The Sentinel

THIRTEEN

The Suburban was still parked in the same spot when Reacher stepped out of the alley. He waved with both arms to attract the driver’s attention then gestured for the guy to join him. The driver shook his head and indicated that Reacher should come to him. Reacher threw up his hands as if exasperated and hurried along the sidewalk until he was level with the passenger door. The window whirred down and Reacher could see that the driver was holding a gun. Another Beretta. Presumably also well maintained. Presumably also loaded. He had it in his left hand, low down in his lap, pointing sideways. Not an ideal firing position. But that was compensated for by the size of the target he had to aim at. Reacher’s chest.

‘Come quick,’ Reacher said, ignoring the gun. ‘To the alley. Your friend needs help. Bring the car.’

‘What are you talking about?’ the driver said.

‘I waited for you at the coffee shop and when you didn’t show I came back to look for you. I figured I’d cut through the alley to save time and I found your friend. He was on the ground. In bad shape. He was bleeding. He had this big cut on his forehead. He was unconscious. Breathing, but only just. He must have gotten mugged. He had no wallet. No phone.’

‘Did you call 911?’

‘I couldn’t. I don’t have a phone. That’s why I came to get you. And I figured that with this whole computer situation going on it would be quicker for you to drive him to the hospital anyway.’

The driver paused, then put down the gun. ‘All right. Show me.’

‘Come on. Follow me. Pull into the alley. Then you’ll see him.’ Reacher set off at a fast jog, and after a second he heard an engine fire up behind him. Tyres squealed and a moment later the Suburban shot past him. It continued to accelerate then darted into the mouth of the alley without signalling. Reacher caught up and squeezed along the passenger side. The driver climbed out, his gun in his hand, and joined Reacher at the front of the vehicle.

‘Where is he?’ the driver said. ‘I don’t see him.’

‘I forgot,’ Reacher said. ‘I put him in the dumpster. The far one. To keep him safe. I didn’t know if you’d still be waiting, or how long it would take to find you.’

The driver raised his gun to Reacher’s chest. ‘You forgot?’

‘What?’ Reacher said. ‘You never forgot anything?’

‘All right.’ The driver raised the gun to Reacher’s head. ‘Back up against the wall. Keep your hands where I can see them.’ He waited for Reacher to comply then moved forward to the dumpster. ‘Don’t move.’ He lifted the lid with his free hand and took a glance inside. Reacher waited a moment for him to register the state his buddy was in, then strode forward and pulled the gun from his waistband. He switched it around so he was holding it by the barrel and swung it in a fast sideways arc. The butt smashed into the driver’s elbow.

The driver dropped his own gun and the lid of the dumpster and slumped down on one knee. Reacher switched the gun to his left hand, wrapped his right hand around the side of the guy’s head and slammed it against the dumpster. Then he grabbed the front of his shirt, half lifted him, and dropped him down in a sitting position with his back against the metal. His body was as slack as a rag doll. Reacher waited a moment to make sure he was conscious, then rammed his gun into the guy’s mouth.

‘I’m going to ask you a question,’ Reacher said. ‘I’ll give you five seconds to think about it then I’ll remove the gun. If you give me the correct answer I’ll let you fish your buddy out of the trash and drive away. Give me anything other than the correct answer and I’ll put the gun back in your mouth and blow the back of your skull clean off. Are we clear?’

The driver’s eyes widened and he did his best to nod his head.

‘What does Rutherford have that you want?’ Reacher raised his thumb and each finger on his right hand in turn at one second intervals, then pulled out the gun.

‘Go ahead.’ The driver raised his chin. ‘Shoot me. Don’t waste any more time. There’s nothing you can say or do that’ll make me tell you what it is.’

‘You’d rather give up your life than one little piece of information?’ Reacher said. ‘That seems like a poor choice.’

‘It’s not just my life. I have a wife. A brother. I know what would happen to them. Come on.’ He opened his mouth, leaned forward, and gripped the muzzle with his teeth. ‘Do it.’

Reacher pulled the gun away and clubbed the driver on the side of the head with his right hand, knocking him out cold. He retrieved the dropped gun, checked it, tucked both weapons into his waistband, then started to go through the guy’s pockets. The contents proved no more satisfying than the passenger’s. He had no credit cards. Nothing with a name or an address. No spare ammunition. His phone had been used more recently, but it contained no names or personal information. Reacher took the cash as before, duct-taped his ankles, wrists and mouth, and dropped him in the other dumpster. Then he turned to the Suburban. He checked the glovebox. The sun visors. The door pockets. Under the seats. Under the floor mats. In the trunk. Around the spare and the jack and the little wallet of tools. Under the hood. In the wheel arches. And found nothing. Not even a loose dime or a discarded candy wrapper. Whoever these guys were, they were fastidious. That was for damn sure.

Reacher closed the hood and the tailgate and all the doors apart from the driver’s. He was tempted to climb in. Take the vehicle. Partly because it could be useful. And partly to deprive the enemy of a valuable asset. But he had seen one of the same crew stick a tracking device on Rutherford’s Beetle. That meant there was a risk they’d use the same technology on their own vehicles. So he made sure the key was in the ignition and left the Suburban to take its chances.

Someone had left a stack of cards advertising a pizza delivery service on the reception counter but otherwise the lobby of Rutherford’s building seemed undisturbed when Reacher returned. He was starting to feel hungry again so he tucked a card into his back pocket then approached the closet door. He braced himself in case the doorman had used the time to think. To see through the ruse. Then he worked the lock. And found the guy sitting on the floor with his knees up near his shoulders. He blinked his tiny eyes against the sudden light then recognized Reacher and tried to speak, but his voice was unintelligible through the shiny tape.

‘Good news,’ Reacher said. He grabbed the doorman’s hands and heaved him to his feet, then took out his smaller knife and started to cut him free. ‘False alarm. There’s no threat against Mr Rutherford. Not today. He’s perfectly safe. For now. Although he’s not feeling very well. He just called. He’s postponed his trip again. He’s going to stay in his apartment for a few days until he’s feeling better. He doesn’t want any visitors, or any other interruptions at all. I’m just going to go up and check if he needs anything, then I’ll be heading back to Nashville. It was a pleasure meeting you. Keep up the good work.’

Reacher figured that if Rutherford’s neighbour could spend half the year away on cruises he must be an older guy. Retired. With plenty of time on his hands. And many years of accumulating junk behind him. Reacher pictured an apartment crammed with chintzy furniture. Flowery curtains. Pictures of children. Probably grandchildren. But when Rutherford opened the door and stepped back Reacher saw a large, almost empty space. All the dividing walls had been removed. The exterior walls had been painted bright white. The floor was covered with pale grey concrete which was sealed and polished to match the kitchen countertops. Aluminium blinds, angled to allow the afternoon sun to flood in, covered the windows. The coffee table had a lozenge-shaped glass top with a curved wood support rather than regular legs. The rest of the furniture was all chrome and black leather. Reacher had seen pictures of things like it in a magazine about mid-century designers. There were polished walnut units with doors set into them separating the far third of the room. Something that looked like a giant metal egg made out of riveted panels set on a black wood tripod. And a set of blond wood shelves. Each one was an apparently random length, but Reacher figured they were probably carefully calculated to create some kind of effect. They seemed to be floating near the wall rather than being attached with brackets or supports, and they held a sparse selection of random objects. The kind that were no doubt pronounced objays by the people who sold them.

‘What do you think?’ Rutherford said.

‘I don’t know,’ Reacher said. ‘Is it a home? Or a showroom?’

‘A home. It’s been Mitch’s for years. Although he does have a couple of other ones too. And it hasn’t always looked like this. He had it completely remodelled last year. He has some really cool things now. See this?’ Rutherford pointed at the egg. ‘It came from a lightbulb factory. In Germany. They used it to test the vacuum seal inside the glass bulbs. Now Mitch uses it for storing his whisky.’ Rutherford walked across and opened a door set into the front of the thing. Inside were four crystal decanters full of golden liquid and eight stubby glasses. ‘Think twice before helping yourself, though. The cheapest kind costs twenty grand a bottle.’

‘I’ll stick to coffee,’ Reacher said. ‘Assuming your friend has anything so pedestrian.’

‘Me too,’ Rutherford said. He crossed to the kitchen area and opened a wall cupboard containing a vast shiny machine bristling with knobs and gauges and levers. ‘If I can figure out how this thing works.’

Reacher moved to the centre of the room. ‘I thought you said you had the keys so you could water your friend’s plants?’

‘Right.’ Rutherford nodded.

‘What happened? Did you forget? Have they died?’

‘No. Of course not. Mitch would kill me. They’re over there on the shelf. Good as new.’ Rutherford pointed to a row of three miniature pots on the shelf to the left of the living area window. Each one contained a shrivelled stalk, like the trunk of a tiny decaying tree.

‘Those things are alive?’ Reacher said.

‘The outer pair are over a hundred years old. The other one is younger. Mitch said it’s about sixty, I think. They come from a forest in the foothills of Mount Fuji, Japan. It’s the only place in the world they grow. The same family has tended to them for generations.’

‘Your friend has interesting taste. What does he do?’

‘He’s in IT, like me.’ Rutherford paused and a look of genuine sadness settled over his face. ‘Only his million-dollar idea actually worked. Unlike the piece of trash I pinned my hopes on.’

Reacher took a seat on one of the couches and waited for Rutherford to finish his battle of wits with the coffee machine. ‘Rusty, we need to talk about something serious now. The people who are coming after you took the bait about you driving to the airport. They showed up in your garage. But they passed on the opportunity to ambush you. That was the correct choice in the circumstances. They planted a tracking device on your car instead.’

‘But I’m not going to the airport.’ Rutherford placed the mugs on the coffee table and sat on the other couch. ‘What will they do when my car doesn’t move?’

‘I don’t know. That depends on how patient they are. And on the urgency of whatever problem they’re trying to solve. My guess is that it won’t be much longer before they come in and get you. But we could avoid that if we can figure out what they want. I need you to focus all your attention on answering that question.’

Rutherford shook his head. ‘I already told you. I don’t have anything that anyone could want.’

‘There are two possible scenarios here,’ Reacher said. ‘You have this thing and don’t realize it. Or they believe you have it but you don’t. Option one we can work with. Option two presents more of a challenge. So here’s what I want you to do. Finish your coffee. Then lie back. Close your eyes. And pick a day. Say, the Monday of the week before the ransomware thing began. Tell me everything you did from the moment your eyes opened in the morning until you fell asleep that night. Every single detail. However trivial. You never know what might trigger a connection.’

‘OK.’ Rutherford took a swig of coffee then slipped off his shoes and swung his feet up on to the cushion. ‘I’ll try. But I’m not sure it’ll help.’

‘You need to focus,’ Reacher said. ‘No distractions, so switch off your phone.’

Rutherford’s phone started to ring.

‘Ignore it,’ Reacher said.

Rutherford was already pulling it out of his pocket. He checked the screen and held it up for Reacher to see. It read Doorman.

‘I told him not to disturb you,’ Reacher said. ‘Ignore it.’

‘I can’t. What if it’s those guys coming up to get me? You said they will. What if he’s trying to warn me? I have to check.’

Rutherford hit the speaker button and placed the phone on the table.

‘Mr Rutherford? I’m sorry to disturb you, sir. I know you’re not feeling well. But I have to give you a heads-up. Someone’s here to see you. I told her no but she marched right by me. She’s on her way up. And man, she’s pissed that I tried to stop her.’

Rutherford hung up then crossed to the door and pressed his eye to the peephole. ‘No one’s there. Not yet. It must be one of the women from yesterday. The one who was watching the building. She must have found out which is my apartment. She’s coming to get me. What are we going to do?’

‘We don’t have to do anything,’ Reacher said. ‘No one knows we’re here.’

‘That’s right.’ Rutherford took a deep breath. ‘We could lie low. Wait for her to go.’

‘We could. Avoid a confrontation in a confined public space. And inject some bad intelligence into their decision-making process. Two good outcomes with zero effort on our part.’

‘OK. Let’s do that.’ Rutherford turned away from the door and a moment later his face creased with alarm. ‘Wait. What if she breaks in? She could pick the locks.’

‘Also good. We could join her. Ask her some questions. And afterwards we’d have the perfect cover. You came back from dropping some trash down the garbage chute and found an intruder in your apartment. She tried to run. She slipped. And she hit her head. Tragic, but the kind of thing that can happen when you choose a life of crime.’

‘We couldn’t— Shhh. Someone’s coming.’ Rutherford pressed his eye back to the peephole. ‘It’s— Oh my goodness.’

He opened the door and stepped out, still in his socks. Reacher saw a woman on the other side of the corridor. She was facing away, ready to ring Rutherford’s doorbell. She had the same colour hair as the Toyota driver. It was the same length. She was the same height. But her clothes were different. She was wearing a pale grey suit. And Reacher didn’t recognize her face.

‘Sarah!’ Rutherford held his arms out wide. ‘So good to see you. What are you doing here?’

‘I was worried about you.’ The woman pulled Rutherford into a hug so tight it looked like she was trying to break his back. ‘You stopped calling. You didn’t answer your phone. I left you all kinds of messages. Then I heard what happened with your job.’

‘I didn’t get any messages. You must have been calling my work phone. The assholes took it when they fired me. I’m sorry. I should have told you. I should have called.’

‘Are you OK?’

‘I am. I was down for a while but I’m doing a lot better now.’

‘Good. Because there’s something we need to talk about. It could be huge. ‘The woman’s giant purse was slipping off her shoulder and as she heaved it back into place her head turned and she spotted Reacher standing in the doorway opposite. ‘Oh. Hello. You must be Mitch. I’ve heard a lot about you.’

‘Actually, no,’ Rutherford said. ‘Mitch is away. This is Jack Reacher. Reacher, this is my friend Sarah Sands. The one I told you about. Sarah was working on Cerberus with me.’

Rutherford made another pot of coffee while Sands fired up her laptop and listened as Reacher ran through a summary of events since he’d arrived in town.

‘I don’t like this.’ Sands took Rutherford’s hand when he set her cup on the table and looked up at him. ‘I don’t like this one little bit. Someone’s trying to kidnap you? That’s not OK. The Bureau should be all over this. We need to keep you safe.’

‘That’s what Reacher told the cops yesterday but they weren’t too impressed.’ Rutherford sat down next to Sands. ‘I’m still pretty much persona non grata around here.’

‘How about you, Sarah?’ Reacher said. ‘Have you got any contacts from your Bureau days? Anyone who could light a fire under this?’

‘Maybe,’ Sands said. ‘I still know some people. I could make some calls. Maybe kick up a few sparks, at least. Have you got any idea what Rusty has that they want, whoever they are?’

‘We’re still trying to figure that out.’

‘Maybe I can help. I bet they want the same thing I’m here to get. The system we created. Or part of it, at least.’

‘Why would anyone want that piece of junk?’ Rutherford slumped back. ‘It didn’t work.’

‘It didn’t work the way we hoped. That’s true. But that doesn’t mean it was a complete failure. Something you said when the attack first happened didn’t quite make sense to me, Rusty. It kept on bugging me. So I ran a bunch of simulations and I think I found something.’

‘That the whole thing was a giant waste of time?’ Rutherford said. ‘That we would have been better off creating a crossword puzzle app for people learning Swahili?’

‘I can’t believe you didn’t see this yourself,’ Sands said. ‘There’s a giant clue right there in your backup.’

‘No. There’s nothing in the backup. Nothing overwrote what was already there on whatever crappy second-hand servers I used to cobble it together.’

‘That’s exactly the point.’

‘Oh my God.’ Rutherford stood up and pressed his palm to his forehead. ‘Sarah, I love you.’

‘So your system did work?’ Reacher took a sip of coffee. ‘You said it didn’t.’

‘Right,’ Rutherford said. ‘It didn’t.’

‘So why would anyone want it?’ Reacher said.

‘It comes down to the way ransomware works,’ Sands said. ‘Attacks don’t happen all in one go. Imagine a computer network is like an enemy fortress. If you want to capture it you don’t just lob a grenade over the wall and hope the soldiers are all killed. You start by infiltrating your best guy. You smuggle him past the defences and leave him to sneak around inside for a while. Get the lie of the land. Draw maps for when your main force arrives. Find out where all the good stuff is hidden. And see if there are any traps to avoid. In our case, for traps read backups. Backups are kryptonite to ransomware. There’s no point in locking a bunch of data if your intended victim has a clean copy. He’d just laugh in your face. And that’s a big problem because some of these groups are in the game for prestige as much as they are for cash. So if they find a backup – which are usually only connected briefly to capture a snapshot of any recent changes and then get taken offline or even off site for safe keeping – they immediately deploy a special kind of program. A particularly sneaky kind. We call it a trident because it does three things all at once. One, it destroys all the data that’s already been backed up. It’s either wiped clean or replaced with porn or taunting messages, or things like that. Two, it prevents any new backups getting saved. And three, it sends spoof signals to the organization’s management system saying that everything is working OK. That way it avoids alerting anyone to what’s happening and adds to the blow when the main systems lock up and the ransom demand is posted.’

‘But your backups didn’t get wiped,’ Reacher said. ‘Or overwritten with porn. Did they?’

‘No,’ Rutherford said. ‘Something stopped that from happening. But nothing new was saved. And spoof management reports did get sent. That’s why I thought we’d be OK after the attack. And why I was so shocked when we weren’t.’

‘Cerberus interfered,’ Sands said. ‘It broke one spike off the trident. It’s the only explanation. I ran simulations using copies of the most recent ransomware we’ve come across, and here’s where things get interesting for the people who are chasing Rusty. In eight out of nine tests, not only was the existing data untouched, but a fragment of the malicious code was retained on the backup system. It was somehow caught by Cerberus when it stopped the disc from getting wiped.’

‘Enough of a fragment to unlock the town’s computers?’ Reacher said.

‘No,’ Sands said. ‘It doesn’t work that way. But it could reveal who’s responsible. It’s like when a bank robber wears a mask but the security cameras pick up his gang tattoos.’

‘That must be why these guys are trying to get their hands on it,’ Rutherford said. ‘They must have analysed the system maps the ransomware sent back to them. Seen something they didn’t recognize – Cerberus. And figured out what it could do. Maybe put that together with the reports in the press about the old data being the only thing that survived. You should have seen the headlines. Rutherford’s Rusty Ransom Response was my favourite. But we have a different reason to want it. Maybe millions of different reasons. Right, Sarah?’

‘That’s why I’m here,’ Sands said. ‘There’s life in the guard dog yet. It’s not the product we thought it was going to be. It obviously doesn’t prevent ransomware attacks happening. But if it bulletproofs any backed-up data, that’s the next best thing. A lot of organizations would pay a lot of money for that. All we need is the servers you were using. Bench tests are fine, but we need to make sure it really was our system that saved the old data. Not some random malfunction. So let’s go get them.’

‘We can’t get them.’ Rutherford flopped back down. ‘When I thought the system had failed I threw everything in the trash.’