Never Go Back: (Jack Reacher 18)

hundreds of thousands, over the years. Our files must be stiff with them. And quite rightly they’re all looked at and laughed at and put away in a drawer and ignored for ever. Except this one was hauled out again into the light of day.’
    ‘Because?’
    ‘It’s another piece of the jigsaw. Morgan told me my file had a flag on it. He said it malfunctioned when you pulled it, but triggered when you sent it back. I don’t believe that. Our bureaucrats are better than that. I don’t think there was a flag at all. I think there was a whole lot of last-minute scrambling going on. Someone got in a big panic.’
    ‘About you?’
    Reacher shook his head. ‘No, about you, initially. You and Afghanistan.’
    Then he stopped talking, because the car filled with blue and red light. Through the mirrors. A cop car, behind them, forcing its way through. Its siren was going, cycling through all the digital variants it had, fast and urgent. The whooping, the manic cackling, the plaintive two-tone horn. Reacher turned in his seat. The cruiser was about twenty cars back. Ahead of it traffic was diving for the kerb, scattering, trying to squeeze an extra lane out of the jammed roadway.
    Turner glanced back, too. She said, ‘Relax. That’s a Metro car. The army will hunt us itself. We don’t use Metro for anything. The FBI, maybe, but not those clowns.’
    ‘Metro wants me for Moorcroft,’ Reacher said. ‘Your lawyer. A detective called Podolski thinks I did it.’
    ‘Why would he?’
    ‘I was the last guy who talked to him, and I trashed my old clothes afterwards, and I was alone and unaccounted for at the relevant time.’
    ‘Why did you trash your clothes?’
    ‘Cheaper than laundry, overall.’
    ‘What did you talk to Moorcroft about?’
    ‘I wanted him to get you out of jail.’
    Now the cop was about ten cars back, shouldering through the jam, pretty fast.
    Reacher said, ‘Take your jacket off.’
    Turner said, ‘Normally I want a cocktail and a movie before I remove my clothing.’
    ‘I don’t want him to see your uniform. If he’s looking for me, he’s looking for you, too.’
    ‘He’s got our plate number, surely.’
    ‘He might not see the plate. We’re nose to tail here.’
    The cars in front were heading for the gutter. Turner followed after them, steering left-handed, using her right hand on her jacket, tearing open the placket, hauling down the zipper. She leaned forward and shrugged out of the left shoulder, and then the right. She got her left arm out, and she got her right arm out. Reacher hauled the jacket from behind her and tossed it in the rear footwell. She had been wearing a T-shirt under the jacket, olive green, short-sleeved. Probably an extra small, Reacher thought, which fit her very well, except it was a little short. It barely met the waistband of her pants. Reacher saw an inch of skin, smooth and firm and tan.
    He looked back again. Now the cop was two places behind, still coming, still flashing red and blue, still whooping and cackling and whining.
    He said, ‘Would you have come out to dinner with me, if you’d been in the office yesterday? Or tonight, if Moorcroft had gotten you out?’
    She said, with her eyes on the mirror, ‘You need to know that now?’
    They were yards short of 17th Street. Up ahead on the right the Washington Monument was lit up in the gloom.
    The cop car came right alongside.
    And stayed there.

TWENTY-TWO

    IT STAYED THERE because the car one place ahead hadn’t moved all the way over, and because in the next lane there was a wide pick-up truck with exaggerated bulges over twin rear wheels. The cop had no room to get through. He was a white man with a fat neck. Reacher saw him glance across at Turner, fleeting and completely incurious, and then away again, and then down at his dashboard controls, where evidently his siren switches were located, because right then the note changed to a continuous cackling blast, manic and never ending, and unbelievably loud.
    But evidently there was something else down between the seats, and evidently it was a lot more interesting than siren switches. Because the guy’s head stayed down. He was staring at something, hard. A laptop screen, Reacher thought. Or some other kind of a modern communications device. He had seen such things before. He had been in civilian cop cars, from time to time. Some of them had slim grey panels, on swanneck stems, full of instant real-time notes and bulletins and warnings.
    He said,