“Not yet,” Reacher said. “Not with this guy.”
“How many more clues do you need?”
“That’s my point,” Reacher said. “It’s a big black sedan with tinted windows. It’s a shiny object. It’s immediately traceable back to Boston. It’s owned by a freight forwarding company at a major international airport. It might as well carry a neon sign. It’s a decoy. They want you to follow it. It’s going to drive around all day at exactly twenty-nine miles an hour. It’s going to signal every turn, and you can bet your ass its tail lights are in working order. Meanwhile the real guy is in an electrician’s van. Or a plumber. Or flowers. Or whatever. We have to assume a certain amount of common sense. The real guy is going to slip into town some time today and no one is going to notice. But hopefully after half past nine in the morning. Because that would make sense anyway. By then you’ll have been on a war footing more than six hours. You’ll be getting tired. He’ll know that. He’ll wait. I’ll be long gone.”
“We’re basing a lot on your friend from yesterday actually showing up again.”
“I guess we are.”
“Will he?”
“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised either way. He was that kind of guy.”
“On time?”
“Same answer.”
“What if he doesn’t show up? You’ll be here all day. That’s the exact scenario I promised Shaw I wouldn’t let happen.”
Reacher nodded.
“I don’t want to put you on the spot,” he said. “I apologize if I already have. I’ll give my guy thirty minutes. That’s all. If he doesn’t show by ten o’clock, you can drive me to the city limit yourself. Does that work?”
“And then what?”
“Then Shaw is happy. I’ll be outside the jurisdiction.”
“It’s a line on the map. You could be followed. Electricians go from job to job. Also plumbers and flower delivery.”
“But at least the county will be stuck with the paperwork, not the city.”
“Your risk, I guess.”
“No, the electrician’s risk. He’s going to be the paperwork, not me. What choice do I have? I can’t send him home to Boston with a pat on the back and a candy bar. Not under these circumstances. That would give the wrong impression entirely.”
“They’ll send a replacement. They’ll send two.”
“That will be the county’s problem, not yours.”
“You shouldn’t stick around.”
“I don’t want to,” Reacher said. “Believe me. I like to keep moving. But on the other hand I don’t like to be chased away. Especially not by people who plan to throw me off a building. Which strikes me as ambitious. They seem awful sure of themselves. Like I’m just a detail.”
“Don’t let ego get in the way of a good decision.”
“You just trashed every general in our nation’s history.”
“You weren’t a general. Don’t make the same mistake.”
“I won’t,” Reacher said. “I doubt if I’ll get the chance. I doubt if our paths will ever cross. I’ll be gone in a day. Two days max. The kid will heal up. All will be forgotten by the holidays. Life will move on. Hopefully I’ll be somewhere warm.”
Amos didn’t answer.
Her door opened again, the same crack, and the same head stuck in, and said, “The black Chrysler is now cruising downtown, with no apparent destination in mind, so far obeying all traffic laws, and the squad car is still behind it.”
The head withdrew and the door closed.
“Decoy,” Reacher said.
“When will the real guy get here?”
He didn’t answer.
* * *
—
The second arrival had many more moving parts than the first. It was a whole big production. Peter drove his Mercedes SUV to a small airfield near Manchester. Not even executive aviation. More of a hobby field. No tower, no log, no reporting requirements at all. He parked inside the fence, level with the end of the runway. He waited, with his window down.
Five minutes later he heard the distant clatter of a propeller plane. In the far distance he saw winks of light in the pale dawn sky. A twin engine Cessna, that kind of thing, hopping and jumping, weightless on the wind. It came in low, and landed, and slowed immediately to a fussy, bustling land-bound scurry, like a nervous bird, roaring with noise. Peter flashed his lights, and it rolled on toward him.
It was an air taxi, out of Syracuse, New York, booked by a shell corporation owned by a nest of ten others, on behalf of a passenger who had an Illinois driver’s license in the name of Hogan. He had arrived in Syracuse moments earlier in a charter Gulfstream out of Houston, Texas, booked by a different shell corporation owned by a different nest of ten others, on behalf of a passenger with a California license in the name of Hourihane. Neither license was real, and no one knew where he had come in from, prior to the wheels-up in Houston.
He climbed down from the plane and Peter helped him put his stuff in the Mercedes. Three soft bags and two hard cases. The money was in one of the soft bags, Peter assumed. The contribution. A physical weight, even in hundreds.
The plane shuddered around in place, a deafening half circle, and then it blared away down the runway and into the air. Peter drove the other way, out the gate, left and right along the back roads. The new arrival sat beside him, in the front passenger seat. He looked excited. He was sweating a little. He wanted to say something. Peter could tell. But he didn’t. Not at first. He didn’t speak at all. He stared ahead through the windshield and rocked in his seat, small movements, sometimes back and forth, sometimes side to side.
But eventually he had to know.
He had to ask.
He said, “What are they like?”
“They’re perfect,” Peter said.
Chapter 24
Dawn came up bright and clear, and a patrolman came by to take breakfast orders, from a diner two blocks down the street. Reacher chose a fried egg sandwich. Ten minutes later it arrived, still hot in greasy aluminum foil. It tasted pretty good. Maybe a little rubbery. Nutritious, anyway. Protein, carbohydrate, grease. All the food groups. He got more coffee from the squad room pot. No one was in there. Day watch was an hour away.
There was a feed from the radio room playing softly through a speaker on someone’s empty desk. Reacher went closer and listened. There were slow blasts of static, like breathing, and call signs and code words and addresses that meant nothing, but he caught the drift. A dispatcher was talking to two separate squad cars. The dispatcher was probably down the hall, and the squad cars seemed to be circling the center of town. One of them seemed to be right behind the Chrysler, and the other seemed to be tracking them both, from a block away. Reacher figured the regular night watch would be just one car. They were spending overtime money.