Текст книги "Make Me"

Автор книги: Lee Child

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

Chapter 44

They woke early the next morning, with open drapes and things on their minds, the same way they had the previous morning in Chicago, just twenty-four hours before. Reacher was revising his theory again, spellbound with the upward progression. It was beyond expectation. Maybe beyond comprehension. Whereas Chang was preoccupied with getting out of town. She was watching morning television on a local Phoenix affiliate, which had shoved recipes and fashion aside in favor of crime. One presenter was reporting on the fatal shooting of a suspected organized crime figure behind a downtown strip club, which involved much breathless speculation laid over meaningless pictures, mostly of the closed gate in the pink fence, above a ticker that said Moscow Comes to Phoenix, which Reacher figured would annoy Ukrainians everywhere, the two countries being entirely separate now, and proud of it, at least in one direction.

The other presenter had the bigger story. No longer a home invasion turned tragic tonight, because tonight was now yesterday, and tragic was now inspiring. Apparently a well-respected local doctor residing at the address in question had used a home-defense weapon and killed three intruders, thereby saving his family members from a fate worse than death. Evan Lair was seen on camera, in the far distance, at the limit of a shaky zoom, waving questions away. His reluctance to talk was seen as sturdy old-fashioned modesty. His legend was building. He was halfway to becoming the badass doc, buoyed up by grainy nighttime videotape of gurneys coming out of the house, bathed in flashing red light. There were distant live shots of Emily, now out of the shirt and bikini, now in jeans and a sweater, and Lydia, who was looking down at the ground.

Then a third presenter broke in to say she was hearing from the police department that the events might be linked, in that the three dead men from the house were known associates of the dead man at the strip club. And a fourth presenter broke in to say she had early word from the DA’s office, that the shootings at the house would likely be seen as justified, and that as far as the strip club incident was concerned, the murder weapon had been recovered from a nearby garbage receptacle, but there were no fingerprints on it, and therefore there were no suspects at this time, and the inquiry would continue.

Up next, ten things to do with chicken.

Chang said, “You OK?”

Reacher said, “Top of the world. Except my head still hurts.”

“No reaction?”

“To what?”

She pointed at the screen. “All that.”

“My ears are still ringing a bit.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I leave people alone if they leave me alone. Their risk, not mine.”

“You’re not upset?”

“Are you?”

“What was the machine you saw at the farm at midnight?”

“It was a dot in the distance. It had a light bar. Like a bull bar, but above the cab. Four rectangular lights, very bright. Could have been a jacked-up pick-up truck. More likely a tractor. It was working hard. I could see exhaust smoke in the lights.”

“Could it have been a backhoe?”

“Why?”

“That was the day Keever disappeared.”

Reacher said, “It could have been a backhoe.”

“That’s why I’m not upset. It could have been me, if things had been different. Suppose Michael had gone missing in Seattle. McCann would have called me, and then later I might have called Keever, for back-up. Right now you could be hanging out with him, looking for me.”

“Perish the thought.”

“Could have happened.”

“You would have handled it better.”

“Keever was a smart guy.”

“Was?”

“I guess I have to face it.”

“Smart, but not smart enough. He made a mistake. You might have avoided it.”

“What mistake?”

“Maybe the same mistake I’m about to make. He underestimated them. If they buried him on the farm with the backhoe, then Merchenko wasn’t involved. Not at that stage. That was all their own work. No help required. Maybe they’re better than we think.”

“They didn’t look it.”

“Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

That morning eight men met at the counter inside the Mother’s Rest dry goods store. As before, the store owner was already there, still in two shirts, still unkempt and unshaven. As before, the first in to join him was the spare-parts guy from the irrigation store, and then came the Cadillac driver from the FedEx store, and the one-eyed clerk from the motel, and the hog farmer, and the counterman from the diner, and the Moynahan who had gotten kicked in the balls and had his gun taken.

The eighth man arrived five minutes later, with his ironed jeans and his blow-dried hair. The first seven guys said nothing. They waited for him to speak.

He said, “The news is not good. Our faith was misplaced. The menu system did not function as expected. It did not do the job for us. As of now we’re on our own.”

Some shuffling, from the first seven. Not yet worry, but indignation. As in, it was all his own idea when it was looking good. Now it’s we and us and ours? The hog farmer said, “Is that what I saw on CNN this morning? From Phoenix? The Russian guy?”

“He was Ukrainian. And it wasn’t just him. The other three were his, too.”

“What about the first one? Was his name Hackett?”

“He’s in the hospital in Chicago. With a cop at the door.”

“So none of them got the job done?”

“I told you that.”

“Going outside of us was a big step.”

“It cost us nothing. Except money. They’re still out there, but they always were out there. They left, and now they’re coming back. We’ll deal with them here.”

“They’ll bring the cops.”

“I don’t think so. They put Hackett in the hospital. I know that for sure. It was probably them in Phoenix too. Which means they can’t talk to the cops. Any police department in the country would arrest them immediately. As a precaution. Until the smoke cleared. They’ll come here alone.”

More shuffling, from the first seven.

The Cadillac driver asked, “When will they come?”

The man with the jeans and the hair said, “Soon, I expect. But we all know the plan. And we all know it works. We’ll see them coming. We’ll be ready.”

Reacher and Chang joined Westwood downstairs for breakfast, and Westwood said he had called the guy in Palo Alto and set something up for happy hour. In Menlo Park. Although he expected the guy to be late. He was that kind of guy. Then he had booked flights from Sky Harbor to SFO. Three seats in business class, all that remained. And a hotel. Two rooms only, which helped. His department’s budget was cut every year. Reacher thought he had the nervous air of a gambler, deep in the hole, but about to win big.

When it was time they took a cab to the airport, where their fancy tickets got them in a lounge, where Reacher ate breakfast again, because it was free. They boarded the plane at the head of the line, and got a drink before taxi and takeoff. Better than the rows in back. Even the exit rows.

The flight itself was neither long nor short, but somewhere in between. Not a hop or a skip, but not a major portion of the earth’s circumference either. Less than New York to Chicago. The cab ride was easy, because it was basically out of town, not that the Santa Clara Valley was sleepy anymore. It was the center of the world, all the way past Mountain View, and people drove like they knew it. The upcoming happy hour was in a bar near a bookstore in Menlo Park, and they found it at the second attempt. They were early, but not early enough to get to the hotel and back, so they paid off the cab and got out.

The bar caused a moment of psychic concern, because every inch of it was painted red, and its name was Red, and the back of Reacher’s brain spun through fantastical conceits, trying to work out how Westwood was either a cop or a bad guy, tormenting him with the ghost of Pink, like something out of Shakespeare or Sherlock Holmes, but then he calmed down and figured the geek would have chosen the spot, and therefore the connection was coincidental. And not exact, anyway. The place was ironic, not tacky. The paint had a somber mid-century tone. Like military issue. There were dirty white-stenciled hammers and sickles, distressed and abraded to make them look old, and framed headlines from Pravda, and Red Army helmets, all battered and scratched. The sign at the door was written with a backward R, to make it look Russian, which caused a minor echo of panic. Was it a reference to Merchenko? No, surely Westwood knew the difference between Russia and Ukraine. But were there Ukrainian-themed bars, for a pedantic tormentor? Or would he have to settle for Russian anyway?

No, the geek chose it.

Chang said, “You OK?”

Reacher said, “Thinking too hard. Bad habit. Bad as not thinking at all.”

“Let’s wait in the bookstore.”

Reacher tripped at the curb. Just a stumble. He didn’t go down. More of a scuff than a trip. As if there was a lump, or an uneven surface. He looked back. Maybe. Maybe not.

Chang said, “You OK?”

He said, “I’m fine.”

Westwood said he had been in the bookstore before. A signing, for an anthology he was in. Science journalism. An award-winning piece. The store was a cool place, in every way, from its refrigerated temperature to its customers. Westwood wandered one way, and Chang another. Reacher looked at the books on the tables. He read when he could, mostly through the vast national library of lost and forgotten volumes. Battered paperbacks mostly, all curled and furry, found in waiting rooms or on buses, or on the porches of out-of-the-way motels, read and enjoyed and left somewhere else for the next guy. He liked fiction better than fact, because fact often wasn’t. Like most people he knew a couple of things for sure, up close and eyeballed, and when he saw them in books they were wrong. So he liked made-up stories better, because everyone knew where they were from the get-go. He wasn’t strict about genre. Either shit happened, or it didn’t.

Chang came back, and then Westwood, and they wandered back to the bar and got ready to wait. Being early gave them a choice of tables, and they took a four-top near a window. Reacher got coffee, and the others got sodas.

Westwood said, “This won’t be good news, I’m afraid. Even if the guy bites. The Deep Web is not an attractive place, overall. So they tell me. Not that I spend time there myself. But you might not like what you see.”

Reacher said, “It’s a free country. And Michael was McCann’s son, not mine. I don’t care what he was into.”

A clock on the wall ticked up to a Cyrillic twelve, the top of the hour, and vodka went down in price by half. Happy hour. The first new person through the door was a young woman in her twenties, flushed, unmistakably new at something, but good at it.

The second person through the door was the guy from Palo Alto.

Dead on time. Not late at all. He was small, white as a sheet, thin as a specter, always moving, even when he was still. The twenty-nine-year-old veteran. He was dressed all in black. He saw Westwood and headed over. He nodded three ways and sat down. He said, “The Valley likes irony, but you got to agree happy hour in a Soviet shrine is the ultimate contradiction in terms. And speaking of the former USSR, my blog alerts tell me a Ukrainian named Merchenko was a mob hit last night. Which is a happy coincidence. But he will be replaced. The market will fill the void. So I’m still not going public.”

Westwood said, “Neither are we. Not until long afterward, in the newspaper. By which time there will be so much to bury you won’t even be close to the top of the list. You have my word. You won’t be public. All we need is to search. In private. For a missing individual and his possible destination.”

“Search where?”

“Chat rooms, mostly. Maybe commercial web sites.”

“I don’t want to become a public resource.”

“I’m happy not to pay you.”

“Then I would be doing it for friendship, which makes the obligation worse.”

Reacher said, “Can you do it? If you wanted to?”

The guy said, “I’ve been doing it since it was called the undernet. And the invisible web. It got harder, but I got better.”

“The destination might be hard to crack.”

“Cracking is easy. It’s finding that’s hard.”

“So what would get you to give us an hour of your time? Apart from getting paid?”

“Do you have a motive, apart from getting paid? Does anyone, really?”

“As a matter of fact I’m not getting paid.”

“Then why are you doing it?”

“Because some guy thinks he’s pretty damn smart.”

“But you’re smarter? And you have to prove it?”

“I don’t have to prove it. I want to prove it. Now and then. Out of respect. For the people who really are smart. Standards should mean something.”

“You’re trying to steer me to the same conclusion. A battle of egos. Me against them, as coders. Good try. You know me well, even though we’ve only just met. But I’ve gone beyond. I’m happy there. I’m better than them. I know that. I’m secure in that knowledge. I no longer feel the desire to show it. Not even now and then. Not even out of respect. Not that I don’t respect the way you feel. The old me would have agreed with you.”

“What would the new me agree with?”

“Tell me about the missing individual. Is he interesting?”

“Thirty-five-year-old male, crippled by what the doctors call anhedonia, and his aunt calls his happiness meter stuck on zero. Otherwise normal IQ. Functional some of the time.”

“Lived alone?”

Reacher nodded. “In sheltered housing.”

“Disappeared?”

“Yes.”

“Sudden new friend prior to disappearance?”

“Yes.”

The guy said, “Thirty-two seconds.”

“For what?”

“I’ll find him in the Deep Web inside thirty-two seconds. I know where to look.”

“When can you do it?”

“Tell me about the aunt.”

“She married up. A doctor. She has a beautiful daughter. But she still loves her nephew. And seems to understand him.”

“I like her image of the happiness meter.”

“We agreed mine is four to nine.”

“I’ve gone beyond. I hit ten now. All the time.”

“That’s the molly talking.”

“The what?”

“I read it in the paper.”

“I haven’t taken molly for two years.”

“Something else now?”

“Everything else now. Got some stress.”

“Just remember, speed kills. That’s what they told us, back in the day.”

“I won’t go public. You understand what that means?”

Reacher nodded. “There won’t be a trial.”

“Was it you with Merchenko?”

“Admit nothing, even on your deathbed. You might suddenly get better.”

“One night only,” the guy said. “No coming back to check on things. I need space of my own.”

“When can you do it?”

“Now, if you like.”

“Where?”

“At my house. You’re all invited.”

Chapter 45

The guy from Palo Alto had a thing on his phone that summoned cars to the curb within minutes. Riding four to a car was deemed unseemly, so he pressed twice and got two. He rode with Westwood, to catch up on old times, and Reacher and Chang followed, in a Town Car all their own. The guy’s house was a 1950s box remodeled in the 1970s to look like the 1930s. Reacher figured it had a triple layer of ironic authenticity all its own, and was therefore worth more than all the money he had made in his life.

Inside it was clean and all silver and black. Reacher had been expecting a tangled riot of computer gear, like they had seen in McCann’s apartment in Chicago, but in the den there was nothing but a small glass table and a lone no-brand desktop. There was a tower unit, and a screen, and a keyboard, and a trackball, none of which matched. There were only five wires, all cut to the right length, none tangled, all neatly placed.

The guy said, “I built it myself. There are various technical hurdles and some serious data incompatibilities to overcome. It’s like visiting a foreign country. You have to learn their language. And their customs, more importantly. I wrote some browser software. Based on Tor, which is what they all use. Which was written by the United States Naval Research Laboratory, ironically. To provide a safe haven for political dissidents and whistleblowers, all around the world. Which is the law of unintended consequences, right there, biting the world in the ass. Tor stands for The Onion Router. Because that’s what we’re dealing with here. Layers upon layers upon layers, like the layers of an onion, in the Deep Web itself, and inside all of its separate sites.”

He sat down and fired up his machine. There was no fancy stuff on the screen. No pictures of outer space, no icons. Just short lines of green writing on a black field. All business, like an airline check-in desk, or a car rental counter.

The guy said, “What’s the missing individual’s name?”

Chang said, “Michael McCann.”

“Social Security Number?”

“Don’t know.”

“Home address?”

“Don’t know.”

“Not good,” the guy said. “There are preliminary steps to be taken. I need what I call his internet fingerprint. It’s an algorithm I wrote. Some of this, some of that. The precise minimum required to be definitive. Elegant, really. We can start with something as simple as his cable bill. But there are other ways. Do we know his next of kin?”

“That would be his father, Peter McCann. His mother is long dead.”

“Do we have an address for Peter McCann?”

Chang told him. The undistinguished brownstone, on the undistinguished street. Lincoln Park, Chicago. Apartment 32. The guy typed a command and what looked like a portal appeared, into the Social Security Administration’s mainframe. The real government deal. Reacher glanced at Chang, and she nodded, as if to say it’s OK, I have one too. The guy entered Peter McCann’s data and found his Social Security Number instantly, which instantly led to Michael’s, because they were nominated for each other’s survivor benefits. Next of kin. Michael’s Social Security Number led to his address, which was also in Lincoln Park, Chicago.

Then the guy came out of Social Security, and went into some other complex database. He entered Michael McCann’s Social Security Number, and his address, and the screen re-drew into a long list of alphanumeric codes. The internet fingerprint. Michael McCann, and no one else.

The guy typed a new command, and the screen came up with a title page, crudely formatted out of plain green writing on a black background, but with tabs and spaces and centering, so that it looked vaguely like a commercial product. Or a prototype. Which it was, Reacher supposed. In a way. Potentially. It looked inviting enough. Like bright emeralds on velvet. The most prominent word on the page was Bathyscaphe.

“Get it?” the guy said.

“A submarine,” Chang said. “Capable of going all the way to the ocean bed.”

“Originally I called it Nemo. After the guy in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. He commands a submarine named Nautilus. I liked him because nemo is Latin for nobody. Which seemed appropriate. But then they made a movie about a fish. Which ruined it.”

He typed another command, and a search box came up.

He said, “OK, start your engines. Thirty-two seconds is the wager.”

He pasted a whole lot of stuff into the search box. Not Michael McCann’s name, but some of the long alphanumeric codes from the previous database. The fingerprint. Better than a name, presumably.

The guy clicked the go tab, and a clock started running in Reacher’s head.

Five seconds.

The guy said, “One day it will be much faster. The raw search is good, but the page search is piped out to the find-and-replace function from an old word processor.”

Twelve seconds.

The guy said, “But please don’t get the wrong impression. In absolute terms it’s fast enough. But the Deep Web is very big. That’s the issue. And I don’t have Google’s advantages. No one is clamoring for my attention. They want the opposite. But I’m down there. Right now. I’m among them. They can’t see me, but I can see them.”

Twenty-five seconds.

The guy said nothing.

Then the search stopped.

The screen changed to a list of links.

“We found him,” the guy said. “Twenty-six seconds. Well below the promised thirty-two.”

“Pretty good,” Reacher said.

“I gambled. I narrowed the field. I knew where I might find him.”

“Which was where?”

“I hope Mr. Westwood explained about me. The rabbit holes we go down are sometimes chosen for us. Not necessarily on merit.”

Reacher said, “The solving, not the problem.”

“Searching the Deep Web is technically elegant, but being in it can be unpleasant. It has a bit of everything, but ultimately it’s a three-legged stool. A third of it is a vast criminal marketplace, where everything is for sale, from your credit card number to murder. There are auction sites where hit men compete for jobs. Lowest bid wins. There are sites where you can specify how your wife should die, and there are contractors who will give you a custom quote.”

Chang asked, “Where did you find Michael McCann?”

The guy said, “The second leg of the Deep Web stool is pornography of the nastiest sort. Stomach-turning, even for me, and I’m not exactly a mainstream person.”

“Is that what he was into?”

“No, I found him in the third leg.”

“Which is what?”

“It was an easy guess. Because of the anhedonia. Because of the happiness meter stuck on zero. The third leg of the Deep Web is suicide.”

The guy from Palo Alto said, “I browse those boards from time to time. As an anthropologist, I hope, not a voyeur. Not a spectator at the zoo. I imagine Michael McCann was on the low end of typical. Born depressed, and if his mother is long dead, she died when he was young. Not a good combination. I’m sure he wanted it all to end. Every day. We can’t imagine how sure and certain these people are. These are not temporary ups and downs. These people hate their lives, deeply and sincerely, and they want them to stop. They want to catch the bus. That’s the phrase they use. They want to catch the bus out of town. But it’s a big step. Some of the boards are about support. Which is why I asked about the sudden new friend. They call them suicide partners. They do it together. They hold hands and jump, so to speak. The boards hook them up. There’s a lot of discussion about compatibility. Is Michael’s partner missing too?”

Chang said, “We don’t know. We don’t even know if it was a man or a woman. Near Tulsa, Oklahoma, we think.”

Westwood said, “What do they talk about on the other boards?”

“They talk about how. Endlessly. That’s their big question. There’s plenty of data out there. They discuss it like scripture. Best of all is a shotgun to the head. Instantaneous, as far as we know, and ninety-nine percent effective. A handgun in the mouth is ninety-seven percent. Shotgun to the chest, ninety-six, and a handgun to the chest about eighty-nine. Which is about the same as hanging yourself. Setting yourself on fire scores about seventy-six. Setting fire to your house is about seventy-three. No one really wants to go lower than that. Meanwhile jumping in front of a train is back up there at ninety-six, and jumping off the roof is at ninety-three, and driving into a bridge support is about seventy-eight. But make sure you wear your seatbelt. You can get thrown clear. Unrestrained drivers score about seventy straight. You have to be there, when the engine comes in through the dashboard. And last but not least, ever popular, right back at the top, second only to the shotgun, is cyanide. Better than ninety-seven percent effective, in about two minutes. But it’s two minutes of hideous agony. And that’s the problem right there. All the best ways are violent. Some folks can’t handle that. Men as well as women. And some don’t have the circumstances. If you live in the city, you don’t have your uncle’s old varmint gun in the back of the barn. If you can’t drag yourself to the bathroom, how can you drag yourself to the railroad track?”

“So what do they do?”

“They talk, endlessly. About the holy grail. Swift and painless. Like falling asleep and never waking up. That’s what they’re looking for. They had it once. Or their parents did. A bottle of sleeping pills, and a glass of scotch. Or a hosepipe through the window of the family Buick. You fall asleep and you never wake up. Guaranteed. But not anymore. Now the family Buick has a catalytic converter. No more carbon monoxide. Not enough, anyway. You get a headache and a rash. Your scotch is the same as ever, but your sleeping pills aren’t. They’re safe now. Take them all at once, and you’ll sleep a day and a half, but you won’t wake up dead. Life has gotten very protected in America. Which gives these folks a problem. It’s what drove them to the Deep Web in the first place. The stigma, of course, but mostly because the solutions to their problems started to look like gray areas. In the surface world there would have been liability issues, and social responsibility, and all the rest of that lawyer stuff. As in, now your Buick is no good anymore, the new preferred source of carbon monoxide is the little hibachi grills you buy at the supermarket. A foil pan with charcoal, and a metal grill, all shrink-wrapped and ready to go. You get six or eight in your bedroom, and you put them high on shelves, and you light them all up, and the monoxide pours out, like liquid, heavier than air, and it pools on your bedroom floor, and the level rises up to the bed, and it snuffs you out. Swift and painless. Like falling asleep and never waking up. The holy grail. Except also one of the grills probably sets the wall on fire and the building burns down and whoever suggested the method gets hit by five hundred lawsuits.”

Chang said, “What other laws are they breaking?”

“It comes back to what they can handle. Even the hosepipe through the window was too rough for some. It’s cold in the garage, and it’s uncomfortable in the car, and the whole thing looks weird. Although carbon monoxide leaves a good-looking corpse. Cherry red. Looks healthy. Makes the mortician’s job very easy. But some folks want to die at home. Inside the house. The holy grail is in bed. So the next new thing was gas of a different kind. Plus an interesting medical fact. May I ask you a question? If you have to hold your breath too long, what is it that makes you desperate to breathe again?”

“I’m running out of oxygen, I guess.”

“That’s the interesting fact. It isn’t the absence of oxygen. It’s the presence of carbon dioxide. Kind of the same thing, but not exactly. The point is, you could suck up any kind of gas, and as long as it wasn’t carbon dioxide, your brain would be happy. You could have a chest full of nitrogen, no oxygen at all, about to kill you stone dead, and your lungs would say, hey man, we’re cool, no carbon dioxide here, no need for us to start pumping again until we see some. Which they never will, because you’ll never breathe again. Because you’ll never need to. Because you have no carbon dioxide. And so on. So those folks started sniffing nitrogen, but you have to go to the welding shop and the cylinders are too heavy to lift, so then they tried helium from the balloon store, but you needed masks and tubes, and the whole thing still looks weird, so in the end most folks won’t be satisfied with anything less than the old-fashioned bottle of pills and the glass of scotch. Exactly like it used to be. Except it can’t be anymore. Those pills were most likely either Nembutal or Secanol, and both of those substances are tightly controlled now. There’s no way to get them. Except illegally, of course, way down where no one can see you. There are sources. The holy grail. Most of the offers are scams, naturally. Powdered Nembutal from China, and so on. Dissolve in water or fruit juice. Maybe eight or nine hundred bucks for a lethal dose. Some poor desperate soul takes the cash to MoneyGram and sends it off, and then waits at home, anxious and tormented, and never sees any powdered Nembutal from China, because there never was any. The powder in the on-line photograph was talc, and the prescription bottle was for something else entirely. Which I felt was a new low, in the end. They’re preying on the last hopes of suicidal people.”

Reacher said, “But you imply there are honest offers too. You said most, not all.”

“Secanol has gone completely. Nembutal is the last chance. Now the holy grail all by itself. The only legal use for Nembutal in the United States is large-animal euthanasia. Some gets stolen, and some veterinarians are bent. Why not? A lethal dose for a human would be two small bottles. Easy to ship. FedEx would take care of it. Nine hundred bucks, for what gets splashed on the floor when you’re killing a mule. You’ll take that deal.”

He saw houses still lived in, and houses converted to offices, for seed merchants and fertilizer dealers and a large-animal veterinarian.

Reacher said, “Show us exactly where Michael McCann was posting. We want to read what he said.”