“Good,” Reacher said.
Then he heard a car. He looked around the open door. It was Griezman and Sinclair, in the department Mercedes.
—
Sinclair knelt down next to Wiley, talking, listening, promising a doctor in exchange for cooperation, already debriefing a mile a minute. Neagley looked at the empty crate in the furniture truck. She caught Reacher’s eye and pointed to the receptacle for the secret file. Thin plywood, with a half-moon shape scooped out for fingers. The part the apprentice had made, eleven times over. Then Reacher went with Griezman, all the way back to the iron bridge, to see what the traffic cop had snared. One panel van, presumably. But no. When they got there the traffic cop swore nothing had passed by. No vans, no cars, no people, no nothing.
—
Reacher and Griezman drove back to the warehouse. They got out of the car and heard nothing at all. Sinclair and Neagley were standing in the gloom, still and silent. The lake of blood on the floor was bigger. But it was no longer increasing.
Wiley had bled out.
He was dead.
Griezman said, “Nothing crossed the bridge.”
Silence.
Then Reacher heard another car.
He stepped out a pace. A taxi. Three passengers. A woman, her head ducked down, shoveling money out of her purse. Paying the fare. And two men, climbing out, small and wiry, dark and bearded, wearing work clothes and protective equipment, looking around, seeing Reacher, looking him right in the eye, and nodding a cautious greeting. As if they expected to see him there. Which they did, he guessed. Generically. They knew a man was going to give them a panel van. They had come to drive it away. Part of the deal.
Reacher put his hand on his gun in his pocket and stepped all the way out to the sunlight. The woman was stuffing her purse back in her bag. The taxi was driving away. The woman looked up. She saw Reacher and looked momentarily confused. Reacher was not the guy she was expecting to see. She was in her early twenties, with jet black hair and olive skin. She was very good looking. She could have been Turkish or Italian.
She was the messenger.
The two guys with her were waiting patiently, stoic and unexcited, like laborers ahead of routine tasks. They were airport workers, Reacher thought. He remembered telling Sinclair that Wiley had chosen Hamburg because it was a port. The second largest in Europe. The gateway to the world. Maybe once. But the plan had changed. Now he guessed they planned to drive the truck into the belly of a cargo plane. Maybe fly it to Aden, which was a port of a different kind. On the coast of Yemen. Where ten tramp steamers would be waiting to complete the deliveries, after weeks at sea. Straight to New York or D.C. or London or LA or San Francisco. All the world’s great cities had ports nearby. He remembered Neagley saying the radius of the lethal blast was a mile, and the radius of the fireball was two. Ten times over. Ten million dead, and then complete collapse. The next hundred years in the dark ages.
The messenger said, “Hello?”
Not Turkish or Italian. Pashtun, probably, from the Northwest Frontier. A tribe as old as time. Dutiful mapmakers drew lines and wrote India or Pakistan or Afghanistan, and the Pashtun smiled politely and went about their eternal business.
The messenger said, “Who are you?”
Reacher nodded beyond the half-open door and said, “Mr. Wiley is in here.”
The men hung back and let the messenger lead the way. Reacher watched their faces. He saw the truth dawning. An empty space. A dead man on the floor. A lake of drying blood. Three unexplained figures standing back from its edge.
Not right.
Reacher pulled his gun.
The two men and the woman turned to look.
Reacher said, “You’re under arrest.”
Their reactions differed by gender. Reacher saw a cascade of ancient, hopeless conclusions in the two men’s eyes. They were guest workers in a foreign nation. They had no status, no power, no leverage, no rights, no expectations. They were bottom of the pile. They were cannon fodder.
They had nothing to lose.
They went for their pockets. They scrabbled at puckered fabric, hitching and bending, ramming their hands in, hauling them out. Reacher yelled no in English and nein in German, but they didn’t stop. They had weird little sawed-off revolvers. Pale steel, pale pinewood grips. Barrels about an inch long, like stubs. Reacher thought Washington D.C. and New York and London would be top of the list. Then maybe Tel Aviv, and Amsterdam, and Madrid. Then Los Angeles and San Francisco. Maybe the Golden Gate Bridge itself. Like Helmsworth had said. Their orders were to strap it to a bridge support, set the timer, and run like hell.