Worth Dying For_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [88]
He had two requirements. First, he needed a vehicle with a degree of prestige. Not necessarily much, but at least some. He couldn’t be seen in a rusted and listing pick-up truck, for instance. That would not be remotely appropriate or plausible for a Mahmeini operative, especially one tasked to impress the Duncans. Image was by no means everything, but it greased the skids. Perception was reality, at least half the time.
Second, he needed a car that wasn’t brand-new. Late-model cars had too much security built in. Computers, micro-chips in the keys, matching micro-chips in the keyholes. Nothing was unbeatable, of course, but a quick-and-dirty street job had its practical limits. Newer cars were best tackled with tow trucks or flat-beds, and then patient hours hidden away with ethernet cables and laptop computers. Lone men in the dark needed something easier.
So, a clean sedan from a mainstream manufacturer, not new, but not too old either. Easy to find in Vegas. Five minutes, tops. But not in rural Nebraska. Not in farm country. He had just walked all over town looking for Asghar, and ninety percent of what he had seen had been utilitarian, either pick-up trucks or ancient four-wheel drives, and ninety-nine percent of those had been worn out, all battered and corroded and failing. Apparently Nebraskans didn’t have much money, and even if they did they seemed to favor an ostentatiously blue-collar lifestyle.
He stood in the cold and reviewed his options. He mapped out the blocks he had quartered before, and he tried to identify the kind of density he needed, and he came up with nothing. He had seen a sign to a hospital, and hospital parking lots were often good, because doctors bought new cars and sold their lightly used cast-offs to nurses and medical students, but for all he knew the hospital was miles away, certainly too far to walk without a guarantee of success.
So he started in the Marriott lot.
And finished there.
He walked all around the H-shaped hotel and saw three pick-up trucks, two with fitted camper beds, and an old Chrysler sedan with Arizona plates and a dented fender and sun-rotted paint, and a blue Chevrolet Impala, and a red Ford Taurus, and a black Cadillac. The pick-ups and the old Chrysler were out of the question for obvious reasons. The Impala and the Taurus were out of the question because they were too new, and they were obviously rentals, because they had bar code stickers in the rear side windows, which meant that almost certainly they belonged to Safir’s guys and Rossi’s guys, and he couldn’t call them down to the lot and have them find him sitting in one of their own cars.
Which left the Cadillac. Right age, right style. Local plates, neat, discreet, well looked after, clean and polished. Black glass. Practically perfect. A no-brainer. He put his bag on the ground right next to it and dropped flat and shuffled on his back until his head was underneath the engine. He had a tiny LED Maglite on his key chain, and he fumbled it out and lit it up and went hunting. Cars of that generation had a module bolted to the frame designed to detect a frontal impact. A simple accelerometer, with a two-stage function. Worst case, it would trigger the airbags. Short of that, it would unlock the doors, so that first responders could drag dazed drivers to safety. A gift to car thieves everywhere, therefore not much publicized, and replaced almost immediately with more sophisticated systems.
He found the module. It was a simple tin can, square and small, cheap and basic, all caked in dry dirt, with wires coming out of it. He took out his knife and used the butt end of the handle and banged hard on the module. Dirt flaked off, but nothing else happened. He thought the dirt was maybe insulating the force of the blow, so he popped the blade on his knife and scraped the front of the module