Make Me

Westwood said, “You mentioned Mother’s Rest before. Way back at the beginning. And you were right. A smart science editor would try to get a jump. So I did. It’s a grain-loading station and a trading post. There’s some technical stuff in the record. But a good reporter likes two sources. So I checked Google Earth, and sure enough, it’s right there on the satellite pictures. Right where it should be. And it looks exactly like a grain-loading station and a trading post. But it’s in the middle of absolutely nowhere. It’s like LA County had one crossroads and the rest of it was empty. It was fascinating. So I messed around a little. I zoomed out to check how far it was from anywhere else, just for the fun of it, and I happened to see a neighbor about twenty miles south. The only neighbor. Even more isolated. So naturally I zoomed in to take a look.”

He turned his computer to face the bed.

He said, “And this is what I saw.”

What he saw was bright daylight, of course, even though it was dark outside. Satellite photographs were not live. Or up to date, necessarily. Things can change. Or not. Reacher guessed the things on the screen hadn’t changed in years. He was seeing a farm, surrounded by a sea of wheat. The farm had a dwelling and a bunch of outbuildings. As far as could be told from a vertical straight-down harshly-shadowed view, everything looked solid and squared away. The place was more or less self-sufficient. There were hogs and chickens and vegetable gardens. There was what looked like a generator building, for electricity. The house itself looked sturdy. It had a place to park cars at one end, and four satellite dishes at the other. And what looked like a well. And a phone line.

Westwood said, “I remembered the satellite dishes later. What are they for?”

Reacher said, “TV.”

“Two of them are. The other two are looking at different birds.”

“Foreign TV.”

“Or satellite internet, maybe. All the bandwidth they want to pay for. Very fast. Doubled up for safety. With their own electricity. That would be an internet powerhouse right there.”

“Can we tell by the way the dishes are set?”

“We’d need to know what day and time Google clicked the picture. To work out the angle of the shadows.”

“Then we need to look from the inside. We need the search engine. If they’re posting from there, we need to read what they’re saying.”

“All I can do is ask.”

“Tell him Merchenko is dead. Tell him you had him whacked, as a service to software developers everywhere. Tell him he owes you a favor.”

Westwood said nothing.

Reacher turned back to the screen.

He said, “Where is this place exactly?”

Westwood said, “Twenty miles south of Mother’s Rest,” and he leaned around from behind and pinched and swiped, making the farm smaller and the wheat bigger, no doubt intending to continue until Mother’s Rest itself slid into view above, to show the distant geographic relationship. But before that happened the picture was clipped across the bottom corner by a dead-straight line, and Reacher said, “What’s that?”

Westwood said, “The railroad track.”

“Show me.”

So Westwood came around from behind the screen and set it up properly. The farm and the railroad, centered, in their correct proportions. Maybe three-quarters of a mile apart. The middle distance, for most human eyes.

Reacher said, “I remember that farm. From when I arrived. It was the first human habitation the train passed in hours. Twenty miles before it finally got to Mother’s Rest. They were running a machine with lights. A tractor, maybe. At midnight.”

“Is that normal?”

“I have no idea.”

Chang said, “We figured the Cadillac drove twenty miles. Remember that? Twenty miles there, and twenty miles back. Now we know where it was going. There’s nowhere else it could go, twenty miles from Mother’s Rest. So that’s where the folks from the train went. The man and the woman, with their bags. But then where?”

No one answered.

Westwood said, “Do farmers use the Deep Web?”

“Someone does,” Reacher said. “We need the search engine.”

“The guy gets paid for his time.”

“No one likes to work for free. That’s something I learned.”

“He won’t come here. We’ll have to go to San Francisco.”

“Like it’s still 1967.”

“What?”

Reacher said, “Nothing.”

Ten minutes later he was alone with Chang, in the room with the weaker wifi.

Chapter 44