The metallic gold GMC Yukon turned left off the north-south two-lane and headed west towards Wyoming on another two-lane that was just as straight and featureless as the first. Reacher pictured planners and engineers a century before, hard at work, leaning over parchment maps and charts with long rulers and sharp pencils, drawing roads, dispatching crews, opening up the interior. He asked, 'How far now, John?'
The kid said, 'We're real close,' which as always turned out to be a relative statement. Real close in some places meant fifty yards, or a hundred. In Nebraska it meant ten miles and fifteen minutes. Then Reacher saw a group of dim lights, off to the right, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. The truck slowed and turned, another precise ninety-degree right angle, and headed north on a blacktop strip engineered in a different way from the standard county product. A private approach road, leading towards what looked like a half-built or half-demolished industrial facility of some kind. There was a concrete rectangle the size of a football field, possibly an old parking lot but more likely the floor slab of a factory that had either never been completed or had been later dismantled. It was enclosed on all four sides by a head-high hurricane fence that was topped by a mean and token allocation of razor wire. Here and there the fence posts carried lights, like domestic backyard fixtures, containing what must have been regular sixty- or hundred-watt bulbs. The whole enormous space was empty, apart from two grey panel vans in a marked-off bay big enough to handle three.
The approach road was scalloped out at one point to allow access in and out of the concrete rectangle through a pair of gates. Then it ran onward towards a long low one-storey building built of brick in an unmistakable style. Classic 1940s industrial architecture. The building was an office block, built to serve the factory it once stood next to. The factory would have been a defence plant, almost certainly. Give a government a choice of where to build in wartime, and it will seek the safe centre of a land mass, away from coastal shelling and marauding aircraft and potential invasion sites. Nebraska and other heartland states had been full of such places. The ones lucky enough to be engaged on fantasy Cold War systems were probably still in business. The ones built to produce basic war-fighting items like boots and bullets and bandages had perished before the ink was dry on the armistice papers.
The kid called John said, 'This is it. We live in the office building.'
The building had a flat roof with a brick parapet, and a long line of identical windows, small panes framed with white-painted steel. In the centre was an unimpressive double door with a lobby behind it and dim bulkhead lights either side of it. In front of the doors was a short concrete path that led from an empty rectangle made of cracked and weedy paving stones, the size of two tennis courts laid end to end. Managerial parking, presumably, back in the day. There were no lights on inside the building. It just stood there, dead to the world.
Reacher asked, 'Where are the bedrooms?'
John said, 'To the right.'
'And your buddies are in there now?'
'Yes. Five of them.'
'Plus you, that's six legs to break. Let's go do it.'
THIRTY-EIGHT
REACHER MADE THE GUY GET OUT OF THE TRUCK THE SAME WAY he had before, through the passenger door, awkward and unbalanced and unable to spring any surprises. He tracked him with the Glock and glanced beyond the wire and asked, 'Where are all the harvest trucks?'
The guy said, 'They're in Ohio. Back at the factory, for refurbishment. They're specialist vehicles, and some of them are thirty years old.'
'What are the two grey vans for?'
'This and that. Service and repairs, tyres, things like that.'
'Are there supposed to be three?'
'One is out. It's been gone a few days.'
'Doing what?'
'I don't know.'
Reacher asked, 'When do the big trucks get back?'
The guy said, 'Spring.'
'What's this place like in the early summer?'
'Pretty busy. The first alfalfa crop gets harvested early. There's a lot of preparation ahead of time and a lot of maintenance afterwards. This place is humming.'
'Five days a week?'
'Seven, usually. We're talking forty thousand acres here. That's a lot of output.' The guy closed the passenger door and took a step. Then he stopped dead, because Reacher had stopped dead. Reacher was staring ahead at the empty rectangle in front of the building. The cracked stones. The managerial parking lot. Nothing in it.
Reacher asked, 'Where do you normally park your truck, John?'
'Right out front there, by the doors.'
'Where do your buddies park?'
'Same place.'
'So where are they?'
The night-time silence clamped down and the young man's mouth came open a little, and he whirled around as if he was expecting his friends to be hiding somewhere behind him. Like a practical joke. But they weren't. He turned back and said, 'I guess they're out. They must have gotten a call.'
'From you?' Reacher asked. 'When you saw Mrs Duncan?'
'No, I swear. I didn't call. You can check my phone.'
'So who called them?'
'Mr Duncan, I guess. Mr Jacob, I mean.'
'Why would he?'
'I don't know. Nothing was supposed to happen tonight.'
'He called them but he didn't call you?'
'No, he didn't call me. I swear. Check my phone. He wouldn't call me anyway. I'm on sentry duty. I was supposed to stay put.'
'So what's going on, John?'
'I don't know.'
'Best guess?'
'The doctor. Or his wife. Or both of them together. They're always seen as the weakest link. Because of the drinking. Maybe the Duncans think they have information.'
'About what?'
'You, of course. About where you are and what you're doing and whether you're coming back. That's what's on their minds.'
'It takes five guys to ask those questions?'
'Show of force,' the kid said. 'That's what we're here for. A surprise raid in the middle of the night can shake people up.'
'OK, John,' Reacher said. 'You stay here.'
'Here?'
'Go to bed.'
'You're not going to hurt me?'
'You already hurt yourself. You showed no fight at all against a smaller, older man. You're a coward. You know that now. That's as good to me as a dislocated elbow.'
'Easy for you to say. You've got a gun.'
Reacher put the Glock back in his pocket. He folded the flap down and stood with his arms out, hands empty, palms forward, fingers spread.
He said, 'Now I don't. So bring it on, fat boy.'
The guy didn't move.
'Go for it,' Reacher said. 'Show me what you've got.'
The guy didn't move.
'You're a coward,' Reacher said again. 'You're pathetic. You're a waste of good food. You're a useless three-hundred-pound sack of shit. And you're ugly, too.'
The guy said nothing.
'Last chance,' Reacher said. 'Step up and be a hero.'
The guy walked away, head down, shoulders slumped, towards the dark building. He stopped twenty feet later and looked back. Reacher looped around the rear of the Yukon, to the driver's door. He got in. The seat was too far back. The kid was huge. But Reacher wasn't about to adjust it in front of the guy. Some stupid male inhibition, way in the back of his brain. He just started up and turned and drove away, and fixed it on the fly.
The Yukon drove OK, but the brakes were a little spongy. The result of the panic stop, probably, back at the old roadhouse. Five years' wear and tear, all in one split second. But Reacher didn't care. He wasn't braking much. He was hustling hard, concentrating on speeding up, not slowing down. Twenty miles was a long distance, through the empty rural darkness.
He saw nothing the whole way. No lights, no other vehicles. No activity of any kind. He got back to the main two-lane north of the motel and five minutes later he passed the place. It was all closed up and dark. No blue neon. No activity. No cars, except the wrecked Subaru. It was still there, beaded over with dew, low down on slowly softening tyres, sad and inert, like road kill. Reacher charged onward past it, and then he made the right and the left and the right, along the boundaries of the dark empty fields, like twice before, to the plain ranch house with the post-and-rail fence and the flat, featureless yard.