“Four now?” Mark said.
Steven switched screens and showed him the data. It was laid out as four separate graphs. Heart rate versus time. Each graph looked like a pencil sketch of mountainous terrain. All of them showed basically the same thing. First elevated and consistent excitement, then a brief plateau of extreme stress, then nothing.
“Might be an equipment fault,” Steven said.
“No,” Mark said. “I saw two of them dead already.”
“What?”
“Their heads were bashed in. By Patty and Shorty, I guess. Who are clearly better than we thought.”
“Where was this?”
“South of the track.”
“What happened to the other two?”
“I don’t know,” Mark said.
Steven switched back to the GPS screen. The surviving flashlight was moving down the track, in the trees, close to the edge. Peter and Robert were still stationary. In a separate window the two surviving customers were showing elevated but consistent heartbeats. Excited. The thrill of the chase. But no sudden spikes. No contact yet.
“Which ones are they?” Mark asked.
“Karel and the Wall Street guy.”
“Can we tell where they are?”
“We know where their bikes are. They seem to have taken up a middle position.”
“With the front two and the back two already gone. It’s up to them now.”
“Who got the back two?”
“I don’t know,” Mark said again.
“This changes everything, you know. It’s not the same now.”
“I agree.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Plan B,” Mark said. “Watch carefully where the flashlight goes.”
Steven kept his eyes on the screen.
Mark pulled a boxy black handgun up and out from under his jacket. His elbow went high, because the gun was long, because it had a suppressor attached. He shot Steven in the back of the head. And again, when the body came to rest. To be sure and certain. Plan B required a lot of both.
He took the bags of cash from the closet, and set them down on the hallway floor. He opened the closet’s back wall and took out his escape kit. Cash, cards, a driver’s license, a passport, and a burner phone. A whole new person, zipped in a plastic bag.
He threw Peter’s and Steven’s and Robert’s on the closet floor.
He carried the bags of cash outside and set them down in the dirt a distance away. He came back to the porch and opened the front door wide. He sawed the quad-bike back and forth in front of it until it had room to fall over. He removed the gas cap and threw it away. He squatted down like a weightlifter and grabbed the frame. He jerked the bike up and toppled it over, on its side. Toward the house. Right next to the open door. Gas gurgled out of the open tank. It made a stain, then a miniature lake.
Mark threw a match, and backed away, and grabbed the bags, and ran. To the barn. Halfway there he stopped and looked back. The house was already alight. All around the front door. The walls, the porch boards. The flames were creeping inside.
He turned again and ran on forward. In the barn he put the bags in his Mercedes. He backed it out and parked it a distance away. He ran back to the barn. To his right the house was burning nicely. The flames were up to the second floor windows. In the barn he hustled over to where the lawn tractor was parked. To the shelf above it, where the gas cans were kept. Five of them, all lined up, filled every time someone drove the pick-up to town. Always ready. The grass had to look good. Curb appeal was important.
Plan B. No more of that.
He emptied the cans on the floor, under Peter’s Mercedes, under Steven’s, under Robert’s. He threw a match, and backed away, and turned and ran to his car. He set the hazard flashers going. For Peter and Robert to see. A panic signal. They already knew their radios were dead. They were looking at two brand new fires. They had no idea what was going on. They would come running.
He drove toward the mouth of the track, at a stately speed, past the glowing ruins of the motel, through the meadow, flashing orange all the way.
He stopped in the center of the meadow.
Robert zoomed in from the right side, a wide curve out of the woods, flailing the seed heads, flattening the meadow grass under four fat tires. He bumped up on the edge of the blacktop and maneuvered next to the passenger side. Mark buzzed the far window down. Robert looked in. Mark shot him in the face.
Mark buzzed the window back up. Peter was approaching on the left-hand side. The same wide swooping curve through the meadow. Exactly symmetrical. Aiming to arrive at the driver’s window, not the passenger’s. Which meant the Mercedes itself was between him and Robert’s empty bike, and the slumped figure on the ground.
Mark buzzed his window down.
Peter maneuvered alongside.
Face to face.
The gun was too long. Because of the suppressor. Mark couldn’t maneuver it. It snagged on the door.
Peter stopped his engine.
He said, “How bad is it?”
Mark paused a beat.
“Really couldn’t be worse,” he said. “The motel burned down. Now the house and the barn are on fire. And four customers are dead.”
Peter paused in turn.
Then he said, “That’s a whole new ball game.”
“I agree.”
“I mean it’s the end of everything. You understand that, right? This is going to be no stone unturned.”
“No doubt.”
“We should get out,” Peter said. “Right this minute. Just you and me. We need to do it, Mark. The pressure will be heavy duty. We might not survive it if we stay.”
“Just you and me?”
“Robert and Steven are useless. They’re a burden. You know that.”
“I need to open my door,” Mark said. “I need to stretch my legs.”
Peter checked.
“You have plenty of room,” he said.
Mark opened his door. But he didn’t get out. Instead he stopped the door as soon as the handle moldings were clear of the suppressor, and where Peter was still nicely framed in the now-angled window. He shot him once in chest, once in the throat, and once in the face.
Then he closed his door again, and buzzed his window up, and turned off his hazard flashers, and drove on, down the track, toward the woods.
Chapter 40
Reacher got through the next section of forest pretty quick, because of the night vision. He stayed six feet off the track. He made no attempt to be stealthy or quiet. He relied on the mathematical randomness of tree distribution to save him from arrows. A clear shot from distance was always going to be a hundred to one.
At one point way far away he heard four separated pops. Two groups, a one and a three. Tiny hollow pinpricks of sound. Maybe thirty seconds apart. The back of his brain said, those were suppressed nine-millimeter rounds, fired in the open air, about a mile away. The front said, or maybe they were something cooking off, possibly aerosol cans, in the fire. Which was getting brighter again. It had flared up once, when he figured the roof fell in, and then it had faded away a little. But now the glow was back, and wider, as if more than one thing was burning.
He stopped. Up ahead on the left he saw two quad-bikes parked side by side, front end in, at an angle, half in and half out of the trees. Like outside a country roadhouse. The night vision showed no riders nearby. Presumably they were up ahead. On foot. Closer to the action. Like the last two. These were the next two. They were operating a multilayered defense. One pair after another. Which was why Reacher had avoided the infantry. He didn’t enjoy slogging through endless terrain.
He moved on, quieter than before.
He stopped again.
He saw a guy up ahead. On the other side of the track, about thirty feet in the trees. Small in the distance, but lit up evenhandedly, like everything else. Delineated with exquisite care, in fine gray and green lines. Clothes like a scuba diver, a bow, a Cyclops eye.