Blue Moon - Lee Child Page 0,60

and then she said, “We were quiet because we were listening.”

“And what did we hear?”

“Nothing.”

“Exactly. We paused right by the target, and we heard no one stepping out or tensing up, and then we moved on, and we heard no one stepping back and relaxing, or scuffling around, waiting for word on plan B. Therefore there’s no one here.”

“That’s great.”

“So far,” Reacher said. “But who knows how long these things take? Not my area of expertise. They could be here any minute.”

“So what should we do?”

“I guess we should take the phones someplace else. We should make them start the search all over again.”

Two blocks south they saw headlight beams coming out of a cross street. Like a distant early warning. Seconds later a car made the left and drove up toward them. Slowly. Maybe searching. Or maybe just a regular nighttime driver worried about a ticket or a DUI. Hard to tell. The headlights were low and wide spaced. A big sedan. It kept on coming.

“Stand by,” Reacher said.

Nothing. The car drove past, same steady speed, same decided direction. An old Cadillac. The driver looked neither left nor right. An old lady, peering out from underneath the rim of the steering wheel.

Abby said, “Whatever, we better be quick about this. Because like you said, we don’t know how long these things take.”

They walked back, four fast paces, and Reacher pulled his rolled-up jacket out of the rusty mailbox.

* * *

—

Abby carried the phones. She insisted. They walked another three blocks on another roundabout route and found a bodega open late. No man in a suit on the door. No suits anywhere, as a matter of fact. The clerk at the register was wearing a white T-shirt. There were no other customers. The space was crowded with humming chiller cabinets and bright with fluorescent light. There was a two-top table in back, unoccupied.

Reacher got two cardboard cups of coffee and carried them back to the table. Abby had the phones laid out side by side. She was looking at them, conflicted, as if half eager to get started on them, and half worried about them, as if they were pulsing secret SOS signals out into the ether. Find me, find me.

Which they were.

She said, “Can you remember which was which?”

“No,” he said. “They all look the same to me.”

She clicked one to life. No password required. For speed, and arrogance, and easy internal review. She dabbed and swiped through a bunch of screens. Reacher saw a vertical array of green message bubbles. Texts. Unreadable foreign words, but mostly regular letters, the same as English. Some were doubled up. Some had strange accents above or below. Umlauts and cedillas.

“Albanian,” Reacher said.

Out on the street a car drove by. Slowly. Its headlight wash scoured a thin blue blade of light across the room. All the way along the back wall, and then all the way along the end wall, and then it was gone. Abby clicked the second phone to life. No password. She found another long sequence of text messages, to and from. Green bubbles, one after the other. All in the Cyrillic alphabet. Named for Saint Cyril, who worked on alphabets in the ninth century.

“Ukrainian,” Reacher said.

“There are hundreds of texts here,” Abby said. “Literally hundreds. Maybe thousands.”

Another car drove by outside, faster.

Reacher said, “Can you make out the dates?”

Abby scrolled and said, “There are at least fifty since yesterday. Your picture is in some of them.”

Another car drove by outside. This time slowly. Lights on bright. Searching for something, or worried about a ticket. A glimpse of the driver. A man in dark clothing, his face lit up spooky by the lights on his dash.

“There are at least fifty Albanian texts too,” Abby said. “Maybe more.”

“So how do we do this?” Reacher asked. “We can’t take the phones home. We can’t copy out all this crap onto napkins. We would make mistakes. And it would take forever. We don’t have time.”

“Watch me,” Abby said.

She took out her own phone. She squared the Ukrainian phone on the tabletop. She hovered her own phone above it, parallel, moving in, moving out, until satisfied.

“Taking a picture?” Reacher asked.

“Video,” she said. “Watch.”

She held her own phone in her left hand, and with her right forefinger she scrolled through a long and complex chain of Ukrainian texts on the captured phone, at a moderate speed, on and on, consistent, five seconds, ten, fifteen, twenty. Then the end of the chain bounced