'We'll deliver.'
'When?'
'As soon as this stranger is out of our hair.'
Cassano just shook his head in frustration.
Mancini said, 'You guys need to change your tactics. The stranger was in the fields, OK, no question, but now he's not any more. He's back in the truck he took from those two donkeys last night. He had it stashed somewhere. You should be looking for it. You should be checking the roads again.'
* * *
Seth Duncan's Cadillac was new enough to have all the bells and whistles, but old enough to be a straight-up turnpike cruiser. It wasn't competing against BMW and Mercedes Benz for yuppie money, like the current models were. It was competing against planes and trains for long-distance comfort, like traditional full-boat Caddies always had. Reacher liked it a lot. It was a fine automobile. It was long and wide and weighed about two tons. It was smooth and silent. It was relaxed. It was a one-finger, one-toe kind of car, designed for sprawling. It had black paint and black leather and black glass. And a warm-toned radio and a three-quarters-full tank of gas.
Reacher had got in it and racked its seat back and eased it out of the garage and K-turned it behind the house and nosed it cautiously back to the two-lane. He had turned left, south, and wafted on down the road in a rolling cocoon of calm and quiet. The landscape didn't change at all. Straight road ahead, dirt to the right, dirt to the left, clouds overhead. He saw no other traffic. Ten miles south of where he started there was an old roadhouse standing alone in the weedy remnant of a beaten-earth parking lot. It was closed down and boarded up, with a bad roof and ancient Pabst Blue Ribbon and Miller High Life signs on the walls, barely visible behind layers of mud. After that there was nothing, all the way to the horizon.
Roberto Cassano stepped out of Jacob Duncan's back door and walked across weedy gravel to where he couldn't be overheard. A thin plume of black smoke rose far to the north. The burned-out truck, still smouldering. The stranger's work.
Cassano dialled his cell and got Rossi after three rings. He said, 'They're sticking to their story, boss. We're not going to get the shipment until they get the stranger.'
Rossi said, 'That makes no sense.'
'Tell me about it. It's Alice in Wonderland.'
'How much pressure have you applied?'
'To the Duncans themselves? That's my next question. How much pressure do you want us to apply?'
There was a long pause, with a breath, like a sigh, resigned. Rossi said, 'The problem is, they sell great stuff. I won't find better. I won't find anything half as good. So I can't burn them. Because I'm going to need them again, in the future. Over and over. No question about that.'
'So?'
'So play their game. Find the damn stranger.'
The doctor stepped out of Eleanor Duncan's door and stared hard at the pick-up truck. He didn't want to get in it. Didn't want to drive it. Didn't want to be seen with it. Didn't want to be anywhere near it. It was a Duncan vehicle. It had been misappropriated, and the manner of its misappropriation had been a major humiliation for the Duncans. Two Cornhuskers, tossed aside, contemptuously. Therefore to be involved with the truck in any way at all would be an outrageous provocation. Insane. He would be punished, severely and for ever.
But he was a doctor.
And sober, unfortunately.
Therefore clear-headed.
He had patients. He had responsibilities. To Vincent at the motel, for one. To Dorothy the housekeeper, for another. Both were shaken up. And he was a married man. His wife was eight miles away, scared and alone.
He looked at the key in his hand and the truck on the driveway. He mapped out a route in his head. He could park behind Dorothy's house and keep the truck out of sight. He could park on the wrong side of the motel office and achieve the same result. Then he could dump the truck to the north and hike across the fields to home.
Total exposure, maybe two miles on minor tracks, and four on the two-lane road.
Ten minutes.
That was all.
Safe enough.
Maybe.
He climbed in the cab and started the engine.
* * *
The anonymous white van was still on Route 3, still in Canada, but it had left British Columbia behind and had entered Alberta. It was making steady progress, heading east, completely unnoticed. Its driver was making no calls. His phone was switched off. The assumption was that cell towers close to the 49th Parallel were monitored for activity. Perhaps conversations were recorded and analysed. Homeland Security departments on both sides of the border had computer programs with sophisticated software. Individual words could trigger alerts. And even without compromising language, an electronic record of where a guy had been, and when, was always best avoided. For the same reason, all gas purchases were made with cash, in the local currency, and at every stop the driver turned his collar up and pulled his hat down low, in case there were cameras connected to digital recorders or distant control rooms.
The van rolled on, making steady progress, heading east.
Rossi clicked off the call with Cassano and thought hard for five minutes, and then he dialled Safir, six blocks away. He took a breath and held it and asked, 'Have you ever seen better merchandise?'
Safir said, 'You don't have to play the salesman. I already fell for your pitch.'
'And you've always been satisfied, right?'
'I'm not satisfied now.'
'I understand,' Rossi said. 'But I want to discuss something with you.'
'Equals discuss,' Safir said. 'We're not equals. I tell, you ask.'
'OK, I want to ask you something. I want to ask you to take a step back and consider something.'
'For example?'
'I need this shipment, you need this shipment, everyone needs this shipment. So I want to ask you to put our differences aside and make common cause. Just for a day or two.'
'How?'
'My contacts in Nebraska have a bug up their ass.'
'I know all about that,' Safir said. 'My men gave me a full report.'
'I want you to send them up there to help.'
'Send who? Up where?'
'Your men. To Nebraska. There's no point in having them here in my office. Your interests are my interests, and I'm already working as hard as I can on this. So I'm thinking your guys could go help my guys and between us we could solve this problem.'
The doctor made it to Dorothy's farmhouse unobserved and parked in the yard behind it, nose to tail with Dorothy's own pick-up. He found her in her kitchen, washing dishes. Breakfast dishes, presumably. Hers and Reacher's. Which had been a crazy risk.
He asked, 'How are you holding up?'
She said, 'I'm OK. You look worse than me.'
'I'll survive.'
'You're in a Duncan truck.'
'I know.'
'That's dumb.'
'Like cooking breakfast for the guy was dumb.'
'He was hungry.'
The doctor asked, 'You need anything?'
'I need to know how this is going to end.'
'Not well, probably. He's one guy, on his own. And there's no guarantee he'll even stick around.'
'You know where he is right now?'
'Yes. More or less.'
'Don't tell me.'
'I won't.'
Dorothy said, 'You should go check on Mr Vincent. He was hurt pretty bad.'
'That's where I'm headed next,' the doctor said.
Safir clicked off the call with Rossi and thought hard for ten long minutes, and then he dialled his customer Mahmeini, eight blocks across town. He took a breath and held it and asked, 'Have you ever seen better merchandise?'
Mahmeini said, 'Get to the damn point.'
'There's a kink in the chain.'
'Chains don't have kinks. Hoses have kinks. Chains have weak links. Are you confessing? You're the weak link?'
'I'm just saying. There's a speed bump. A Catch-22. It's crazy, but it's there.'