The Midnight Line (18 page)

Noble said, “I typed it up, word for word based on what you told me, and then I ran it through some software we have, which automatically checks against our existing databases, to see if we know the names already, for other reasons. And Seymour Porterfield came up blocked. I dug around and found three separate files on the guy, all locked, all needing high-level passwords.”

Reacher said, “What kind of a guy would get a file like that?”

“A source of information,” Noble said. “It's a security measure.”

“Interesting.”

“I need to know who Porterfield was.”

“He had an expensive kitchen.”

“I need you to tell me what you know.”

“I don't know anything about Porterfield. He wore blue jeans a lot and had an eye for décor. But I don't really care. He's not why I'm here.”

“One of the files was about Porterfield and a second person. Judging by the codes, the second person was a woman. I can't read the date on the file but the sequencing suggests it was first opened about two years ago and last looked at by someone not long before Porterfield died.”

“Interesting,” Reacher said again. “How deep in your system are these files?”

“Very deep. But I don't think they're DEA originals. I think we got copied in as a courtesy, by someone else.”

“Who?”

“It's a weird code. Not the FBI or the ATF. It's like what we used to get when we had Special Forces deployed in Colombia. Not a remote source, you understand. Somewhere fairly near our main office.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “I understand. Don't forget to call Oklahoma.”

He clicked off. Told the others.

Mackenzie said, “Does this help us?”

“I don't know,” Reacher said. “Who Porterfield was two years ago doesn't necessarily tell us where Rose is now. We shouldn't invest too much time in it. I guess we could go pull off the road ahead of the fourth place, and I could make a call from there, while we were waiting.”

They parked on the slope of the shoulder, at an angle, like a cop with a radar gun. Ahead of them were twelve more homesteads, all widely separated and out of sight, all along forty more miles of the dirt road. And then nothing. No one was coming. Reacher borrowed Bramall's phone and dialed the same ancient number from memory.

The same woman answered.

“West Point,” she said. “Superintendent's office. How may I help you?”

“This is Reacher.”

“Hello, major.”

“I need to speak with the supe.”

“You don't know his name, do you?”

“I guess not currently.”

“It's General Simpson. He'll be happy you called. He has information for you. Wait one, major.”

There were clicks and dead air, and then the supe's voice came on the line.

It said, “Major.”

Reacher said, “General.”

He didn't use the name Simpson. Just in case it wasn't. West Point culture was full of practical jokes, and although he very much doubted the woman who answered the phone would set him up, he couldn't be sure.

The supe said, “What progress are you making?”

“Some,” Reacher said. “I think I'm close to the right location.”

“Which is where?”

“Bottom right-hand corner of Wyoming.”

“So she went home.”

“Not exactly, but not far away. I found trace evidence in a house in a place called Mule Crossing. She was there about a year and a half ago. My sense is she's still in the general neighborhood.”

The supe said, “There's something you need to know. It might be important. Out of curiosity I tried to take a look at Sanderson's service record and medical file. I couldn't get in. They're sealed tighter than a duck's butt on a choppy day. I think your people did it.”

“My people?”

“Military police.”

“When?”

“Hard to tell exactly. Not recently. But after she left the service, almost certainly. Two years ago, possibly.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Now guess what I was calling about?”

“How could I?”

“The house where I found evidence was owned by a guy who also has a sealed file in a government database. Three sealed files, in fact. One of which was first opened around two years ago, and features the guy with a woman. Apparently they are not native files. The folks at the database think the agency in question was copied in as a courtesy, by another agency.”

“Do they know which one?”

“They hinted at the Pentagon.”

“I find that interesting,” the supe said. “As you knew I would. But you didn't call just to entertain me. You want me to do something.”

“Who do you know down there?”

“A couple of people.”

“Do they owe you?”

“How big of a risk would they be taking?”

“Not much. This thing went cold a year and a half ago. It's ancient history now. And they don't have to give us chapter and verse. Just confirm or deny if Sanderson is the woman in the file with the guy who owned the house. His name was Seymour Porterfield. Social Security should show a county sheriff's notification of death around the start of spring last year.”

“He's dead?”

“It's Wyoming. He was eaten by a bear.”

Reacher spelled Porterfield's names, first and last.

The supe repeated them back.

“Thank you, general,” Reacher said, “You can call me back on this number. My partner Mr. Bramall will answer.”

“Thank you, major.”

Reacher said, “Sir, is your name Simpson?”

“Correct,” the supe said. “Sean Simpson.”

“Yes, sir,” Reacher said, purely out of habit.

He clicked off, and gave the phone back to Bramall, who plugged it in to charge.

They waited an hour on the shoulder, and saw no one coming, except a small herd of elk, who came out of the trees on one side of a gulch, and into the trees on the other. Overhead, black birds of prey hovered motionless, high in the sky.

The road stayed empty.

“I'm sorry,” Mackenzie said. “I did it again. Every idea looks like a good idea. Until it turns out wrong.”

“Neither of us had a better idea,” Reacher said.

“Maybe it's a good thing if we don't see her. It would mean she doesn't need what Billy was selling. It would mean she's OK. Someone stole her ring. You said so yourself.”

“Best case.”

“Which sometimes happens.”

“Sometimes,” Reacher said.

“How often?”

“More than never. Less than always.”

“Wait,” Bramall said.

He pointed.

There was a dust cloud on the road ahead. In the west, way far in the distance, on the rising horizon. There was a tiny dot at its head, smoothed by the haze, but coming on fast.

They waited. The dot grew bigger and the cloud spun and howled behind it, furiously and endlessly generating itself anew, exactly the shape of a parachute, but infinitely long, hanging together with some kind of internal aerodynamic constraint, before finally going limp, and succumbing to wind and gravity, and drifting back to earth.

“Stand by,” Bramall said.

He pulled his phone off the charger, ready to take a photograph.

They waited.

An SUV flashed by, moving fast, an ancient model, boxy and battered and square, covered with rust and red dust so thick it looked baked on. The window glass was just as bad, except the front windshield, which had two smeared arcs from the wipers, where the dust was thinner. Through them they got a fractured split-second glimpse inside.

Just a dull and hazy impression.

A small figure, flinching away.

A silvery color.

Bramall swung off the shoulder and took off in pursuit like the highway patrol. The truck up ahead was still moving fast. The road ran straight for long stretches, then dipped through hollows, and rose over knolls, and curved out of sight, but the dust cloud was always there, showing the way. The big Toyota growled along, pattering hard over the rough surface, going plenty fast itself, but their quarry wasn't slowing any. In fact it was speeding up. At times the cloud between them grew half a mile long.

And then it was gone.

The Toyota came leaning out of a long fast curve, through the last of the dust, into clear air, pure and bright and empty for miles ahead.

No truck. Nothing there.

Behind them the severed cloud swayed in the wind, and pulled off the road, and died in the scrub.

Bramall stopped.

“She turned off,” Reacher said. “There's no dust on the ranch roads. What's back there?”

Bramall made a U-turn, shoulder to shoulder, and went back to see.

“Driveway on the left,” Mackenzie said. “I think. It's hard to be sure.”

“The pie lady,” Reacher said. “Porterfield's neighbor. We were here yesterday. We almost missed it then.”

“But the pie lady is out. We saw her go.”

Bramall turned in on the track and drove, the same way as the day before, but faster, twisting and rising through the trees, more than three miles, during which distance they saw nothing and no one, and then as before all of a sudden the trees opened up and the Toyota burst out on the flat acre with the long view east, and the one-story house, with its brown boards, and its ancient millwork, and its old church pew.

Nothing there.

No battered old SUV, caked with dust.

Nothing moving.

No sound.

Mackenzie said, “There must be other ways out of here. Like the places I showed you yesterday.”

Bramall drove on, in a wide bumpy circle, all the way around the house, around the outbuildings, always tight to the tree line. They saw three separate forest tracks running onward through the trees. One went due west, one went south, and one split the difference between. They were like trails for hikers or hunters, all worn and beaten down, all gnarled with roots and rocks, all dappled with gentle sunlight, all curving out of sight.

All narrow.

But good enough for a boxy old SUV.

It was impossible to say which one had just been used. The ground was bone dry. There were tire tracks everywhere, sharp in the dust.

“Want to gamble?” Bramall said.

“Waste of time,” Reacher said. “These trails have too many turns. The odds would get impossible. Plus your truck is bigger than hers. We'd get stuck.”

“If it was her,” Bramall said.

“Suppose it was.”

“Doesn't matter which way she went,” Mackenzie said. “The question is why she went. What happened?”

“We scared her,” Reacher said. “We were waiting on the shoulder. We could have been state police. She didn't want us to catch her. So she pulled off the road and tracked back on some weird forest service route only she knows. Now she's laying low someplace, trying to figure out what she wants to do next.”

“Where?”

“Within about a thousand square miles of right here. In a spot we'll never find.”

Mackenzie was quiet a beat.

Then she said, “Did you see the silver?”

Bramall said, “An impression.”

“What did you make of it?”

“A coat,” Bramall said. “With a hood.”

“But tight,” Reacher said. “I thought like athletic wear. The kind of thing they peel off before the race.”

“Did it look like foil?”

“Partly,” Bramall said. “Maybe the trim.”

Mackenzie said, “Why didn't she want us to catch her?”

“She didn't know it was you,” Reacher said. “She didn't see your face. Her windows were dusty, and so were ours, and when she came by head-on, she was looking the other way. It wasn't an emotional decision. It was practical. She thought we were cops. Maybe she's the kind of person who can't let a cop see the inside of her car.”

“If it was her,” Bramall said.

“Because she's an addict,” Mackenzie said.

“Worst case,” Reacher said.

“Which happens.”

“More than never, less than always.”

“Which way are you leaning?”

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

“Seriously.”

“I'm thinking about Seymour Porterfield,” Reacher said. “We're assuming Billy took over his business, whereupon that kind of thing usually triggers some kind of vigorous expansion afterward, which seems to be the whole reason businesses get taken over in the first place, all because someone else sees missed opportunities. And this is not a type of business that ever gets smaller anyway. It only gets bigger. Therefore, long story short, on a theoretical basis, for a number of reasons, we could expect law enforcement to see Billy as a bigger proposition now than Porterfield ever was. But the Boy Detective as good as told us he isn't even interested in a person like Billy. He said he was going to put his face in the system. That's code for letting him walk away. Because he's too boring to talk to. Whereas on the other hand, the even less interesting Seymour Porterfield has his own sealed file at the Pentagon.”

Bramall said, “Could be nothing. He might once have had small-time connections in Central America. The military wrote everything down. His file might be one word long. You know what that stuff was like. You were probably there.”

“Why would a one-word file be sealed?”

Bramall said, “I don't know.”

“What do we actually know for sure about Porterfield?”

“Very little.”

“What impression did you get?”

“Like the neighbor said. A rich guy from out of state, come to find himself, maybe writing a novel.”

“Nice life.”

“You bet.”

“You liked his house.”

“I could live there.”

“He had everything a person could need,” Reacher said. “Including granite countertops and his very own file at the Pentagon. In fact he had three files at the Pentagon. One of which seems to cover some kind of a joint enterprise with an unspecified woman, during the last six months of his life. On top of which is the broken window in his house. Which looked like government work. Which is ridiculous. Until it isn't. Plus the guy got eaten by a bear. Or a mountain lion. Either of which is highly unlikely. And all of which lead to wild speculations about what exactly happened during those last six months. Especially toward the end. Maybe Rose ran just now because a year and a half ago she learned not to trust expensive black vehicles full of people. So to answer Mrs. Mackenzie's original question, I guess right now I'm leaning slightly away from the worst case. Worst cases are usually very banal. This thing feels more complex than that.”

Mackenzie said, “You think Porterfield wasn't the man you thought he was?”

“He could have been ten times worse. Now I don't know for sure. Which is the interesting part. It makes it equally possible he was ten times better.”

Bramall said, “If he was, how would Arthur Scorpio know his name?”

“Through Billy, maybe. Billy was Porterfield's neighbor, just as much as the pie lady. They all talk. Maybe Scorpio liked to hear neighborhood gossip.”

“He had ten grand in a shoebox.”

“Maybe to live on while he wrote his novel.”

Bramall didn't answer. His phone rang. He answered, and listened, and gave the phone to Reacher.

“It's General Simpson,” he said. “For you.”

Reacher put the phone to his ear.

The supe said, “Porterfield was a U.S. Marine.”