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“What?”
“If he’s not steady enough to type on a phone, he’s not steady enough to aim and fire a rifle.”
“It’s word perfect.”
“Then he was much faster than I thought he would be. He’s a good soldier. I see why you chose him. Tell him to take targets of opportunity as soon as Julia no longer has a gun to her head.”
She texted back.
Send.
Delivered.
Read.
“Good to go,” she said.
Reacher propped the shotgun against the fence. He squared his shoulders, to keep his shirt tail hanging clear of the pistol in the small of his back. He raised his hands and stepped out into the light.
Chapter 44
Reacher saw Julia sitting on the ground, her back against the pickup truck’s front wheel. Amanda was in her lap, unhappy. A guy with an MP5 on a sling was leaning on the headlight. Looking away, but close enough. Three other guys were fanned out around some imaginary perimeter, guarding the scene, posted like sentries. The nearest guy was the last survivor of the crew Reacher had seen in Palo Alto. The guy who had gone in first, through the Sequoia Suites lobby. The day crew leader. They all had MP5s on slings, over their shoulders. They all had pistols in holsters, strapped to their legs. Spare magazines crammed everywhere.
Hennessy was on an inner perimeter. Behind the sentries, ahead of Julia. Just standing there. A face like a potato. Gray hair, gray beard. Wide in the waist. He too had an MP5 on a sling, and a pistol on his leg. Reacher walked on toward him, empty hands held palm out.
“Stop there,” Hennessy called.
A voice accustomed to yelling orders.
Reacher stopped. For a mad optimistic second he thought Hennessy was going to send a man over to frisk him. Which would have been the free gift of a human shield. Game over about three seconds later. But no. Hennessy wasn’t that dumb. Twenty years in the 75th Ranger Regiment. He wanted to talk instead.
“Where are the others?” he called out.
“The general needed the bathroom,” Reacher called back. “You know what women are like. She’ll be along in a moment.”
“Where’s Elwood?”
“He was in the motel. He needed a nap. You know what colonels are like. He’ll be along in a moment too. Maybe a little later than her. He has a longer walk.”
“Are you playing games with me?” Hennessy asked. “Please don’t tell me you’re that dumb.”
“Just keeping you informed,” Reacher said.
“What are they doing?”
“I already told you that.”
“Where are they now?”
“Right behind me.”
“I don’t see them.”
“Maybe they got delayed by something,” Reacher said. “Or by someone.”
Then he saw in Hennessy’s face that the inevitable question had finally lodged in his mind: Where the hell is my lookout?
The army tested everything. It always had. It had run thousands of experiments on every kind of human vulnerability. Along the way it had proved that a new and suddenly urgent worry, if introduced during a critical phase of a complex operation, tended to increase reaction time and degrade situational awareness, both by a significant degree, sometimes estimated to be as much as fifty percent. And so it proved with Hennessy. Reacher moved his left hand, to distract, and felt behind him with his right, and came back with the pistol in his hand, the M17, safety off, a round in the chamber, coming up, aiming, firing, hitting the guy leaning on the headlight smack in the throat. He slid down and bounced off the bumper. Whereupon there was an immediate distant crack of a rifle, and the left-hand sentry went down, and a simultaneous purr of a submachine gun, and the right-hand guy went down, and then immediately another distant crack and the middle guy went down.
