Lee Child - The Midnight Line

She said, “He’s still in his office.”

“He’s doing it by remote control. It’s happening a little ways north of here. I assume the guy who texted is his man on the spot.”

“Can we tap his computer wires?”

“We already are. It’s called the internet. But he has a firewall. We could hack him but it would take us days.”

She said, “The driver must be his. Of the ghost truck that never leaves the factory. Except it does. The guy must know where to drive it.”

Her friend said, “I wonder if they remembered about employment records. They would need to amend the guy’s hours and miles. That might be a way in.”

“We don’t have the records.”

“Then there’s nothing you can do.”

“Maybe there is. Only half of this thing is records and computers. The other half is a physical reality. It’s a real truck, driving on a real road, with physical stuff in it. How would it get here?”

“From where?”

“New Jersey, I think.”

“I-90.”

“And what’s a little ways north of here, where the text came from?”

“I-90.”

“Where could he stop?”

“Lots of places. A lonely gas station ten miles out from an exit. Or some old industrial park somewhere, full of empty sheds with roll-up doors.”

She said, “Scorpio is not going to leave his office tonight, right?”

“He never does,” her friend said. “Except to go home.”

“OK, I’m heading up to the highway to take a look.”

She clicked off and started her motor.

—

They had already driven as far as New York to Boston, but they were still in Wyoming, and so far barely halfway through their trip. The big Toyota kept on rolling. Mackenzie and Sanderson talked together in the back, in quiet murmurs, in the kind of fast, unfinished shorthand Reacher guessed must be second nature to twins. Sanderson stayed in the good zone for most of an hour. Then she started to fade. Pretty fast. She withdrew into herself, as if she was preparing for a hard internal battle. She seemed to cramp up and get uncomfortable. She stared out the window. Maybe she was setting herself a new target. Different than on the highway. Maybe three herds of antelope, or two of mule deer, or a break in the snow fence.

—

Nakamura drove north out of town on the four-lane, past Klinger’s family restaurant, where she ate sometimes, if work brought her out in that direction. She kept on going, through the empty miles before the I-90 ramps, looking left and right, seeing what there was to see. Which wasn’t much. In fact nothing at all, from the truck driver’s point of view. Not exactly a stolen vehicle, but hot nonetheless. Or in fact cold. Zero degrees. It wasn’t there. It didn’t exist. Which put a lot of pressure on the driver. Attention had to be avoided. No speeding tickets, no weird maneuvers, no traffic cameras, no exposure at all. South of the highway felt wrong. He wouldn’t go there.

North of the highway was worse. She carried on under the bridge and came out amid no density whatsoever. No cover, no concealment. Mostly open prairie. Flat land. Distant horizons. She drove ten minutes, and pulled over on the shoulder. There was nothing ahead of her.

South of the highway felt wrong.

North of the highway felt wrong.

Therefore the guy stayed on the highway. Had to. No other choice. He never got off. There was a rest area six miles east. It was a big place. She had been there before. Food, fuel, a state trooper building, a motel in back, some highway department stuff. All kinds of nooks and crannies.

She U-turned ditch to ditch and headed back to the highway. She hit the ramp and hit the gas.

—

They stopped again, at a gas station that had a two-table coffee shop next to the car wash machine. Mackenzie used the bathroom. Sanderson popped another quarter-inch strip. She sat on a bench outside, and nursed a go-cup of coffee, with the smell of unleaded coming from one direction, and auto shampoo from the other. Reacher came out and she scooted over, as if to offer him room, plus a yard of space between.

An invitation.

He sat down.

He said, “You OK?”

“Right now,” she said.

“Tell me about the gates of death.”

She was quiet a long moment.

Then she said, “You build up a tolerance. You need to use more and more, just to get to the same place. Pretty soon you’re taking what is technically a fatal dose. One sniff would kill a straight person stone dead. And then you want more. Now you’re taking literally higher than a fatal dose. Are you brave enough for the next step?”

“Were you?”

“I felt the same way when I was overseas. The only way to get through was never back down. Always step up. Always take it on. You had to be scornful. Like, is that all you got? So sure, I took the next step. And the next.”

She sighed. The new quarter-inch strip was kicking in.

She said, “That’s the beautiful thing about next steps. There’s always another one coming.”

Reacher said, “Logically there must be a last one.”

She didn’t answer.

He said, “What did Porterfield do for a living?”

“Didn’t the roofer tell you?”

“He said he talked a lot on the phone. Sheriff Connelly said he drove a lot of miles in his car.”

“Sy was a disabled veteran. He didn’t work.”

“Apparently he filled his time somehow. Was it a hobby?”

“Why do you care about Sy so much?”

“Just a professional thing. Either he was killed somewhere else and dumped in the woods, or he got eaten by a bear. I never had a situation where getting eaten by a bear was a genuine possibility.”

“There’s a third possibility.”

“I know. And I know you were there. You told me.”

She was quiet another moment.

“I’ll make a deal,” she said. “I’ll tell you the story if we win tonight.”

“That’s a hard bargain,” he said. “Could be tough. Is the story worth it?”

“It’s not exciting,” she said. “But it’s sad.”

“Then we need more of a prize. I would want to hear your story, too.”

“About the roadside bomb? My sister told me your theories. A failed operation with multiple U.S. casualties.”

“Worst case,” he said.

She sighed again, long, hard, deeply, happily.

Almost like purring.

She said, “It was way worse than worst case. It was a catastrophe. But it wasn’t my operation. I was representing the support effort, but the whole thing was a much bigger deal than that. It was devised at a much higher level. The town was in hilly country, compact in size, not walled but well defended. The road looped in on the right and out on the left. Long story short, we needed to take the town, but the pointy-heads said we had to do it without unprovoked civilian casualties. Which at the time was code for no air strikes. So we planned approaches by armored infantry on the road from both directions at once. But the same pointy-heads had some clever analysis that said the enemy would expect that, and be capable of defending it, so we should mount a third approach up the open hillside, halfway in between, so we could come up in the middle of the town and isolate both sets of defenders at once.”

Reacher said, “How bad was the terrain?”

“That was everyone’s first question. It was the kind of place you had to get eyes-on. The pointy-heads worked out a spot where we could see the whole rise at once. They said in terms of seeing one contour in particular it was where we had to be. They were very precise. But they said not to worry, because it was outside RPG range. So we went there. The dead dog was on the exact same spot. Three of us died, and eleven were hurt.”

“Any of yours?”

“Happily no. Only upward, which isn’t the same. But that was the problem. That’s why the files were sealed. Some big names went down. It was a failure of intelligence. With a small letter, not a capital. Ours was less than theirs. Once again we underestimated them. These unshaven guys wearing dresses had predicted exactly how we were going to attack, and even exactly where we would stand to plan it out, and exactly when we would show up to do it. A day either way on that, maybe. But four-day dogs are what they like best, and that’s what we got. The umpires would have to call it one–zip for them. We had fourteen down. Cost them nothing except a cell phone and someone else’s dog.”