Текст книги "A Wanted Man"

Автор книги: Lee Child

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

‘Not what I expected,’ Reacher said.

‘I told you,’ Delfuenso said. ‘A decent, crowded neighbourhood.’

‘Syrians don’t stand out here?’

‘The pale ones say they’re Italians. The dark ones have been telling people they’re Indians. From the subcontinent. You know, Delhi and Mumbai and places like that. Most people can’t tell the difference. They say they work tech jobs in the city.’ Then she slowed, and came to a stop on the kerb. She said, ‘OK, I think we’re about two blocks away. How do you want to do this?’

Reacher had stormed houses before. More than once, less than twenty times, probably. But usually with a full company of MPs, divided into squads, some of them in back, some of them out front, some of them held in reserve in armoured trucks with heavy firepower, all of them equipped with working radios. And all of them usually in places cordoned off and cleared of non-combatants. And usually with a bunch of medics standing by. He felt under-equipped, and vulnerable.

He said, ‘We could set fire to the place. That usually works pretty good. They all come running out sooner or later. Except that McQueen could be tied up or locked in or otherwise incapacitated. So we’d better put one of us in the cellar door, if there is one, and one of us through the front, and one of us through the back. How are your marksmanship skills?’

‘Pretty good,’ Delfuenso said.

‘Not bad,’ Sorenson said.

‘OK, you’ll have your guns up and out in front of you. Shoot anything that moves. Except if it’s me or McQueen. Use head shots for certainty. Aim at the centre of the face. Save rounds. No double taps. We’ll have the advantage for about four seconds. We can’t let it turn into a siege.’

Delfuenso said, ‘You don’t want to try a decoy approach? I could go to the door and pretend to be lost or something.’

‘No,’ Reacher said. ‘Because then after they shoot you in the head Sorenson and I will have to do all the work on our own.’

‘Have you done this kind of thing before?’

‘Haven’t you?’

‘No, this is strictly a SWAT function.’

‘It’s usually about fifty-fifty,’ Reacher said. ‘In terms of a happy ending, I mean. That’s been my experience.’

‘Maybe we should wait for Quantico.’

‘Let’s at least go take a look.’

They slid out of Bale’s car, stealthy and quiet, guns in their hands. They were the only things moving. Dark blue clothing, nearly invisible in the moonlight. They went single file on the sidewalk, instinctively six or eight feet from each other, the whole length of the first block, and across the street without pausing, at that kind of time in that kind of place more likely to come down with a rare disease than get run over by moving traffic. They walked the length of the second block, but slowed towards its end, and bunched up a little, as if discussion might be necessary. Delfuenso had said she knew the house from above, in two dimensions on the computer screen, and she had said she hoped she would know it in three dimensions on the ground. It was all going to depend on what the block looked like from the side. From a human’s point of view, not a satellite camera’s.

They stopped on the corner and Delfuenso peered up the street to their right. It rose on a slight slope, and then it dropped away again. The first few houses were visible. The rest weren’t.

‘This is it,’ Delfuenso said.

‘Which house?’

‘The second house over the hill on the left.’

‘You sure? We can’t see it yet.’

‘The satellite pictures,’ she said. ‘I looked at the neighbours. Up and down the street. And the corners. I know this is the right street. No fire hydrant. Every other corner has had one. This one doesn’t. W for without a fire hydrant, W for Wadiah. That’s how I planned to remember it.’

Reacher glanced around. No fire hydrant.

‘Good work,’ he said.

Sorenson volunteered to go in through the cellar door. If there was one. If not, she would find a side window and break in from there. Reacher was OK with that. The third angle would help, but it wouldn’t be decisive. Clearly the most dangerous spot would be the front, and clearly the most effective spot would be the back. Only two real choices. Risk and reward.

He said, ‘I’ll be the back door man.’

Delfuenso said, ‘Then I’ll take the front.’

‘But don’t tell them you’re lost. Shoot them in the face instead. Before they even say hello.’

‘We should give Sorenson a head start. If there is a cellar door, I mean. That’s a slower way in.’

‘We will,’ Reacher said. ‘When we get there.’

And then they moved off together, walking fast, up the street to their right.

SIXTY-THREE

THEY STAYED OFF the sidewalk and walked in the road. No point in wasting what little tree cover there was. Reacher stopped them when he figured they were about seven feet below the crest of the rise. From there he and Sorenson would go yard to yard behind the houses, and Delfuenso would pause a long moment and then walk on alone. She would give them that head start because of their sideways detour and their tougher going. Fences, hedges, dogs. Maybe even barbed wire. This was Missouri, after all. The Southern Wire Company of St Louis had once been the world’s biggest manufacturer of bootleg cattle wire. Three cents a pound. Enough to go round.

But Delfuenso’s approach was always going to be the most dangerous. Lookouts were always posted out front. Not always posted out back. If any approach was going to be spotted, it was going to be hers. Then it would depend on their paranoia level. Which might be high, by that point. Was she just an innocent pedestrian, or was everything a threat now?

There was no barbed wire. No dogs. Suburban pets were too pampered to spend the night outside. Suburban yards were too fancy for wire. But there were hedges and fences. Some of the fences were high and some of the hedges had thorns. But they got through OK. Sorenson was very agile over the fences. Better than Reacher. And thorny hedges could be backed through. Cheap denim was a tough material.

It was going to be hard to tell exactly when they would hit the top of the hill, because they were on flat rolled lawns in yards built up with all kinds of terraced landscaping. But there was a weak moon in the sky and Reacher could see the power lines through the gaps between houses, and he saw them peak on one particular pole, in a very shallow inverted V, and he took that to mean they were at the crest of the rise.

The second house over the hill on the left.

Sorenson got it. She used her hands and mimed it out, one, two, and then she pointed at the two as if to say that’s the target. Reacher nodded and they moved on, through the yard they were in, over a picket fence with rabbit wire stapled to it, into the next yard, which belonged to the target’s next-door neighbour. It was crowded with stuff. There was a gas grill, and lawn chairs, and many and various wheeled vehicles. They were the kind small children sit astride and either pedal or scoot. One was in the shape of a tennis shoe. Reacher stopped and looked at the house. Three bedrooms, probably. Two of them full of kids. Thin walls. Nothing but siding and sheet rock. Better to shoot in the other direction. Unless the other neighbour was an orphanage.

They moved on, to the last fence. They looked over at their target.

Their target was a two-storey house.

It was about half as wide and twice as high as any of its neighbours. It had dark red siding. It had what looked like a full-width kitchen across the back. Then would come a front central hallway, probably, with rooms either side. And a staircase. Probably four rooms on the second floor. About the size of any other house, really, but split in half and stacked.

Not good. Not good at all. Two-storey houses were about eight times as difficult as one-storey houses. That had been Reacher’s experience.

Sorenson looked a question at him.

He winked. Left eye.

They climbed the fence. Into the target’s yard. It was minimally maintained. Rough grass, no flowerbeds. No trees. No ornamental plantings. No grills, no chairs, no toys.

But there was a cellar door.

And it was wide open.

It was the traditional kind of cellar door. Made of pressed metal, maybe five feet long by four feet wide, split down the middle into two halves, built at a very shallow angle into the ground, the top end hard up against the foundation of the house and about a foot and a half higher than the bottom end. It gave on to a short flight of rough wooden steps.

There was no light in the basement. Reacher walked left and right and saw no light anywhere in the house, except behind a small pebble-glass window on the ground floor, on the left-hand side of the building. A powder room, presumably. Occupied, possibly. Worst case, all kinds of fanatics sleeping four to every room, with one of them awake and in the toilet.

Dining room, living room, maybe four rooms upstairs.

Worst case, maybe twenty-four people.

He walked back to Sorenson and she held forked fingers under her eyes and then put them together and pointed them down through the cellar door: I’m going to take a look down there. He nodded. She took the wooden steps slowly and carefully, putting her weight near the outer ends, where creaks were less likely. She reached the concrete floor and ducked her head and disappeared under the house.

Reacher waited. Forty seconds. A whole minute.

Sorenson came back. The duck of the head, the reappearance in the well at the foot of the steps. In the moonlight she looked a little out of breath. But she nodded. OK. It’s clear. Reacher pointed at her, and tapped his left wrist, and then touched his ear. Wait until you hear us at the doors.

Sorenson disappeared again.

Reacher backed away until he could see down the side of the house to the street. Delfuenso was waiting there. In the shadows. She was leaning on a sidewalk tree. She was practically merged with it. He waved. She pushed off the tree. She mimed: What’s happening? A cupped hand, brought up to her shoulder, her elbow tucked in. He shrugged. A big exaggerated gesture: I’m not sure. She held her thumb sideways: Yes or no?

He held his thumb up.

Yes.

She nodded. She took a breath. She held her palms out to him, both hands, including the gun, and she spread all her fingers: In ten.

She curled a finger down: In nine.

Another finger: In eight.

Then she scooted sideways out of the picture, towards the front door, and Reacher did the same thing, towards the back.

Seven. Six. Five. Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

Delfuenso had been counting faster than Reacher. He heard a hammering on the front door while his foot was still in the air. The hammering sounded like the butt of a Glock on a steel plate. A steel front door. Reinforced. A security measure. He wondered what kind of resistance the back door was about to offer him.

Not much, as it turned out.

He smashed his boot heel an inch above the knob, accelerating all the way, punching hard through the last final fraction, and the door burst inward and then Reacher was right there in the kitchen, a little fast, but otherwise with no more trouble than stepping over some kind of small hurdle in his way. The hammering continued at the front. The kitchen was cold and empty. Recently used, but currently deserted. Reacher stepped into the hallway, ready to find someone on the way to answer the door, ready to shoot that someone in the back.

The hallway was deserted.

The hammering continued. Loud enough to wake the dead. Reacher prowled the hallway, his gun stiff-armed way out in front of him, his torso jerking violently left and right from the hips, like a crazy disco dance. The house-storming shuffle. There was a dining room on the left. It was full of stuff and full of furniture. But it was empty of people.

There was a parlour on the right.

Full of stuff. Full of furniture.

Empty of people.

There were two more doors off the hallway. One had a bar of light under it. The pebble-glass window. The powder room. Occupied, possibly. Reacher took a long step and raised his boot and smashed it through the lock. The lock proved no stronger than the kitchen’s. The door crashed open and Reacher stepped back with his finger tight on the trigger.

The powder room was empty.

The light was on, but there was no one home.

Then Sorenson stepped in through the final door, leading with her Glock.

‘Don’t shoot,’ Reacher said. ‘It’s me.’

He saw the cellar stairs behind her. Empty. No one there.

Ground floor all clear.

He said, ‘Let Delfuenso in. I’m going to check upstairs.’

He went up. His least favourite situation. He hated the stairs. Everyone did. Everything was against you, including gravity. Your enemy had the high ground and the better angle. And the limitless possibilities of concealment. And the immense satisfaction of seeing you lead with your head.

Not good, but Reacher went up those particular stairs happily enough, because by that point he was certain the house was empty. He had busted into houses before. The vibe was wrong. There was no heartbeat. It felt still and quiet. It felt abandoned.

And it was.

There were four bedrooms with four walk-in closets and two bathrooms, and Reacher checked them all, jerking left and right again, pirouetting like a damn paramilitary ballerina. There should have been music playing, with sudden orchestral climaxes.

All the bedrooms and closets and bathrooms were empty.

There was junk, there were beds, there were clothes, there was furniture.

But there were no people.

Ground floor all clear.

Second floor all clear.

Nobody home.

Which in some small portion of everyone’s mind is a very welcome result. Human nature. Relief. Anticlimax. Peace with honour. But Reacher and Sorenson and Delfuenso met in the central hallway and admitted to nothing but frustration. If McQueen wasn’t there, he had to be somewhere else just as bad, if not worse. He had been evacuated in a hurry.

‘They must have a bigger place somewhere,’ Reacher said. ‘Surely. They’re supposed to be two medium-sized groups working together. This place is too small for them, apart from anything else. This place is just a pied-à-terre, or officers’ quarters, or guest quarters. Something like that. Some kind of extra facility.’

‘Could be a mail drop,’ Sorenson said.

‘McQueen lived here,’ Delfuenso said. ‘We know that for sure. He told us so, and we have seven months of GPS to prove it.’

Reacher walked up and down the hallway, turning lights on as he went. He lit up the dining room and he lit up the parlour. He lit up the kitchen. He said, ‘Start looking. If they’re back and forth between two places regularly, they’ll have left some kind of a trace. However well they cleaned up.’

And they had cleaned up pretty well. That was clear. They had done a decent job. But not in any conventional sense. There was considerable disarray. There were used dishes in the sink. The beds were unmade. Sofa cushions had not been plumped, old newspapers had not been removed, the trash had not been taken out. Mugs had not been washed, ashtrays had not been emptied, clothes had not been folded and put away. The occupants had gotten out fast.

But they had prioritized. They had taken a lot of stuff with them. That was where their clean-up effort had been spent. Mail, paperwork, bills, bureaucracy, officialdom. No trace of any such items had been left behind. No names. No papers large or small. No scraps. No notes, no doodles, no messages. Not that Reacher was expecting to find a treasure map with OUR HQ and an arrow on it, in bright red ink. But most people leave something behind. Some small unconsidered item. A toll receipt, a matchbook, a cinema ticket. In the trash, dropped in a corner, under a sofa cushion. These guys hadn’t. They were pretty good. Careful, meticulous, alert and aware. Very disciplined. That was clear. Disciplined on an ongoing day-to-day basis, too. Not just high days and holidays. Good security. Further progress was going to depend on a random mistake.

Then Sorenson called from the kitchen.

With the random mistake.

SIXTY-FOUR

SORENSON HAD SEVEN big-size McDonald’s paper sacks lined up on the kitchen counter. Take-out food. The bags were used and stained and crumpled. Sorenson had emptied them all. There were soda cups and milk shake cups and burger clamshells and apple pie wrappers. There were cheeseburger papers and register receipts. There was old lettuce going brown, and chopped onion going slimy, and ketchup packets going crusted.

Sorenson said, ‘They like McDonald’s.’

‘Not a crime in itself,’ Reacher said. ‘I like McDonald’s.’

‘But it’s a good plan B,’ Delfuenso said. ‘We could leave them alone and they’ll die anyway in five years from heart attacks.’

‘They like McDonald’s,’ Sorenson said again. ‘My guess is pretty much every day they sent a gofer to the nearest drive-through for a couple of sacks. I bet there’s a drive-through not more than five minutes from here.’

‘This is America, after all,’ Delfuenso said.

‘And maybe you get the taste for it. So when you’re stationed at your other camp, maybe you look for a drive-through near there, too. And maybe once in a while if you have to make the trip all the way from A to B, you stop at the drive-through near A and you load up with a little something for the ride. And then if you have to make the trip all the way back again from B to A, maybe you stop at the drive-through near B and you do the same thing.’

‘And you cross-pollute your garbage,’ Reacher said.

Sorenson nodded.

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘You buy a burger and fries and a soda, and you eat it in the car along the way, except maybe you don’t finish the soda, so you carry the sack into the house at the end of the trip and you finish it right here. In this kitchen. And then you dump the sack in the trash. Which is hygienic, but the bad news is you just linked two geographic areas that should have stayed separate.’

Reacher asked, ‘What do the register receipts tell us?’

‘Six of them are from one place and the seventh is different.’

‘Where is the seventh from?’

‘I don’t know. It’s not an address. It’s a code number.’

Sorenson couldn’t go through her field office. As far as her field office was concerned she was quarantined in the motel in Kansas, at the central region’s express request. So she got on-line on Trapattoni’s phone and found a PR number for McDonald’s. She wasn’t optimistic. Any jerk could call from a cell phone and say she was with the FBI. She was expecting a long and tedious runaround.

So Reacher asked Delfuenso, ‘How is McQueen’s GPS data recorded?’

‘Screen shots,’ she said. ‘Lines and points of light on a map. You can choose the interval. A week, a day, an hour, whatever you want.’

‘Can they do seven months?’

‘I don’t see why not.’

‘How would you get it if you needed to see it?’

‘By e-mail. To my phone, if necessary.’

‘We need to see it.’

‘They think I’m holed up in that motel.’

‘Doesn’t matter. You don’t have to tell them you aren’t. Just tell them you’re going crazy doing nothing and you want to help out. Tell them you have a theory and you want to work on it. Tell them you might as well do something while you’re sitting there. Tell them you’ll get right back to them if it pans out.’

‘What theory?’

‘Doesn’t matter. Be shy about it. Just tell them you need the data.’

Delfuenso dialled her phone, and Sorenson got put on hold for the second time.

By that point they were two hours and nearly thirty minutes into it. Reacher figured Quantico would be well into the process of gearing up. He wasn’t exactly sure how FBI SWAT teams worked. Maybe they had pre-packed trucks ready for the drive out to Andrews Air Force Base. Or maybe they used helicopters. Or maybe they stored their stuff at Andrews permanently, all ready to go. Then would come the long flight west. Well over a thousand miles. In an Air Force C-17, he figured. He doubted that the FBI had heavy jets of its own. Then the landing, at Kansas City’s own municipal airport, way to the northwest, or at Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base, about twenty miles south. If Richards-Gebaur was still in business. He wasn’t sure. Plenty of places had been abandoned, right at the time his own career was coming to an end. A systemic problem. In which case Whiteman Air Force Base would be the only alternative, sixty miles to the east. Then would come more trucks or helicopters, and then painstaking tactical preparations, and then finally action.

Eight hours. It’s a big country. There’s a lot to organize.

The choice of airport would depend on where McQueen was. Sorenson was still talking her way through a corporate maze. Delfuenso was staring at her phone, willing an e-mail to arrive. Time was ticking away. Reacher figured they might end up doing nothing more than guiding the Quantico team in on target. Like forward observers. Like Peter King.

Better than nothing.

Sorenson got her information first. Such as it was. There had been no real opposition from the McDonald’s main office. No real secrecy or obfuscation. Just confusion, and a certain amount of incompetence, and a lot of hold music and phone tag. Eventually she had ended up talking to a minimum-wage server at the franchise in question. A burger flipper. On a wall phone, probably. She could hear tile echo and raw fries being plunged into hot oil. She asked the server for his location.

‘I’m in the kitchen,’ the boy said.

‘No, I mean, where is your restaurant?’

The boy didn’t answer. Like he didn’t know how. Sorenson thought she could hear him chewing his lip. She thought he wanted to say, Well, the restaurant is on the other side of the counter. You know, like, from the kitchen.

She asked him, ‘What is your mailing address?’

He said, ‘Mine?’

‘No, the restaurant’s.’

‘I don’t know. I never mailed anything to the restaurant.’

‘Where is it located?’

‘The restaurant?’

‘Yes, the restaurant.’

‘Just past Lacey’s. You can’t miss it.’

‘Where is Lacey’s?’

‘Just past the Texaco.’

‘On what road?’

‘Right here on Route 65.’

‘What’s the name of the town you’re in?’

‘I don’t think it has a name.’

‘Unincorporated land?’

‘I don’t know what that is.’

‘OK, what’s the nearest town with a name?’

‘Big town?’

‘We could start with that.’

‘That would be Kansas City, I guess.’

Then there was some yelling. A manager, Sorenson thought. Something about clean-up time.

The kid said, ‘Ma’am, I got to go,’ and hung up the phone.

Sorenson put her phone on the kitchen counter and Reacher looked a question at her and she said, ‘Route 65, near something called Lacey’s, just past a Texaco station.’

Reacher said nothing.

Sorenson got back on-line on her phone and called up a map. She made all kinds of pinching and spreading and wiping motions with her fingertips. On and on. Her face was falling all the time. She said, ‘Terrific. Route 65 runs all the way through the state, north to south, from Iowa to Arkansas. It’s nearly three hundred miles long.’

‘Any sign of Lacey’s?’

‘This is a map. Not the business pages. Lacey’s is probably a store of some kind. Or a bait shop. Or a bar.’ But she stayed with it. She went ahead and searched on-line. She typed Lacey’s + Kansas City. Nothing. Then Lacey’s + Missouri.

She said, ‘It’s a small grocery chain.’

She dabbed her finger against the glass to follow a link. The phone was slow. Then the site came up and she started with the wiping and the pinching and the spreading again. She said, ‘They have three locations on Route 65. Each one about twenty miles apart. Like an arc. They’re all about sixty miles from the city.’

Two hours and forty minutes into it.

‘Making progress,’ Reacher said.

Then Delfuenso’s phone pinged, for an incoming e-mail.