Sinclair said, “This is the endgame. Starting now. The van is for the delivery.”
“And then he’s getting the hell out,” Waterman said. “He’s burning through his spare ID. He’s keeping his Sunday best for the airport.”
“Twenty minutes,” Landry said. “He could be ten miles out of town by now. Griezman has no more jurisdiction. We need to go federal.”
The phone rang.
Griezman.
Who said, “Now we have a positive ID on the sketch. It was Wiley who rented the truck. Confidence level is a hundred percent. I already put out an APB on the plate number. The traffic division will handle it. They can liaise out of town. They do it all the time. We’re assuming a fifteen-kilometer radius by now. About ten miles. It’s coming up on twenty-five minutes. Almost certainly he’s moving south or east. Unless he’s going to Denmark or Holland. We have cars on the main roads and the autobahns. Rest assured we’ll have a lot of eyeballs on it. It’s a large vehicle. And slow.”
“What address did he use?” Reacher asked.
“It was phony. Nothing but a hole in the ground. For another new apartment building on the other side of town.”
“Anything else?” Reacher said.
“Just that the clerk at the rental franchise said Wiley was concerned about the height of the load floor, and that he needed a roll-up rear door, not hinged, because he said he intended to back the truck up to another truck and transfer a load across.”
“Thanks,” Reacher said.
He killed the call.
Sinclair said, “At least now we know what kind of thing it is. It’s not a document. It’s not intelligence. It needs a large panel van with a roll-up door.”
“To back up to a similar vehicle,” Neagley said. “Why? If the load is already in a truck, why get another truck?”
“Maybe the first truck was stolen,” Reacher said. “Maybe he’s worried about getting pulled over.”
Neagley turned and leafed through the telex concertina. Cold-case property crimes in Germany, near military installations, during Wiley’s deployment. She traced her finger down the faint gray list.
Her finger stopped.
She said, “Seven months ago a delivery truck with a roll-up door was stolen from a mom-and-pop furniture store on the outskirts of Frankfurt. Local and then national police were given the number, but the vehicle was never found.”
Her finger started again. She licked her thumb and turned the pages.
She said, “Nothing else. Plenty of cars, but no more roll-up doors.”
Reacher said, “That was three months before he went AWOL.”
“It was a long game.”
“Did he steal the thing the same night he stole the truck?”
“Almost certainly. Which begins to define a location. If he’s the kind of guy who worries about getting pulled over, he would steal the truck close by, drive it the minimum, steal the thing, drive the minimum again, and hide the truck as soon as possible. In a barn, or something. With the thing still inside. A triangular route, fast and focused. Minimum mileage. Minimum risk. We could be looking at a fairly small area, somewhere near Frankfurt.”
“But then he returned to his unit. For three months. Why?”
“He was laying low. Waiting for a reaction. Hiding in plain sight. Which was a smart move. We’d have been looking at AWOLs and outside bad guys. Not grunts on the post. But the thing was never missed. The alarm was never raised. There was no reaction. So as soon as he felt sure of that, he left, at the next opportunity. He holed up in Hamburg. It took him four months to sell the thing. Now he’s headed back to pick it up.”
“Those are big conclusions,” Sinclair said. “Aren’t they? Anyone could have stolen that furniture truck.”
Reacher said, “We need to know where Wiley was seven months ago. We need his movement orders.”
“They’re coming,” Neagley said.
And right then the telex machine burst into chattering life.
—
Wiley had driven the big new van back toward the center of town, slowly, carefully, inching through the city traffic, waiting at lights, checking his mirrors. He looped around the Ausenalster lake, and crawled through St. Georg, curving west, heading toward where he lived, but long before he got there he turned left and rumbled over a boxy metal bridge, into the old docks, where the piers were too small for modern freighters, which meant the warehouses were also too small, which made them cheap to rent.