Never Go Back: (Jack Reacher 18)

in?’
    ‘He’s FBI, so it won’t be instantaneous.’
    ‘We could head back to the truck and drive ourselves.’
    ‘No, the truck should stay here. We need to keep breaking the chain. Get on the bus. The driver will be back in a minute. Got to be. He left it running.’
    Reacher said, ‘We’ll be sitting ducks.’
    ‘We’ll be invisible,’ Turner said. ‘Just folks on a bus.’
    Reacher glanced around. The guy was still at the counter. No one behind it. The shuttle bus was all done up in chrome and a corporate style. It had black windows. Like a movie star’s limousine. A touch of glamour, for the everyday traveller.
    Black windows. Just folks on a bus. Predator and prey, motion and stillness. An old evolutionary legacy. Reacher said, ‘OK, we’ll get on the bus.’
    They climbed aboard, and the suspension dipped under their weight, and they shuffled along a low narrow aisle and took seats on the far side, halfway to the back.
    And then they sat still and waited.
    Not a great feeling.
    The view out was not great either, because of the distance and the window tint and the multiple layers of glass, but Reacher could still see the guy. He was getting impatient. He had turned around to face the empty lobby, and he had stepped a yard away from the desk. Claiming the wider space, expressing his resentment, but staying close enough to the help to remain definitively first in line. Not that he had any competition. Nor would he for an hour or so. Red-eye arrivals would start about six, too.
    Then the guy suddenly moved forward, a long pace, eager, as if he was about to greet someone. Or accost someone. On the right of the frame a second figure stepped into view. A man, in a black uniform with a short jacket. A bellboy, maybe. The FBI guy asked a question, accompanied by a sweeping gesture with his arm, like where the hell is everybody , and the guy in the short jacket paused, uncomfortable, as if obliged to venture outside his accustomed territory, and then he squeezed behind the counter and rapped on a door, with no result, so he opened the door a crack and called through, enquiringly, and fifteen seconds later a young woman came out, running her fingers through her hair. The FBI guy turned back to the desk, and the young woman moved up face to face with him, and the guy in the short black jacket walked out of the lobby.
    Not a bellboy.
    The bus driver.
    He climbed aboard, and saw that he had customers, and he glanced back at the lobby, to see if he was about to get more, and he must have concluded not, because he asked, ‘Domestic or international?’
    Turner said, ‘Domestic.’
    So the guy dumped himself down in his seat, and unspooled a long seat belt, and clipped it tight, and the door closed with a wheezing sigh, and the guy put the bus in gear.
    And then he waited, because he had to, because an arriving car was manoeuvring around the parked Crown Vic, and thereby blocking his exit.
    It was the car with the dented doors.

FORTY-THREE

    THE CAR WITH the dented doors squeezed around the parked Crown Vic, and then it slowed to a walk and prepared to pull up just short of the hotel entrance. The bus moved off into the vacated space, grinding slow and heavy, and it passed the car close by, flank to flank. Reacher got up off his seat and stared out the window. All four guys were in the car. The two he had met on the first night, and the third guy, and the big guy with the tiny ears. The whole crew was there.
    ‘Leave it,’ Turner said.
    ‘We need to take them off the table.’
    ‘But not here, and not now. Later. They’re on the back burner, remember?’
    ‘No time like the present.’
    ‘In a hotel lobby? In front of an FBI agent?’
    Reacher craned around and saw the four guys climb out of the car. They glanced left and right, fast and fluid, and then they headed straight inside, single file, a crisp linear stream, one, two, three, four, like men with an urgent purpose. Turner said, ‘Stand easy, major. Another time, another place. We’re going to LA.’
    The bus picked up speed and left the hotel behind. Reacher watched for as long as there was something to see, and then he turned back. He said, ‘Tell me what you know about how the FBI tracked our names.’
    ‘The modern world,’ Turner said. ‘Homeland Security. It’s an information-dependent operation. All kinds of things are linked together. Airlines, for sure, and no doubt airport hotels too. In which case it would be easy enough to set