FIFTY-SIX

REACHER STEPPED OUT OF THE BARN AGAIN ELEVEN MINUTES later, and saw Dorothy Coe’s truck driving up the track towards him. There were three people in the cab. Dorothy herself was at the wheel, and the doctor was in the passenger seat, and the doctor’s wife was jammed in the space between them. Reacher stood absolutely still, completely numb, blinking in the sun, the captured rifle in one hand, the other hand hanging free. Dorothy Coe slowed and stopped and waited thirty feet away, a cautious distance, as if she already knew.

A long minute later the truck doors opened and the doctor climbed out. His wife slid across the vinyl and joined him. Then Dorothy Coe got out on her side. She stood still, shielded by the open door, one hand on its frame. Reacher blinked one last time and ran his free hand over his taped face and walked down to meet her. She was quiet for a moment, and then she started the same question twice, and stopped twice, before getting it all the way out on the third attempt.

She asked, ‘Is she in there?’

Reacher said, ‘Yes.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Her bike is in there.’

‘Still? After all these years? Are you sure it’s hers?’

‘It’s as described in the police report.’

‘It must be all rusted.’

‘A little. It’s dry in there.’

Dorothy Coe went quiet. She was staring at the western horizon, a degree or two south of the barn, as if she couldn’t look directly at it. She was completely still, but her hand was clenched hard on the truck’s door frame. Her knuckles were white.

She asked, ‘Can you tell what happened to her?’

Reacher said, ‘No,’ which was technically true. He was no pathologist. But he had been a cop for a long time, and he knew a thing or two, and he could guess.

She said, ‘I should go look.’

He said, ‘Don’t.’

‘I have to.’

‘Not really.’

‘I want to.’

‘Better if you don’t.’

‘You can’t stop me.’

‘I know.’

‘You have no right to stop me.’

‘I’m asking you, that’s all. Please don’t look.’

‘I have to.’

‘Better not.’

‘I don’t have to listen to you.’

‘Then listen to her instead. Listen to Margaret. Pretend she grew up. Imagine what she would have become. She wouldn’t have been a lawyer or a scientist. She loved flowers. She loved colours and forms. She would have been a painter or a poet. An artist. A smart, creative person. In love with life, and full of common sense, and full of concern for you, and full of wisdom. She’d look at you and she’d shake her head and smile and she’d say, come on, mom, do what the man says.’

‘You think?’

‘She’d say, mom, trust me on this.’

‘But I have to see. After all these years of not knowing.’

‘Better if you don’t.’

‘It’s just her bones.’

‘It’s not just her bones.’

‘What else can be left?’

‘No,’ Reacher said. ‘I mean, it’s not just her bones.’

Up on the 49th Parallel, the transfer was going exactly to plan. The white van had driven slowly south, through the last of Canada, and it had parked for the final time in a rough forest clearing a little more than two miles north of the border. The driver had gotten out and stretched and then taken a long coil of rope from the passenger foot well and walked around to the rear doors. He had opened them up and gestured urgently and the women and the girls had come on out immediately, with no reluctance, with no hesitation at all, because passage to America was what they wanted, what they had dreamed about, and what they had paid for.

There were sixteen of them, all from rural Thailand, six women and ten female children, average weight close to eighty pounds each, for a total payload of 1,260 pounds. The women were slim and attractive, and the girls were all eight years old or younger. They all stood and blinked in the morning light and looked up and around at the tall trees, and shuffled their feet a little, stiff and weary but excited and full of wonderment.

The driver herded them into a rough semicircle. He couldn’t speak Thai and they couldn’t understand English, so he started the same dumb show he had performed many times before. It was probably faster than talking anyway. First he patted the air to calm them down and get their attention. Then he raised a finger to his lips and twisted left, twisted right, tracking the whole length of the semicircle, a big exaggerated pantomime, so that they all saw, so that they all understood they had to be silent. He pointed at a spot on the ground and then cupped a hand behind his ear. There are sensors. The earth listens. The women nodded, deferential, keen to let him know they understood. He pointed to himself, and then to all of them, and then pointed south, and wiggled his fingers. Now we all have to walk. The women nodded again. They knew. They had been told at the outset. He used both hands, one and then the other, palms down, stepping on the air gently and delicately. He kept the gesture going and looked along the semicircle, making eye contact with each of his charges. We have to walk softly and keep very quiet. The women nodded eagerly, and the girls looked back at him shyly from behind their hair.

The driver uncoiled his rope and measured off six feet from the end and wrapped that point around the first woman’s hand. He measured another six feet and wrapped the rope around the first girl’s hand, and then the next, and then the second woman, and so on, until he had all sixteen joined together safely. The rope was a guide, that was all, not a restraint. Like a mobile hand-rail. It kept them all moving at the same pace in the same direction and it prevented any of them from wandering off and getting lost. The forest transfer was dangerous enough without having to double back and crash around, hunting for stragglers.

The driver picked up the free end of the rope and wrapped it around his own hand. Then he led them off, like a train, snaking south between bushes and trees. He walked slowly and softly and listened out for commotion behind him. There was none, as usual. Asian people knew how to keep quiet, especially illegals, especially women and girls.

But as quiet as they were, twenty minutes later they were clearly heard, in two separate locations, both more than six hundred miles away, first in Fargo, North Dakota, and then in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Or more accurately they were seen in both places, in that remote seismograph needles flickered a little as they passed over a buried sensor. But the deflection was minor, barely above the level of background noise. In Fargo, an employee of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security checked back on his graph and thought: Deer. Maybe whitetails. Maybe a whole family. His counterpart in Canada checked his own graph and thought: A breeze, bringing clumps of snow down off the trees.

*     *     * 

They walked on, slowly and carefully, treading lightly, patiently enduring the third of the four parts of their adventure. First had come the shipping container, and then had come the white van. Now came the hike, and then there would be another van. Everything had been explained beforehand, in great detail, in a small shipping office above a store in a town near their home. There were many such offices, and many such operations, but the one they had used was widely considered the best. The price was high, but the facilities were excellent. Their contact had assured them his only concern was that they arrive in America in the best of condition, as fresh as daisies. To that end, the shipping container, which would be their home for the longest of the four phases, was equipped with everything necessary. There were lamps inside with bulbs that simulated daylight, wired to automobile batteries. There were mattresses and blankets. There was plenty of food and water and there were chemical toilets. There was medicine. There were ventilation slots disguised as rust holes, and in case they weren’t enough there was a fan that ran off the same batteries as the lights, and there were oxygen cylinders that could be bled slowly if the air got stuffy. There was an exercise machine, so they could keep in shape for the four-mile hike across the border itself. There were washing facilities, and lotions and moisturizers for their skin. They were told that the vans were equipped with the same kind of stuff, but less of it, because the road trips would be shorter than the sea voyage.

An excellent organization, that thought of everything.

And the best thing was that there was no bias shown against families with girl children. Some organizations would smuggle adults only, because adults could work immediately, and some allowed children, but older boys only, because they could work too, but this organization welcomed girls, and wasn’t even upset if they were young, which was considered a very humane attitude. The only downside was that the sexes always had to travel separately, for the sake of decorum, so fathers were separated from mothers, and brothers from sisters, and then on this particular occasion they were told at the very last minute that the ship the men and the boys were due to sail on was delayed for some reason, so the women and the girls had been obliged to go on ahead. Which would be OK, they were told, because they would be well looked after at their destination, for as long as it took for the second ship to arrive.

They had been warned that the four-mile hike would be the hardest part of the whole trip, but it wasn’t, really. It felt good to be out in the air, moving around. It was cold, but they were used to cold, because winter in Thailand was cold, and they had warm clothes to wear. The best part was when their guide stopped and raised his finger to his lips again and then traced an imaginary sideways line on the ground. He pointed beyond it and mouthed, ‘America.’ They walked on and passed the line one after the other and smiled happily and picked their way onward, across American soil at last, slowly and delicately, like ballet dancers.

The Duncan driver in the grey van on the Montana side of the border saw them coming about a hundred yards away. As always his Canadian counterpart was leading the procession, setting the pace, holding the rope. Behind him the shipment floated along, seemingly weightless, curving and snaking through the gaps between the trees. The Duncan driver opened his rear doors and stood ready to receive them. The Canadian handed over the free end of the rope, like he always did, like the baton in a relay race, and then he turned about and walked back into the forest and was lost to sight. The Duncan driver gestured into the truck, but before each of his passengers climbed aboard he looked at their faces and smiled and shook their hands, in a way his passengers took to be a formal welcome to their new country. In fact the Duncan driver was a gambling man, and he was trying to guess ahead of time which kid the Duncans would choose to keep. The women would go straight to the Vegas escort agencies, and nine of the girls would end up somewhere farther on down the line, but one of them would stay in the county, at least for a spell, or actually for ever, technically. Buy ten and sell nine, was the Duncan way, and the driver liked to look over the candidates and make a guess about which one was the lucky one. He saw four real possibilities, and then felt a little jolt of excitement about a fifth, not that she would be remotely recognizable by the time she was passed on to him.

Dorothy Coe stood behind her truck’s open door for ten whole minutes. Reacher stood in front of her, watching her, hoping he was blocking her view of the barn, happy to keep on standing there as long as it took, ten hours or ten days or ten years, or for ever, anything to stop her going inside. Her gaze was a thousand miles away, and her lips were moving a little, as if she was rehearsing arguments with someone, look or don’t look, know or don’t know.

Eventually she asked, ‘How many are in there?’

Reacher said, ‘About sixty.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘Two or three a year, probably,’ Reacher said. ‘They got a taste for it. An addiction. There are no ghosts. Ghosts don’t exist. What the stoner kid heard from time to time was real.’

‘Who were they all?’

‘Asian girls, I think.’

‘You can tell that from their bones?’

‘The last one isn’t bones yet.’

‘Where were they all from?’

‘From immigrant families, probably. Illegals, almost certainly, smuggled in, for the sex trade. That’s what the Duncans were doing. That’s how they were making their money.’

‘Were they all young?’

‘About eight years old.’

‘Are they buried?’

Reacher said, ‘No.’

‘They’re just dumped in there?’

‘Not dumped,’ Reacher said. ‘They’re displayed. It’s like a shrine.’

There was a long, long pause.

Dorothy Coe said, ‘I should look.’

‘Don’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘There are photographs. Like a record. Like mementos. In silver frames.’

‘I should look.’

‘You’ll regret it. All your life. You’ll wish you hadn’t.’

‘You looked.’

‘And I regret it. I wish I hadn’t.’

Dorothy Coe went quiet again. She breathed in, and breathed out, and watched the horizon. Then she asked, ‘What should we do now?’

Reacher said, ‘I’m going to head over to the Duncan houses. They’re all in there, sitting around, thinking everything is going just fine. It’s time they found out it isn’t.’

Dorothy Coe said, ‘I want to come with you.’

Reacher said, ‘Not a good idea.’

‘I need to.’

‘Could be dangerous.’

‘I hope it is. Some things are worth dying for.’

The doctor’s wife said, ‘We’re coming too. Both of us. Let’s go, right now.’