Bad Luck and Trouble

vehicle, closing fast, trailing a cloud of khaki dust that was backlit by the dawn like a halo.

85
    They moved away from the windows and waited in the living room, tense and silent. Five minutes later they heard the crunch of stones under tires and the wet muffled beat of a worn Detroit V-8. The crunching stopped and the engine died and they heard a parking brake ratchet on. A minute after that they heard a tinny door slam and the sound of random footsteps on gravel. The driver, stumbling around, yawning and stretching.
    A minute after that, they heard a knock at the door.
    Reacher waited.
    The knock came again.
    Reacher counted to twenty and walked down the hall. Opened the door. Saw a man standing on the step, framed against the light, with a mid-sized panel truck parked behind him. The truck was a rented U-Haul, white and red, top-heavy, a little ungainly. Reacher felt like he had seen it before. He had never seen the man before. He was medium height, medium weight, expensively dressed but a little rumpled. He was maybe forty years old. He had thick black hair, shiny, beautifully cut, and the kind of mid-brown skin and regular features that could have made him Indian, or Pakistani, or Iranian, or Syrian, or Lebanese, or Algerian, or even Israeli or Italian.
    In turn Azhari Mahmoud saw a disheveled giant of a white man. Two meters tall, easily, a hundred and ten kilos, maybe a hundred and twenty, shaved head, wrists as wide and hard as two-by-fours, hands like shovels, dressed in dusty gray denims and work boots. A crazy scientist, he thought. Right at home in a desert shack.
    “Edward Dean?” he said.
    “Yes,” Reacher said. “Who are you?”
    “No cell coverage here, I notice.”
    “So?”
    “And I took the precaution of cutting your landline ten miles down the road.”
    “Who are you?”
    “My name doesn’t matter. I’m a friend of Allen Lamaison’s. That’s all you need to know. You are to extend me the same courtesies that you would extend to him.”
    “I don’t extend courtesies to Allen Lamaison,” Reacher said. “So get lost.”
    Mahmoud nodded. “Let me put it another way. The threat that Lamaison made is still operative. And today it will benefit me, not him.”
    “Threat?” Reacher said.
    “Against your daughter.”
    Reacher said nothing.
    Mahmoud said, “You’re going to show me how to arm Little Wing.”
    Reacher glanced at the U-Haul.
    “I can’t,” he said. “All you have are the electronics.”
    “The missiles are on their way,” Mahmoud said. “They’ll be here very soon.”
    “Where are you going to use them?”
    “Here and there.”
    “Inside the United States?”
    “It’s a target-rich environment.”
    “Lamaison said Kashmir.”
    “We might ship some units to select friends.”
    “We?”
    “We’re a big organization.”
    “I won’t do it.”
    “You will. Like you did before. For the same reason.”
    Reacher paused a beat and said, “You better come in.”
    He stepped aside. Mahmoud was accustomed to deference, so he squeezed past and walked ahead into the hallway. Reacher hit him hard in the back of the head and sent him stumbling toward the living room door, where Frances Neagley stepped out and dropped him with a neat uppercut. A minute later he was hog-tied on the hallway floor with one figure-eight cable tie binding his left wrist to his right ankle and another binding his right wrist to his left ankle. The ties were zipped hard and the flesh around them was already swelling. Mahmoud was bleeding from the mouth and moaning. Reacher kicked him in the side and told him to shut up. Then he stepped back into the living room and waited for the truck from Denver.

    The truck from Denver was a white eighteen-wheeler. Its driver was hog-tied next to Mahmoud a minute after climbing down from the cab. Then Reacher dragged Mahmoud out of the house and left him faceup in the sun next to his U-Haul. Mahmoud’s eyes were full of fear. He knew what was heading his way. Reacher figured he would prefer to die, which was why he left him there alive. O’Donnell dragged the driver out and dumped him next to his truck. They all stood for a moment and looked around one last time and then crammed themselves into Neagley’s Civic and headed south, fast. As soon as cell coverage kicked in they stopped and Neagley called her Pentagon buddy. Seven o’clock in the west, ten in the morning in the east. She told the guy where to look and what he would find. Then they