The Hard Way (Page 77)

He stood absolutely still. Listened hard. Heard nothing at all. He moved his head left. Listened. Nothing. He moved his head right. Nothing.

He tried the password one more time, soft and low: Canaries.

He heard no reply.

Lane, he thought.

He wasn’t surprised. Surprise was strictly for amateurs, and Reacher was a professional. He wasn’t upset, either. He had learned a long time ago that the only way to keep fear and panic at bay was to concentrate ruthlessly on the job at hand. So he spent no time thinking about Lauren Pauling or Kate Lane. Or Jackson or Taylor. Or Jade. No time at all. He just walked backward and to his left. Preprogrammed. Like a machine. Silently. Away from the house. Making himself smaller as a target and improving his angle of view. He checked the windows. They were all dark. Just a faint red glow from the kitchen. The remains of the fire. The front door was closed. Near it was the faint shape of the Mini Cooper, cold and gray in the dark. It looked odd. Canted down at the front, like it was kneeling.

He walked toward it through the dark, slow and stealthy. Knelt down on the driver’s side near the front fender and felt for the tire. It wasn’t there. There were torn shreds of rubber and a vicious curled length of bead wire. And shards of plastic from the shattered wheel well lining. That was all. He shuffled quietly around the tiny hood to the other side. Same situation. The wheel had its alloy rim on the ground.

A front-wheel-drive car, comprehensively disabled. Both wheels. One had not been enough. A single tire can be changed. Two submachine gun bursts had been necessary. Twice the risk of detection. Although in Reacher’s experience an MP5 set to fire bursts of three sounded more innocent than a rifle firing single shots. A single gunshot was unmistakable. It was a singularity. It was a precise pinpoint of noise. An MP5 was rated to fire 900 rounds a minute. Fifteen every second. Which meant that a burst of three lasted a fifth of a second. Not quite a singularity. Altogether a different sound. Like a brief blurred purr instead. Like a distant motorcycle heard waiting at a light.

Lane, he thought again.

But when?

Seventy-five minutes previously he had been five miles away. Audibility decays according to the inverse square law. Twice the distance, the sound gets four times as quiet. Four times the distance, sixteen times as quiet. He had heard nothing. He was sure of that. Across land as flat and featureless and in night air as thick and damp as Norfolk’s he would have expected to hear MP5 bursts a couple of miles away. Therefore Lane had been gone at least thirty minutes. Maybe more.

He stood still and listened hard. Heard nothing. Headed for the front door. It was closed but unlocked. He dropped his left hand off the rifle and turned the handle. Pushed the door open. Raised the rifle. The house was dark. It felt empty. He checked the kitchen. It was warm. Dull red embers in the hearth. Jade’s drawings were still on the kitchen chair where he had left them. Pauling’s purse was still where he had dumped it after taking the Maglite. There were empty mugs of tea all over the place. Dishes in the sink. The room looked exactly like he had left it, except there were no people in it.

He switched on the flashlight and clamped it in his left palm under the rifle’s barrel. Used it to check all the other ground floor rooms. A formal dining room, empty, cold, dark, unused. Nobody in it. A formal parlor, furnished like the Bishop’s Arms saloon bar, still and quiet. Nobody in it. A powder room, a coat closet, the mud room. All empty.

He crept up the stairs. The first room he came to was clearly Jade’s. He saw the green seersucker sundress folded on a chair. Drawings on the floor. The battered old toys that had been missing from the Dakota were all arrayed in a line along the bed, leaning on the wall. A one-eyed bear with the fur worn down to its backing, sitting up. A doll, one eye open and one eye closed, a lipstick effect inexpertly applied with a red marker pen. The bed had been slept in. The pillow was dented and the sheets had been thrown back.

No sign of the child herself.

The next room belonged to the Jacksons. That was clear. There was a vanity table cluttered with British cosmetic brands and tortoiseshell hairbrushes and matching hand mirrors. There were framed photographs of a girl that wasn’t Jade. Melody, Reacher guessed. On the back wall there was a bed with a high headboard and freestanding armoires in matching dark veneers, full of clothes, men’s and women’s. There was a backhoe catalog on one of the night tables. Tony Jackson’s bedtime reading.

No sign of Jackson himself.

The next room was Kate’s and Taylor’s. An old queen bed, an oak night table. Austere, undecorated, like a guest room. The photograph was propped on a dresser. Kate and Jade, together. The original print. No frame. The two faces glowed in the Maglite’s beam. Love, captured on film. There was an empty tote bag. Kate’s luggage. No sign of the money. Just three empty leather duffels piled together in a corner. Reacher had carried one of them himself, down in the Dakota’s elevator to the black BMW, with Burke restless at his side.

He moved on, looking for box rooms or bathrooms. Then he stopped, halfway along the upstairs hallway.

Because there was blood on the floor.

It was a small thin stain, a foot long, curved, like flung paint. Not a puddle. Not neat. It was dynamic, suggestive of rapid movement. Reacher stepped back to the head of the stairs. Sniffed the air. There was a faint smell of gunpowder. He sighted down the hallway with the Maglite beam and saw an open bathroom door at the far end. A smashed tile on the back wall, at chest height. A neat burst, contained by a single six-inch by six-inch ceramic square. A running target, a raised gun, a squeezed trigger, three shots, a through-and-through flesh wound, probably to an upper arm. A short shooter, otherwise the downward angle would be more pronounced. The smashed tile would be lower. Perez, probably. Perez, firing maybe the first of at least seven bursts that night. This one, inside the house. Then the two Mini Cooper tires. Then four Land Rover tires, for sure. A four-wheel-drive vehicle would need all four tires taken out for a cautious man to be satisfied. A desperate driver might get somewhere on two.

Seven submachine gun bursts in the dead of night. Maybe more. Forty or more minutes ago. People here have phones, Jackson had said. Some of them even know how to use them. But they hadn’t used them. That was for sure. The Norwich cops would have arrived in less than forty minutes. Thirty miles, empty roads, lights and sirens, they could have done it in twenty-five or less. So nobody had called. Because of the MP5’s other-worldly rate of fire. Machine guns on TV or in the movies were generally old-fashioned and much slower. In order to be properly convincing. So forty or more minutes ago people wouldn’t have known what they were hearing. Just a random series of inexplicable blurred purrs, like sewing machines. Like jamming your tongue on the roof of your mouth and blowing. If they had heard anything at all.

So, Reacher thought. At least one wounded and the cavalry ain’t coming.

He eased down the stairs and back out into the night.

He circled the house, clockwise. The barns were distant and dark and quiet. The old Land Rover was collapsed on its rims, as he had been certain it would be. Four blown tires. He walked straight past it and stopped against the south gable wall. Turned the Maglite off and stared down the driveway into the darkness.

How had it happened?

He trusted Pauling because he knew her and he trusted Taylor and Jackson even without knowing them. Three professionals. Experience, savvy, plenty of active brain cells. Tired, but functioning. A long perilous approach from the intruders’ point of view. No contest. He should have been looking at four riddled bodies and a wrecked rental car. Right about then Jackson should have been firing up the backhoe. Pauling should have been cracking cans of beer and Kate should have been making toast and heating beans.