Page 72 of In Too Deep

Dokonaly ushered Reacher through the door. He said, “Wait here, please. Someone will be with you in a minute.” Then he guided Knight toward the kitchen.

Reacher looked at the chairs and decided to sit on the floor. Fiveminutes ticked by. Ten. He smiled to himself. The accommodations might have been unconventional and the furnishings improvised, but the Bureau’s tactics were still the same. That was clear. Make the suspect wait, alone, and in silence. Isolation ratchets up the tension. Silence breeds the urge to speak. And speaking in a tense situation can easily lead to a confession. Reacher assumed they would be doing the same with Knight. He hoped she could keep a lid on the guilt she felt about not realizing Kane had summoned help, which had led to his escape. Especially since it looked like her interview was going to happen in the place Kane had escaped from. It was possible that a smart agent could connect those dots without her saying anything. If that happened, they would deal with it, down the line. But there was no point in inviting trouble by incriminating yourself.

Reacher lay down. His mind wandered back to the drive from the motel. Figures floated into his head. Speeds. Distances. Given a spell of downtime he could never resist running random calculations. The shapes and patterns that numbers form themselves into always soothed him, like the harmonies in a perfectly constructed musical phrase.

He started with distance. The stretch of road from the motel to the house was roughly ten miles long. He had been driven on it by three people, that he could remember. Vidic. Knight. And that morning’s agent. The agent had been the fastest. He had averaged a whisker over sixty miles per hour, making the journey last ten minutes. The agent driving Knight had left two minutes earlier. Knight was already talking to Dokonaly when Reacher arrived at the house, so he assumed that she must have arrived at least a minute before him. That meant the slowest her agent could have driven was 54.5454 miles per hour. Reacher liked that. He enjoyed coming across quirky results, like prime numbers or recurring decimals. He shifted his focus to the split time from the motel to the switchbacks, hoping formore of the same. But he came to a much less satisfying conclusion. Not because of the numbers involved. Because of the people.

The distance from the motel to the switchbacks was roughly five miles. According to Vidic he had left the motel five minutes after Gibson, and he had caught up with him just before the switchbacks. There was a problem with that, Reacher realized. Even if he assumed that Vidic had raised his game and had driven as fast as the agent had done that morning, all Gibson would have had to do was average above thirty miles per hour. Then he would have been through the switchbacks before Vidic got to them. Gibson was a trained agent. He knew his cover was blown. He was effectively running for his life. Was it reasonable to believe that he would drive at less than thirty miles per hour? When it was possible for people with the same training to do fifty-five or sixty on that stretch of road? Reacher didn’t think so. It was another anomaly in Vidic’s story. And Reacher didn’t like anomalies.

Chapter28

Reacher had moved on frommath in his head to music when the door to the room opened. He was halfway through a live version of “You Done Me Wrong” by Shawn Holt. He was enjoying it. He was inclined to make whoever had finally arrived wait until the end of the song before he acknowledged them. But in the end he didn’t, because of something he smelled.

He sat up and saw a woman in a dark pantsuit and cream blouse settling into one of the collapsible chairs on the far side of the picnic table. She had dark hair, cut short. Minimal makeup. Flat shoes. And no jewelry. A disposable plastic cup was sitting on the table in front of her. She pushed it toward Reacher and said, “I heard you like coffee. This is from my own supply. If you enjoy it, let me know. I have plenty.”

Reacher stood and crossed to the table. The woman’s expression turned to concern. She said, “Are you all right?”

Reacher said, “I’m fine. Thank you. Why?”

“No back issues? Sciatica?”

“No.”

“That’s good. I was worried when I saw you lying on the floor. That’s what a lot of people do when they have back problems.”

“Not me. I was worried about having a chair problem. Conserving tax dollars is admirable but maybe next time spring for the adult size.”

“You have a point. These look a little delicate. But they’re stronger than they appear.”

Reacher eased his weight down onto a chair on the opposite side of the table to the woman’s. The material sagged. The leg joints groaned. But the structure held. He picked up the coffee cup she had brought and sampled the aroma. He nodded, then took a taste. He smiled. “This is excellent. Thank you.”

“I’m delighted you like it. My name is Agent Devine, by the way. Laura. I’m here for a rather somber reason, unfortunately. We have a personnel file to close. That’s the diplomatic way to put it, according to our training unit.”

“Agent Gibson’s file. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Let’s call him Albatross for now. Gibson wasn’t his real name. Agents use pseudonyms when they’re undercover, obviously. They’re supposed to be recorded in the file, but that doesn’t always happen. Some handlers are more accommodating than others and turn a blind eye or put in a place holder entry. Some agents are more security conscious—or paranoid, in the original English—and don’t want anything in the computer at all. We have a saying. There are old agents. There are bold agents—”

“But there are no old, bold agents.”

“You know that. Of course. Thirteen years in the Military Police. Lots of overlap between our worlds. Anyway, his real name needs to remain confidential for the time being. The family. Privacy. You know how this works.”

“I do. So what do you need from me?”

“I want to home in on the identification. We have the technical side covered. We took prints and DNA from the wreck of his vehicle. The prints are already back and they confirm it’s him. The DNA is at the lab, and it’s being expedited. I have no doubt that it will corroborate what we already know. But this is a dead agent we’re dealing with. We have to keep one eye on the future. When we catch the assholes who are responsible—and you can bet your house we will—we need to make sure we don’t leave any cracks in our armor. Nothing that a defense lawyer could exploit.”

“Makes sense.”

“So I don’t just want the testimony of machines. I want warm bodies involved. People who can stand up in front of a jury and win their hearts and minds. Normally we would start with the agent’s handler. Have him or her identify the body and swear to it if necessary. But this time we can’t do that because we don’t have a body.”

“It got burned up in the fire.”

“Correct. Which further reinforces what we know. The point of the fire was obviously to prevent the body being identified as an agent’s. Hence the phosphorus. To destroy the DNA and avoid a match being made. Which leaves, who?”

Reacher didn’t answer.

Devine said, “Fletcher. But he’s no use. Uncooperative and unreliable. Your basic evidentiary nightmare. There’s no reason to believe that Kane, Paris, or Vidic will be any better when we recapture them. Detective Knight never met him.”

“She took pictures of him. Of his body, when we found it. She got a couple of good shots of his face. And she took his prints. Give me your info and I’ll get her to send them to you.”

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