The Sentinel

SIXTEEN

There were two people at the kitchen counter in Mitch’s apartment alongside Reacher, and they were both mad at him.

‘I can’t believe you offered to sell the server.’ Both of Rutherford’s hands were clenched into fists. ‘You had no right. It’s not yours. We don’t know where it is. And ten measly grand? Cerberus will be worth a hundred times that much. A thousand times.’

‘I can’t believe you would even think of going.’ Sands threw the slip of paper on to the countertop. ‘It’s a trap. It’s obvious. How can it not be?’

Reacher took a mouthful of coffee. ‘OK. First of all, Rusty. Don’t worry. I have no intention of selling your computer thing. And Sarah, yes. It’s almost certainly a trap. But sometimes the only way to know if the stove is hot is to touch it.’

Sands glared at him.

‘Someone smart told me that once,’ he said.

‘You’re obviously not smart if you’re even considering walking into a trap.’

‘I never said I was smart. Stubborn, maybe. Obstinate even, on occasion.’

‘Why offer to sell if you had no intention?’ Rutherford said. ‘Are you going to rip Klostermann off? We can’t do that. I have to live here. My reputation’s tattered enough already.’

‘We’re not ripping anyone off,’ Reacher said. ‘It was a test. To get a sense of how important these records are to him. Or sensitive. Or embarrassing. I named a big number and he didn’t turn a hair. That tells us something. And here’s another reason. Say Klostermann isn’t what he seems to be. Say he’s somehow behind Garza’s murder and the attempt to kidnap you. Do you want him thinking you’re not willing to play ball? This way his incentive is to keep us alive.’

‘If you care so much about being free and healthy why would you knowingly walk into an ambush?’ Sands said. ‘Are you crazy?’

‘Not in the slightest,’ Reacher said. ‘And I’m not going to walk into anything. The best way to defeat an ambush is to be there first. Which I will be. But logistics aren’t the most important thing. You’re focusing in the wrong place. Look at the note.’

Sands picked up the scrap of paper. She re-read it slowly, and checked the other side. ‘What? I don’t see anything.’

‘The first two words. What do they mean?’

‘Romeo, Juliet. R J. Reacher, Jack. Your name.’

‘Exactly. Someone made it personal. I’m not some faceless guy who got in the way any more. They’re coming after me specifically. They need to understand that’s the wrong thing to do.’

Reacher parked Marty’s car half a mile south of the factory and covered the rest of the ground on foot. He moved slowly. He stopped frequently, but never at the same interval. He never continued until he was certain no one was following. And no one was watching. The clock in his head said 10:45. Seventy-five minutes before he was due at the rendezvous. More time would have been better but experience told him seventy-five minutes would be enough. Nine times out of ten.

The moment the abandoned building came into view Reacher knew that no kind of ghost story could have kept him away when he was growing up. Or his brother Joe. There were too many iron girders to climb. Too many nooks and alcoves to hide in. Too many frontal assaults and insane last stands and against-the-odds escapes to stage. And too much prime real estate to fight over with the other kids.

Plus ça change … as his mother used to say. The more things change …

The moment Reacher stepped through the gap where the tall wooden door used to be he knew seventy-five minutes weren’t enough. Not this time. He’d hit the one in ten. The ambushers were already there. He couldn’t see them. Yet. Or hear them. Or smell them. But he knew. Eyes were on him. He could feel them. He could feel a chill on his neck. Some kind of primal response to being watched. A warning mechanism hardwired into his lizard brain, as finely tuned as his ancestors’ had been millions of years ago. Then, forests. Now, a factory. Either way, evading predators. Not getting eaten. Not getting shot. Living to fight another day.

Plus ça change …

Reacher kept moving. Same speed. Same direction. He didn’t want whoever was watching to know he was aware of their presence. Not until he knew exactly where they were. And how many there were. He strained his ears. Heard nothing. Scanned the rubble and the weeds covering the ground. Checked the long line of smashed windows. The gaping holes in the roof. Looking for movement. Shadow. Shape. Shine.

He saw nothing.

Reacher took another step. Something made a sound behind him. Metal shifting against stone. But not someone looking to shoot him. They could have done that already. A decoy? Reacher scanned the ground in front. Behind. Both sides. He increased the radius. Looking for signs of disturbance. A place for someone to hide. To spring out of when his attention was drawn away. To get in close, quickly, and neutralize his advantage in strength and size.

He saw nothing.

‘It’s just you and me, Major.’ It was a woman’s voice. Behind him. Calm and confident. ‘And there’s no need to worry. No need to do anything either of us will regret in the morning. I just want to talk.’

Reacher turned around. The woman he’d last seen driving the Toyota was standing next to a sheet of corrugated iron against the wall. She must have eased her way out from behind it. She was dressed all in black, with a small tactical backpack slung over one shoulder and her hair tied back in a ponytail. There was a gun in her hand. A Glock 19. Reacher approved of her choice. It was compact. Easy to conceal. And reliable. The chances of a misfire were slim to none. Her hand seemed steady. He was a sizeable target. They were fifteen feet apart. If he rushed her she would have fifteen chances to hit him, assuming the magazine was full. Sixteen if she had one already in the chamber. More than one chance per foot. Not odds Reacher liked.

‘I’ve never been much of a conversationalist,’ he said.

‘Then just listen. I know a lot about you. Enough to believe I can trust you. I need to even those scales. And I need to do it quickly. So I’m going to tell you one story from my past. My father was a Stanford man. He wanted me to follow in his footsteps but I had other ideas. I wanted to study in England so I applied to college there. One of the old ones. It doesn’t matter which. But because I was foreign I had to jump through a couple extra hoops. One was writing a special essay. There was no word limit. No time limit. And no choice of subject. The title they gave me was What is a risk? You know what I wrote?’

Reacher said nothing.

‘Four words. This is a risk. It worked. I got in. And I wasn’t lying. It was a risk. The biggest one I’d taken at that time. Now I’m going to take a bigger one. The biggest I’ve ever taken.’

She slipped the backpack off her shoulder and lobbed it underarm, straight at Reacher. It landed at his feet and kicked a small cloud of dust up over his shoes.

‘Pick it up,’ she said. ‘Open it.’

The pack was made of black ballistic nylon. It wasn’t new. One of the shoulder straps was starting to fray and the bottom corners were scuffed. A tried and tested piece of equipment. The best kind. It had a small pocket on the right-hand side. An identical pocket on the left. Both were empty. There was a triple row of MOLLE webbing across the front, with nothing attached. And one internal compartment. Reacher unzipped it and looked inside. There were three spare magazines for the Glock. A set of car keys. For the Toyota, Reacher assumed. A hairbrush with two elastic ponytail holders wrapped around the handle. And a book.

‘See the Bible?’ she said. ‘Take it out.’

Reacher set the pack down and fished out the book. It was a King James hardcover edition. It had a dark red cardboard front. A dark red cardboard back. Gold printing on the front. Gold printing on the spine. It was scuffed and worn as if she carried it everywhere. The leaves were yellow and dark as if the victim of some spillage, long ago. Maybe some kind of fruit drink. Certainly something sticky, because the pages were gummed up solid.

‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘Dig your fingernails in. Pull. It will open.’

‘I don’t need to.’ Reacher slipped the book back into the pack. ‘I’ve seen one just like it before. You’re with the FBI?’

‘Special Agent Fisher,’ she said. ‘Margaret. You can call me Mags. If you help me.’

‘What kind of help do you need? The same kind Toni Garza gave you? Did you know enough to trust her, too? And did she trust you in return?’

‘Who’s Toni Garza?’

Reacher said nothing.

‘I’m serious,’ Fisher said. ‘I don’t know who Toni Garza is. I have an entirely different problem.’

‘Toni Garza was a journalist. She’s dead. Murdered by the people you’re working for. In a very nasty way.’

‘I can believe that,’ Fisher said, after a moment. ‘I’m working for some very nasty people. But I didn’t kill her. My cell didn’t kill her. I don’t know anything about her. But I do know this. If you don’t help me, more people like her will get hurt. Maybe murdered. Also in a very nasty way.’

Reacher said nothing.

‘The cell I’ve infiltrated was sent here to bag someone named Rusty Rutherford. But I guess you know that since you stumbled into the op and royally screwed it up.’

‘I’m not helping you capture Rutherford. Even if you convince me about Garza.’

Fisher held up her hand. ‘I’m not asking you to. All I need from you is information. Rutherford was to be taken because he has something a certain foreign power is desperate to get its hands on. He either has this thing in his possession or he knows where it is. If I can get to it first, before they go after Rutherford again, that’s the best way to keep him out of further danger.’

‘Which foreign power are we talking about?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘If you want my help you’re going to have to turn your cards all the way up.’

Fisher sighed. ‘Russia.’

‘OK. And what is the thing they want?’

‘I don’t know. Not exactly. All the cell was told is that it’s an item. An object. Something physical. It contains data or records of some kind so it could be a paper file or a photograph. But I think it’s most likely to be computer related, given the job Rutherford just lost.’

‘What kind of records?’

‘I don’t know exactly. Something that reveals a name or an identity. Or that would enable us to deduce one.’

‘Of an agent?’

Fisher nodded.

‘Theirs or ours?’

‘Theirs.’

‘An active agent?’

‘Very active. And that’s a situation that needs to be corrected.’

‘Why is there an agent in a sleepy town like this?’

Fisher shook her head. ‘The information is here. Not the agent. He’s somewhere else. Or she.’

‘Where?’

‘Repeat a word of this and I’ll kill you. I’ll probably have to kill myself, too. Have you heard of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory?’

‘Near Knoxville. Where they develop the supercomputers?’

‘They do many things there. Supercomputing is one of them. Another is cyber security. The United States is facing a lot of threats. We have a lot of defensive programs running. And the Russians have an agent in place who’s attempting to steal a copy of the most critical one. Its official name is project C02WW06BHH21.’

‘Snappy name.’

‘Only the geeks call it that. Everyone else calls it The Sentinel.’

‘What does it do?’

‘It protects the integrity of the election system software in forty-eight states. It’s the only thing that does.’

‘Why not all fifty?’

‘Politics. I haven’t got time to go into it.’

‘And the Russians are trying to steal a copy. So what? If they succeed what could they do with it? Change the result of an election? Aren’t there fail-safes? Paper backups?’

‘In some places. But changing the result is not their goal. That’s too direct. This is the Russians we’re talking about. You’ve got to understand just how long a game these people play. Their philosophy is if you hit a man with a fire hose he goes down, but he can get up again. If you gather enough raindrops and use them in the right way you wind up with the Grand Canyon. They’re trying to carve gaps in society that are too big to bridge. It’s all part of a bigger campaign. To sow discord and division. It’s been running for years. On social media. Conspiracy theories. Attempts to undermine the mainstream media.’

‘Fake news? I’ve heard about that.’

‘This time they’re specifically trying to erode faith in the election system itself. We know they’re serious. They already had a dry run four years ago, in Kentucky. What happened was, on election day, they sent out a phishing email. You know what that is?’

‘No idea,’ Reacher said.

‘It’s an email that looks legitimate, like it’s from some official trusted source. Like a bank or an insurance company.’

‘People trust banks and insurance companies?’

‘Some do. Anyway, the messages look genuine and they generally have a subject that sounds tempting in some way. Or urgent. Like half-price car insurance if you apply within twelve hours.’

‘So gullible people open these messages and something bad happens? Like an old-school letter bomb.’

‘Right. Opening the message or following a link or downloading an attachment, one way or another it infects the computer. A malicious program gets in and gains access to your files and passwords, and if you’re on a network it gets into that too. In the Kentucky case the Russians sent an email to all the election officials purporting to be from the VP of technical support at the company that supplied the election software. The subject line said it contained a critical update to the operating instructions.’

‘I can see how people could fall for that.’

‘They shouldn’t. They’re specifically trained not to. But trained or not, the email went to two hundred people. Six of them opened it.’

‘So the Russians got access?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did they do?’

‘Nothing. That time. They were proving the concept. Laying the foundations. Building up to a wider-scale attack this year. Imagine the scenes on election day if every person who shows up to vote at the correct precinct is told they’ve been re-registered without their knowledge at some other precinct on the other side of town. Or that their registration’s been cancelled altogether. Or when the results are announced it turns out that in some marginal districts Mickey Mouse and Daffy Duck are registered. Or that a bunch of people are registered in multiple precincts, even if they didn’t know it at the time or act on it.’

‘There’d be chaos.’

‘Total chaos. Only The Sentinel can stop it.’

‘It didn’t stop their dry run.’

‘It didn’t exist then. That’s why it was developed.’

‘Are you sure it works? This is the Russians we’re talking about. Maybe they’ve already penetrated some local elections and are just pretending they want to steal it to make you think they’re frightened of it.’

Fisher shook her head. ‘No. We know The Sentinel works. It’s already stopped twelve attempts in six different states. Plus we have a source who’s confirmed the Russians don’t believe they can defeat it. They weren’t too worried because they have an agent in place to steal it. Then panic set in because a record of some kind surfaced here that could lead to his exposure.’

‘I heard the town archive burned down.’

‘It did. The Russians did that. They’re also behind the ransomware attack that cost Rutherford his job. Evidently they wanted to shut down the new digital archive before it could go online.’

‘The town’s going to pay to get it unlocked. It had insurance. Why not wait until it’s up and running again, and go through it with a fine-tooth comb?’

‘The town might pay, but that archive is never going to see the light of day. I guarantee you that. Not all of it, anyway. Not the part we need.’

‘Rutherford figured out that some system he built might have captured the identity of whoever ran the ransomware attack. He thought that’s what someone wanted to get from him.’

‘Not possible. We know it was the Russians. The Russians know we know. And they want us to know, frankly. Every successful attack is them giving us the finger.’

‘I spoke to a guy yesterday at the courthouse. He said he was an agent with Homeland Security. Infrastructure Protection. He had a theory that Rutherford had colluded with the attacker.’

‘Agent Wallwork? He’s my partner. Sorry for the deception. We were hoping Rutherford might have somehow revealed what the item is. Or where it is. No. The panic’s about whatever can unmask their agent. That’s definite.’

‘In that case, how much do you know about a guy named Henry Klostermann?’

‘Who lives at the so-called Spy House? Don’t even think of going there. It’s such an obvious coincidence but we checked it out anyway. Those original guys from the fifties weren’t KGB agents. Just misguided citizens giving secrets to people they thought were their friends. They did some serious damage when they were in Los Alamos but nothing at all while they were here. They moved on after two years and defected soon after because they felt the noose beginning to close. They’re both dead now. They never married. They had no illegitimate offspring. No cousins. No other family that we know of. And they weren’t members of any parties or groups that might be looking to carry on their work.’

‘So there’s no connection to Klostermann other than the address?’

‘No. None. Why?’

‘I met him this morning. I think he’s looking for the same thing you are.’

‘You know what the thing is?’

‘Possibly. A computer thing. A server. It has a preliminary copy of part of the town archive on it.’

‘Jesus Christ. Why didn’t you say so before?’

‘I didn’t know about the agent and The Sentinel before. Klostermann said he wanted it for a different reason.’

‘What reason?’

‘Some family tree project, he claimed. It didn’t quite ring true. I think he’s trying to hide something.’

‘How does he know about this server?’

‘He said he hired Toni Garza, the journalist who was murdered, to dig up some property records going back to when his father immigrated. She found out that when the town started putting the archive on the computer they were using this server. It turned out to be too small so they switched it for a larger one, and Rutherford as IT manager took it back into stock for some future use.’

‘When did Garza start working for Klostermann?’

‘I don’t know exactly.’

‘But before the archive burned down?’

‘Yes. She started searching the paper records, then was going to use the online archive, then contacted Rutherford as some kind of Hail Mary, hoping he still had the server.’

‘This is finally starting to make sense. She must have found something in the records. Realized the significance and tried to report it. Or just mentioned it to the wrong person without even knowing its importance.’

‘Or the Russians could have had some kind of tripwire in place. Something to alert them if anyone was close to finding whatever they wanted to keep hidden. They’re not reckless. They’d know that one document sitting unnoticed amongst how many – thousands? millions? – in a dusty old archive would attract less attention than a fire.’

‘Either way, Rutherford needs to hand over that server. Like, yesterday.’

‘That’s a logical request. But it’s impossible.’

‘Why?’

‘Rutherford doesn’t know where the server is.’

Fisher turned and slammed her palm against the wall. ‘Damn. Are you sure?’

Reacher nodded. ‘He already tried to get it back.’

‘How did Klostermann account for his project getting someone killed?’

‘He claimed Garza wasn’t working for him exclusively. Said she had a bunch of projects on the go. Blamed her death on some hoodlums from Nashville that she’d been sniffing around.’

‘But you didn’t believe him.’

‘I’m not saying he killed her. I’m not saying he’s working for the Russians. But I know when someone’s hiding something.’

‘I’ll have my people take another look at him. The organization is so compartmentalized you could be married to the local Russian contact and not know it.’

‘I get that.’

‘And Rutherford? Not knowing where the server is? Are you sure he’s telling the truth?’

‘I am. It turns out he used the server for some other project and—’

‘Tell me he didn’t wipe it.’

‘No. He didn’t. Don’t worry. Before the ransomware attack he pressed the town to buy a backup system for all the computers. They wouldn’t come up with the cash so he tried to build one of his own out of spare parts. It was supposed to overwrite whatever was on the server, but that didn’t happen. That’s how he knew it had failed. He was so mad about it he threw all the equipment in the trash.’

‘He’s got to get it back.’

‘He’s trying.’

‘Why? To give it to Klostermann?’

‘No. He thinks the server can help with another thing he’s working on. He wants it back for himself.’

‘Can you help him find it?’

‘Can’t you? With all the resources of the Bureau?’

‘No.’ Fisher shook her head. ‘If the Russians latch on to a bunch of federal agents searching the local trash heaps they’ll know where to look. We have to keep this under the radar. Give it another couple of days. Please.’

‘What difference will a couple of days make? The election is weeks away. Rutherford can find the server on his own and figure out a way to get a copy to you. He’s a smart guy.’

‘It’s not that simple. For a start, the election. Yes, it’s a while away. But for thirty days leading up to it there’s what’s called a systems freeze. Nothing computer related can be changed in any way. It’s the same kind of thing the credit card companies and online retailers do heading into Black Friday and Christmas. It makes sure no one loads new software which turns out not to work properly and screws everything up at their most critical time. So, if we can’t positively confirm that The Sentinel hasn’t been compromised before then, we have a real problem. And if – when – we get our hands on Rutherford’s server we don’t even know what we’re looking for. There could be thousands of documents on there, and I very much doubt one of them will be labelled Identity of Russian Spy. All kinds of cross-referencing will be needed. Lateral thinking. Reading tea leaves and casting chicken bones, probably. So the bottom line, like I said, is we need that thing yesterday.’

‘I’ll tell Rutherford to search quickly. And anyway, how many trash heaps can there be in a town this size?’

‘Finding the server’s not the only problem. You said you care about keeping Rutherford safe.’

‘And?’

‘The original plan was for us to snatch Rutherford. He’d give up the item – the server, as we now believe – or its location and then, overcome by shame and depression after losing his job and bearing the blame for the ransomware attack, he would kill himself. I’m the senior operative so it would have been me who staged it. Obviously I’d have made sure Rutherford walked away. Only before that could happen you arrived and put half the team on the disabled list. The rest of us have been switched to surveillance only. A new guy is being brought in to finish the job. A specialist, from Moscow. He’ll outrank me. So if you leave and he gets his hands on Rutherford, there may be nothing I can do about it.’