Never Go Back: (Jack Reacher 18)

place?’
    ‘He was buying and selling U.S. ordnance in the hills seven years ago.’
    ‘After which he fell off the radar. By getting better at it. He moved right up to the top of the tree. Now he’s the top boy and the go-to guy. He’s making a fortune for somebody. He has to be. Why else would they go to such lengths to hide him?’
    ‘You’re probably right.’
    ‘I need your serious input here. Not mindless agreement. You’re my executive officer.’
    ‘Is that a promotion?’
    ‘Just new orders.’
    ‘I mean it, you could be right. The informer called him a tribal elder. Which strikes me as a status-based label. Like an honorific. And a black sheep who sits around all day doing nothing productive wouldn’t be thought of as a person of status. More likely the village idiot. Certainly he wouldn’t be honoured. So old Emal is doing something for somebody. And my only objection was having a team on standby in North Carolina, when all the action is in Afghanistan. But maybe there’s a legitimate role for them. Because if what you think is true, then there’s a lot of money coming home. Wagonloads, probably. A big, physical quantity. So yes, they need a team in North Carolina. Just not to handle weapons. To handle the money.’

    Romeo called Juliet and said, ‘It’s getting worse.’
    Juliet said, ‘How could it?’
    ‘They just used Lozano’s Amex. Two thousand dollars on an entertainer. Do you know what that means?’
    ‘They’re bored?’
    ‘There’s only one kind of entertainer who carries her own card reader, and that’s a prostitute. They’re taunting us. They’d be giving it to homeless people, if homeless people had card readers on their phones. Or phones at all, I suppose.’
    ‘Which they don’t.’
    ‘And Reacher’s lawyer got Zadran’s full jacket, about an hour ago. So it’s out there now.’
    ‘You worry too much.’
    ‘It’s an obvious connection. It won’t take a genius to work it out.’
    ‘Or maybe you worry too soon,’ Juliet said. ‘You haven’t heard the good news yet.’
    ‘Is there any?’
    ‘Our boys just saw them drive past the lawyer’s office. In a twenty-year-old Range Rover, black. Hard to be sure, because it had dark windows, but the strong impression was there were two people inside, one large and one small.’
    ‘When was this?’
    ‘Less than an hour ago.’
    ‘Just once?’
    ‘So far. Reconnaissance, obviously.’
    ‘Is there much activity there?’
    ‘It’s a strip mall. It’s like a Fourth of July parade.’
    ‘Where did they go after they cruised by?’
    ‘They took the freeway. Probably looped around. They’re probably holed up a few blocks to the north.’
    ‘Anything we can do?’
    ‘Yes, I think there is. They were super-cautious around that office. They must know the MPs and the FBI are all over it. And there’s nothing to be learned there. Not for them. It would be the worst kind of malpractice. So I don’t think they’ll go near that office again. In which case guarding it is a waste of personnel. We can’t miss them there, because they won’t go there. Simple as that. Therefore our boys would be better used elsewhere. Possibly in a more proactive role. Just a suggestion.’
    ‘I agree,’ Romeo said. ‘Turn them loose.’

    Reacher and Turner passed the time by trying to figure what kind of ordnance would sell for a lot of money and fit in the back of a pick-up truck. Which was frustrating, because the two categories tended to be mutually exclusive. MOABs were sinister finned pear-shaped cylinders thirty feet long and four feet wide. Drones were worth thirty-seven million dollars a pop, but had a wingspan greater than sixty feet. And without the joystick controls they were just lumps of dumb metal. And the joystick controls were all in Texas or Florida. Conversely rifles and handguns and hand grenades weren’t worth much. A Beretta M9 was about six hundred bucks in a store. Maybe four hundred used, on the street, or in the hills, less overhead and expenses, which meant it would take three or four hundred sales just to cover the hundred grand risked in the Cayman Islands. And even the army would notice if it was losing handguns by the thousand.
    They got nowhere.
    And then Emily came back.

FIFTY

    EMILY GOT OUT of a cab, just like the first time, still in character, all radiant and naive, and she hustled over and stood where she had before, about five feet from Turner’s window. Turner buzzed the glass