Echo Burning (48 page)

“For breakfast?”

She nodded.

“O.K.,” he said. “But eggs first. Maybe bacon. You're a kid. You need good nutrition.”

He fumbled the phone book out of the bedside drawer and found a diner listed that was maybe a mile nearer Fort Stockton. He called them and bribed them with the promise of a
twenty-dollar tip to drive breakfast out to the motel. He sent Ellie into the bathroom to get washed up. By the time she came out, the food had arrived. Scrambled eggs, smoked bacon, toast, jelly, cola for her, coffee for him. And a huge plastic dish of ice cream with chocolate sauce.

Breakfast changes everything. He ate the food and drank the coffee and felt some energy coming back. Saw the same effect in Ellie. They propped the room door wide open while they ate to smell the morning air. Then they dragged chairs out to the concrete walk and set them side by side and sat down to wait.

 

They waited more
than four hours. He stretched out and idled the time away like he was accustomed to doing. She waited like it was a serious task to be approached with her usual earnest concentration. He called the diner again halfway through and they ate a second breakfast, identical menu to the first. They went in and out to the bathroom. Talked a little. Tried to identify the trees, listened to the buzz of the insects, looked for clouds in the sky. But mostly they kept their gaze ahead and half-right, where the road came in from the north. The ground was dry again, like it had never rained at all. The dust was back. It plumed off the blacktop and hung in the heat. It was a quiet road, maybe one vehicle every couple of minutes. Occasionally a small knot of traffic, stalled behind a slow-moving farm truck.

A few minutes after eleven o'clock Reacher was standing a couple of paces into the lot and he saw the Crown Vic coming south in the distance. It crept slowly out of the haze. He saw the fake antennas wobbling and flexing behind it. Dust trailing in the air.

“Hey kid,” he called. “Check this out.”

She stood next to him and shaded her eyes with her hand. The big car slowed and turned in and drove up right next to them. Alice was in the driver's seat. Carmen was next to her. She looked pale and washed out but she was smiling and her eyes were wide with joy. She had the door open before the car stopped moving and she came out and skipped around the hood and Ellie ran to her and jumped into her arms. They
staggered around together in the sunlight. There was shrieking and crying and laughter all at the same time. He watched for a moment and then backed away and squatted next to the car. He didn't want to intrude. He guessed times like these were best kept private. Alice saw what he was thinking and buzzed her window down and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Everything squared away?” he asked her.

“For us,” she said. “Cops have got a lot of paperwork ahead. All in all they're looking at more than fifty homicides in seven separate states. Including what happened here twelve years ago and Eugene and Sloop and Walker himself. They're going to arrest Rusty for shooting Walker. But she'll get off easy, I should think, in the circumstances.”

“Anything about me?”

“They were asking about last night. Lots of questions. I said I did it all.”

“Why?”

She smiled. “Because I'm a lawyer. I called it self-defense and they bought it without hesitating. It was my car out there, and my gun. No-brainer. They'd have given you a much harder time.”

“So we're all home free?”

“Especially Carmen.”

He looked up. Carmen had Ellie on her hip, with her face buried in her neck like the sweet fragrance of her was necessary to sustain life itself. She was walking aimless random circles with her. Then she raised her head and squinted against the sun and smiled with such abandoned joy that Reacher found himself smiling along with her.

“She got plans?” he asked.

“Moving up to Pecos,” Alice said. “We'll sort through Sloop's affairs. There's probably some cash somewhere. She's talking about moving into a place like mine. Maybe working part-time. Maybe even looking at law school.”

“You tell her about the Red House?”

“She laughed with happiness. I told her it was probably burned down to a cinder, and she just laughed and laughed. I felt good for her.”

Now Ellie was leading her by the hand around the
parking lot, checking out the trees she had inspected previously, talking a mile a minute. They looked perfect together. Ellie was hopping with energy and Carmen looked serene and radiant and very beautiful. Reacher stood up and leaned against the car.

“You want lunch?”

“Here?”

“I've got a thing going with a diner. They've probably got vegetables.”

“Tuna salad will do it for me.”

He went inside and used the phone. Ordered three sandwiches and promised yet another twenty bucks for the tip. Came out and found Ellie and Carmen looking for him.

“I'm going to a new school soon,” Ellie said. “Just like you did.”

“You'll do great,” he said. “You're smart as a whip.”

Then Carmen let go of her daughter's hand and stepped near him, a little shy and silent and awkward for a second. Then she smiled wide and put her arms around his chest and hugged him hard.

“Thanks,” was all she said.

He hugged her back. “I'm sorry it took so long.”

“Did my clue help?”

“Clue?” he said.

“I left a clue for you.”

“Where?”

“In the confession.”

He said nothing. She unwound herself from his embrace and took his arm and led him to where Ellie wouldn't hear her.

“He made me say I was a whore.”

He nodded.

“But I pretended to be nervous and I got the words wrong. I said ‘street stroller.'”

He nodded again. “I remember.”

“But it's really streetwalker, isn't it? To be correct? That was the clue. You were supposed to think to yourself, it's not
stroller,
it's
walker
. Get it? It's
Walker
. Meaning it's Hack Walker doing all of this.”

He went very quiet.

“I missed that,” he said.

“So how did you know?”

“I guess I took the long way around.”

She just smiled again. Laced her arm into his and walked him back to the car, where Ellie was laughing with Alice.

“You going to be O.K.?” he asked her.

She nodded. “But I feel very guilty. People died.”

He shrugged. “Like Clay Allison said.”

“Thanks,” she said again.

“No hay de que, señora.”

“Señorita,”
she said.

 

Carmen and Ellie
and Alice drifted inside to get washed up for lunch. He watched the door close behind them and just walked away. It seemed like the natural thing to do. He didn't want anybody to try to keep him there. He jogged to the road and turned south. Walked a whole hot mile before he got a ride from a farm truck driven by a toothless old man who didn't talk much. He got out at the I-10 interchange and waited on the west ramp for ninety minutes in the sun until an eighteen-wheeler slowed and stopped next to him. He walked around the massive hood and looked up at the window. The window came down. He could hear music over the loud shudder of the diesel. It sounded like Buddy Holly. The driver leaned out. He was a guy of about fifty, fleshy, wearing a Dodgers T-shirt and about four days' growth of beard.

“Los Angeles?” he called.

“Anywhere,” Reacher called back.

Turn the page for a preview of Lee Child's novel,

Without Fail

Available in paperback from Jove Books

T
HEY FOUND OUT
about him in July and stayed angry all through August. They tried to kill him in September. It was way too soon. They weren't ready. The attempt was a failure. It could have been a disaster, but it was actually a miracle.
Because nobody noticed.

They used their usual method to get past security and set up a hundred feet from where he was speaking. They used a silencer and missed him by an inch. The bullet must have passed right over his head. Maybe even
through his hair
, because he immediately raised his hand and patted it back into place as if a gust of wind had disturbed it. They saw it over and over again, afterward, on television. He raised his hand and patted his hair. He did nothing else. He just kept on with his speech, unaware, because by definition a silenced bullet is too fast to see and too quiet to hear. So it missed him and flew on. It missed everybody standing behind him. It struck no obstacles, hit no buildings. It flew on straight and true until its energy was spent and gravity hauled it to earth in the far distance where there was nothing except empty grassland. There was no response. No reaction.
Nobody noticed
. It was like the bullet had never been fired at all. They didn't fire again. They were too shaken up.

So, a failure, but a miracle. And a lesson. They spent October acting like the professionals they were, starting over, calming down, thinking, learning, preparing for their second attempt. It would be a better attempt, carefully planned and properly executed, built around technique and nuance and sophistication, and enhanced by unholy fear. A worthy attempt. A
creative
attempt. Above all, an attempt that wouldn't fail. Then November came, and the rules changed completely.

•   •   •

R
EACHER'S CUP WAS
empty but still warm. He lifted it off the saucer and tilted it and watched the sludge in the bottom flow toward him, slow and brown, like river silt.

“When does it need to be done?” he asked.

“As soon as possible,” she said.

He nodded. Slid out of the booth and stood up.

“I'll call you in ten days,” he said.

“With a decision?”

He shook his head. “To tell you how it went.”

“I'll
know
how it went.”

“Okay, to tell you where to send my money.”

She closed her eyes and smiled. He glanced down at her.

“You thought I'd refuse?” he said.

She opened her eyes. “I thought you might be a little harder to persuade.”

He shrugged. “Like Joe told you, I'm a sucker for a challenge. Joe was usually right about things like that. He was usually right about a lot of things.”

“Now I don't know what to say, except thank you.”

He didn't reply. Just started to move away, but she stood up right next to him and kept him where he was. There was an awkward pause. They stood for a second face-to-face, trapped by the table. She put out her hand and he shook it. She held on a fraction too long, and then she stretched up tall and kissed him on the check. Her lips were soft. Their touch burned him like a tiny voltage.

“A handshake isn't enough,” she said. “You're going to do it for us.” Then she paused. “And you were nearly my brother-in-law.”

He said nothing. Just nodded and shuffled out from behind the table and glanced back once. Then he headed up the stairs and out to the street. Her perfume was on his hand. He walked around to the cabaret lounge and left a note for his friends in their dressing room. Then he headed out to the highway, with ten whole days to find a way to kill the fourth-best-protected person on the planet.

•   •   •

I
T HAD STARTED
eight hours earlier, like this: team leader M. E. Froelich came to work on that Monday morning, thirteen days after the election, an hour before the second strategy meeting, seven days after the word
assassination
had first been used, and made her final decision. She set off in search of her immediate superior and found him in the secretarial pen outside his office, clearly on his way to somewhere else, clearly in a hurry. He had a file under his arm and a definite
stay back
expression on his face. But she took a deep breath and made it clear that she needed to talk right then. Urgently. And off the record and in private, obviously. So he paused a moment and turned abruptly and went back inside his office. He let her step in after him and closed the door behind her, softly enough to make the unscheduled meeting feel a little conspiratorial, but firmly enough that she was in no doubt he was annoyed about the interruption to his routine. It was just the click of a door latch, but it was also an unmistakable message, parsed exactly in the language of office hierarchies everywhere:
You better not be wasting my time with this
.

He was a twenty-five-year veteran well into his final lap before retirement, well into his middle fifties, the last echo of the old days. He was still tall, still fairly lean and athletic, but graying fast and softening in some of the wrong places. His name was Stuyvesant. Like the last Director-General of New Amsterdam, he would say when the spelling was questioned. Then, acknowledging the modern world, he would say: like the cigarette. He wore Brooks Brothers every day of his life without exception, but he was considered capable of flexibility in his tactics. Best of all, he had never failed. Not ever, and he had been around a long time, with more than his fair share of difficulties. But there had been no failures, and no bad luck, either. Therefore, in the merciless calculus of organizations everywhere, he was considered a good guy to work for.

“You look a little nervous,” he said.

“I am, a little,” Froelich said back.

His office was small, and quiet, and sparsely furnished, and very clean. The walls were painted bright white and lit with halogen. There was a window, with white vertical blinds half closed against gray weather outside.

“Why are you nervous?” he asked.

“I need to ask your permission.”

“For what?”

“For something I want to try,” she said. She was twenty years younger than Stuyvesant, exactly thirtyfive. Tall rather than short, but not excessively. Maybe only an inch or two over the average for American women of her generation, but the kind of intelligence and energy and vitality she radiated took the word
medium
right out of the equation. She was halfway between lithe and muscular, with a bright glow in her skin and her eyes that made her look like an athlete. Her hair was short and fair and casually unkempt. She gave the impression of having hurriedly stepped into her street clothes after showering quickly after winning a gold medal at the Olympics by playing a crucial role in some kind of team sport. Like it was no big deal, like she wanted to get out of the stadium before the television interviewers got through with her teammates and started in on her. She looked like a very competent person, but a very modest one.

“What kind of something?” Stuyvesant asked. He turned and placed the file he was carrying on his desk. His desk was large, topped with a slab of gray composite. High-end modern office furniture, obsessively cleaned and polished like an antique. He was famous for always keeping his desktop clear of paperwork and completely empty. The habit created an air of extreme efficiency.

“I want an outsider to do it,” Froelich said.

Stuyvesant squared the file on the desk corner and ran his fingers along the spine and the adjacent edge, like he was checking the angle was exact.

“You think that's a good idea?” he asked.

Froelich said nothing.

“I suppose you've got somebody in mind?” he asked.

“An excellent prospect.”

“Who?”

Froelich shook her head.

“You should stay outside the loop,” she said. “Better that way.”

“Was he recommended?”

“Or she.”

Stuyvesant nodded again.
The modern world
.

“Was the
person
you have in mind recommended?”

“Yes, by an excellent source.”

“In-house?”

“Yes,” Froelich said again.

“So we're already in the loop.”

“No, the source isn't in-house anymore.”

Stuyvesant turned again and moved his file parallel to the long edge of the desk. Then back again parallel with the short edge.

“Let me play devil's advocate,” he said. “I promoted you four months ago. Four months is a long time. Choosing to bring in an outsider
now
might be seen to betray a certain lack of self-confidence, mightn't it? Wouldn't you say?”

“I can't worry about that.”

“Maybe you should,” Stuyvesant said. “This could hurt you. There were six guys who wanted your job. So if you do this and it leaks, then you've got real problems. You've got half a dozen vultures muttering
told you so
the whole rest of your career. Because you started secondguessing your own abilities.”

“Thing like this, I
need
to second-guess myself. I think.”

“You think?”

“No, I know. I don't see an alternative.”

Stuyvesant said nothing.

“I'm not happy about it,” Froelich said. “Believe me. But I think it's got to be done. And that's my judgment call.”

The office went quiet. Stuyvesant said nothing.

“So will you authorize it?” Froelich asked.

Stuyvesant shrugged. “You shouldn't be asking. You should have just gone ahead and done it regardless.”

“Not my way,” Froelich said.

“So don't tell anybody else. And don't put anything on paper.”

“I wouldn't anyway. It would compromise effectiveness.”

Stuyvesant nodded vaguely. Then, like the good bureaucrat he had become, he arrived at the most important question of all.

“How much would this person cost?” he asked.

“Not much,” Froelich said. “Maybe nothing at all. Maybe expenses only. We've got some history together. Theoretically. Of a sort.”

“This could stall your career. No more promotions.”

“The alternative would
finish
my career.”

“You were my choice,” Stuyvesant said. “I picked you. Therefore anything that damages you damages me, too.”

“I understand that, sir.”

“So take a deep breath and count to ten. Then tell me that it's really necessary.”

Froelich nodded, and took a breath and kept quiet, ten or eleven seconds.

“It's really necessary,” she said.

Stuyvesant picked up his file.

“Okay, do it,” he said.