Worth Dying For

FORTY-FIVE

ROBERTO CASSANO AND ANGELO MANCINI HAD BEEN IN THE AREA three whole days, and they figured their one real solid-gold advantage over Mahmeini’s crew was their local knowledge. They knew the lie of the land, literally. Most of all, they knew it was flat and empty. Like a gigantic pool table, with brown felt. Big fields, for efficiency’s sake, no ditches, no hedges, no other natural obstacles, the ground frozen firm and hard. So even though their car was a regular street sedan, they could drive it cross-country without a major problem, pretty much like sailing a small boat on a calm open sea. And they had seen the Duncan compound up close. They had been in it. They knew it well. They could loop around behind it in the car, slow and quiet, lights off, inky blue and invisible in the dark, and then they could get out and climb the crappy post-and-rail fence, and storm the place from the rear. Surprise was everything. There might be eyeballs to the front, but in back there would be nothing at all except the Duncans and Mahmeini’s guys all sitting around in one of the kitchens, probably toasting each other with cheap bourbon and sniggering about their newly streamlined commercial arrangements.

Two handgun rounds would take care of that happy conversation.

Cassano came south on the two-lane and switched off his lights level with the motel. The Ford was still burning in the lot, but only just. The remains of the tyres were still giving off coils of greasy rubber smoke, and small flames were licking out of the gravel all around where oil had spilled. Safir’s boys were dark shrunken shapes about half their original size, both fused to the zigzag springs that were all that was left of the seats, their mouths forced open like awful shrieks, their heads burned smooth, their hands up like talons. Mancini smiled and Cassano rolled slowly past them and headed on down the road, cautiously, navigating by the light of the moon.

Four miles south of the motel and one mile north of the Duncan place he slowed some more and turned the wheel and bumped across the shoulder and struck out across the open land. The car lurched and pattered. In a geological sense the ground was dead flat, but down there where the rubber met the dirt it was rutted and lumpy. The springs creaked and bounced and the wheel jumped and chattered in Cassano’s hands. But he made steady progress. He kept it to about twenty miles an hour and held a wide curve, aiming to arrive about half a mile behind the compound. Two minutes, he figured. At one point he had to brake hard and steer around a bramble thicket. Just beyond it they saw the burned-out shell of an SUV. It loomed up at them out of the dark, all black and ashen grey. Reacher’s work, from earlier in the day. But after that it was easy all the way. They could see a pool of faint yellow light ahead, like a homing beacon. A kitchen window, almost certainly, spilling warmth. The southernmost house, probably. Jacob Duncan’s place. The big cheese.

Mahmeini’s man climbed out of the Cadillac and stood for a second in the night-time cold. He looked all around, east, west, north, south, and he saw nothing stirring. He closed his door, to kill the interior light. He took a step towards the trunk. He had been right. There was a light in the trunk. It was throwing a pale sphere of yellow glow into the mist. Not serious from the front, but a problem from behind. The human eye was very sensitive.

He took another step, past the rear passenger door, and he raised his left hand, palm flat, somehow already feeling the familiar sensations associated with an action he had performed a thousand times before, his palm on the metal maybe a foot from the edge of the lid, so that the force of his push would act on both hinges equally, so that the panel would not buckle, so that both calibrated springs would stretch together with soft creaks, whereupon the lid would go down smooth and easy until the upmarket mechanism grabbed at it and sucked it all the way shut.

He got as far as putting his palm on the panel.

Subconsciously he leaned into the motion, not really intending to slam the lid, not at all bad-tempered, just seeking a little physical leverage, and his change of position hunched his shoulders a little, which brought his head forward a little, which changed his eye line a little, which meant he had to look somewhere, and given the choice of the lit interior of a previously closed space or a featureless length of dark blacktop, well, any human eye would opt for the former over the latter.

Asghar Arad Sepehr stared back at him.

His sightless eyes were wide open. His olive skin was pale with death and yellow in the light. Forces from braking and accelerating and turning had jammed him awkwardly into the far rear corner of the trunk. His limbs were in disarray. His neck was bent. His look was quizzical.

Mahmeini’s man stood absolutely still, his hand on the cold metal, his mouth open, not really breathing, his heart hardly beating. He forced himself to look away. Then he looked back. He wasn’t hallucinating. Nothing had changed. He started breathing again. Then he started panting. His heart started thumping. He started to shake and shiver.

Asghar Arad Sepehr stared up at him.

Mahmeini’s man took his hand off the trunk lid and shuffled all the way around to the rear of the car. He stood there with the idling exhaust pooling around his knees and with his fingers steepled against his forehead, looking down, not understanding. Asghar was stone dead, but there was no blood. No gunshot wound between the eyes. No blunt-force trauma, no caved-in skull, no signs of strangulation or suffocation, no knife wounds, no defensive injuries. Nothing at all, except his friend, dead in the trunk, all slack and undignified, all thrown about and jumbled up.

Mahmeini’s man walked away, ten feet, then twenty, and then he turned back and raised his head and raised his arms and howled silently at the moon, his eyes screwed tight shut, his mouth wide open in a desperate snarl, his feet stamping alternately like he was running in place, all alone in the vast empty darkness.

Then he stopped and swiped his hands over his face, one after the other, and he started thinking. But the subtleties were almost completely beyond him. His friend had been killed sixty miles away, by an unknown person and an unknown method with no visible signs, and then locked in the trunk of a car that could have absolutely nothing at all to do with either Rossi’s boys, or Safir’s. Then his own rental had been taken away, so that he had been forced to steal the very same car, the only possible choice in an entire town, inevitably and inexorably, like a puppet being manipulated from afar by a grinning intelligence much greater than his own.

It was incomprehensible.

But, facts were facts. He walked back to the trunk and steeled himself to investigate further. He pushed and pulled and hauled Asghar into the centre of the space and began a detailed examination, like a pathologist leaning over a mortuary table. The trunk light burned bright and hot, but it revealed nothing. Asghar had no broken bones, and no bruises. His neck was intact. He had no wounds, no cuts, no scrapes, no scratches, and there was nothing under his fingernails. His gun and his knife and his money were missing, which was interesting. And all around him in the trunk were the usual kinds of things a person might expect to find in a trunk, which was odd. No attempt had been made to clean it up. No incriminating evidence had been removed. There was an empty grocery bag with a week-old register receipt inside, and a month-old local newspaper never read and still neatly folded, and some browned and curled leaves and some crumbs of dirt as if items had been hauled home from a plant nursery. Clearly the car belonged to someone who used it in a fairly normal manner, and who had not prepared it in any special way for its current gruesome task.

So, whose car was it? That was the first question. The licence plates would reveal the answer, of course, assuming they were genuine. But there might be a faster way to find out, given the fact that nothing seemed to have been sanitized. Mahmeini’s man stepped away to the front passenger door, and opened it, and leaned in, and opened the glove box. He found a black leather wallet the size of a hardcover book, stamped on the front with the Cadillac shield in gold. Inside it he found two instruction books, one thick, one thin, one for the car and one for the radio, and a salesman’s business card clipped into four angled slots, and a registration document, and an insurance document. He pulled out both documents and dropped the wallet in the foot well and held the documents close to the light inside the glove box.

The car was Seth Duncan’s.

Which was logical, in a sudden, awful, spectacular way. Because everything had been utterly, utterly miscalculated, right from the start. There was no other possible explanation. There was no giant stranger on the rampage. No one had seen him and no one could describe him, because he didn’t exist. He was an invention. He was imaginary. He was bait. He was a ruse. The whole delivery delay was bullshit. It had been staged, from beginning to end. The purpose had been to lure everyone to Nebraska, to be cut out, to be eliminated, to be killed. The Duncans were removing links, severing the chain, intending to remake it with nobody between themselves at the bottom and the Saudis at the top, with a truly massive increase in profit as their prize. Audacious, but obvious, and clearly feasible, clearly within their grasp, because clearly their abilities had been grotesquely underestimated by everyone. They were not the clueless rural hicks everyone thought they were. They were ruthless strategists of stunning and genuine quality, subtle, sophisticated, capable of great insight and penetrating analysis. They had foreseen Mahmeini as their strongest opponent, quite correctly and accurately and realistically, and they had absolutely crippled his response from the get-go by taking Asghar down, somehow, mysteriously, before the bell had even sounded, and then by leaving his untouched body in a car they knew for sure would be found and identified as one of their own.

So, not just a coup, but a message too, brazenly and artfully and subtly delivered. A message that said: We can do anything we want. We can reach out and touch anyone, anywhere, any time, and you won’t even begin to understand how we did it. And in case subtlety didn’t impress, they had reached out and burned Safir’s guys to death in the motel lot, in a brutal demonstration of range and power. Rossi’s boys hadn’t done that. Rossi’s boys were probably already dead themselves, somewhere else, somehow else, maybe dismembered or bled out or even crucified. Or buried alive. Rossi’s spokesman had used those very words, on the subject of the Duncans’ tastes.

Mahmeini’s man felt completely alone. He was completely alone. He was the last survivor. He had no friends, no allies, no familiarity with the terrain. And no idea what to do next, except to lash out, to fight back, to seek revenge.

No desire to do anything else, either.

He stared through the darkness at the three Duncan houses. He closed the trunk lid on Asghar, reverently, with soft pressure from eight gentle fingertips, like a sad chord on a church organ. Then he walked along the dirt on the shoulder, back to the passenger door, and he leaned in and picked up his Glock from where it lay on the seat. He closed the door, and skirted the hood, and crossed the road, and stepped on to the dirt of someone’s fallow field, and walked a straight line, parallel with the Duncans’ fenced driveway, their three houses a hundred yards ahead of him, his gun in his right hand, his knife in his left.

Half a mile behind the Duncan houses, Roberto Cassano slowed and hauled the Chevrolet through a tight turn and let it coast onward towards the compound. A hundred yards out he brought it to a stop with the parking brake. He reached up and switched the dome light so it would stay off when the doors opened. He looked at Angelo Mancini next to him, and they both paused and then nodded and climbed out into the night. They drew their Colts and held them behind their backs, so that the moon glinting off the shiny steel would not be visible from the front. They walked forward together, shoulder to shoulder, a hundred yards to go.