I used my own initiative. Morgan has been in and out of everywhere, basically. He’s the go-to guy for filling a gap. But we live in a random universe, and he’s been in more logistics battalions than randomness alone would predict. None of them supplying Iraq, and all of them supplying Afghanistan. Which is not entirely random either.’

‘Was it always Scully who moved him?’

‘Every single time.’

‘Thank you, captain.’

‘What side of history are we on right now?’

But Reacher hung up without answering, because another phone was ringing. Not Turner’s, but Shrago’s. Like Rickard’s had, with the crazy birdsong. The same kind of phone. Shrago’s was on the hotel dresser, loud and piercing, grinding away like a mechanical toy. The window on the front said: Incoming Call . Which was superfluous information. But then directly below it said: Home .

The phone rang eight times, and then it stopped.

Reacher said nothing.

Turner said, ‘That was anxiety. Simple as that. We haven’t spent any more money, so we haven’t generated any new leads. So they’ve got nothing to tell him.’

‘I wonder how long they’ll stay anxious. Before they get real.’

‘Denial is a wonderful thing.’ Turner walked over to the window, and peered out between the drapes. She said, ‘When I get back I’m going to have my office steam-cleaned. I don’t want any trace of Morgan left behind.’