57

Vaughan was a cop from a small quiet town, but she handled the traffic stop beautifully. She started the car when the truck was still a quarter-mile away and put it in gear. Then she waited for the truck to pass and pulled out of the old road onto the new and settled in its wake. She hung back a hundred yards, to be clearly visible in its mirrors. Reacher opened his window and clamped the bubble light on the roof. Vaughan hit a switch and the light started flashing. She hit another switch and her siren quacked twice.

Nothing happened for ten long seconds.

Vaughan smiled.

“Here it comes,” she said. “TheWho, me? moment.”

The truck started to slow. The driver lifted off and the cab pitched down a degree as weight and momentum settled on the front axle. Vaughan moved up fifty yards and drifted left to the crown of the road. The truck put its turn signal on. It rolled ahead and then braked hard and aimed for a spot where the shoulder was wide. Vaughan skipped past and tucked in again and the two vehicles came to a stop, nose-to-tail in the middle of nowhere, forty miles of empty road behind them and more than that ahead.

She said, “A search would be illegal.”

Reacher said, “I know. Just tell the guy to sit tight, five minutes. We’ll wave him on when we’re done.”

“With what?”

“We’re going to take a photograph.”

Vaughan got out and cop-walked to the driver’s window. She spoke for a moment, then walked back. Reacher said, “Back up on the other shoulder, at right angles. We need to see the whole truck, side-on with the camera.”

Vaughan checked ahead and behind and jockeyed forward and back and then reversed across the blacktop in a wide curve and came to rest sideways on the opposite shoulder, with the front of her car pointed dead-center at the side of the truck. It was a plain, simple vehicle. A stubby hood, a cab, twin rails running back from it with a box body bolted on. The box had alloy skin and was corrugated every foot for strength and rigidity. Tan paint, no writing.

Reacher said, “Camera.”

Vaughan hit laptop keys and the screen lit up with a picture of the truck.

Reacher said, “We need to see the thermal image.”

Vaughan said, “I don’t know if it works in the daytime.” She hit more keys and the screen blazed white. No detail, no definition. Everything was hot.

Reacher said, “Turn down the sensitivity.”

She toggled keys and the screen dimmed. Ahead through the windshield the real-time view stayed unchanged but the image on the laptop screen faded to nothing and then came back ghostly green. Vaughan played around until the road surface and the background scrub showed up as a baseline gray, barely visible. The truck itself glowed a hundred shades of green. The hood was warm, with a bright center where the engine was. The exhaust pipe was a vivid line, with green gases shimmering out the end in clouds. The rear differential was hot and the tires were warm. The cab was warm, a generalized green block with a slight highlight where the driver was sitting and waiting.

The box body was cold at the rear. It stayed cold until it suddenly got warmer three-quarters of the way forward. A section five feet long directly behind the cab was glowing bright.

Reacher said, “Take it down some more.”

Vaughan tapped a key until the tires went gray and merged with the road. She kept on going until the grays went black and the picture simplified to just five disembodied elements in just two shades of green. The engine, hot. The exhaust system, hot. The differential case, warm. The cab, warm.

The first five feet of the box body, warm.

Vaughan said, “It reminds me of the wall around the metal plant. Hotter at one end than the other.”

Reacher nodded. Stuck his arm out the window, waved the driver onward, and peeled the bubble light off the roof. The truck lurched as the gears caught and it pulled across the rumble strip and got straight in the traffic lane and lumbered slowly away, first gear, then second, then third. The laptop screen showed a vivid plume of hot exhaust that swelled and swirled into a lime-green cloud before cooling and dissipating and falling away into blackness.

Vaughan asked, “What did we just see?”

“A truck on its way to Canada.”

“That’s all?”

“You saw what I saw.”

“Is this part of your theory?”

“Pretty much all of it.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“Later.”

“Than what?”

“When it’s safely across the border.”

“Why then?”

“Because I don’t want to put you in a difficult position.”

“Why would it?”

“Because you’re a cop.”

“Now you’re trying to keepme out of trouble?”

Reacher said, “I’m trying to keep everybody out of trouble.”

They turned around and drove back to where the old road forked. They bumped down off the new blacktop and this time they kept on going, between the two ruined farms, all the way to Halfway township. First stop was the coffee shop, for a late breakfast. Second stop was a Holiday Inn, where they rented a bland beige room and showered and made love and went to sleep. They woke up at four, and did all the same things in reverse order, like a film run backward. They made love again, showered again, checked out of the hotel, and headed back to the coffee shop for an early dinner. By five-thirty they were on the road again, heading east, back toward Despair.

Vaughan drove. The setting sun was behind her, bright in her mirror. It put a glowing rectangle of light on her face. The truck route was reasonably busy in both directions. The metal plant ahead was still sucking stuff in and spitting it out again. Reacher watched the license plates. He saw representatives from all of Colorado’s neighboring states, plus a container truck from New Jersey, heading outward, presumably empty, and a flat-bed semi from Idaho heading inward, groaning under a load of rusted steel sheet.

He thought:license plates.

He said, “I was in the Gulf the first time around.”

Vaughan nodded. “You wore the same BDUs every day for eight months. In the heat. Which is a delightful image. I felt bad enough putting these clothes back on.”

“We spent most of the time in Saudi and Kuwait, of course. But there were a few covert trips into Iraq itself.”

“And?”

“I remember their license plates being silver. But the ones we saw last night in the container were off-white.”

“Maybe they changed them since then.”

“Maybe. But maybe they didn’t. Maybe they had other things to worry about.”

“You think those weren’t Iraqi cars?”

“I think Iran uses off-white plates.”

“So what are you saying? We’re fighting in Iran and nobody knows? That’s not possible.”

“We were fighting in Cambodia in the seventies and nobody knew. But I think it’s more likely there’s a bunch of Iranians heading west to Iraq to join in the fun every day. Maybe like commuting to a job. Maybe we’re stopping them at the border crossings. With artillery.”

“That’s very dangerous.”

“For the passengers, for sure.”

“For the world,” Vaughan said.

They passed the MP base just before six-fifteen. Neat, quiet, still, six parked Humvees, four guys in the guard shack. All in order, and recently resupplied.

For what?

They slowed for the last five miles and tried to time it right. Traffic had died away to nothing. The plant was closed. The lights were off. Presumably the last stragglers were heading home, to the east. Presumably the Tahoes were parked for the night. Vaughan made the left onto Despair’s old road and then found the ruts in the gathering gloom and followed them like she had the night before, through the throat of the figure 8 and all the way to the spot behind the airplane barn. She parked there and went to pull the key but Reacher put his hand on her wrist and said, “I have to do this part alone.”

Vaughan said, “Why?”

“Because this has to be face-to-face. And the whole deal here is that you’re permanent and I’m not. You’re a cop from the next town, with a lot of years ahead of you. You can’t go trespassing and breaking and entering all over the neighborhood.”

“I already have.”

“But nobody knew. Which made it OK. This time it won’t be OK.”

“You’re shutting me out?”

“Wait on the road. Any hassle, take off for home. I’ll make my own way back.”

He left the ladder and the wrecking bar and the flashlight where they were, in the car. But he took the captured switchblades with him. He put one in each pocket, just in case.

Then he hiked the fifty yards through the scrub and climbed the fieldstone wall.