Echo Burning

with the heel of his hand. Turned it sharp and hard and broke the lock. Pulled the drawer and raked through the files with his fingers.
    The files all had tiny labels encased in plastic tabs arranged so they made a neat diagonal from left to right. The labels were all typed with words starting with B . But the contents of the files were way too recent. Nothing more than four years old. He stepped two paces sideways and skipped the next B drawer and went to the next-but-one. The air was hot and still and the bell was ringing loud and the glare of the flashing blue strobe pulsed in through the windows. It was just about keeping time with his heartbeat.
    He broke the lock and slid the drawer. Checked the labels. No good. Everything was either six or seven years old. He had been inside the building two minutes and thirty seconds. He could hear a distant siren under the noise of the bell. He stepped sideways again and attacked the next B drawer. He checked the dates on the tabs and walked his fingers backward. Two minutes and fifty seconds. The bell seemed louder and the strobe seemed brighter. The siren was closer. He found what he was looking for three-quarters of the way back through the drawer. It was a two-inch-thick collection of paperwork in a heavy paper sling. He lifted the whole thing out and tucked it under his arm. Left the drawer all the way open and kicked all the others shut. Ran through the secretarial pen and down the stairs. Checked the street from the lobby and when he was certain it was clear he ducked around into the alley and straight into the VW.
    “Go,” he said.
    He was a little breathless, and that surprised him.
    “Where?” Alice asked.
    “South,” he said. “To the Red House.”
    “Why? What’s there?”
    “Everything,” he said.
    She took off fast and fifty yards later Reacher saw red lights pulsing in the distance behind them. The Pecos Police Department, arriving at the courthouse just a minute too late. He smiled in the dark and turned his head in time to catch a split-second glimpse of a big sedan nosing left two hundred yards ahead of them into the road that led down to Alice’s place. It flashed through the yellow wash of a streetlight and disappeared. It looked like a police-spec Crown Victoria,plain steel wheels and four VHF antennas on the back. He stared into the darkness that had swallowed it and turned his head as they passed.
    “Fast as you can,” he said to Alice.
    Then he laid the captured paperwork on his knees and reached up and clicked on the dome light so he could read it.

    The B was for “border patrol,” and the file summarized the crimes committed by it twelve years ago and the measures taken in response. It made for unpleasant reading.
    The border between Mexico and Texas was very long, and for an accumulated total of about half its length there were roads and towns near enough on the American side to make it worth guarding pretty closely. Theory was if illegals penetrated there, they could slip away into the interior fast and easily. Other sectors had nothing to offer except fifty or a hundred miles of empty parched desert. Those sectors weren’t really guarded at all. Standard practice was to ignore the border itself and conduct random vehicle sweeps behind the line by day or night to pick the migrants up at some point during their hopeless three- or four-day trudge north across the wastelands. It was a practice that worked well. After the first thirty or so miles on foot through the heat the migrants became pretty passive. Often they surrendered willingly. Often the vehicle sweeps turned into first-aid mercy missions, because the walkers were sick and dehydrated and exhausted because they had no food or water.
    They had no food or water because they had been cheated. Usually they would pay their life savings to some operator on the Mexican side who was offering them a fully accompanied one-way trip to paradise. Vans and minibuses would take them from their villages to the border, and then the guide would crouch and point across a deserted footbridge to a distant sandhill and swear that more vans and minibuses were waiting behind it, full of supplies and ready to go. The migrants would take a deep breath and sprint across, only to find nothing behind the distant sandhill. Too hopeful and tooafraid to turn back, they would just blindly walk ahead into exhaustion.
    Sometimes there would be a vehicle waiting, but its driver would demand a separate