'Why shouldn't I? You just tried to kill me with a truck.'
'I'm sorry about that.'
'You're sorry about that?'
'I had to do it.'
'Just following orders?'
'I'm surrendering, OK? I'm out of the fight now. Like a POW.'
'You're bigger than me. And younger.'
'But you're a crazy man.'
'Says who?'
'We were told. About last night. You put three of us in the hospital.'
Reacher asked, 'What's your name?'
The guy said, 'Brett.'
'What is this, the Twilight Zone? You've all got the same name?'
'Only three of us.'
'Out of ten, right?'
'Yes.'
'Thirty per cent. What are the odds?'
The guy didn't answer.
Reacher asked, 'Who's in charge here?'
'I don't know what you mean.'
'Who told you to come out this morning and kill me with a truck?'
'Jacob Duncan.'
'Seth Duncan's father?'
'Yes.'
'You know where he lives?'
The guy nodded and pointed into the distance, south and east, beyond the burning vehicle. The flames had moved inside it. The glass had shattered and the seats were on fire. There was a column of black smoke in the air, thick and dirty. It was going straight up and then hitting a low atmospheric layer and spreading sideways. Like a miniature mushroom cloud.
Then the gas tank exploded.
An orange fireball kicked the rear of the truck clear off the ground and a split second later a dull boom rolled across the dirt on a pressure wave hard enough to make Reacher stagger a step and hot enough to make him flinch away. Flames leapt fifty feet in the air and died instantly and the truck crashed back to earth, now all black and skeletal inside a hot new fire that roiled the air a hundred feet above it.
Reacher watched for a second. Then he said, 'OK, Brett, this is what you're going to do. You're going to jog over to Jacob Duncan's place, and you're going to tell him three things. You listening to me?'
The big guy looked away from the fire and said, 'Yes.'
'OK, first, if Duncan wants to, he can send his six remaining boys after me, and each one will delay me a couple of minutes, but then I'll come right over and kick his ass. Got that?'
'Yes.'
'Second, if he prefers, he can skip getting the six boys hurt, and he can come out and meet with me face to face, right away. Got that?'
'Yes.'
'And third, if I see those two out-of-towners again, they'll be going home in a bucket. Is that clear? Got all that?'
'Yes.'
'You got a cell phone?'
'Yes,' the guy said.
'Give it to me.'
The guy dug in a pocket and came back with a phone, black and tiny in his giant red paw. He handed it over and Reacher pulled it apart. He had seen cell phones dropped on sidewalks, and he knew what was in there. A battery, and a SIM card. He pulled off the cover and clipped out the battery and tossed it twenty feet in one direction, and he took out the SIM card and threw the rest of the phone twenty feet in the other direction. He balanced the SIM card on his palm and held it out, a tiny silicon wafer with gold tracks on it.
'Eat it,' he said.
The guy said, 'What?'
'Eat it. That's your forfeit. For being a useless tub of lard.'
The guy paused a second and then he took it, delicately, finger and thumb, and he opened his mouth and placed it on his tongue. He closed his mouth and worked up some saliva and swallowed.
'Show me,' Reacher said.
The guy opened his mouth again and stuck out his tongue. Like a kid at the clinic. The card was gone.
'Now sit down,' Reacher said.
'What?'
'Like you were before.'
'I thought you wanted me to head for the Duncans' place.'
'I do,' Reacher said. 'But not yet. Not while I'm still in the neighbourhood.'
The guy sat down, a little worried, facing south, his legs straight out and his hands on his knees and his upper body curled forward a little.
'Arms behind you,' Reacher said. 'Lean back on your hands.'
'Why?'
Enemy ordnance.
'Just do it,' Reacher said.
The guy got his arms behind him and put his weight on his hands. Reacher stepped behind him and crashed the sole of his boot through the guy's right elbow. The guy went down flat and shrieked and rolled and whimpered. Then he sat up again and cradled his broken arm and stared at Reacher accusingly. Reacher stepped around behind him again and kicked him hard in the back of the head. The guy toppled slowly, forward at first, and then he twisted sideways as his gut got in the way of further progress. He sprawled out and landed softly on one shoulder and lay still, like a large letter L on a dirty brown page. Reacher turned away and slogged on north, towards the two wooden buildings on the horizon.
TWENTY-TWO
THE CANADIAN SEMI TRUCK WITH THE DUNCANS' SHIPMENT aboard was making good time, heading due east on Route 3 in British Columbia, driving mostly parallel to the die-straight international border, with Alberta up ahead. Route 3 was a lonely road, mountainous, with steep grades and tight turns. Not ideal for a large vehicle. Most drivers took Route 1, which looped north out of Vancouver before turning east later. A better road, all things considered. Route 3 was quiet by comparison. It had long stretches of nothing but asphalt ribbon and wild scenery. And very little traffic. And occasional gravel turnouts, for rest and recuperation.
One of the gravel turn-outs was located a mile or so before the Waterton Lakes National Park. In U.S. terms it was directly above the Washington-Idaho state line, about halfway between Spokane and Coeur d'Alene, about a hundred miles north of both. The turn-out had an amazing view. Endless forest to the south, the snowy bulk of the Rockies to the east, magnificent lakes to the north. The truck driver pulled off and parked there, but not for the view. He parked there because it was a prearranged location, and because a white panel van was waiting there for him. The Duncans had been in business a long time, because of luck and caution, and one of their cautionary principles was to transfer their cargo between vehicles as soon as possible after import. Shipping containers could be tracked. Indeed they were designed to be tracked, by the BIC code. Better not to risk a delayed alert from a suspicious Customs agent. Better to move the goods within hours, into something anonymous and forgettable and untraceable, and white panel vans were the most anonymous and forgettable and untraceable vehicles on earth.
The semi truck parked and the panel van K-turned on the gravel and backed up to it and stopped rear to rear with it. Both drivers got out. They didn't speak. They just stepped out into the roadway and craned their necks and checked what was coming, one east, one west. Nothing was coming, which was not unusual for Route 3, so they jogged back to their vehicles and got to work. The van driver opened his rear doors, and the truck driver climbed up on his flatbed and cut the plastic security seal and smacked the bolts and levers out of their brackets and opened the container's doors.
One minute later the cargo was transferred, all 1,260 pounds of it, and another minute after that the white van had K-turned again and was heading east, and the semi truck was trailing behind it for a spell, its driver intending to turn north on 95 and then loop back west on Route 1, a better road, back to Vancouver for his next job, which was likely to be legitimate, and therefore better for his blood pressure but worse for his wallet.
In Las Vegas the Lebanese man named Safir selected his two best guys and dispatched them to babysit the Italian man named Rossi. An unwise decision, as it turned out. Its unwisdom was made clear within the hour. Safir's phone rang and he answered it, and found himself talking to an Iranian man named Mahmeini. Mahmeini was Safir's customer, but there was no transactional equality in their business relationship. Mahmeini was Safir's customer in the same way a king might have been a boot maker's customer. Much more powerful, imperious, superior, dismissive, and likely to be lethally angry if the boots were defective.