Blue Moon

TWENTY-FIVE

Reacher and Abby covered the three block distance via a roundabout route. Obviously if the phones were truly traceable, they might have already been discovered, in what was clearly a temporary stash, in which case surveillance might have been set up against their eventual retrieval. Better to play it safe. Or as safe as possible, which wasn’t very. There were shadows and alleys and deep doorways and two out of every three street lights were busted. There was plenty of habitat for hidden night-time watchers.

Reacher saw the rusty mailbox up ahead. The middle of the next block. He said, ‘Pretend we’re having some kind of a deep conversation, and when we get level with the mailbox we stop to make an especially big point.’

‘OK,’ Abby said. ‘Then what?’

‘Then we ignore the mailbox completely and we move on. But at that point very quietly. We glide away.’

‘An actual pretend conversation? Or just moving our lips, like a silent movie?’

‘Maybe whispered. Like we’re dealing with secret information.’

‘Starting when?’

‘Now,’ Reacher said. ‘Keep on walking. Don’t slow down.’

‘What do you want to whisper about?’

‘I guess whatever is on your mind.’

‘Are you serious? We could be walking into a dangerous situation here. That’s what’s on my mind.’

‘You said you want to do one thing every day that scares you.’

‘I’m already way over quota.’

‘And you survived every time.’

‘We could be walking into a hail of gunfire.’

‘They won’t shoot me. They want to ask me questions.’

‘You absolutely sure?’

‘It’s a psychological dynamic. Like in the theatre. It’s not necessarily the kind of thing that has a yes or no answer.’

The mailbox was coming up.

‘Get ready to stop,’ Reacher whispered.

‘And give them a stationary target?’

‘Only as long as it takes to make a big imaginary statement. Then we move on again. But very quietly, OK?’

Reacher stopped.

Abby stopped.

She said, ‘What kind of big imaginary statement?’

‘Whatever is on your mind.’

She was quiet a beat.

Then she said, ‘No. What’s on my mind is I don’t want to make a statement about what’s on my mind. Not yet. That’s my statement.’

‘Go,’ he said.

They moved on. As quiet as they could. Three paces. Four.

‘OK,’ Reacher said.

Abby said, ‘OK what?’

‘No one here.’

‘And we know this how?’

‘You tell me.’

She was quiet another beat, and then she said, ‘We were quiet because we were listening.’

‘And what did we hear?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Exactly. We paused right by the target, and we heard no one stepping out or tensing up, and then we moved on, and we heard no one stepping back and relaxing, or scuffling around, waiting for word on plan B. Therefore there’s no one here.’

‘That’s great.’

‘So far,’ Reacher said. ‘But who knows how long these things take? Not my area of expertise. They could be here any minute.’

‘So what should we do?’

‘I guess we should take the phones someplace else. We should make them start the search all over again.’

Two blocks south they saw headlight beams coming out of a cross street. Like a distant early warning. Seconds later a car made the left and drove up towards them. Slowly. Maybe searching. Or maybe just a regular night-time driver worried about a ticket or a DUI. Hard to tell. The headlights were low and wide spaced. A big sedan. It kept on coming.

‘Stand by,’ Reacher said.

Nothing. The car drove past, same steady speed, same decided direction. An old Cadillac. The driver looked neither left nor right. An old lady, peering out from underneath the rim of the steering wheel.

Abby said, ‘Whatever, we better be quick about this. Because like you said, we don’t know how long these things take.’

They walked back, four fast paces, and Reacher pulled his rolled-up jacket out of the rusty mailbox.

Abby carried the phones. She insisted. They walked another three blocks on another roundabout route and found a bodega open late. No man in a suit on the door. No suits anywhere, as a matter of fact. The clerk at the register was wearing a white T-shirt. There were no other customers. The space was crowded with humming chiller cabinets and bright with fluorescent light. There was a two-top table in back, unoccupied.

Reacher got two cardboard cups of coffee and carried them back to the table. Abby had the phones laid out side by side. She was looking at them, conflicted, as if half eager to get started on them, and half worried about them, as if they were pulsing secret SOS signals out into the ether. Find me, find me.

Which they were.

She said, ‘Can you remember which was which?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘They all look the same to me.’

She clicked one to life. No password required. For speed, and arrogance, and easy internal review. She dabbed and swiped through a bunch of screens. Reacher saw a vertical array of green message bubbles. Texts. Unreadable foreign words, but mostly regular letters, the same as English. Some were doubled up. Some had strange accents above or below. Umlauts and cedillas.

‘Albanian,’ Reacher said.

Out on the street a car drove by. Slowly. Its headlight wash scoured a thin blue blade of light across the room. All the way along the back wall, and then all the way along the end wall, and then it was gone. Abby clicked the second phone to life. No password. She found another long sequence of text messages, to and from. Green bubbles, one after the other. All in the Cyrillic alphabet. Named for St Cyril, who worked on alphabets in the ninth century.

‘Ukrainian,’ Reacher said.

‘There are hundreds of texts here,’ Abby said. ‘Literally hundreds. Maybe thousands.’

Another car drove by outside, faster.

Reacher said, ‘Can you make out the dates?’

Abby scrolled and said, ‘There are at least fifty since yesterday. Your picture is in some of them.’

Another car drove by outside. This time slowly. Lights on bright. Searching for something, or worried about a ticket. A glimpse of the driver. A man in dark clothing, his face lit up spooky by the lights on his dash.

‘There are at least fifty Albanian texts too,’ Abby said. ‘Maybe more.’

‘So how do we do this?’ Reacher asked. ‘We can’t take the phones home. We can’t copy out all this crap on to napkins. We would make mistakes. And it would take for ever. We don’t have time.’

‘Watch me,’ Abby said.

She took out her own phone. She squared the Ukrainian phone on the tabletop. She hovered her own phone above it, parallel, moving in, moving out, until satisfied.

‘Taking a picture?’ Reacher asked.

‘Video,’ she said. ‘Watch.’

She held her own phone in her left hand, and with her right forefinger she scrolled through a long and complex chain of Ukrainian texts on the captured phone, at a moderate speed, on and on, consistent, five seconds, ten, fifteen, twenty. Then the end of the chain bounced to a halt and she shut off the recording.

She said, ‘We can play it and pause it as much as we want. We can freeze it anywhere. Just as good as having the phones themselves.’

She did the same thing with the Albanian phone. Five seconds, ten, fifteen, twenty.

‘Nice work,’ Reacher said. ‘Now we should move these phones again. Can’t leave them here. This place doesn’t deserve a visit from the goon squad.’

‘So where?’

‘I vote back in the mailbox.’

‘But that’s ground zero for their search. If they’re behind the curve a little, they could be getting there right about now.’

‘Actually I’m hoping being in a small metal box will cut off the transmissions. They won’t be able to search at all.’

‘Then they never could.’

‘Probably not.’

‘Then there never was any danger.’

‘Until we took them out.’

‘How long does it take, for a thing like that?’

‘We already agreed, neither one of us knows.’

‘Does it have to be that mailbox? How about the nearest mailbox?’

‘No collateral damage,’ Reacher said. ‘Just in case.’

‘You don’t really know, do you?’

‘It’s not necessarily the kind of thing that has a yes or no answer.’

‘Are the transmissions cut off or not?’

‘I’m guessing probably. Not my area of expertise. But I listen to people talk. They’re for ever bitching and moaning about their calls cutting out. For all kinds of reasons, all of which sound much less serious than getting shut in a small metal box.’

‘But right now they’re right here on the table, so there is currently a degree of danger.’

Reacher nodded.

‘Getting larger every minute,’ he said.

This time Reacher carried the phones, for no reason other than normal squad rotation. There were plenty of cars around. Plenty of bouncing, blinding headlight beams. All kinds of makes and models. But no Lincoln Town Cars. No sudden changes in speed or direction. Apparently no interest at all.

They put the phones in the mailbox and squealed it shut. This time Reacher kept his jacket. Not just for the warmth. For the guns in the pockets. They set out to walk back to Barton’s house. They got less than a block and a half.