Page 62 of Exit Strategy
‘What makes you think Violeta’s still alive to help? If I were Strickland, she’d be face down in the Patapsco with her throat cut.’
‘That’s possible, obviously. But I’d be surprised. The public face of the campaign Strickland has built is centered around Violeta. Journalists and politicians are starting to question it. If he has a chance to wheel her out in front of them and have her repeat her story – maybe even double down on the weakest parts of it – he won’t want to miss that. If she cooperates, she’ll be safe. If she doesn’t, she probably has a day or two while he tries to persuade her.’
‘How do you know her original story was fake? Maybe she was telling the truth then and is lying now.’
‘No. I’m certain. When I saw the first video Violeta made I knew it was bullshit. I tracked her down in Turkey, where she was living at the time. I talked to her. Made her see who Strickland really was. How he was using her. It wasn’t easy but I got her to trust me. She agreed to come to the United States and set the record straight. So now we need to figure out where Strickland’s taken her. If she refuses to cooperate with him, I don’t want to think about what he’ll do to her. In case I haven’t mentioned it, the guy’s a twenty-four-karat asshole.’
‘You don’t know where his operation is based?’
‘I know about the public-facing stuff. Where his corporation is registered. Where he pays taxes. Things like that. But he keeps the operational part under wraps. I guess he thinks it adds to his mystique.’
‘All right, then let’s figure it out. The guys who showed up this morning must have come from somewhere within a radius of maybe thirty miles.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because of the time it took from us talking to Arlon James, the security guard, and them arriving.’
‘Okay, but a circle with a thirty-mile radius? That’s, what, about twenty-eight hundred square miles. Needle, meet haystack.’
‘Not quite that large. Some of it’ll be sea. But we can narrow it down. He’s going to hold her somewhere private. Probably isolated. Probably somewhere that he owns or leases, to avoid the public walking in on them or hearing her scream if he gets physical or she cries for help. And it’ll be a place where there’s a lot of limestone. A quarry, maybe. Or a mine. Or even a supply depot for contractors.’
‘How do you figure limestone?’
‘The guy I shot had little white fragments in the cleats of his boots. It looked like limestone to me. There was the same color powder around the cuffs of James’s pants. And around the wheel arches of their van.’
‘You’re sure it was limestone? What are you, a geologist?’
‘No. But I’ve seen limestone before and this looked the same. Have you got anything better?’
Kasselwood didn’t answer.
‘It doesn’t hurt to look.’ Taylor tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, pulled out her phone, and started to google. A moment later she said, ‘I’ve got something.’ She showed Reacher and Kasselwood. It was a news report, three years old, about a military contractor thathad taken a lease on a decommissioned quarry. The idea was to use it for vehicle storage between deployments, according to the reporter. A photograph showed the first batch of Humvees that had arrived, looking shabby in faded Desert Tan and parked in a ragged line at the base of a cliff.
Kasselwood enlarged the image. She squinted at it for a moment, then said, ‘No. Sorry, Ellie. Look at the vehicles. There are logos on the doors. They’re like some dumbass medieval coat of arms. The text is too small to read, but I’ve seen the design before. It belongs to United Allied, which is run out of Florida by a pretentious prick named de Zerbi. It’s not connected to Strickland’s outfit.’
Gilmour said, ‘Could Strickland have taken the site over from these other guys?’
Taylor took her phone back. She said, ‘I’ll find out,’ and started tapping away at the screen again.
Kasselwood brushed the scar on her cheek with her fingertips then turned to Reacher and said, ‘You thought I was a pimp or something. What gave you that impression?’
Reacher said, ‘You smuggled a woman into the country in a box, then talked about her being taken from you like she was a piece of property.’
‘She wasn’t in the box the whole way from Turkey. Just the last couple of hours so that we could run the decoy.’
‘You’re a true humanitarian.’
‘What did you think I was doing before you knew about Violeta?’
‘We thought you were trying to rip off the CIA.’
‘Rip offthe CIA? What had you been smoking?’
‘Gilmour recognized the code you used on the custom forms. We assumed it was a covert shipment.’
Kasselwood looked at Gilmour and said, ‘You recognized the code?’
Gilmour nodded.
