Nothing to Lose

They were close enough now to see clearly. Their faces jerked forward with every shouted word, gray and pink and contorted with hate and rage and fear and anger. Reacher didn’t like crowds. He enjoyed solitude and was a mild agoraphobic, which didn’t mean he was afraid of wide-open spaces. That was a common misconception. He liked wide-open spaces. Instead he was mildly unsettled by theagora, which was an ancient Greek word for a crowded public marketplace. Random crowds were bad enough. He had seen footage of stampedes and stadium disasters. Organized crowds were worse. He had seen footage of riots and revolutions. A crowd two hundred strong was the largest animal on the face of the earth. The heaviest, the hardest to control, the hardest to stop. The hardest to kill. Big targets, but after-action reports always showed that crowds took much less than one casualty per round fired.

Crowds had nine lives.

“What now?” Vaughan asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. He especially didn’t care for angry organized crowds. He had been in Somalia and Bosnia and the Middle East, and he had seen what angry crowds could do. He had seen the herd instinct at work, the anonymity, the removal of inhibition, the implied permissions of collective action. He had seen that an angry crowd was the most dangerous animal on the face of the earth.

Out!

Crash!

Out!

Crash!

He said, quietly, “Put the shifter in Reverse.”

Vaughan moved the lever. The car settled back on its haunches, like prey ready to flee.

He said, “Back up a little.”

Vaughan backed up and steered and got straight on the center line and stopped again, thirty yards out. Ninety feet. The distance from home plate to first base.

“What now?” she asked.

The crowd had tracked the move. It had changed shape again, back to what it had been at the beginning. A dense triangle, with a blunt vanguard of six men, and a wide base that petered out thirty feet into the scrub on both sides of the thoroughfare.

Out!

Crash!

Out!

Crash!

Reacher stared ahead through the windshield. He dropped his window again. He felt a change coming. He sensed it. He wanted to be a split second ahead of it.

Vaughan asked, “What do we do?”

Reacher said, “I’d feel better in a Humvee.”

“We’re not in a Humvee.”

“I’m just saying.”

“What do we do in a Crown Vic?”

Reacher didn’t have time to answer. The change came. The chanting stopped. There was silence for a second. Then the six men at the front of the crowd raised their weapons high, with clamped fists and straight arms.

They screamed a command.

And charged.

They bolted forward, weapons high, screaming. The crowd streamed after them. Two or three hundred people, full speed, yelling, falling, stumbling, stampeding, eyes wide, mouths open, faces contorted, weapons up, free arms pumping. They filled the windshield, a writhing mob, a frantic screaming mass of humanity coming straight at them.

They got within five feet. Then Vaughan stamped on the gas. The car shot backward, the engine screaming, the low gear whining loud, the rear tires howling and making smoke. She got up to thirty miles an hour going backward and then she flung the car into an emergency one-eighty and smashed the shifter into Drive. Then she stamped on the gas. She accelerated east and didn’t stop for miles, top speed, engine roaring, her foot jammed down. Reacher had been wrong in his earlier assessment. Way too cautious. A Crown Vic with the Police Interceptor pack was a very fast car. Good for a hundred and twenty, easily.

43

They got airborne over the peak of the rise that put the distant Rockies close again and then Vaughan lifted off the gas and took most of the next mile to coast to a stop. She craned her neck and spent a long minute staring out the back window. They were still deep in Despair’s territory. But all was quiet behind them. She slumped in her seat and dropped both hands to her lap.

“We need the State Police,” she said. “We’ve got mob rule back there and a missing woman. And whatever exactly Ramirez was to those people, we can’t assume they’re going to treat his girlfriend kindly.”

“We can’t assume anything,” Reacher said. “We don’t know for sure she’s there. We don’t even know for sure that the dead guy was Ramirez.”

“You got serious doubts?”

“The state cops will. It’s a fairy tale, so far.”

“So what do we do?”

“We verify.”

“How?”

“We call Denver.”

“What’s in Denver?”

“The green car,” Reacher said. “And the guy who was driving it. Three hundred miles, six hours’ drive time, call it seven with a stop for lunch. If he left around eight this morning, he’ll be there by now. We’ll call him up, ask him if he gave Maria a ride, and if so, where exactly he let her out.”

“You know his name?”

“No.”

“Number?”

“No.”

“Great plan.”