Chapter 31

Burke and Reacher drove back on the same road, west toward Ryantown. Reacher watched the bars on Burke’s old phone. When they dropped from three to two he asked Burke to pull over on the shoulder, so he could call Amos again, before service ran out completely. He dialed, and she answered, on the third ring.

She said, “Where are you now?”

“Don’t worry,” Reacher said. “I’m still out of town.”

“We can’t find Carrington.”

“Where have you looked?”

“His home, his office, the coffee shop he likes, the lunch places he goes.”

“Did he tell his office he would be out?”

“Not a word.”

“Does he have a cell phone?”

“He’s not answering.”

“Try the city records department,” Reacher said. “Ask for Elizabeth Castle.”

“Why?”

“She’s his new girlfriend. Maybe he’s hanging out over there.”

He heard her call across the room, Elizabeth Castle, city records.

He asked, “Any sign of the guy from Boston?”

She said, “We’ve been running every plate we’ve seen, in and out of town. We have automatic software now. Nothing yet.”

“Want me to come back to help?”

“No,” she said.

“I could walk around and flush the guy out.”

“No,” she said again.

He heard someone shouting a message.

She said, “Elizabeth Castle is not at work either.”

“I need to come back to town.”

“No,” she said, for the third time.

“Last chance,” he said. “I’m about to head north to a motel. I’m going to lose cell service.”

“Do not come back to town.”

“OK,” he said. “But in exchange I need you to do something for me.”

“Like what?”

“I need you to look at ancient history on your computer again.”

“I already have plenty to do today.”

“It only takes a minute. You have a really good system there.”

“Are you flattering me?”

“Did you design the system?”

“No.”

“Then no, I’m not. All I’m saying is it won’t take much time. Otherwise I wouldn’t have asked. I know you’re extremely busy.”

“Now you’re respecting me to death. What would I be looking for?”

“Check the files after that thing with my father, seventy-five years ago. The next twenty-four months, until September 1945.”

“What happened then?”

“He joined the Marines.”

“What would I be looking for?”

“Something unsolved.”

“When do you need it by?”

“I’ll call you back as soon as I can. I want to hear about Carrington.”

They passed the wandering turn that led away through the orchards to Ryantown. They stayed on the back road, heading north. Reacher watched the phone. The bars went out, one by one. For a moment the screen said it was searching, and then it gave up and said no service. Up ahead were miles of fields, and then more woods, far in the distance. A left to right wall. Burke drove on toward it. He said he thought the motel entrance was about five miles in. On the left side. He remembered the signs. There was one each way. They said Motel, in plastic letters painted gold. They were mounted on gnarled old posts.

Five minutes later they drove into the trees. The air felt cooler. Sunlight sparkled through the leaves. Reacher checked the speedometer. They were doing forty. About five miles would take about seven or eight minutes. He counted time in his head. The trees grew thicker. Like a tunnel. No more sunbeams. The light turned green and soft.

Burke took his foot off the gas at seven minutes exactly in Reacher’s head. Burke said he was pretty sure the turn was coming up. Ahead on the left. Pretty soon. He remembered. But they saw no signs. No plastic letters, no gold paint. Just a pair of twisted old posts, leaning over a little, and the mouth of a track. Left and right of it on the main drag were unbroken walls of trees, both up ahead and far behind.

“I’m pretty sure this was it,” Burke said.

Reacher hitched up and pulled his map from his pocket. The one he had bought at the old edge-of-town gas station. He unfolded it and found the back road. He checked the scale and moved his finger. He showed Burke. He said, “This is the only turn for miles around.”

Burke said, “Maybe someone stole their signs.”

“Or they went out of business.”

“I doubt it. They were very committed. They had a business plan. I heard something about them, as a matter of fact. From the county office. They were extremely ambitious. But they got off to a bad start, as it turned out. They got in a fight about a permit.”

“Who did?”

“The people developing the property. They said any motel keeper depends on opening on time at the start of the season. They said the county was unreasonably slow with the permit. The county said the developer had started work without permission. They got in a fight.”

“When was this?”

“About a year and a half ago. Which is why they were upset about their timetable. They wanted to open the following spring. Which is also why they can’t be out of business yet. Their plan showed a two-year reserve.”

A patrol car responded to the county offices because a customer was causing a disturbance. He claimed a building permit was slow coming through. He claimed he was renovating a motel somewhere out of town.

He gave his name as Mark Reacher.

Reacher said, “I really need to go take a look at this place.”

Burked turned in, over broken blacktop that was missing altogether in whole table-sized patches. The light was greener still. Branches dipped in close, from both sides, some of them limp and broken, still fresh, as if a large vehicle had brushed by not long ago.

They found the large vehicle thirty yards later. It was stopped up ahead, tight against the trees on both sides, blocking the track completely.

It was a tow truck. Huge. Red paint, gold stripes.

“We just saw this thing,” Reacher said. “And I also saw it yesterday.”

A yard behind its giant rear tires was a wire, laid side to side across the road. It was fat and rubbery. It was the kind of thing they had at gas stations.

Reacher wound his window down. There was no noise from the truck’s engine. There were no fumes from its exhaust. Burke stopped the Subaru six feet before the wire. Reacher opened his door. He got out and walked forward. He stepped over the wire. Burke followed him. Reacher made sure Burke stepped over the wire too. He didn’t like wires on roads. Nothing good ever came of them. Best case surveillance, worst case explosions.

The truck had a long sloping haunch at the back, with a short sturdy crane and a giant tow hook. It had lockers with gleaming chrome doors. Reacher squeezed down the driver’s side, leading with his left shoulder, keeping his left elbow high, keeping the twigs away from his face. He slid past the owner’s name, which was Karel, proudly painted a foot high in gold letters. He made it level with the cab. He stepped up on the bottom rung of the ladder and tried the driver’s door. It was locked. He stepped down again and forced his way around the hood to the front of the truck. Ahead of him the track ran on through the woods. The surface remained the same. Worn blacktop, missing in places, randomly covered in grit, gravel, dirt, and leaf mold. There were tire tracks here and there, some of them ancient, some of them recent. Twenty yards farther on there was a hole in the trees. Like a natural recess. It had brand new tire tracks. Two tight V shapes. Like a car had backed in to turn around. Which made some kind of sense. Because the tow truck driver didn’t seem to be around anymore. Possibly a car had driven down to pick him up. It would have stopped nose to nose with the truck, and then backed up and turned and driven away forward.

Reacher looked ahead.

He said, “I’m going to go take a look at what they got up there.”

“How?” Burke said.

“I’m going to walk.”

“Your map showed this track is more than two miles long.”

“I need a place to sleep. Also I’m curious.”

“About what?”

“I think the guy who got in the fight about the permit was a kid named Reacher.”

“How do you know?”

“It was in the police computer. A squad car had to go calm things down. A year and a half ago.”

“Are you related?”

“I don’t know. Maybe as much as I am to the professor from the university.”

“Do you want company?”

“We could be walking two miles back again, if we don’t get lucky.”

“That’s OK,” Burke said. “I guess now I’m curious too.”

They set out together. By geographic map-making standards the land was dead flat, which made walking easy, but up close and personal the track was uneven and pitted, which made it hard. Every step was an inch and a half higher or lower than the one before, which meant any step could become a stumble. At one early point they passed through a grassy ring, where no trees were growing. It was maybe sixty feet wide. It seemed to curve away, in both directions, as if it ran in a circle all the way around. As if it defined an inner part of forest. A woods within a woods. It was like a giant crop circle, but carved out of sixty-foot maple trees, not stalks of corn. All the way across they felt the warmth of the sun. Then the cold green shadow claimed them again. They had crossed the boundary. Now they were in the inner forest. They were in the woods within the woods. They were walking toward its center.

Two miles would have taken Reacher thirty minutes, but they took Burke forty-five. They came out of the trees together, and they saw the track run on ahead, through a couple of grassy acres, to what looked like a dirt parking lot in front of what was indisputably a motel. It had an office at the left-hand end, and a station wagon and a panel van and a compact car and a pick-up truck, all parked at intervals outside the rooms.

They set out walking toward it.

They were instantly detected. Two separate ways. Robert had copied a facial recognition algorithm from a photo chip and coded it into the close-up camera. As soon as the algorithm detected a face among the trees it rang a bell and flashed a light, like a distant early warning. Like radar. Persons approaching. But by chance Steven was watching the right screen anyway, as part of a disciplined rotation through the points of the compass. The movement caught his eye. He saw two men step out of the shadows and into the sunshine.

He said, “Mark, look at this.”

Mark looked.

And said, “Who the hell are they?”

Robert zoomed the camera all the way. The image trembled with distance, and wavered with haze. Two guys were walking toward the lens. Head on. Seemingly making no progress, because of the extreme telephoto. One guy was small and old. Slightly built, and slow. Denim jacket, gray hair. The other guy was huge. As wide as a door. Hair sticking up all over. A face like the side of a house.

He looked rough.

Mark said, “Shit.”

Steven said, “You told us he wouldn’t come here. You said he was a different branch of the family. You said he wouldn’t be interested.”

Mark didn’t answer.

Then Peter buzzed through from the office. His voice came out of the intercom speaker. He said, “But actually it turns out the guy was interested enough to walk two whole miles past the roadblock. Good call, bro.”

Again Mark didn’t answer.

He was quiet a long moment more.

Then he said, “Keep everyone inside the house. Give them all another cup of coffee. Show them another video. Keep the doors closed. Make sure no one leaves.”