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“Leave it with me,” Brill said.

He dialed his flip phone. Lazarus Lorenzo. The concierge.

—

Turner put the guns back in her bag and slung it over her shoulder. They walked out of the parking lot and paused on the sidewalk. The desert tan SUV was on their right, facing away, maybe a hundred feet from them, in the last meter bay before the Sequoia Suites lobby. The driver was still at the wheel. Behind him was a line of four more cars, each one parked in its own meter bay, each one empty, each one a different size and shape and color.

“Remember his phone,” Turner said. “Consider it active. We can’t let him make a sound and we can’t use a gun. Even with the suppressor it’s loud up close. The other end of the phone will hear it clearly. It will cut right through. Unmistakable.”

“OK,” Reacher said.

“How do you want to play it?”

“Are you asking me for tactical input?”

“I like options to consider.”

“I think you should cross the avenue and approach on the other sidewalk. I’ll keep pace this side, using the line of cars as cover.”

“And then what?”

“Then you turn ninety degrees and cross back to this side, as if you’re heading straight for the lobby door, on a line where you’re going to pass right in front of his vehicle. At some point he’ll see you coming in the corner of his eye, and he’ll move his head half-left, for a better look. I’ll take care of things from there.”

“How?”

“I can see a way to do it.”

“Will it work?”

“Sure it will,” Reacher said. “This time old Helmuth von Moltke can kiss my ass.”

Chapter 17

Turner crossed the avenue, like she had before, not drawing attention, in a loose informal group with three other women headed the same direction. She made it to the far corner and peeled off and turned right and set out walking, not fast, not slow, unsuspicious, no different from anyone else.

By then Reacher was between the fourth car in line and the third, bent down, as if searching for something he had dropped on the ground. He saw her pass level with him, so he moved on, still bent over, as if whatever he had dropped had rolled away along the gutter. He followed the sidewalk curb and ended up between the third car and the second. He waited. Turner drew level, he moved on, like predictive leapfrog, and he ducked down between the second car and the first, and he waited again.

Will it work? Truth was, he didn’t know for sure. It depended on the answer to a simple question. Was the driver sitting in a locked car, or an unlocked car? Reacher was gambling everything on the latter. Unlocked. Had to be. Lesson number one in getaway-driver school, surely. Standard operating procedure for all such drivers everywhere in the world. Their passengers could hustle out a building’s door fast and in an urgent panic at any given second. No one wanted to be fumbling with central locking buttons at such a moment. Doors had to be left ready to grab open from the outside, so that passengers could hurl themselves inside, unimpeded, and then race away, seamless and immediate and undelayed. So common sense said the car was unlocked. Chances were the plan would work.

Probably.

He hoped.

He saw Turner get as far as she needed to. He saw her swivel ninety degrees and step out into the roadway. One pace, two, three, four. He slid around the trunk of the last car in line and eased along its flank, on its driver’s side. He matched Turner’s pace. On her fifth stride, he moved past its driver’s door. On her sixth stride, along the length of its hood. He crossed the gap to the desert tan SUV. He watched the driver’s head.

Turner took her seventh step.

The driver’s head turned left.

Reacher took a long stride and yanked the SUV’s rear door handle. The seat behind the driver. The door opened. The car was unlocked. From there it was plain sailing. Helmuth von Moltke, eat your heart out. Reacher kept on barreling forward and his left shoulder pushed the door all the way open and his right hand snaked in, over the back of the driver’s seat, between the guy’s right ear and the headrest. He cupped his palm under the guy’s jaw and heaved suddenly backward like he was trying to pull up a tree. The guy’s mouth slammed shut and he came up off his seat, against his belt, more and more, until his shoulders were jammed between the door pillar and the headrest. Reacher kept on hauling, backward and downward, until the guy’s neck was stretched out and bent back as far as it would go.

Reacher punched him hard in the throat, and then clamped his right hand over his mouth, and pinched his nose shut with his left thumb and forefinger. By then Turner was all the way across the avenue. She opened the front passenger door and leaned inside. She pointed at the driver’s phone. It was on the dash, on speaker, lit up with a call in progress. She put her finger to her lips. Reacher nodded, silently. By then the driver had stopped breathing. A broken hyoid bone, no airways. Inevitable. Job done.

Reacher pushed him back in his seat and arranged him as best as he could. The seat belt held him upright. His head lolled forward. Like he was taking a nap. Which was OK. A common sight. A car service driver, parked at the curb, waiting through the downtime, catching up on sleep. Happened all the time.

Turner backed out and closed her door quietly and Reacher did the same. They formed up and paused on the sidewalk halfway to the lobby door. Turner said, “You OK?”

“So far so good,” he said.