Winter Territory

A Cameron REACHER Novel

Scott Blade

Also by Scott Blade

www.scottblade.com

Get Reacher Series

Gone Forever

Foreign & Domestic (Coming Soon)

Other Novels

The Secret of Lions

S.Lasher & Associates Series

The StoneCutter

Cut & Dry

Copyright © 2015 Black Lion, LLC.

All Rights Reserved

Visit the author website:

scottblade.com

Get Reacher book series and Winter Territory are works of fiction, produced out of the author’s imagination. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or taken WITH permission from the source or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Characters, places, or story arcs that seem based on the creations of other authors are used under indicative permission based on the creator’s public permission, as well as express permission given by representatives of the author, as well as by the author himself.

Note that copyrighted characters are not used. Jack Reacher is the sole property of Lee Child. Permission has been obtained before the publication of this book series.

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Published by: Black Lion, LLC.

Visit the author website:

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Contents

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

About the Author

Dedication

This one is to a great friend, David. And they stay there...

To my fans, thank you.

To Jack Reacher and of course to Lee Child.

The old guy’s watery eyes flicked all around the sunless room and came to rest on his daughter’s eighteen-year-old face (picture).

“Do you have a child?”

“Nah,” Reacher said. “I don’t.”

“Neither do I,” said the old man. “Not anymore.”

—Jack Reacher, Without Fail.

Chapter 1

The man was about twenty-five years old and freezing. The cold pierced through his skin and shot straight to his bones. The temperatures outside dipped into the low twenties and the winter hadn’t even come on yet. Not fully. It was still the middle of November, but the mountaintops were snowcapped and the sky was wet in that cold, dewy feeling that came with high altitudes and cold skies. Which described exactly his location, a high altitude and stark cold weather. He was in the Absaroka Mountain Range, which is a part of the Rockies. The elevation was somewhere above 13,000 feet, but he wasn’t sure of the exact number.

The man was hiding out in a familiar place. A place that he used to hide in when he was young. He felt safe there.

Outside the night wind blew and batted up against the old ruggedly built wooden structure, primitive, but a structure that had endured the cold winters for many, many years. For the moment nothing and no one would find him. He was safe, but it wouldn’t be long. He figured that that was the case, but he had nowhere else to go. The man had run out of options and out of time.

They were coming for him. They were coming and they would come in hot, guns blazing. They would kill him dead for sure. No doubt about it. But that wasn’t even the thing that worried the man at the moment. He had been running for days and he knew that he would come face-to-face with them soon enough. His cover had been blown all to hell and back. There was no changing that now. There was no changing the past.

The thing that was the immediate danger wasn’t the guys coming to kill him for betraying them. It wasn’t the fact that they had trusted him and he had turned on them. It wasn’t the dangerous enemies who once terrified him.

The immediate danger wasn’t the contents of his stolen bulletproof briefcase that was covered in dirt and grime and still damp from being dragged through the snowy terrain.

The immediate danger that ate away at him was that he was starving. He hadn’t eaten in days, so many days that he had no idea when the last time that he had eaten was.

Two weeks ago he had been on a military stealth chopper on his way into Mexico or back from Mexico across the Mexican and United States border. He couldn’t remember for sure. The details were fuzzy now because he was slipping in and out of cognitive thinking. Five or six or seven days without food will do that to a man. He tried to remember his training, his tradecraft, but for some reason all that he could focus on was the stealth chopper.

He had thought that it was such a cool thing. It was a Comanche RAH-70. It was the most terrifying machine that he had ever witnessed. Reports from around the world had claimed that highly modified Black Hawk UH-60s were the stealth choppers used in the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in 2011. The man hadn’t been there in 2011 and he had been far too young at the time to have been involved in that operation, but he did have top secret clearance and was privy to knowledge that the choppers used were in fact Comanche’s RAH-70s, which were cousins of the RAH-66.

Public knowledge says that the Comanche choppers were canceled way back in 2004. The programs were too expensive for the U.S. military, but not for his employer.

The man’s employer had found use for them and financed dozens of them to be created for stealth missions. They were housed in strategic military installations all around the world. Military service personnel were restricted from accessing them. Authorized persons were told never to reveal any details about them to anyone.

The chopper was a remarkable machine with deadly and accurate machine guns attached.

It was equipped with special side turret style machine guns that fired M50 ammunition at 1,500 rounds per minute. The design was based on the Vulcan style gun. The ammunition housed 500 rounds and could be reloaded in fifteen minutes.

The man knew this information not because of his military training, but because of his tradecraft.

Although, now he questioned the statistics and details of the information that he knew because he also knew one more thing and he knew that for certain: He was starving and the lack of substance in his body was causing him to lose focus and reasoning.

He tried desperately to concentrate on the details of the stealth chopper. It helped. But the one other thought that taunted him was the irony that he was starving, but he was in one of the richest states in the country and at that moment he was a rich man. He was richer than he had been five or six or seven days ago because of the value of the contents of the security briefcase that was in his possession.

Next to the man was a Beretta 9mm, a service weapon that was given to him just before his secret mission. It rested on top of a closed shoebox next to him, in close grabbing distance. Safety on, but that could change quickly. The shoebox was stacked on top of a large old appliance box that now held old items from a childhood long past.

The room that the man was in was dark and dank and not well insulated. Spiders indigenous to the region crawled along the far corner of the ceiling. They crawled in the shadows of a swinging bulb that hung down on a long cord and blew slightly back and forth in a curved arc from west to north.

Somewhere in the room, blowing in from cracks in the roof or unsecured windows, was a wind that chilled the room and blew the bulb around.

The man could hear a faint whistle that blew in with the gusts of wind from the outside terrain.

The man was sitting down on the floor with his back to the wall. He craned up and looked out of a snow-covered, shuttered window above his head. He had to stretch his body back up against the wall and use his arms to hoist himself up just to see down.

Billions of stars shimmered across the stretch of sky. The ground was covered in snow, but the night sky was clear and dark blue and picturesque like the wallpaper on someone’s desktop computer somewhere. Perhaps back at Langley Virginia, which was where he had lived for the last year of his life.

The man leaned forward some more and looked straight down at the front of the house. He couldn’t see the front door from his position, but he was more than two stories up and he could see more than 100 yards down the steep land in front of him. Behind him were dense trees and then the edge of a rugged mountain. He wasn’t much worried about men coming for him from behind because these guys would just come straight up the long, wide driveway. If they could find it. The snow had covered over it and left no signs of where it used to be. More than likely his enemies would be coming in by snowmobile, which he would hear in the dead silence around him. The engine noise would echo and bounce off the far-off trees or the sides of the mountains. No way would anyone surprise him on a snowmobile. The alternative means of transportation would’ve been on horses. The snow covering the ground wasn’t deep enough to prevent horses from riding up the track and a faster way.

Either means of transportation for his enemies wouldn’t matter. He was ready at the moment. His main problem wasn’t how they would come for him. His main problem was when they would come for him.

The owner of the house didn’t know that he was there. He was hiding out. He prayed that he wouldn’t be discovered. The last thing that he wanted to do was involve innocent people.

Just then he heard a noise, a creaking on a staircase below him. He stretched back up and craned his head and looked out the window. He still couldn’t see the front door because of an overbuilt porch, a fact that he had forgotten. Then he remembered that he had just looked down and couldn’t see the front door only moments ago.

The man heard more noises from below him. He heard footsteps growing louder and louder. A moment later someone was on the floor beneath him and then he heard a chair moving across the floor and light footsteps as if someone climbed the chair and then reached up for the rope to the attic door. He heard the creaks and crackles of his frozen bones as he twisted to look at the trapdoor and then the squeaking of springs from the door itself as someone pulled down on it. The sound was deafening in the silence of the house.

The man grabbed his Beretta and quickly pointed it at the attic door as it was pulled downward.

Light flashed in through the crack and up onto the ceiling above him. And then it filled half of the attic. He wanted to slide over and hide behind some of the larger boxes, but he couldn’t really move his legs. He had lost feeling in them some time ago and then he had lost movement. He couldn’t remember when. Truth was that he had forgotten that they were even paralyzed.

The trapdoor came down all the way and the folding staircase attached plopped down below.

The man heard the creak of the wooden ladder as someone climbed it, applying weight to each rung. A head stuck up into the attic and then a body followed.

The tiny figure in front of him scanned the area and the boxes until their eyes connected.

The man lowered his Beretta when he saw a small boy of approximately six years of age. The boy glowered at him in a peculiar way like a mixture of fright, probably because of the gun, and then recognition and then a face that said hey, you know me.

The man had been in and out of sleep for days and had expended so much energy holding the Beretta up that the next thing that happened was the heavy weight of his eyelids slamming his eyes shut.

Chapter 2

Cameron Reacher has being doing what Reachers do—wandering. He has spent the last months doing more and seeing more than he had ever done or seen in his whole life. He traveled from Mississippi, a place that seemed so far away and long ago in his memory. He had traveled through seven states, across hundreds of highways, probably thousands of cloverleafs and over the southern part of the Rocky Mountains. He’d traveled all the way west until he couldn’t go any farther unless he started swimming or chartered a boat or stole a submarine or bought a plane ticket. And even then he was out of states except Hawaii and Alaska, depending on what you consider to be west.

He had only slept about five hours the night before because he had met a girl in Salt Lake City. Her name was Farrah, which he had known as the actress Farrah Fawcett, but when he asked the girl about it, she had denied being named after the actress. She had said that she had gotten that question her entire life, but had never even seen a Farrah Fawcett film. Being that the girl was only 19 years old that had probably been true. Farrah had been dead for years and hadn’t really acted in decades. The only thing that Reacher knew her from was Charlie’s Angels, a horrible show from way before he was born.

Farrah, the nineteen-year-old and not the actress, had been a lot of fun for Reacher. She was a part-time waitress and student, not at the University of Utah, but at a community college. She was taking night classes to be a nurse, a trade that Reacher admired. He admired anyone who was in the profession of helping others. Military, criminal justice, firefighting, medical, even clergymen were all trades that he respected.

Farrah was the complete opposite of Farrah Fawcett, but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t gorgeous. The truth was that she was absolutely gorgeous, far more so than the 1970s actress, that was Reacher’s conclusion.

She was six feet tall and mixed with black and white traits. She was dark skinned with long black straight hair and even longer legs. She was toned but not in a fitness kind of way, but in a youthful kind of way like she had great genes. Athletic genes was something that Reacher knew about. He himself had been born of great genes, only his genes weren’t really athletic as much as they were like a warrior’s. Most humans had evolved into different shapes and sizes depending on the environment that they had to deal with. Reacher’s ancestors seemed to have developed to the period of when humans were killing wooly mammoths and running from saber-toothed tigers and then they stopped evolving—physically. Instead all of evolution selected to concentrate solely on their brain power.

Reacher had met Farrah at a local bar where she worked and he had asked her to have a drink after she got off. Which they did. His time on the road had been lonely. Reacher accepted that, but an occasional friend was something that he had grown to look forward to. Not that the isolation hadn’t appealed to him as well. He liked to be alone. There was something romantic and purposeful about wandering. He found peace.

After the drink, Farrah had invited Reacher back to her place for another drink. Which turned the one drink into an all-night thing. Which was okay with him.

In the morning, Reacher put his clothes on and said goodbye to Farrah as she slept. He wasn’t sure if she had heard him or not and it hadn’t mattered. He was ready to be on his way.

He left her asleep in her bed in her ground level apartment and locked the door behind him. He left without a phone number or without leaving her one in return. No email. No forwarding address. No point.

He had no phone. No address. No email. At least not one that he checked. There was literally no more existence of the boy who had once lived in Mississippi with his sheriff mother. Most of his life he had been known as Reacher, a name that was his father’s, which was a fact that he had never known until his mother confessed to him on her death bed that his father had been a former military cop turned drifter.

Some people called him Cameron, but no one had called him Cameron in months. When asked what his name was he simply said, “Reacher.” No point in giving away his first name. He didn’t even see much point in giving away his last name, but there wasn’t much point in lying either. Except when he had to fill out forms like motel registries.

Cameron Reacher had been born in Mississippi to a beautiful, single mom. She was an ex-Marine, which meant that she was still a Marine. She was also the sheriff of the town that Cameron had grown up in until six months ago when she died from cancer. On her deathbed, she confessed why she had always called him Reacher instead of Cameron. It hadn’t been because of her military background. It had been because she was in love with his father and Reacher had been his name. First name Jack. No middle initial.

Cameron had grown up thinking that his father was dead, but the truth was that Jack Reacher had no idea that he even existed. The day that his mother died, Reacher scattered her ashes on a set of old train tracks like she had instructed. Then he turned and walked right out of town. He hitchhiked straight across Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas and went all the way to California. He was on a quest to find Jack Reacher and to get to know who his father was. But how do you find a man who can’t be found? How do you get to know a man who is always somewhere? Who is always anonymous?

Cameron Reacher gets to know his father by literally following in his footsteps.

For a while he had carried around his Mississippi state driver’s license, but he ditched that back in Arizona in a truck stop trashcan. He could always get a new one from his lawyer back home. He wasn’t sure of the process required to get one, but he was certain that his family attorney had his birth certificate and could acquire a new driver’s license if he needed one, but what would he have needed one for? Reacher didn’t drive anymore. He had no car and didn’t plan on owning a car. No possessions had been his father’s thing and now it was his thing. Partially because it was his way of getting to know his father, by following in his footsteps. And partially it was because Reacher didn’t want any possessions. Possessions meant commitment and stuff and things to carry and store. None of these ideologies appealed to Reacher.

The only thing that Reacher carried now was his debit card that gave him access to his savings account, and a wad of cash, which was $458.35 at that moment. He had learned that it was better to carry a good amount of cash on him. He never knew when he would need quick access to cash. Plus using cash created a lot more anonymity for him over using his debit card for everything. He always tried to keep around $500 in his pocket.

The only other item that he carried with him was a foldable toothbrush which looked like a blue barber-style shaving blade. Instead of a blade that snicked out of the handle, there was a toothbrush. The bristles and plastic head folded down into the handle and flipped out like a switchblade.

In the morning after Reacher left Farrah for Salt Lake City, he ventured to visit the different attractions around the city including Temple Square Gardens, which is 35 acres of land downtown that headquarters the Mormon Church. The gardens are world famous and have 250 flower beds and 700 different types of plants from all across the planet. The gardens are replanted and redesigned every year. It takes hundreds of volunteers to finish it, but Reacher couldn’t get in to see it because the garden was just open in the summer and tours were by appointment only.

So Reacher spent the afternoon running a daily or weekly ritual that depended on where he was and how dirty he had gotten. He went to a cheap-looking old barbershop and said hello to an old guy with a jarhead haircut and photographs of himself with other guys, doing guy things, that were pinned all over a bulletin board near the entrance. The old guy said hello back and asked if Reacher needed a cut. Reacher nodded and told him that he would like a buzz.

On the road, Reacher had discovered the benefits of keeping his hair short and he had shed the long-haired look. Of course in the winter months it made sense to let it grow long, but Reacher was still getting used to the drifter life. For the last six months he had been getting his head buzzed short and had not thought about the winter yet. He’d figured that he’d spend it in California, but he had gotten there earlier than he’d imagined. Part of the new nomadic life was going with the flow and the flow had turned him around at the Pacific Ocean.

After the jarhead barber cut his hair short, Reacher got out of the chair, paid the man, and thanked him. Then he left the barbershop and walked down the street along a cracked cement sidewalk into a side of town that was less than pristine. Potholes and old cars parked along the street and leaning telephone poles besieged the area like the spoils of a forgotten time.

Reacher walked on until he found what he was looking for, an old consignment store called America’s Clothing Store. Which wasn’t a catchy name for a consignment store, but Reacher wasn’t looking for trendy. He was looking for cheap. He walked into the store and nodded at a cute girl behind the counter. She was folding clothes and nodded and smiled back at him.

She looked to be barely an adult and was possibly Asian and white mixed. She wore a multicolored striped top with mostly gray in it and black chinos. She was petite, probably 5’1” tall. Her hair was less than shoulder length, dyed pink, and shaved along one side. She had a look like what Reacher thought of as a modern punk rocker, a style that was returning.

Traveling from state to state, city to city, Reacher had come across young people of all types. In the urban areas, he’d noticed similar hairstyles, especially among girls. Although he was from a southern state, a conservative state, Reacher couldn’t complain about the new look. In fact, on her it looked damn good.

He began looking around the store. They didn’t have a big and tall section; he had found most places didn’t. The big and tall sections of America hadn’t vanished. There were plenty of them out there, but most stores that catered to bigger people had become specialty stores—expensive specialty stores. So Reacher had often settled for XXL or XXXL if he could find it in tops. Fitting his waist hadn’t been a problem because he had a thin waist for a guy his size—34 inches, but he was 6’6” tall. He needed pants that were long enough. Usually he’d buy size 36 and let them ride on his hips.

Reacher headed to the pants section and searched around. He looked at jeans first and found a pair of Levi carpenter jeans, size 35. The legs were long. He grabbed them and walked over to tops. He sifted through the selections and pulled out a long-sleeved white shirt. Then he turned and started toward a wall of shoes on display, but before he got there he saw a nice gray fleece vest from the corner of his eye. He stopped and looked it over. He was thinking about heading northeast since he had already traveled from the south when he came out west. He realized that he had no winter gear and it was the beginning of November.

Temperatures in Mississippi in around November were generally nice days and cold nights. So he grabbed the fleece and looked at the tag. It was an XXL, but was a sleeveless vest so he didn’t need to worry about having long sleeves that only went down to his forearms.

If the one picture of his father from his days at West Point and his own abnormally long arms were any indicator of his physical heritage. He had an enormous arm span. From one fingertip to the other, he could bear hug a bear. Hell, he could bear hug two bears.

Reacher grabbed his clothes and went over to the fitting room, which was in the very back of the store. He dipped into a little hallway and came face-to-face with a young black girl who was barely out of high school. Like the girl from the front, she also had a punk rocker look about her. No pink hair, but she had three nose piercings and those huge pieces in her earlobes that looked like rims for a truck. They were black and rubber looking. They opened her ears up to a size big enough to slide his pinkie through. And Reacher’s pinkie wasn’t the size of a pinkie. It was more like the size of a gun barrel.

She said, “How are you, sir? Want to try those on?”

Reacher said, “Yes.”

“How many items do you have?”

“I have three, but I want to grab a pair of shoes and socks too. Can I leave these with you?

She said, “Here, I’ll take them and set you up in a fitting room.”

She reached out with tiny coffee-colored hands and took his three items. She had to use both arms to carry them and then she was swallowed up like a newborn wrapped in tons of sheets.

Reacher turned and walked out to the shoes. He paced back and forth looking, for he had only one goal on his brain and that was to locate the size 16, which was his shoe size. This was one of the hardest things about being a giant, locating a comfortable shoe.

He had walked one way up the aisle and then back again when he realized that the bigger sizes were all the way at the top of the wall, well above the eye line of a normal guy, but Cameron Reacher wasn’t a normal guy and he had gained weight on the road. Two factors contributed to this. The first was that he was aging and a natural consequence of aging is that one gets heavier, but this wasn’t the main reason for his weight gain. The real reason had nothing to do with his diet or his age. It was because he walked most of the day. Reacher had covered about 2,000 square miles of the western United States in the last six months and that was why he had gained weight.

Reacher looked at the small selection of shoes that were in size 16. His choices were pretty slim. There wasn’t much there, not much at all. Not in the way of comfortable shoes. He had found that mostly it was better to look at the work shoes and boots. There usually seemed to be a larger selection of them and in pretty decent shape.

He picked up a pair of plain black boots that were comparable to Timberlands, but without the name brand. The boots were worn, but still in good shape. So he took them and returned to the fitting room and gathered his clothes and followed the young clerk to a room. She handed him a white and yellow tag that said 4 in big block font. It indicated how many items that he was taking into the dressing room.

He went into the booth and closed the door and tried the clothes on. Everything fit pretty well, including the long-sleeved white shirt. He rolled the sleeves down over his forearms and looked in the mirror. He looked okay.

He ripped the tags off all of the items and pulled the size stickers off and walked out wearing them.

The girl looked him up and down and smiled. She said, “Nice. Everything looks good.”

“Thanks. I’ll take them. I’m just going to wear them out.”

The girl said, “That’s fine. Where are your old clothes?”

“Right,” he said. Then he turned and went back into the room and picked up his old clothes and shoes and the tag that she had given him and he came back out.

He handed her the tag and she said, “If you take them to the front then Shelly will ring you up. Have a nice day.”

Reacher smiled and stayed quiet.

He went to the register and paid for his new clothes and walked out of the store. He stopped just outside the front door and turned to a Goodwill bin that looked like a giant blue city garbage can with a slot to throw old clothes in.

He bunched up his old clothes and tossed them in. No reason to waste them.

Then he turned and looked at the shadows on the ground. The time matched what he guessed it to be, which was about 2:45 in the afternoon.

Reacher had been raised by a Marine mother and one of the skills that she had taught him was how to tell time by the sun’s shadows. He had found that this skill wasn’t completely necessary since he had always been good at guessing the time fairly accurately, but his real talent was in measuring time, not telling it. Reacher’s brain was like a human stopwatch. He could measure the length of things down to the microsecond, even farther, probably. This ability had always served him well. And Reacher liked numbers anyway. Numbers don’t lie.

Chapter 3

The number on the side of the building was 113 Main Street and the building was a little country diner called Terry’s Diner. Nothing special about it. Plain diner. Plain booths. Plain long countertop.

The address was 113, but the guy sitting in the booth by the window had wondered why it was 113. The number made no sense because there were not 112 other addresses on the street. There weren’t even 12 other ones. Main Street in Tower Junction, Wyoming was really more like the only street. The other streets snaked off of Main Street like little streams feeding off one slightly larger river.

The guy dressed far too nice to be a local. He wore cowboy boots, cowboy hat, and a black suit. His clothes looked expensive because they were expensive. They were probably bought in Texas or New Mexico. That was what Aubree thought.

Aubree was the youngest waitress who worked at the diner. She had just turned 18 two weeks ago. Today was her first shift on the floor by herself, but the whole waitress thing wasn’t that hard. You greet people. Take their orders. Write them down on a ticket for the cook. He makes the orders and stabs the ticket on a spindle when it’s ready. Then you bring it out to the guest. Not a big deal. And the menu was pretty plain. It was an all-American diet: cheeseburgers, soups, salads, etc. No seafood. No pastas. But there was chicken on the menu and even that was a chicken sandwich. No fried foods except for French fries and even they weren’t really fried. They were microwaved, but Aubree was taught that there was no reason to tell the guest about the fries.

She had greeted the guy sitting by the window, but all he had wanted was coffee and nothing else. The guy wore nice clothes, but that wasn’t the thing that really stuck out to Aubree. The thing that really struck her was that he would’ve been very good-looking for an older guy except that he had a vicious deep-set scar that ran jagged across his face like someone had come at him with a chainsaw and skimmed the outside of his face. His left eye was completely grayed out like a blind man’s and the left part of his nose and left nostril were missing. The only thing that was left was a black hole shaped like a tiny pyramid.

The guy’s right eye was an amazing ice blue color like the middle of the ocean. He had silver and gray hair slicked back creating the perfect style. He also had a beard that was peppered with black and gray hair.

The guy was probably in his late forties, not an old guy, not like a grandfather, but close to her dad’s age.

Most of what Aubree could see about the guy was the good side of his face and there was nothing wrong with that. But when she brought him his coffee he turned his features directly to her and she swallowed hard when she saw the hole on the one half of his nose. The rest of the scar had faded into his hairline perfectly at the top of his head and it barely scraped across his upper lip. It left a slight cleft that wasn’t bad, not at all. One time in high school, Aubree had to “volunteer” at a homeless shelter with other students who were a part of the local church. At this function she had seen a guy with the upper part of his lip and teeth completely missing. The guy had tried to grow a mustache over it, but it was still visible.

Aubree remembered being told by her teacher to stop staring, but she couldn’t help it. She watched the guy eat. She remembered that it had sickened her to her stomach. She felt bad about that later. After all, the guy wore a denim vest with military and veteran patches all over it. He had served in Vietnam or some war that happened long before she had been born.

The guy in the booth at the window accepted the coffee from her and never touched it.

He never looked back at her again. He just sat and stared out the window like he was waiting for something or someone.

The guy had a serious way about him like he was ex-military or somehow he was important.

Other than the cowboy hat, which rested on the table in front of him, and the boots, the guy really didn’t fit in. Besides Tower Junction being a small town and the fact that Aubree knew almost everyone in it, the guy stood out. And that wasn’t because of the scar. It was more than that, but Aubree couldn’t explain it.

Whatever the guy was waiting on, there was no doubt that there was something on his mind. Something that was important.

She wondered if he was waiting on a miracle.

Chapter 4

The sky was a light blue. Huge lenticular clouds hovered over the horizon like giants. There was no weather, not yet, but Reacher knew that it was on the way. Still he had been walking on Highway 20, heading in a northeastern direction for 30 minutes when he was finally picked up by an old guy with a thick beard and a completely bald head and a dried-out look like he had just stepped out of aggressive chemotherapy, driving a newer model red Ford Explorer. The guy had picked him up and although Reacher hadn’t anticipated heading farther north, not into what looked like blizzard weather, he couldn’t complain.

He had left Utah and hiked east and then north into Twin Falls. This was when he had been grateful for the fleece because the weather had gotten colder—much colder. On the outskirts of Twin Falls, he had seen a digital bank sign that read the time and the temperature in a bright green color. The temperature had read 46 degrees, which wasn’t that cold, but the night was approaching. And Reacher knew that it would get colder.

The old guy hadn’t been much of a talker, but he had seemed nice enough. And talking wasn’t something that Reacher was interested in. He liked the quiet, but most people who had picked him up expected conversation. Perhaps that was why a lot of them had stopped in the first place.

The red Explorer had big, white magnetic signs stuck to the doors that read: Dale’s Supply Runs. The guy driving wasn’t Dale. His name was Floyd and he had told Reacher that he drove across the state line into Wyoming once a month in order to trade with the Lakota Indians on the Red Rain Reservation. Reacher hadn’t corrected him and said Lakota Native Americans. What would have been the point? He didn’t want to insult the guy who was giving him a ride and driving him around 100 miles.

Floyd finally broke the silence and said, “So why are you headed into Yellowstone?”

Reacher said, “I’m going wherever.”

“So are you like a drifter?”

Reacher nodded.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have picked you up then?”

Reacher said, “I’m not dangerous. But certainly hitchhiking has gotten a bad reputation these days. Which makes it harder and harder to get rides.”

“That’s why I picked you up. No harm in giving a young guy a ride. Even if you are a drifter. I give people rides through here all the time. I find it to be safe enough.”

“Well, I sure do appreciate it,” Reacher said.

Floyd said, “You’re a nice kid. Why are you drifting? Running away from something?”

Reacher stayed quiet and Floyd seemed to reconsider his comments and then he said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be nosy.”

Reacher said, “It’s okay. Perfectly reasonable question. No, nothing like that. I’m actually looking for someone.”

“I see. So sort of a tracking someone down situation?”

“You got it.”

Floyd smiled a good friendly smile that shined through the beard. Then he said, “So it’s like a quest?”

Reacher stayed quiet.

Floyd asked, “Are you like a bounty hunter?”

Reacher smiled and then said, “Yes and no. In a way I am because I am tracking someone. Then again. Not really because a bounty hunter hunts people down for money. No one is going to pay me to find the guy that I’m looking for.”

Reacher paused a beat. And then he said, “The man that I’m looking for is my father.”

Floyd said, “So it’s a personal matter?”

Reacher nodded. Said nothing about the details of his quest to find and know his father.

Floyd seemed to sense that as well and changed the subject.

He asked, “So you ever been on an Indian reservation before?”

“Can’t say that I have. I guess that the closest that I’ve ever been to one is passing through the same county.”

“Ahh. They’re great. They are all different but basically the same. They are kind of sad if you think too much on it. But for the most part they have an Old West feel. This one that we’re headed to is about as untouched by society as can be. Now they do depend on tourism a lot and that is primarily their only outside source of income.

“Many other ones around the country have casinos. And some don’t. This one doesn’t.”

Reacher nodded along and stayed quiet. He thought about it and realized that he had never given Indian reservations much thought before. He loved history. So he wasn’t really sure why he had never considered visiting one before. It had simply never occurred to him.

Floyd paused and glanced in his side mirror and switched on his turn signal and changed lanes over to the fast lane. He sped up and the Explorer revved and jumped. It had a well-oiled engine, no doubt about that.

Reacher asked, “So what makes this one so indifferent to society?”

“The Red Rain Reservation doesn’t have a casino like I said, but they depend on tourism and almost have no choice, but to stay open for tourists because it is located high in the mountains in Yellowstone National Park.”

“An Indian reservation high in the mountains and in one of the biggest parks in the world? That does sound really interesting. I can’t wait to see it.”

“It’s quite something. The other thing about it, like a lot of reservations, is that it has a very poor side. There are some decent buildings, but for the most part the residents live in poor conditions,” Floyd said.

Reacher nodded and said nothing about it. Then silence fell between them and Reacher stared out the window.

“I’ll tell you something interesting,” Floyd said. “Have you ever heard of Red Cloud?”

Reacher paused for a moment and thought about it before he answered. Then he said, “Red Cloud is Chief Red Cloud of the Oglata Lakota Tribe. He is revered as a strong war leader. He led as a chief from 1868 to 1909.

“He was one of the most adept Native American opponents that the U.S. Army ever faced. In 1866, 1867, and 1868 he waged a successful war campaign known as Red Cloud's War. It was a dispute over the Powder River Country in northeastern Wyoming and part of southern Montana.”

Floyd turned his head and stared at Reacher for so long that he almost veered over into oncoming traffic; then he jumped back to life and straightened out the Explorer. He moved his old hands to the ten and two o’clock positions on the steering wheel and then he gazed back at Reacher, just a quick glance this time, not more than a few seconds. He asked, “How did you know all that?”

Reacher turned in his seat, the seatbelt pulled with him. He shrugged and then he said, “I like history. Especially American history. I remember things like that.”

Floyd asked, “What, do you have a photographic memory?”

“It’s actually called eidetic memory. I can recall images, sounds, or objects with unusual precision and accuracy within minutes.”

Floyd smiled and chuckled a little, probably because he didn’t know what else to say to that. Then he said, “Well, it fades as you get older. Trust me. I can barely remember what day it is when I wake up in the morning. Sometimes Mrs. Floyd has to remind me.”

Reacher smiled and let out a friendly laugh, but he thought that his memory wasn’t very likely to fade. It never had. Most people that he had encountered reacted the same. They were impressed by his uncanny memory, but to Reacher it had been as much of a curse as a blessing.

Imagine recalling so much detail in your brain that it can often be hard to decipher between where the real world ends and the memory begins. So far in life, Reacher had not come to this problem, but it was a real concern. There was plenty of scientific evidence out there to support the fact that eidetic memory wasn’t healthy for a person. The ability to recall so much clear detail often meant that the brain suffered in some other way. There is, after all, only so much RAM in a computer and the human brain is a natural computer. If a computer’s memory gets filled to the brim, often the computer’s performance will suffer somewhere else.

Reacher hadn’t known his father, but he did know that he got his brain power from his father. His mother had been a very smart woman, but her brain functions were that of a normal intelligent person, not a freak like himself. And one of the negative aspects of not knowing one’s parents was the inability to diagnose future health traits, like problems with the brain.

Reacher ran his fingers across his cropped hair, warming his head.

Floyd said, “Old Red Cloud has a descendant at Red Rain. The Tribal Police is made up of two peace officers during the winter months and five in the summer when they add three more deputies. The two officers are father and daughter and their last name is Red Cloud.”

“A father and daughter pair of cops?” Reacher said and then he thought, That’s a new one to me, although not unfathomable because my mother was a cop and I solved a lot of cases for her.

Reacher’s mother had been a sheriff back in Mississippi and she had taken advantage of his powerful mind early on. She had been supportive and nurturing of his gifts. So she had taught him everything that she knew about homicide investigation and police work. It wasn’t long until Reacher was solving crimes that not even she could figure out.

Reacher decided to change the subject. He glanced over at Floyd and asked, “So what kinds of goods do you deliver to the Red Rain Reservation?”

Floyd said, “Dale sells all kinds of things, but the thing that we deliver the most of is coffee.”

Reacher smiled and asked, “Coffee?”

“Well, actually coffee beans. Sure as heck do. We bring huge sacks of them every month. I got a pile of sacks stacked all the way in the cargo space.”

Reacher turned and sniffed the air.

How did I miss that? he thought. The air was filled with the scent of fresh coffee beans. Coffee was his drug. According to his mother it was his father’s drug as well, and probably generations of Reachers before that.

“Do you drink coffee?” Floyd asked.

“You have no idea,” Reacher said.

Driving through Yellowstone National Park was one of the best experiences that Reacher had had in six months. The park was enormous and filled with rugged snowcapped mountains, miles and miles of untouched wilderness, winding roads, and rolling half green and half snowy plains as far as the eye could see. He had seen a herd of buffalo roaming in the distance around one of the bends. The closest that he had ever been to a buffalo before was seeing it on a menu.

The traffic that traveled along Highway 20 had weakened miles back. Reacher was sure that he had seen a sign that indicated that Highway 20 had turned into Grand Loop Road, but he had paid little attention to the signs. The grandeur of the forest around him had taken precedent over signs. Nature’s creations were far more beautiful than manmade objects.

They drove on for a while, following the road as it looped and snaked and Reacher figured pretty quickly why it was called Grand Loop Road. The Grand was an understatement and Loop was more like twists and turns, but in the end it was worth it to follow the road just to take in the scenery.

Reacher craned his head and peered up at the sky. The sun was half hidden behind a cloud in the 3 o’clock position and then he craned his head again and scanned the horizon. The clouds in the distance were reminders of Jarvis Lake. The day that he had ridden in with Hank Cochran six months ago there had been a looming storm. These clouds were different than those. They were high in the mountains, but just as foretelling of an incoming storm.

Floyd leaned forward and looked out of the windshield and peered up at the clouds.

He said, “Boy, those clouds don’t look good.”

Reacher nodded.

Floyd returned his eyes to the road and asked, “Do you want me to drop you off at Tower Junction? It’ll be much easier to find shelter and even get a ride from there than Red Rain.”

“I’ll get out at the reservation. It sounds interesting and I’m a guy looking to experience interesting things.”

“Kid, the reservation is beautiful and the people there are warm, but they don’t really like outsiders who aren’t there to trade or buy from them.”

“It’s not illegal to be there as a tourist, right? This is America.”

Floyd said, “No, not exactly. They can’t keep you out. I don’t think that they can.

“Look, there’s a shuttle service that runs to Tower Junction. I think that it runs till 8 p.m. If I were you I’d make sure that you’re on it. There’s nowhere to rent a room on the reservation, not like a motel or anything.”

The guy paused a beat, then he said, “They will probably be pretty friendly to you until nightfall. And then they’re going to wonder why you’re there. So if that’s where you want to go, no big deal. But like I said, be on the last shuttle out around nightfall. Tower Junction is a good 30 miles down the road. The last thing that you want is to get stuck hitching rides out there. Especially since I’m guessing that those clouds are bringing snow. Maybe worse.”

Floyd paused again and then he said, “We should turn on the radio. Check for a weather forecast.”

He switched the radio on. The Ford was a newer model vehicle. Reacher wasn’t sure about the year, but it had all of the bells and whistles including buttons to control the stereo from the steering wheel.

Floyd pressed some buttons and tuned the stereo to a nearby channel that Reacher wasn’t familiar with. The broadcast came on with one of those buzzing emergency sounds and then a voice said, “This is an emergency notification by the broadcasting emergency system of Wyoming.

“As of 2:30 p.m., a blizzard warning is in effect for all of northern Wyoming. The storm seems to be headed north into Montana. But it could change direction and come into the Yellowstone National Park area. Extreme caution is advised.”

Floyd said, “See, that blizzard might sweep through here and then you’ll end up landlocked. Be careful out here on your own.”

Reacher stayed quiet.

They drove on through the hills and plains and then followed the road as it wound up through the mountains. As they climbed to a higher altitude Reacher could feel the temperature outside dropping dramatically. At one point Floyd had to blast the heat at the highest setting just to keep the inside of the cabin comfortable.

The road went up over a steep hill and as they passed over the top, Reacher saw straight down into a deep valley outside the passenger side window. It was a fall that certainly would kill him if he opened the door and decided to jump out, which was not a temptation that he had.

At the top of the hill, Grand Loop Road went on to the east, but Floyd slowed the vehicle and pulled over to turn onto a road that was rock and gravel. The Explorer took to the track like an SUV was supposed to.

They followed the track which snaked up through more mountains and came into a light snowfall. Which delighted Reacher because he was from the South where it never snowed. He remember it snowing way back in 2004 on New Year’s Day, but even that was gone practically before it hit the ground. He remembered his mother letting him make snowballs, which were more like snow cones, but he loved it. They had played snowball fighting in the backyard and she had let him practice his aim.

She had said, “Throw it like a live grenade. Don’t count. Don’t think about it. Let it be second nature. Throw it.”

Which made Reacher wonder when he would ever have need to throw a live grenade.

They drove farther into the mountains and the air whitened like the wind carried moisture. The road ahead curved and even though things were graying together in a way that was the opposite of the beautiful landscape farther down the mountains, Reacher could see well enough. His eyes were well equipped for any climate or atmosphere, a feature that meshed with a string of powerful genetics from a family tree where one side was wiped out and the other side he had known of only one other Reacher—his father.

On the ride up with Floyd, he had wondered why they would build a reservation high up in the mountains when there was so much land below. Surely, the plains and wilderness and springs below the mountain range provided a much more plentiful place to support an entire tribe of people. But then again Reacher had no idea how Indian reservations had been created. Maybe they were born from a shady treaty with the government. Probably they were formed after months and months of deliberations. He had no idea how much say the Native American tribes had in the negotiation process.

The track was a rocky two-lane drive. At first there were close leafless trees with snow drizzled across the branches. Then they drove on for about a mile passing open plains and then they came to a treacherous gorge with a cement bridge that was in decent shape, better than the road.

They crossed over the bridge and drove on another half a mile and came to the entrance to the Red Rain Reservation. Reacher sat up higher in his seat and gazed over the Native American reservation. It was spectacular in an Old West sort of way like it was built for the set of a movie.

Light smoke trickled up out of the smokestack of a large two-story building that looked like some sort of a community center or a welcome center that was built close to the reservation entrance.

Before they entered, they came to a set of impressive gates, built high out of thick wood. They weren’t painted and still had that wooden glimmer to them as if they had been sanded and shined. The sign was written in bold black letters across a flat board like it had been written in the Old West except that the font was machine generated.

The sign was three tiered. The bottom two pieces read: Red Rain and Indian Reservation. The top tier had been broken off and hung vertically from one splintered corner.

Reacher craned his neck and followed the sign as they passed underneath it. He turned back to the front when it was behind them and looked into the side mirror back at it. The top tier had read: Welcome. Someone had turned that part of the sign down and the locals had never fixed it.

The Explorer’s suspension rocked up and down slightly over the snowy track.

Floyd drove past the community center. The smoke from the chimney rose past them and Reacher saw it in the side mirror as they drove farther up. After about another half a mile, they came to what appeared to be the bulk of the reservation’s civilization. Reacher hadn’t known what exactly to expect. The traditional economy of reservations wasn’t that lucrative, but he had never set foot on an Indian reservation before, so it was all new to him and he didn’t want to have any prejudgments.

Set off to the west and north were dozens of old beat-up mobile homes huddled together like a shantytown. There was no logic or reason to the borders between them. Some were parked close enough together to be touching and some were scattered farther apart.

To the east were three separate tracks that broke away from the main one and veered off in three different directions like a trident with three twisted, uneven tips that speared off into strange directions.

Near the southernmost track there was a set of low, roughly made stucco buildings, painted in an ugly mix of white and salmon colors. The roofs were flat with small patches of snow falling off the sides like sands in an hourglass.

The ground around the buildings was covered in snow and Reacher could see icy spears of grass piercing up and leaning over to one side. Some of them cracked and broke off under the weight of the ice.

Everywhere there hung sharp, jagged icicles like knives hanging from a rack in someone’s kitchen. They were on the sides of the group of buildings and off the broken porches of the mobile homes.

Floyd pulled up closer to the stucco buildings and parked in a space between two old ‘80s model trucks.

“This is my stop. This first building here is the local store which has no name really, but everyone calls it the general store. The owner buys a bunch of stuff from us every month. We’ve been delivering to them for over a decade,” Floyd said. Then he killed the engine and clicked his seatbelt and it slid up and back to its starting position.

Reacher got out after him. The truck seemed to rock back up on its suspension like a giant had gotten out of the cab. Reacher frowned and shut the door and looked over the roof and down at Floyd. He placed one of his giant bear hands on the roof and felt the ice cold steel chill his skin.

He said, “Do you need any help bringing in the supplies?”

Floyd looked back up and over the roof at him. He studied Reacher up and down like he was taking in his size for the first time, even though he had seen him walking on the side of the road.

Then he thought for a moment.

The cold gusts of breath exhaled from his big nostrils and his beard stiffened in the breeze.

He said, “Sure, that’d be fantastic. You mind lifting some of those heavy sacks of coffee beans for me and bringing them inside? They’re heavy, but I’m sure you can manage. The Indians here love coffee.”

Reacher stayed quiet, but thought about coffee, which was one of the preprogrammed addictions in his genes.

Floyd said, “If you want to bring those in for me, we’ll call it even for the ride.”

Reacher shrugged and nodded. A few big sacks filled with coffee beans a few yards for miles and miles of a free ride? Sounded like a great deal to him. So he went around to the back of the Explorer and grabbed the handle and opened the door. He stood back as the door rose up automatically. A whiff of the warm air from inside the cabin engulfed his face and then he stopped and stared. Floyd hadn’t been lying when he had said that the sacks were big and that they loved coffee here. There were five huge sacks of coffee beans. They were the size of Reacher’s torso.

He shrugged at the sacks as if he were speaking to them and then he reached down and picked up two of the industrial-sized sacks. Along the sides in a diagonal direction the label of the company, Grinded Coffee Bean Co, was printed on the bags.

Grinded Coffee Bean Co was some sort of bean that he had never heard of. The bags were closed and probably sealed, but even so the aroma of fresh coffee spilled out and filled his nose and rejuvenated him like a contact high. If Reacher was honest with himself, he really wasn’t certain that the aroma of the beans had really seeped out of the bags or not because just knowing that the coffee beans were that close to him may have incited his brain to send out the same signal to him as when he did smell coffee. After all, the bags were probably sealed and therefore airtight because in Reacher’s experience most coffee bean bags were sealed and airtight for freshness.

The first bag lumped up in his hands like a beanbag. He lifted two of the big bags up and out of the back of the Explorer and tossed them over his shoulders. They were heavy. He wondered how the old guy had carried them normally on his own. He must’ve done one bag at a time or maybe there was a dolly inside the store. Reacher thought that it would’ve been a good idea to carry a dolly in the Explorer, if there was room, and if not, then perhaps he could’ve had one attached to the bottom of the carriage.

Floyd said, “Walk on in with them. You can leave them up against the wall. And again I sure do appreciate the help.”

Reacher stayed quiet and followed the instructions and walked across the snow-covered ground and stepped up a couple of wooden steps that creaked under his weight.

The general store on the outside blended in with the other buildings that it was attached to like they were originally all a part of one big structure. The name of the store was Red Rain’s General Goods. It was written on the wall just outside the front entrance in an old faded font.

Reacher prepared to lay one of the bags down by the door for a second so that he could pull the door open and enter, but right before he initiated this plan, the door swung open and a giant Native American stepped out onto the porch. He wore a clean and starched brown apron and black cargo pants with a thick white sweater.

The guy was a Native, no doubt about it because he looked just like a stereotypical Indian from an old Western movie like one of those Sergio Leone films. If it weren’t for his clothes, Reacher would’ve assumed that he was acting in one. The guy had long black hair like a Native American warrior and a headband that pulled it back out of his face. The only things that the guy was missing were feathers and a bow.

Reacher smiled at the guy and waited as he stepped aside and held open the door, then Reacher walked past the guy and into the store. He turned at the inside and put down the bags and then he turned and looked around the store, scanning it. The inside was just as plain as the outside, only slightly more modern. Everything was arranged in neat places which made perfect common sense: newsstand off to one corner, milk in the coolers in the back, knickknacks on shelves near the front of the store set up as impulse buys.

The store was average in size and average looking. No signs hanging around that displayed what aisles had what items. No candy machines. No soda machines or snack machines. No carts at the front. Instead there was a stack of green handheld baskets with no markings on them.

Reacher turned around and walked through the door and back out into the cold air. He stepped past the big guy in the apron and walked back toward the Explorer. He saw Floyd stepping out from the back of the Explorer carrying one bag of the coffee beans and a few other smaller items in his free hand. He wasn’t carrying the bag on his shoulder like Reacher had done. He had more dragged the bag and half carried it instead.

When he saw Reacher coming toward him he picked up the pace and the bag like he didn’t want Reacher to think that he was weak, which was a technique that a lot of guys had done in the past. Reacher ignored it like he had done many times before.

He walked to the back of the Explorer and ducked inside and grabbed the last two bags and then he carried them just as he had the first two. He walked back past the big guy in the apron who didn’t smile, but instead he stared Reacher up and then down. Reacher walked into the store and set the two bags next to the first two that he had brought in and looked over the shelves and saw Floyd walking to the back of the store.

Reacher called out to him and said, “I’m going to head out now. Thanks again for the ride.”

Floyd said, “Thanks so much for the help. I appreciate it. And good luck to you, son. I hope that you find your dad.”

Reacher stayed quiet and walked out of the store. He passed the big guy one last time and did the hat-tipping gesture that he had seen in old cowboy movies even though he had no hat on and then he carried on. He walked back to the station or community center or whatever it was back down the road a bit. He figured that since that had been the nicest building so far, and also the first, then it must be where tourists were greeted when they first walked onto the reservation. Therefore they might have a map of the reservation. Normally, he didn’t use maps, but since he had never heard of Red Rain Reservation before, he figured that it would be helpful to take a glance at a map. Especially when he looked up at the sky and saw no sun even though it was still daytime and this worried Reacher because the weather report had mentioned a blizzard. Judging by the clouds on the horizon and across the sky, there was something harsh coming this way. Reacher figured that knowing the layout of the land was a good idea. He wasn’t above sleeping outside, under the stars, but tonight there would be no stars, just hard snow and white squalls of wind.

He followed the smoke from the chimney that he had seen earlier and it led him back toward the community center. The building was much nicer than the complex of the general store and whatever else the other buildings connected had been and it was far nicer than the shantytown of mobile homes across the road.

Reacher walked back over some hills and across the snowy ground. Back at the community center he stepped onto a blanket of hard snow and then realized that it was concrete underneath. The snow had camouflaged the parking lot.

He walked through the empty lot and over to the community center. When he got closer, he saw that there was a metal sign on the wall that read:

Red Rain Tribal Police

Around Side

Near the front entrance to the community center, Reacher peered around the side of the building and saw that there was another parking lot with one squad car in it, an Old Crown Victoria covered in snow with Red Rain Reservation Police faded across the doors. The tires were buried in snow. Next to the one car, he saw tire tracks in the snow that led out of the lot and over to a small one-lane track and then they led off toward the mountains to the north.

Reacher tried the doors to the community center; they were locked, but there was an office door that was separate. Reacher opened it and walked in. A blast of heat from the heating vents inside the office caressed his face.

A woman sat behind the desk. She wore a purple turtleneck sweater with a design on it that looked like a drawing of a large moon with green grass growing out of it. It was one of the ugliest things that Reacher had ever seen someone wear, but he made no acknowledgement of it so as not to offend her because for all he knew it represented something special to her.

The woman also had a cheery smile on her face when she saw him as if she hadn’t seen another person all day. The office was quiet except for an instrumental melody that played on a radio set to a low volume. The radio was an old gray thing with one big speaker and a handle on the top. The antenna was extended outward at the one o’clock position and the tip was broken off, leaving a vicious-looking point at the end.

She had long black hair and leathery tan skin, yet she retained a beautiful glow about her that anyone could see was the positive vibe that she gave off.

She stayed seated and stared up at Reacher’s hulking bulk standing in the tiny office space over her. Even though she was smiling warmly, Reacher could tell that she hadn’t expected a hulk to come walking into her space. Now that he was standing there he realized that she had only smiled out of habit because a quick burst of fear seemed to sweep through her eyes and across her face. It was quick and she returned to her cheery smile fast, but Reacher had seen it because he had learned long ago to recognize when people were terrified of him. In fact, he had come to expect it as if it was as natural as breathing, which in a way it was, because four things that were very natural to almost every creature on earth were: breathing, breeding, feeding, and self-preservation. And whenever people met Cameron Reacher for the first time, the small, prehistoric parts way in the backs of the brain kicked into gear and signaled to every appendage in their bodies to be cautious. This is a fierce predator that can hurt you, their brains would say. But the civilized part of this woman’s brain overrode her natural warning instinct and told her that this guy wasn’t here to hurt her. He was only here looking for help.

Reacher smiled back at her and said, “I need some help.”

She said, “You came to the right place. Welcome to Red Rain Native American Reservation. What can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for a map of the reservation. I’m a tourist.”

The woman’s smile fell a little bit and then she said, “On the wall behind you. There’s also a small one if you need to take one.”

Reacher raised his hand and said, “Not necessary. I’ll glance over the big one and then be on my way and out of your hair.”

Reacher turned and walked to the map on the wall and looked over it. He traced the roads with his eyes and followed the main one from the entrance through the populated part of the reservation, which was the shantytown, and then he studied the other roads that branched off into multiple directions like tree branches. The routes set into his mind like an internal GPS. He looked over the reservation and saw that mostly it was rugged mountainous terrain to the west and north and that most of the population was settled in the south, where he was.

The reservation depended on tourism and outsiders for almost the entire revenue is what Floyd had told him, but looking over the map, Reacher hadn’t seen much that was geared toward tourism. Sightseeing here would mostly be gazing at nature. There were no historical battles fought on the land or memorials or Native American museums that were clearly marked. Most of the so-called tourists must’ve been people who had already seen Yellowstone Park and wanted to include some Native American history in their adventures, but they were most certainly disappointed in Red Rain Reservation. Reacher figured that like the tourists who wandered onto the reservation seeking some real sights, for him this would also turn into a short expedition.

He turned back to the woman behind the desk. Hoping that she might have a better insight than Floyd, he asked, “Is there anywhere to stay the night in town?”

She smiled at him and said, “Unfortunately the nearest town is Tower Junction to the southeast. They will have a couple of motels there, but we don’t have any here in town. You might be able to rent a room for the night at the general store from Henry Little. He runs the store. He is a quiet and a hard-looking man, but he is nice enough, although not by sight. He will probably rent to you if you wait late enough to ask.”

Reacher stayed quiet.

The woman asked, “Are you driving?”

Reacher said, “No car.”

She said, “If you can, I’d be on the last bus into Tower Junction. If you miss it, head over to the general store and purchase something from Henry, then ask him about a room. Tell him that you missed the bus. He is a very big man like you. You can’t miss him.”

Reacher nodded. She must be talking about the huge Native guy that he had seen at the store already. Henry Little was a funny name for a giant, he thought. Should’ve been Henry the Huge.

“Thank you for your help,” Reacher said. He turned, didn’t wait for a response from her. He just left.

Chapter 5

Walking alone was something that Cameron Reacher had done for more than six months. He was used to it. There was no conflict in his head. No internal struggles. Moving on was easy when you kept yourself free and clear of attachments, which came easily to him since the only person that he’d ever been attached to was gone. His mother had been a sheriff for a small town in Mississippi and a decorated Marine cop before that and she had trained him in every imaginable form of combat, weapons, and investigation that she had known. Like most parents, she wanted Cameron to have it better than she had, but she also expected more of him than most kids and so she made him work hard at everything that he did. She never thought twice about being overly hard on him because he was a Reacher and a Deveraux and he could take it.

Reacher had spent the last two hours walking the reservation. He’d pulled up the map in his head and had followed it along the main road and ventured a couple of times off the beaten path and mostly discovered exactly what he had already predicted. That was that most of the sights to see on the reservation weren’t manmade. He had seen thick forests, incredible mountains in the distance with tremendous peaks, old Western-style houses and structures, and even some wild animals, and all of it was covered in snow. Reacher had been awed by the natural beauty of the land and disappointed in the low care given to most of the buildings. In general it seemed that the community was poor.

Reacher didn’t want to speculate, but he imagined that it was something related to government, taxes, no economic viability, or all of the above. The one thing that he had learned so far was that the reservation had some tourism flowing into it, but the locals didn’t seem too keen on tourists and so they had never built any monuments or tourist attractions.

Looking through the general store in Reacher’s mind, he perfectly recalled the layout and there were some items targeted at tourists. Most of which were the knickknacks that lined the walls near the entrance. Reacher guessed that Henry Little was the only game in town so to speak. Business didn’t appear to be booming at the general store, but then again the weather now wasn’t the perfect climate for tourists. Maybe the tourism in the reservation picked up in the summer months. It was too bad that the Natives didn’t open a ski resort or a casino near one of the mountains that were on their property because the skiing must’ve been incredible and Reacher had heard that many Native American reservations had embraced casinos on their properties. And these casinos had proved to be very, very profitable for the entire community.

The Red Rain residents hadn’t seemed too open to growing their economic status by opening up their land to such endeavors. Perhaps they were too proud or perhaps they viewed such a thing as selling out. Reacher wasn’t sure, mainly because so far no one had spoken to him. Since he had been walking, he hadn’t even seen another soul. Not a car passed on the roads. Not a citizen had come out of his home.

Reacher looked up to the sky and devised that the time was near what his mind had calculated. Reacher had learned from his mother how to tell time down to the minute by the shadows on the ground, which was a useful trick, but he never seemed to need such a trick because Reacher’s brain was wired like a computer. He could tell time without even thinking about it. This was a gift that he hadn’t yet perfected. The one thing that his mind could do without ever faltering was it acted as a stopwatch. He could calculate the exact amount of time that an action took from start to finish. That was why he related his mind more to a stopwatch than to an actual clock.

The time was 4:51 p.m.

Reacher looked to the western horizon and watched the seductive colors of the sky as the sun began the process of setting over the mountains.

Remembering that Floyd had warned him about being stuck on the reservation for the night, he decided to return back to the main part, near the stucco buildings and the community center and the general store. He imagined that the shuttle that left and headed back to Tower Junction was probably going to be doing its final runs for the night. Floyd had said that the last one was at 8 p.m., but judging by the weather on the horizon, he thought that it was best to head back sooner. He had seen all that there was to see in Red Rain. At least that was what he thought.

Chapter 6

Reacher walked back to the central hub of the reservation in 16 minutes flat. He hadn’t explored all of the reservation. It was too big to explore completely in two hours, but he had seen enough and was ready to move on. So far there had been nothing special about Red Rain Reservation except for the majestic scenery, which he could’ve seen just by staying in Yellowstone National Park. The only other thing that he had seen so far was that the inhabitants of the reservation were less than friendly; frankly they were less than interesting to him.

All that was about to change in 36 seconds. Reacher turned around the back corner of one of the buildings attached to the general store and walked along the wall until he turned another corner. That was when he witnessed a remarkable scene.

Three people. Two men and one police officer. Two men wearing street clothes—brown jackets, dark cargo pants, combat boots. One had a white shirt under his jacket with buttons on the top and the other wore a black button-down shirt with a crooked collar. No tie. They both had buzz cuts like jarheads, like himself at the moment. He figured that the odds were good that these guys were ex-military. The way that they stood and crowded up on the officer was military trained into them. No doubt in Reacher’s mind about that.

The guy in the black shirt was doing all the talking. The guy in the white was shoving a female police officer with one big, gloved hand. Reacher saw the whole thing. The two guys stood around the officer who was literally backed in a corner near the back of the general store.

The officer was a woman—young, Native American features, and completely beautiful. She had thick, long black hair that was in an updo that Reacher believed was called a fishtail.

She didn’t speak, but was obviously in distress. Reacher wondered why she wasn’t pulling out her service weapon. He could see the handle of a pristine Glock 22 Gen4. The modular back strap allowed the user to adjust the grip so that the gun could fit smaller and bigger hands alike. The rough design and the hard black color glimmered in the dying sunlight.

Reacher had helped a woman in distress once, more than once really, but the last time had been back in Black Rock, Mississippi. A cop had been harassing a local woman. Reacher had intervened and disrupted the harassment like a gentleman should, which was something that his mother had instilled in him. She had taught him earlier on that there were gentlemen and there were ladies and then there were other people. These two guys were obviously other people.

Reacher clenched his fists tight and then rolled his sleeves up to his biceps.

He looked the two guys up and down and then he noticed that the guy with the black shirt with the crooked collar had a bulge behind his brown jacket. It was something shaped like a gun tucked into his waistband, no doubt about it. Reacher assumed that the other guy must’ve also had a gun on him. Reacher revaluated the approach in his mind. In seconds his brain worked like a tactical computer, evaluating different scenarios and outcomes in different variations trying to figure out the very best approach to take. The way that his brain analyzed the situation was like one of those machines from the Terminator movies—delivering real-time battlefield awareness and feedback so that his mind could quickly assess and plan the right course in order to neutralize the bad guys.

His brain also took into account the conditions around the guys. The snow. The icicles hanging like stalactites from the corner of the building above them. The dwindling amount of light from the setting sun to the west.

In the end, Reacher decided it best to use the element of surprise. He had no reason to give up his second biggest advantage to these guys since they were both armed. He thought this was the second advantage since his first advantage was his fighting ability. Reacher had an uncanny fighting ability not due to his size but because he was a natural and experienced brawler. His mother had raised him to try to solve his problems with words, but she had also taught him that sometimes the last resort was the best resort. He had no intention of facing two guys armed with guns that he could only assume they knew how to use.

So Reacher looked over his shoulder and was pleased to see that the sun was setting directly behind him. The setting light was decreasing, but it was sharp and crisp and shot out across the sky like a laser beam. He crept down low so that the laser beam of sunlight swept over his body and blinded anyone who looked in his direction. Not even the officer could’ve seen him until he was already on them.

Carefully, Reacher crept past the wall of the closest building and saw his shadow directly out in front of him on the ground. He adjusted his trajectory so that the shadow shrank in size and continued to creep up on them.

His new shoes were comfortable and silent—two advantages that he appreciated at that moment because they enabled a guy of his size to sneak all the way up behind two ex-military trained men. And Reacher was no kind of graceful or naturally stealthy guy. Something that he was discovering about himself over recent years was that even though he was not what someone would call “graceful,” he still managed to be silent whenever he needed to be. Like some primal switch that was implanted in him long ago, he could automatically be light on his toes.

From the moment that he had seen the two guys until he was down low only three feet behind them had taken 12 seconds—a record in his mind. He had managed to pull off the perfect amount of stealth, silence, and speed necessary to get the job done. It wasn’t his mistake that got him caught at the last minute. Not entirely.

As Reacher neared the backs of the two guys, he rose up out of his crouch and he saw an expression of what he could only recognize as sheer horror sweep across the police officer’s majestic face. In a microsecond, her face, a face that only moments ago Reacher had thought was the most statuesque face that he had ever seen, turned into the face of someone who had looked into the depths of evil and was about to scream.

It was her expression that gave away his presence to the two guys.

He stood up behind the two guys and rose up so that his hulking bulk towered over them. The Native American cop couldn’t see his face or his skin color or his youth. The only two things that she had seen in that second was his massive size. To her it was only a fraction of a second ago that she had been blinded by the sunlight and distracted by the two guys poking and pushing and picking at her. Now she was faced with some massive being that blocked out the sun.

From Reacher’s perspective, he could see the backs of the two guys and the front of the police officer perfectly until the moment that he stood up. One thing that he hadn’t calculated or factored into the situation was his shadow. And suddenly he felt stupid for letting something so obvious slip through his tactical planning.

Reacher’s mind hadn’t identified which of the two guys was the leader or the faster reactor or the more deadly of the two, but in that moment he knew that it was the guy in the crooked collar black shirt because he spun around and went for his gun. Tucking your gun in the rear of your waistband has advantages and drawbacks. One advantage is that it is more comfortable and natural than tucking it into the front. It is also easier to conceal from people who are in your front. It is a lot less deadly to a man’s more vital areas in case the safety backfires and the gun accidentally fires.

However, one drawback is that it is slower to draw. Especially when there is a guy directly behind you.

In two moves, Reacher reached out with his left hand, a hand that was more like a bear paw than it was a human hand, and slammed his paw down on the guy’s right elbow, which was bent back because the guy’s entire hand was behind him and pulling his gun out.

Reacher slammed down on the back of the guy’s elbow and prevented him from executing his draw, which wasn’t hard because the angle that the guy’s arm was bent was an awkward one for the human arm. It was like trying to scratch the middle of your back with one hand bent behind you. Next Reacher reared back and lunged forward in a powerful head-butt that started in the heels of his feet and launched up like a rocket into space. The kinetic force fired up through his bones and muscle tissue. He used his head like a cannonball.

His head whipped forward and crashed right into the bridge of the guy’s nose. The blow wasn’t Reacher’s most powerful attempt, not like the one that he had delivered six months ago and not because he had gotten weaker, but because he didn’t want to kill this guy. He only wanted him out of commission as fast as possible and a perfectly delivered head-butt would do the job. Which it had, because the guy collapsed forward to his knees and grabbed his nose with his free hand. His nose had broken in at least two places. The guy had also dropped his gun and it plopped down into the snow making a light thud sound.

Reacher let go of the guy’s left arm and turned his focus to the other guy. The sunlight still blinded the guy. Reacher could tell because he had stepped aside and saw the guy’s face light up like a spotlight had been shined directly on it. The guy had been quick to react. Faster than Reacher had thought because the guy in the white shirt had already drawn his gun, but he had it pointed downward in a military or police-trained safety move so that he didn’t accidently shoot his friend.

The guy in the white shirt had naturally leaned on the side of caution as he had been trained to do somewhere at some time, but Reacher didn’t have that same programmed burden. His nature was to act, not to threaten. To most people a drawn gun was enough of a threat to stop them cold even if it was pointed down, but not to Reacher. To him a drawn gun was a problem quickly resolved with quick action.

The guy in the white shirt squinted his eyes, trying to identify the enormous creature that was attacking them. He never got the chance to confirm any kind of identification because Reacher stepped left, lunged forward, and cracked the guy right in the middle of his chest, the solar plexus. It was a perfect hard blow. It was so fast that even without the sunlight blinding her, the police officer wouldn’t have even seen it. She would’ve only witnessed a quick jerk of Reacher’s right shoulder. A jerk forward. A jerk backward like a shot fired from a captive bolt gun, a cattle gun.

The captive bolt gun is the gun used by ranchers and in slaughterhouses to instantly ignite unconsciousness in cattle before they are slaughtered. This is called stunning. The gun is loaded with a single retractable bolt with a sharp piercing tip. The bolt fires and propelled by pressurized air or a blank cartridge, the bolt penetrates the skull of the animal, enters the cranium, and calamitously damages the cerebrum. Due to the destruction of vital centers of the brain and an increase in intracranial pressure, the animal loses consciousness—stunned.

The guy dropped his gun which fell and sank down into the snow. Simultaneously, the guy flew back off his feet like he had been hit in the chest by a shotgun blast. He sank deep into the snow too. His head fell back and didn’t come back up. He was unconscious.

Reacher stepped forward and checked both guys. He glanced at the guy in the crooked collar. He was still wriggling around on the ground, cupping his nose. Not an immediate danger. Then Reacher walked over to the other guy. He knelt down and lifted the guy’s head up and out of the snow. It was clear that the guy was still alive because little puffs of air came out of his nose like vapors. He was breathing fine.

Reacher gently laid the guy’s head back down in the snow and stood back up. He hadn’t really thought about how the cop would react to his interfering. He hadn’t expected a grateful police officer or even a thank you for the assist, but what he got was completely unexpected. Standing there in a trained stance, but with a look of fear and confusion on her face, was the cop that he had just helped and in her hands was her Glock 22 Gen4. She had it pointed straight up at Reacher’s head. She had to point up at the two o’clock position because of the height difference.

She said, “Don’t move or I’ll shoot you.”

Chapter 7

Cops are taught to use what’s called the cop voice. Loud, fearful tone. Sharp, precise command and most of all, an authoritative voice. “GET ON THE GROUND!” or “FREEZE! FREEZE!” or “PUT YOUR HANDS UP!”

Any variation of commands like that will work. The one thing that they are trained not to do is to show fear or hesitation. They are trained to show confidence. They are trained to show power, force, and strength and nothing else. Signs of fear can get you shot. Signs of fear can get you killed.

The police officer he had just assisted in defending herself was pointing a gun at him and saying the right words, but she trembled. Reacher could see fear in her eyes and hear it in her voice as if it made its own audible signals.

“GET YOUR HANDS UP!” she shouted. “GET THEM UP! GET THEM UP!”

This upset Reacher for two reasons. First he had just helped her out of a sticky situation. Clearly she was in need of assistance because she was letting those two guys push her around and assaulting an officer is a crime everywhere that Reacher was aware of. Second he found himself uncontrollably attracted to her. He had noticed how attractive she was from the first moment that he had seen her, but it wasn’t until now that he could see just how incredible she was.

She had beautiful black hair, big brown eyes, and crisp eyebrows on a smooth forehead. She had a small mouth and thin long lips and high, defined cheek bones. Her nose was thin and bridged her eyes seamlessly with her lips. Her complexion was a natural medium saddle color. The only thing that was unattractive about her was that she pointed a gun at him. Maybe he hadn’t expected her to be grateful for the help, but certainly it insulted him that now she was trying to detain him after all of that. After all, it was the other two guys who had assaulted her and now she knew that they were carrying concealed weapons. Which might’ve been a crime on this reservation. Reacher wasn’t sure.

“Relax. I’m not a threat,” Reacher said in a firm voice. He tried to hide his annoyance at her reaction.

Not a very good start, he thought.

She shouted, “GET YOUR HANDS UP!”

Reacher slowly raised his hands. Over to his right he noticed that the sunlight was almost gone. If he wanted, he could’ve jumped right and scrambled to her and gotten hold of the Glock. He could’ve pushed it down and to the left and rendered it useless unless she wanted to shoot at the ground, but she was a good guy. So he discarded this plan.

No need to assault a police officer, even though she apparently wouldn’t have done anything about it. Apparently, he thought.

He glanced down at her nameplate. It read: Red Cloud. A look of intrigue splashed across his face and he thought about Chief Red Cloud. This officer must’ve been related to him and proudly wore his name as her own last name.

He took another glance a little lower and saw her badge clipped to the front of her belt near the lower right hand side of her abdomen. The badge had an Old West design to it. It was natural, unadorned, and simple with a whitish rust color swirling through it and the name of her tribe plastered across the top in big letters: Lakota.

In the middle of the badge, just under the name of her tribe, was a seal of an Indian head profile with the feathers and all, then at the bottom was the word: Police.

At the very top of the badge was a blackened arrow that faced upward.

Officer Red Cloud cocked her head to the left and stared coldly into Reacher’s young face. Then she said, “Slowly turn around and keep your hands up until I tell you otherwise.”

Reacher didn’t argue. He shrugged and turned slowly and kept his arms up in the air.

Then she said, “Lower your arms slowly and place them behind your back.”

Not again, Reacher thought ironically. He had been arrested more than six months ago for beating up three rednecks who were picking on a weaker guy and now he was about to be handcuffed for the same crime. He was starting to think that maybe he wasn’t supposed to help total strangers anymore, because so far the endeavor had brought him nothing but bad luck and trouble.

“Are you arresting me?”

“Sir, please comply. Place your arms down behind your back,” Officer Red Cloud said.

Reacher closed his eyes tight and shrugged and placed his arms down behind his back with his wrists clamped together. No tightening in his muscles. No intention of resisting.

He heard Officer Red Cloud step closer to him in the snow. Her boots crunched down and she moved in closer behind him. She never lowered her gun until she was close enough to grab him. She had seen big guys before and she knew that part of her job was occasionally having to face a guy much larger than herself. She had been trained to do so way back at the Law Enforcement Academy of Wyoming. The bulk of the school was stationed clear at the opposite corner of the state in Douglas, but she had attended most of her classes on a university campus in Cody. It was a joint program like a satellite of the academy, but the courses that taught her how to engage a man of Reacher’s stature were courses that she had to take one semester when she moved down to Douglas.

And Officer Red Cloud had seen her fair share of big guys. There was Henry Little who ran the general store. He was big, but there was a huge difference between Henry and this guy. This guy had just snuck up behind two guys with special ops backgrounds and taken them down faster than any takedown that she had ever seen before. This guy was serious business.

She waited until she was in reaching distance of Reacher and then she lowered her gun and held it with only her right hand. Then she reached behind her and pulled out her handcuffs. Reacher heard the clatter of the cuffs together and the chain.

Officer Red Cloud slammed the first cuff on his left wrist and then the second on his right. She jerked on the chain and made sure that they were tight enough to hold him. This was an action that she had taken hundreds of times before on both practice and real suspects, but this time was the first time that she had actually been afraid that the steel cuffs weren’t going to be enough to restrain the guy.

Reacher looked back over his shoulder at her and asked, “Is this how you treat every guy who tries to help you?”

“Help me? How the hell are you helping me?”

Reacher stayed quiet out of fear of showing his annoyance with her.

She didn’t wait for a response. Instead she jerked the cuffs and holstered her weapon, but she left the safety buckle undone in case she had to draw it again.

She tugged on Reacher’s cuffs like reigns to a saddle and she moved him in a southern direction away from the buildings and the two guys.

She stopped ten feet past the guys and said, “Stay here. Don’t move.”

Reacher stayed quiet, but complied. He felt her let go of the cuffs. He thought, I could run. I could make it off into those trees. Maybe she’d get one good shot off, but she wouldn’t hit him unless she was a crack shot. No way. The light was near death and Reacher was fast, not as fast as he used to be, but he still had speed and natural athleticism on his side. He knew that he could’ve been low down and behind the bunch of trees only 30 yards away from him, but he didn’t run. He had done nothing wrong. She was the one who was in the wrong.

Then he heard Officer Red Cloud speak to the guy with the crooked collar and the broken nose. She said, “That nose is bad. You should tape it up and head back to Tower Junction. Go to the emergency room there.”

Then she paused a beat and said, “I’d call you an ambulance, but we don’t have one here. As you know. Your friend doesn’t look so good. I’d take him to a doctor when you get to Tower Junction. Like I told you. We don’t know a Jacobs here. Tell your bosses that and don’t come back. We have rights here, gentlemen.”

The guy with the broken nose muttered something back to her. Reacher couldn’t make it out. And if he had broken the law by helping her out, then he was about to break it again by not obeying her because he turned and faced them. He didn’t want to have his back to two guys that he had just laid out. He knew that they had been armed. Why she wasn’t doing anything about that, he had no idea.

As it turned out there was no need for Reacher to worry because one guy was still unconscious and the other guy was cupping his nose. He wasn’t going to be able to do anything because it took both of his hands just to keep his nose from bleeding out. Can a man die from a nosebleed? Reacher wasn’t sure, but he knew that if anyone would, then it’d be this guy. The snow around him was painted crimson red from his blood loss so far.

First time for everything, Reacher thought.

The cop turned to Reacher and walked back to him. The fear had left her face and was replaced with that police confidence that Reacher expected from cops.

She approached him and said, “Face the other way and walk.”

Reacher complied.

They stayed quiet for the next minute as they walked south and then she pulled him to turn east and toward a second road that connected to the other side of the row of buildings. It was a road that Reacher hadn’t walked on, but he recalled it from the map that he had memorized. The road snaked north and then zigged west and eventually it connected to another branch of the tree of roads that ran into the mountains.

They walked some more and then they looped around a corner and Reacher saw their destination. It was a parked police cruiser in an empty lot to the southeast. The only way that Reacher could follow the entrance into the lot was by following the tire tracks from the cruiser that led back out.

The cop must’ve just parked there since the time that Reacher had arrived on the reservation because it hadn’t snowed since he’d been there and her car didn’t have a flake of snow anywhere on it.

They reached the car and Officer Red Cloud said, “Stop.”

Then she said, “Lean down face first on the car.”

She used her small hand and pushed Reacher gently forward against the passenger door of the car and she moved left and opened the door. Then she stepped back and said, “Get in.”

Reacher ducked down and got into the rear of the car. She was supposed to push his head down so that he wouldn’t hit it getting into the car, a pretty standard universal cop move, like Cop 101, but she hadn’t done this and Reacher knew why. It was because she couldn’t even reach his head.

Officer Red Cloud was about 5’10”, which was tall for a woman. At least most of the women that Reacher had ever met were shorter than she was, but this was still far shorter than Reacher. Eight inches shorter.

Reacher sat back on his hands in the backseat and got as comfortable as he could. Then he stared forward in a kind of trance. He wasn’t really angry or annoyed anymore, but the experience had moved far beyond being funny at this point. Now it was real. He was going to the station and he was probably going to spend the night behind bars.

Reacher had a natural sense to find the good in any situation. And even though he looked menacing on the outside, on the inside he was smiling because he realized that at least now he’d have a room for the night and he didn’t have to pay for it. A free room was always a welcoming factor for him. Then he smiled on the outside because he found something that was funny about the whole thing. This was the second night in a row that he had had a free room for the night and both had been because of beautiful women: Farrah from Utah and now Officer Red Cloud from Red Rain Reservation.

Ironic, he thought and then he thought about that old Tom Hanks movie: Forrest Gump. “Life is like a box of chocolates.” Except in Reacher’s case, life on the road was like a box of chocolates because you never knew what you were going to get.

Officer Red Cloud opened the driver’s door and plopped down into the seat. She put her seatbelt on, which reminded Reacher of his mom, who had been a cop.

She put the keys into the ignition, fired up the engine, and revved it up and let it get warm. Cold air blasted through the vents and she let the car run for a while so that the heater would have a chance to warm up the air.

Reacher leaned forward and asked, “Are you going to tell me why I’m being detained?”

She looked in the rearview mirror. Reacher could see her forehead. In order to see his eyes she had to reach up and adjust the mirror because all she could see was the bottom of his chin.

She said, “Interfering with police work. Obstruction of justice. Assault on an officer of the law. Take your pick, sir!”

“Assault on an officer?!”

She said, “Yes.”

“What officer? You were the one getting assaulted. I helped you.”

She turned back in her seat and faced him. Anger seeped into her face and her smooth forehead suddenly crinkled violently. She said, “Sir, I’m not the officer that you assaulted. Those guys are.”

Suddenly and violently and involuntarily, Reacher swallowed hard.

The two guys poking and prodding and accosting her like that in public hadn’t been criminals; they were cops too. That’s why she hadn’t drawn her service weapon.

She must’ve seen the realization in his eyes because she started nodding and then she said, “Yeah. That’s right. You assaulted two federal agents and now you’re going to jail.”

Then she said nothing else and turned around in her seat. She popped the gear into reverse and hit the gas and accelerated backward. Then she shuffled the lever to drive and hit the accelerator and the tires peeled out in the snow, spraying a trail of white haze behind the car.

Seconds later they were driving over the rugged snow-covered roads back to the police station and for the first time in months Reacher was worried.

Chapter 8

For the second time in his life; Cameron Reacher was going to spend the night in jail. Somehow he felt that this was Jack Reacher’s fault. If he had never learned that Jack was his father then there was a good chance that he’d still have been a regular upstanding, taxpaying citizen back in nowhere Mississippi. Then again, he thought that if it wasn’t for learning about Jack Reacher then he would still be a regular upstanding, taxpaying citizen in nowhere Mississippi. On that point he felt grateful. After all there is a whole great big world out there and he would’ve never experienced any of it if it wasn’t for the events of his life.

Officer Red Cloud pulled into the parking lot of the police station, which was at the back of the community center, where Reacher had memorized the map of the reservation earlier.

The daylight had died away completely, but the northern territory of Wyoming wasn’t really pitch black at night, not like other places because the sky was lit up from billions of bright stars and solar satellites. This night had that kind of skyline, only to the south and to the east, because to the north and to the west were the looming clouds carrying what the old guy Floyd had said was probably a blizzard. That was confirmed by the guy on the weather forecast that Reacher had heard back in Floyd’s Explorer.

Reacher sat back on his hands in the police cruiser and waited for Officer Red Cloud to park the car, slide the gear into park, kill the engine, and step out. She shut her door and walked around to Reacher’s door and popped it open. Then immediately like some sort of primitive reaction of self-preservation, she jumped back on her heels and rested one hand on the hilt of her Glock.

She said, “Get out.”

Reacher leaned forward and scooted over and stepped out of the car with his head bent down on the way up. He barely cleared the doorframe trying to get out.

Reacher stretched as best as he could. From his toes to his upper torso, he felt ten times better being out of the cramped space in the backseat.

He purposefully stretched his fingers out behind him and Officer Red Cloud heard the knuckles crack in a menacing sound. It was Reacher’s way of showing his agitation at being arrested for being a Good Samaritan.

He said, “Where to?”

She said, “Forward.”

And she pointed straight ahead to a faded orange door with a security camera above it. The door looked more like the backdoor to a warehouse or a shed or a hardware store than it did a police station. The station itself had no sign on the door, on the building, or anywhere posted on the parking lot out front. Reacher guessed that it didn’t need a clear sign marking it because everyone who mattered probably already knew its location and everyone who didn’t know where it was located probably didn’t matter. Not to the police or the citizens of Red Rain Reservation because so far Reacher didn’t figure that even the police respected outsiders.

Reacher walked toward the door until Officer Red Cloud tugged on his handcuffs again and halted him like he was a prize stallion on reigns and he stopped and growled in a low, deep and primitive caveman grunt that he hadn’t meant to make, but it came out anyway. She must’ve been startled by it because she paused a beat, showing her hesitation and again showing that she was scared of him. Then Officer Red Cloud made a fatal mistake; she released her grip on his cuffs and she walked past him, past his reach. Even though he was restrained and couldn’t have reached out with his hands and snatched her right up, he could’ve easily lunged forward and head-butted her. He could’ve killed her with it. Reacher knew that.

The head-butt had become a secret weapon in his arsenal. He wasn’t really sure how he knew how to perform it, but there it was like some kind of instinct as if it had been handed down to him from his genetic line from his father and from his father’s father and so on. In the story of Perseus and Zeus, Zeus handed his son, Perseus, the Chrysaor or the sword of gold, which Perseus used to defeat the Gorgons in his battles. Reacher’s head-butt was like that.

Officer Red Cloud walked past Reacher over to the orange door and pulled out her keys. She slid the right key into a deadbolt and unlocked the door. Reacher thought that was a very outdated security measure, but was not surprised.

She turned back to him and said, “Inside. Follow the line on the floor.”

Reacher entered the station and saw no reception area. Probably because they had entered from the back, which made sense. Most stations had an entrance for arrests and bookings separate from the one for the public. That was not his experience in Mississippi, but Wyoming was a different state and a different set of customs.

Officer Red Cloud followed behind Reacher as he walked and followed the line on the ground, which led him down the corridor and under bright florescent lights with cracked, old covers. They turned a corner and Reacher saw on one side of a large room that there were three sets of holding cells facing the bullpen, which was made up of only four cubicles with four chairs and four desks and four lamps and four computers.

The station itself was clean and tidy and plain and efficient. Nothing was out of place or impractical. Everything had a purpose and everything had a place.

The floor was a stone white tile with kinked, copious black borders. The ceiling was twelve feet or so with the same cracked florescent lights as the hallway. The cells were very clean, the cleanest that Reacher had ever seen in a basic jail. There were clean toilets, clean beds, clean floors, clean walls, and polished black bars with fallow locks that looked straight off the shelf from some chain store.

Officer Red Cloud said, “Walk over to the first cell and step inside.”

Reacher finally broke through his tension and asked, “Are you really going to go through with this? I was trying to help you.”

“You attacked two federal agents and you broke one of their noses! Not to mention that the guy you knocked out might have a concussion or worse! What did you expect would happen?”

“Those guys were shoving and poking at you! I’m sorry that they were federal agents or whatever. It looked from where I was standing that you needed assistance. It looked like you let two guys get the drop on you. How was I supposed to know that they were cops?

“Besides, cops or not, those guys were harassing you and harassing or assaulting a police officer is a crime no matter if it is done by a civilian or by another cop. I know what I’m talking about. My parents were cops. I grew up around cops. Police work is in my blood.”

Officer Red Cloud said, “If you know about cops then you’ll recognize the inside of a jail cell. Now get in!”

Reacher shrugged and stepped inside the open cell.

Officer Red Cloud left the cuffs on him and slammed the door to the cell shut. It was one of those old time cells that opened up and swung outward. Not an automatic one that slid into the wall and was programmed to a timer or controlled by a security booth or from some panel behind the desks.

The locks engaged on impact and made a clicking sound that Reacher hadn’t heard from the cells that he had seen in the past because they had all been the automatic kind, but he was familiar with the sound because he had heard it as a sound effect in movies and cop shows and even video games that he’d played in his teenage years.

Officer Red Cloud said, “Now step backward and slide your hands through the cell so that I can unlock you.”

Reacher complied with her instructions. However, she didn’t unlock him, not yet. Instead she asked, “Do you have any weapons in your pockets?”

“No.”

Reacher thought that it had been strange that she’d skipped on patting him down. Now he knew why. It was because she hadn’t wanted to touch him or get too close to him.

She said, “Stand there and wait. I’m going to pat you down.”

Reacher waited with his back leaning up against the cold bars that chilled him even through his layers of clothes.

Officer Red Cloud kept her fingers loose and gently and thoroughly and swiftly she patted him down in his pockets, his waistband, and his legs, especially near his shoes. Then she stood back up and said, “You’re good. Now I’m going to unlock you.”

She took out her keys again and unlocked him and then she slid the cuffs off his wrists.

Reacher cracked his fingers and loosened them up and then rubbed his wrists like people always seemed to do, but in his case he actually needed to because his wrists were the size of two-by-fours and handcuffs are notoriously uncomfortable on the wrists. Then he turned around slowly. It was the first time that she had really gotten a look at his face.

Officer Red Cloud didn’t smile or let it on, but there was a slight movement in her face almost like a wave of something. A look. A look that Reacher had seen before. Reacher was no Romeo or lady’s man. In fact he was mostly socially awkward. He had always been on the fringe, like a tree in the desert. He simply hadn’t fit in to what was normal and he preferred it that way. One of the reasons why he felt so compelled to follow in his father’s footsteps was to go out there and be himself. That was where he fit in—out there.

And even though Reacher had never been a lady’s man, he had had some good luck with women in the past, recent past. He was growing into a confidence in his own skin. It was a lot easier when he let go of all the conditioning that small town public schools had placed on him. In the real world when you are a stranger everywhere you go you are always the new kid and the new kid doesn’t quite fit in anywhere. Not bad. Not good. Just set apart from everyone else. And he liked being apart from everyone else. This social position came with advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages was that the stranger who just came into town was something mysterious and women liked mystery. And Cameron Reacher wasn’t a bad-looking young guy. He had good breeding and was an all-around good guy. His father was a drifter who wandered out there somewhere, helping the helpless, and his mother had been a beautiful woman dedicated to her community. She had raised him to be a gentleman and to do the right thing and in the end she wanted him to find his father. The more that he searched for Jack Reacher, the more he found himself eager to find him because he was getting more and more satisfied with finding his place in the world. And his place was no place. Like the stranger, he fit in nowhere because his station in life wasn’t to settle down. It was to move and to apply his talents helping people who couldn’t help themselves. He felt good about his good deeds so far, but Reacher was far from a saint. He was pretty sure that sainthood required pure thoughts and at that moment Officer Red Cloud was filling his head with impure thoughts and he had noticed the glimmer that went across her face just then.

She was attracted to him whether she’d admit it or not. The human is an animal deep down. And in the animal world men and women can instantly be attracted to each other without explanation, without words, and without admittance. That was the attraction that he felt for her and he assumed that was what she felt for him because minus that primitive attraction, she wasn’t on his good side; after all, she had arrested him for helping her out.

Reacher said, “Officer Red Cloud, aren’t you going to book me? Fingerprints? Charge me? Miranda? You know, all of that cop stuff.”

Red Cloud leered at him, which made Reacher think that the anger was mutual. He must’ve interrupted something more complicated than simply two street clothes agents harassing her. Still it smelled fishy to him, but he no longer cared about the details.

She said, “All in good time. By reservation law, I can detain anyone for any reason for up to 48 hours. I’ll get back to you on the charges. For now you just sit tight.”

Reacher asked, “Aren’t you going to ask for my ID? My name?”

She stopped. Upset and turned to him.

“Give me your ID.”

Reacher went into his pocket and pulled out a Mississippi driver’s license and handed it to her through the bars. She stared at it and stuffed it into her right front pocket. Maybe she’d insert him into the system. Maybe not.

Reacher said, “I got to go to the bathroom.”

Officer Red Cloud shrugged and said, “Don’t care. Tell it to the walls.”

And then she turned and snapped her gun holster button shut and walked off and turned down the corridor. A moment later, Reacher heard the back door open again and her voice came echoing down the hall.

She said, “I’ll be back.”

The door slammed shut behind her and then Reacher heard it lock.

He stared into the station and didn’t know how to react or what to think. He’d never seen such unprofessional police work in his life. She’d left him locked in a holding cell all by himself. No guards. No other prisoners. Life on the reservation was certainly a lot different than he’d thought.

Reacher liked to find the good in every situation and he thought about how he had a room for the night if she kept him locked up overnight, which he’d bet all of his money that she would. So at least he had a warm place to sleep. Better than riding or hiking 30 miles to Tower Junction and spending money on a room.

Never in his life had he ever met a cop like her, but then again never in his life had he ever met a woman like her.

He thought, Officer Red Cloud.

Chapter 9

Back in the darkness over at Tower Junction, 30 miles away, the local hospital was a four-story building with off-white paint and hunter green trim which was dulled by harsh winters of blasting snow.

In the parking lot were parked one emergency vehicle and one police cruiser, the employees’ cars and one Ford King Ranch painted gray with thick black tires. The registration in the glove box said that the truck was owned by a Carlos George Roderigo III, a Mexican name, but the guy who had been driving Mr. Roderigo’s truck hadn’t been Mexican. Not by blood. Not by birth. Not even by distant cousins.

The guy who had commandeered the truck and had therefore parked it in the hospital’s parking lot was a tall man with one fierce blue eye and one grayed-out eye. The guy had a jagged scar that ran down his face and replaced part of his nose with a tiny pyramid-shaped hole.

The man with the scar stood next to the two federal agents in a hospital room. One was bandaged across his face with a nose splint from a severely broken nose and the second one was awake, but stared blankly at his surroundings like one minute he had been standing facing Amita Red Cloud, the cop from the reservation, and the next minute he was waking up in a hospital with no memory of the seconds and minutes in between.

The guy with the jagged scar scowled at the two agents in a look that they had seen before and feared greatly.

The guy with the scar asked, “How many guys attacked the two of you?”

The guy with the broken nose said in a nasal voice, “It was one...one guy.”

The guy with the jagged scar said, “One. One.”

“Yes.”

The man with the jagged scar turned and looked at the other agent and asked, “Did you see him?”

“I don’t remember.”

The man with the jagged scar stayed quiet for a long minute. He looked back over his shoulder at the door to the room. No one entered the room and there was little noise from the outer hallway. No nurses or patients or doctors walking up and down the halls. Then he turned back to the two agents and said, “Get up.”

“Why?” asked the one with the broken nose.

The guy with the jagged scar pulled out a Kimber Custom Model 1911, a standard .45 ACP and let his hand fall to his side with the weapon obvious to both agents.

They jumped up out of their beds and the guy with the broken nose said, “Hold on a second. We’re sorry, sir.”

The guy with the jagged scar asked, “You said that one guy attacked the two of you. One guy?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah.”

“Was this guy armed?”

The two agents were standing in the middle of the room staring at the gun in his hand and then they stared at each other. They didn’t know what to think. They didn’t know what their boss was going to do. Fear and confusion flashed across both of their faces.

The guy with the jagged scar said, “Relax. Now answer the question. Was the guy armed?”

“No,” said the guy with the broken nose.

“I don’t believe it,” said the guy with the jagged scar. “No way did an unarmed man attack the two of you and get the best of you. Two trained agents of the very best agency and military in the world.”

The two agents nodded and stared blankly at each other like each was asking the other what do we do?

The guy with the jagged scar took his gun and tossed it onto the nearest bed and then he turned his body to show the two agents that now he was unarmed.

He moved in closer to the one with the broken nose and he said, “Now I’m unarmed, right?”

“Yes, sir,” the guy responded.

Then in a sudden flurry of powerful and skilled blows the guy with the jagged scar punched the guy with the broken nose. Once. Twice. In the gut. Once. Twice. Three times in the left side of the rib cage. The agent spilled forward and onto his knees and started to scream but then the guy with the jagged scar kneed him straight in the face—a brutal blow. The agent’s nose splint snapped and shards of metal pierced through the tape on his face and blood erupted from his wound like a geyser.

Then the guy with the scar looked back at the other agent and said, “Remember that? Did you get that?”

The agent started to hold up his hands in the universally known defensive position.

He said, “No. I’m sorry. We’re sorry. The guy must’ve been some kind of specially trained military to get the drop on us like that. I swear it was over very fast.”

“The GUY that you’re talking about. The one who got the drop on you. The one with the special military training that you’re pointing out isn’t a guy at all. That cop looked him up after you two left.

“He’s a kid! He is an eighteen-year-old,” the guy with the jagged scar said and he walked closer to the other agent. He clenched his fists like he was ready to pound on him as well.

Then he said, “I don’t know what you consider to be a man. I know that in this country you can vote, buy a pack of cigarettes, hell you can even die for your country at the age of 18. But when you get to be my age and you have fought for your country as long as I have then you change your mind as to what age a man is a man. And to me 18 is not a man. He was taking some young thing to a prom only a year ago, I’m sure.”

The guy with the jagged scar dropped his fists and relaxed. He didn’t pound on the other agent. Instead he turned and bent down and popped the other guy twice more in the face. Once right in the broken nose again and then a second time in the forehead and the guy fell back and was knocked completely unconscious.

The guy rose back up and glanced over his shoulder back at the other agent and said, “Now he’s been knocked out too. Like you. If you mess up again then next time I’ll have to even you out with him. I don’t think that you want a broken nose, not like the one he’s got. Now turn him over so that he doesn’t drown in his own blood. I’ll send the nurse in to reset his nose.”

The guy with the jagged scar stopped at the bed and picked up his Kimber Custom 1911 and holstered it and walked out of the hospital room. The door shut slowly behind him, hissing the whole way of the arc back to a closed position.

Chapter 10

Jack Reacher was his father and Elizabeth Deveraux had been his mother. Both were ex-military cops. His mother had made a life out of being a professional cop back in Mississippi and his father had made a life of being a drifter, but according to his mother’s investigations into Jack’s past, he still held onto the cop habits. Two parents. One on the right side of the law and the other on the wrong side of the law, but both always trying to do the right thing. The difference was that his mother never approved of unlawful means of getting the right results, but his father often used unlawful means in order to see justice done. Although, his mother may have understood vigilantism. Sometimes it might have been the only way.

Now that Cameron Reacher sat in a jail cell in the freezing temperatures of northern Wyoming, he wondered to himself which parent he took after more. No way would his mother approve, but he wondered if his father would’ve.

The stationhouse was completely empty. Reacher heard the wind howl and the office machines hum and the low ambient sounds of hibernating computer systems. Officer Red Cloud had been nice enough to leave the lights on for him, another silver lining that he thought about.

She must like me, he joked to himself.

Reacher had spent the last hour or so lying back on the cot in his cell and staring at the ceiling. He let his mind drift in thought. At one point he analyzed the different routes that he could take once he got out of this cell. He had thought of five different routes, all of which branched off from a long stint on Interstate 212 and headed east.

East was the heading that he had come in to Wyoming on and he didn’t plan on changing his course just because of a police officer and her inability to stand up to some federal agents, although he did think that the best thing to do was to take off the very first chance that he got. Then his mind started to think about how he was going to get out of the situation. If the cops pressed charges he’d have to do something that he’d really rather not do, which was skip town. Skipping town on misdemeanors wasn’t really a big deal or even on some worse charges like petty theft or even assault, but skipping out on charges of assaulting a cop, and two federal agents at that, wasn’t something that would be easy because then Reacher would be a fugitive that the agency in question wouldn’t just let go. Even worse was that the two agents probably wouldn’t let it go and he was sure that they’d take it personally.

In fact, he expected a visit from them as soon as they were out of the hospital. Reacher hoped that they’d accept his apology and perhaps he could convince them to give him a beating instead of charging him with assault on cops. He didn’t really want to get beaten up by a couple of big ex-military guys with a grudge, but it sounded better to have some bad wounds that’d heal in a matter of days over facing serious jail time that he’d have to run from.

This dilemma set Reacher’s thoughts on every scenario that could come out of his getting his ass kicked and every one came back at him with the reality that he’d get his nose broken for sure. That one guy wasn’t going to forget about it.

Then suddenly Reacher heard a noise from down the corridor beyond the small bullpen and he sat up on his cot and faced forward. He’d had an experience once while he was in jail before that made him suspicious of sounds coming from hallways.

He heard a man making regular huffing and grunting sounds that men made, like someone who’d thought that he was alone. Perhaps walking into his own home and tossing off his shoes and laying his jacket over the back of the sofa. The guy who came down the hall was another police officer. If Reacher had to guess, it was the chief since he was so old. The way that he carried himself was with confidence that only a veteran officer walks with.

The guy had sandpaper red skin and thick white hair that was growing out of a buzz cut. In the military they would have casually reminded him that it was time to get a cut because it was touching his ears. The sides and the top were of equal length. Reacher made special note of how thick that it was because usually in a man’s buzz cut, especially a man his age, there was visible scalp, but this guy’s head was all white hair.

He had high cheek bones and deep-set eyes that almost looked hidden in darkness because of how brown they were and how far back they were set on his face.

The guy stopped at the center of the bullpen and looked over at Reacher. He held a cup of coffee or hot tea in one hand. It was in a medium-sized paper to-go cup like from a coffee shop. Maybe he had gotten it from the general store. Maybe it was brewed from the coffee beans that he had ridden in with.

The guy stayed where he was and then he said with a deep, crisp voice, “Who are you?”

Reacher said, “I’m nobody. Just a guy at the wrong place at the wrong time and now I’m sitting in your jail.”

The cop breathed in heavily and walked over to a desk that was set past the bullpen in the corner inside an office space with no door. Reacher couldn’t read the name on the door because of the distance, but he guessed that this guy was definitely the police chief or why else would he have his own office space?

The chief set his coffee down on the desk and then he took off his heavy cropped jacket which had the same symbols on the sleeves as he had seen on the Lakota police badge on Officer Red Cloud’s shield. Then the guy walked out of his office, past the bullpen, and over to Reacher’s cell. He stopped three feet away and looked Reacher up and down.

The guy was tall, about 5’10”, but he had a powerful stare, a cop stare, plus a strong Native American stare as if he was also descended from warriors of the old world.

Then Reacher noticed the name on his nameplate that was set just above a pocket on his left breast and Reacher sighed. He felt that he might be in more trouble than he’d wanted to be in because the nameplate read: Red Cloud.

The guy was Officer Red Cloud’s father.

Chapter 11

Officer Red Cloud, the father, said, “I asked you who you are.”

Reacher said, “Reacher, sir.”

“Reacher? What kind of name is that?”

“A last one,” Reacher said.

“What’s your first name, son?”

“Cameron Reacher is my full name.”

“Cameron. Why the hell are you in my jail?”

“I was arrested.”

The chief rolled his eyes and then he said, “I meant why are you in there? What did you do?”

“I was arrested by a female officer. I wasn’t told what my charges were. Actually I haven’t even been booked or read my rights.”

The chief rolled his eyes again and then gave Reacher a hard stare and looked him up and down again.

“I guess that I’m in here for assaulting a police officer.”

The guy said, “That’s my daughter for you. Did you try to hit on her or something?”

“Not exactly. Although she is a beautiful woman. But she didn’t arrest me for that. She wasn’t the officer that I assaulted.”

Then Reacher paused a beat and said, “Allegedly assaulted.”

A confused look came over Chief Red Cloud’s face. He broke his stare at Reacher and stepped away and walked over to a random desk that appeared to be empty. He sat down on top of it and pulled a cell phone out of his pocket. He stared at it and dialed.

A moment later someone must’ve answered because he looked up and listened.

“Okay. So why is he here in my cell?”

He listened some more and then he said, “Amita, this guy is a kid and a citizen. You can’t just leave him here.”

Another pause and another moment of listening to her and then Chief Red Cloud asked, “What federal agents?”

He paused a beat and then he asked, “Where are they from?”

He listened some more and then he said, “Amita, they don’t have any jurisdiction here. They should’ve cleared any operations with us first. So explain to me why this kid assaulted them and why they aren’t here right now filing a grievance.”

He listened some more this time, much longer as Reacher guessed that she was explaining the situation to him. Apparently it was a long story because the guy listened for a long time and said nothing.

Reacher couldn’t really make out what the details were because it sounded complicated. The only thing that he could put together was that these two federal agents weren’t supposed to be on the reservation in the first place and that was all that he was interested in. The fact that they weren’t supposed to be there meant that they were wither running a secret operation or that they were off the books. Suddenly, Reacher felt better about his situation because if they were off the books then they couldn’t charge him for anything and he’d be out of there within 48 hours. If they were running a secret operation then they still couldn’t hold him without charging him. So either way he was going to be a free man and back on the road, which was where he wanted to be. Which was where Jack Reacher was.

The chief said, “Amita. Amita. Stop. Stop. Listen to me. Calm down. Stop looking for those guys and get your ass back here. I don’t care about who they work for. They can’t operate here without my knowledge. Okay.”

Then he switched the phone off.

Chief Red Cloud looked back up at Reacher and walked over to the cell again.

Reacher said, “Trouble?”

“It appears that you are a lucky young man. My daughter tells me that you beat up two guys who were pushing and shoving her?”

Reacher nodded.

“For that I thank you for being a gentleman and trying to help her out, but you can’t go around beating up guys. Not on my land. Do you understand me?”

Reacher nodded.

“It turns out that these two guys are federal agents and that’s why she arrested you. Now perhaps she overreacted, but she is a good cop. A very good cop. She loves her people and I think that she reacted out of shock and surprise since you did sneak up on them. And maybe you terrified her. No offense, but you are a scary customer.”

Reacher nodded again. He wasn’t offended. He was used to people being scared of him and a beautiful woman like Amita Red Cloud was usually the type who was afraid of him. That thought dug into him like a little shrill dart.

“Are you going to let me out?”

“Not yet. We have to hold you because you did assault two officers of the U.S. government,” he said it like he had little attachment to the federal government, which Reacher imagined was true. Growing up in America and learning that your government at one point robbed your people of their lands and systematically murdered most of them to the point of extinction could put a damper on a man’s patriotism. However, Chief Red Cloud had proven himself to be a reasonable and good cop.

Reacher asked, “When then?”

“I don’t know. Amita and I will discuss it when she comes back. She said that she went back to find the agents that you put down and they were gone. So the good news is that they must be alive, which is good for you. She said that you hit one of them so hard that he didn’t get back up. Apparently he is up.

“The other good news is that they still haven’t contacted us. So if we don’t hear from them by morning I’m satisfied with cutting you loose.”

Reacher smiled and said, “That works for me. Free room for the night.”

“And board. Law says that we have to feed you at least two meals a day. You hungry?”

“No thanks. I don’t have much of an appetite right now.”

The chief nodded.

Then Reacher said, “I will take a cup of coffee if you got it.”

The chief smiled and then he said, “I don’t have any here. Not made. But I know what to do.”

Then he walked back to his office and walked back out with his radio. He got on it and called Amita.

“Come in, Amita.”

“What now!” she called back over the air.

“Stop back at the general store on your way and pick up a medium coffee. Hold on a second,” Chief Red Cloud said and he moved his mouth away from the radio and released the talk button and asked, “How do you want your coffee?”

Reacher said, “Black.”

Reacher smiled because he realized that not only was this better than staying in a motel because it was free, but he was also getting room service.

“Bring the coffee straight black. No cream. No sugar. Got it?”

Static crackled over the speaker for a second and then Amita Red Cloud’s voice came back over calm and collected. She said, “Ten four.”

No other reply. No snappy comeback. No sign of distaste that her father was treating her prisoner like a guest instead of a dishonest and violent white man that she had thought of him as. At least that was Reacher’s initial assumptions, but he was willing to revisit the issue. He felt that an apology from her would do the trick. However, he didn’t expect that he’d get one and he didn’t want to push her like her father was doing. After all, he was the chief and her father. He could push her all he wanted and get away with it. Reacher figured that he didn’t want to be on her bad side any more than he already was because she had arrested him and all he did was come to her rescue in a way.

Chief Red Cloud said, “My daughter is a great police officer and a wonderful person, but she’s stubborn and takes her heritage to heart. I don’t think that it’s really your fault. You’re a stranger who comes from a different world. An idealistic world. Out there society pities the Indian. Here we don’t want pity. We’re a proud and good people. You’ll find that many residents feel indifferent toward you because you’re an outsider and a white man. But not by the law and not in my house and not by my daughter.

“I want you to know that from a legal standpoint, what you did is wrong. But you didn’t know that these guys were cops or whatever they are. And that’s their fault. They shouldn’t be out on the reservation ordering around any of my officers, especially not my daughter.

“When she gets here, she and I are going to have a talk about this and I’ll know more about what’s going on with these two guys. None of that concerns you. Except that I’m sure you’ll be okay. Seems like a big misunderstanding that went too far, but that’s life.”

Reacher nodded and stayed quiet, but deep down he was very impressed with Amita’s father; really he was impressed with both of them, a father-daughter team. Reacher thought back to his mother. If she had still been alive, then maybe they would’ve been a mother and son team. He might still be in Carter Crossing, working for her as one of her deputies, and one day he might’ve been sheriff of a small town in Mississippi. Although he missed his mother greatly, he was very glad that he had left and was seeing more of the world.

Chapter 12

Officer Amita Red Cloud pulled into the lot of the police station and parked behind her father’s Chevy Silverado with police markings etched all over it and a light bar on the roof. She killed her engine and stepped out of the car. She leaned back over and picked up her gear and a hot black coffee that she hoped was for her father, but feared that it was for their prisoner.

She shut the door and practically stomped her way through the lot to the rear entrance and she unlocked the door and walked in.

She walked back into the station and saw a sight that made her freeze in place and stare, wide-eyed.

Her father was sitting in a chair that was pulled all the way up in front of the prisoner’s cell and his cell door was wide open. He sat in another office chair on wheels that apparently her father had rolled over to him and allowed him to use. He was halfway out of his cell.

Her prisoner was sitting and talking with and laughing with her father.

She said, “Dad! What the hell is going on?”

Chief Red Cloud sat upright and then got up on his feet and she watched a smile drain from his face. He looked at her and held his hands out like he was approaching a wild beast, trying to tell it that he meant it no harm, which wasn’t far from the truth because Amita felt her blood boiling. Her father was breaking all kinds of protocols and security measures. Not to mention public safety concerns.

Red Cloud said, “Amita, calm down. Before you get all fired up, just listen to me.”

Amita said, “Dad! This man is my prisoner!”

“He is technically detained, but you didn’t arrest him or charge him or book him. So he’s not a prisoner. He’s classified as a detained suspect in a crime at best. And so far no one has come forward and filed charges against him.”

“What the hell do you think that I’ve been out there doing? I’ve searched and searched for those guys. I’m sure that they will want to press charges against him. He beat the shit out of them and right in plain view of me.”

Red Cloud breathed in and breathed out slowly, a thing Reacher imagined fathers did to their children to communicate with them that they needed to watch the line they were crossing, but Reacher wouldn’t know for sure since his father was still out there somewhere.

Amita said, “This guy that you’re sitting with and chatting it up with beat up two federal agents. No question of guilt. I saw him do it. I don’t care what his reasons are. And neither will these guys. I’m telling you that these guys are assholes and they will be back here for him.”

Red Cloud thought for a moment and then he said, “Why don’t you come over here and join us. You can explain it to both of us.”

Amita said, “Both of you? I don’t have to explain anything to him. He’s a prisoner!”

“Amita! He is not a prisoner! You failed to charge him, book him, fingerprint him, or read him his rights. We may live on the reservation, but this is still the United States and we have a little thing called the Constitution to consider. He has a right to face his accusers and a right to due process. So far there are no accusers and you have neglected giving him due process. So the way I see it we can give him due process now. Sit with us and tell us about it. He has a right to understand the details. You know that if we charge him with assault on a cop, the first thing that his lawyer is going to say is that he has a right to know all of the details of the situation in order to stage a proper defense.”

Amita stood, quiet for a long moment. Reacher stared at her, trying to make sure that she didn’t catch on to the fact that he was uncontrollably attracted to her.

Reacher had no plans of dating anyone or getting attached to anyone or getting married or having a house and a dog and a picket fence. Those things didn’t belong in his whole life addiction that he’d discovered by following in his father’s footsteps. It was the freedom that drew him to the nomadic life. In fact, he hadn’t thought too much about it, but what the hell was he going to do whenever he did find Jack Reacher, if he ever did? The answer to that question, he had no idea.

He looked down at the stone white tile floor and stayed in his seat. He kept his hands on his lap and in plain view of Amita Red Cloud because his gut told him that if he raised them even a little bit, she’d shoot him where he sat.

There was a lot of hostility aimed his way and he wasn’t really sure why. He guessed that it was the situation that he had interrupted, two federal agents pushing her around. She seemed to be a very proud Native American and a woman and a cop to boot. She had overcome a lot of adversity that Reacher was certain of and deeply respected. Perhaps the problem was being saved by a man. Perhaps it was being perceived that she needed saving by a man. Or perhaps there was some other reason why she was angry at him, but she definitely had some sort of grudge against Reacher.

She said, “Dad...”

And then she trailed off and agreed to sit with them. She handed the coffee to Chief Red Cloud and he walked over and gave it to Reacher.

He smiled a good hearty smile and said, “Here. Now the three of us can sit and figure this out. Mr. Reacher here was just telling me about himself. He has an interesting story.

“His mother was a sheriff back in Mississippi.”

“Was?” Amita asked.

“Unfortunately she moved on a while ago,” Red Cloud said.

Reacher nodded and stayed quiet. He did notice that Red Cloud had said moved on instead of passed on, which he had never heard before. He didn’t ask, but he wondered if it was a view that the Lakota people held about death like instead of dying they transcended because “moved on” suggested that someone left instead of died.

Red Cloud said, “Mr. Reacher is now on a very special quest.”

Amita remained standing for a minute like she wanted to make a special point that she was the last to sit and then she pulled a chair from the bullpen. It had no wheels like the one that her father had pulled out and so it screeched across the floor when she moved it. Then she set it to Reacher’s right. Close to her father, but far from Reacher’s reach.

Amita said, “What is that, Mr. Reacher? Beating up cops? Saving women in distress?”

“What is your problem with me?” Reacher asked without thinking about it, which was not out of character for him, but he had been on the road for months and hadn’t spoken to many people beyond daily pleasantries. And deep down this woman intrigued him for good or bad. So in a way he couldn’t help himself.

Amita said, “I don’t like a stranger coming on my reservation, my home, and beating up on federal agents! I don’t like that you just assumed that I needed your help! I am a police officer! You don’t rescue me! I rescue you!”

Her eyes turned red around the brown and her face darkened like she was going to explode. Reacher didn’t feel anger. He didn’t feel regret about asking point blank either. Instead now he understood her. He had had a proud mother who was a cop and he got that she was proud. Then he thought about all of those obstacles that she must’ve overcome again and he didn’t blame her for being headstrong. She probably had to be.

Red Cloud said, “Amita! Mr. Reacher isn’t a criminal here! He’s our guest until two agents walk through that door and tell me that they want to press charges against him. The Constitution says innocent until proven guilty. Let’s act like it. Now act civilized.”

Amita stayed quiet and looked away for a moment like she was trying to compose herself and then she looked back and faked a smile at Reacher.

He had never seen anyone smile with daggers behind it before. He had heard of someone staring at another person with daggers in his eyes, but never had he heard of a smile with daggers.

Then he said, “It’s okay. I don’t need special treatment or any kind of apology. I respect Officer Red Cloud. And I respect the law. I really thought that I was helping you out back there. That’s why I intervened. I saw that those guys were pushing at you and I guess that my instincts preceded my thoughts.”

Amita swallowed hard like she was forcing down her emotions. Then she composed herself and asked, “Why did you think that I was in danger? Because I’m a little woman and they were two big guys?”

Reacher shook his head and said, “Not at all. I saw that two civilians were poking and prodding at an officer of the law. That set me off first. My mother was a cop and I have a particular respect for cops. And my mother taught me to respect women, so I have a particular soft spot for a woman, a woman of the law.”

He paused a beat. Looked around the room and then he looked back at Amita and said, “A woman of the law in potential danger sets me off. I know now that you could’ve handled it, but at the time I wasn’t sure that you knew that those guys were armed. I saw a guns tucked into each of their waistbands and I reacted. The other thing that I learned from my sheriff mother was that it was best to get your reaction in first.”

Amita nodded and stayed quiet.

Chief Red Cloud said “Act first. Ask for forgiveness and not permission sort of attitude?”

Reacher nodded and then he said, “In some situations it’s best to act first, plan later.”

Amita stayed quiet.

Reacher said, “I sincerely apologize to you. And if those guys come around I’ll apologize to them too.”

Amita stayed quiet.

Red Cloud said, “There you have it. Reacher is sorry. Now accept his apology.”

Amita said, “I’m sorry that maybe I overreacted. And I thank you for your concern. Maybe those guys won’t come in to press charges anyway. Actually, I know they won’t so I guess that you’re off the hook.”

Reacher smiled and then he said, “Thank you. The apology isn’t necessary. I was mistaken. I’m sorry to you.

Red Cloud said, “So what the hell are two agents doing on my reservation anyway?”

Amita looked at Reacher and then she must’ve decided that he was privy to the information anyway because she said, “They had FBI badges. Said that they were here looking for someone.”

“Why didn’t they come by and tell me first?”

“They came by yesterday. They showed me. You were out.”

“You went off alone with them? Why didn’t you radio me?”

“Dad, I’m perfectly capable of liaising with a couple of FBI agents without you.”

“You mean that you were more interested in impressing them than doing your job properly?”

Amita didn’t answer that.

Reacher said, “Better to ask for forgiveness over permission.”

Amita finally cracked a smile.

Red Cloud said, “Next time, you call me. So who were these agents looking for?”

Amita looked directly in her father’s eyes with a stare like she waited for his reaction. Like it was the most important thing ever and she said, “Mike Jacobs.”

Red Cloud said, “Michael Jacobs? Your Mike Jacobs?”

Amita nodded. Reacher assumed that your Mike Jacobs meant that she knew the guy that they were hunting.

Red Cloud asked, “What does the FBI want with a guy who hasn’t been seen here in two years?”

Amita said, “They wouldn’t say. They said that it was vital that they look around for him. They said that they wanted to keep it quiet. That’s why I didn’t call you. I knew that you wouldn’t let me help them.”

“You’re damn right that I wouldn’t let you! That son-of-a-bitch left you heartbroken two years ago and he ran off and left his old grandpa to live way out there alone. Jacobs had no respect for his elders.”

Reacher stirred for the first time throughout this conversation and both father and daughter looked at him.

Amita said, “What? You think that this is all about my ex-boyfriend?”

Reacher shook his head and said, “No. Although I didn’t expect that a couple of agents would be here searching for your ex-boyfriend and you happen to be the cop who basically answered the door when they came through.”

“Yeah, that’s what happened. So what is it that you’re thinking? Something is bothering you. It’s written across your face.”

Reacher said, “What is bothering me is that something’s not right with these agents.”

Red Cloud said, “What do you mean?”

Reacher looked at him and then back at Amita and he said, “FBI agents don’t behave that way. FBI agents call ahead and check in with local law enforcement. The FBI has strict protocols in place for dealing with local cops and then there are issues of jurisdiction. And FBI agents don’t dress like those guys. Those guys were rugged and wore street clothes. The FBI guys wear suits normally.”

Both Red Clouds looked at each other and then back at Reacher.

Chief Red Cloud said, “Undercover cops dress rugged all the time.”

Reacher nodded and said, “Maybe. But those guys were obviously ex-military. Had to be.”

Amita asked, “So what?”

Reacher said, “Cops dress rugged, sure. And a lot of ex-military become cops when they get out of uniform. They trade one uniform for the other.”

The Red Clouds nodded.

Reacher said, “But have you ever looked up how to apply to be a special agent with the FBI?”

Amita nodded and said, “I’ve always wanted to be a special agent. What about it?”

Reacher said, “Then you know how rigorous the application process is and all of the stipulations that they require to get in?”

Amita nodded.

Reacher said, “The most common way to get in is to get a law degree.”

She nodded again.

Reacher said, “How many guys do you know went into the military, got a law degree, and then joined the FBI?”

The Red Clouds stared at him and didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “It’s possible. There’s the JAG Corps, but the military requires that they serve a while after graduating. The odds of both of these guys having gone that route aren’t very high.”

“Maybe they only served four years and then went to law school after?” Amita asked.

“Possible, but I don’t think so. These guys were lifers. They bled military in their stances and the way they dressed. Everything about them was military.”

Red Cloud said, “What’re you saying?”

Reacher said, “These guys might’ve been feds, but they weren’t FBI.”

Chapter 13

At that moment a silence fell over the stationhouse. It was broken after a minute by the whir of a heater kicking on and the vents above exhaling warm air. Tiny thin ribbons of thread hung from the scattered vents and whipped around from the sudden rush of air.

Reacher gazed up at the ceiling on some natural impulse and then back down at Amita Red Cloud who was thumbing her lip as if she were trying to keep herself from chewing on her nails. She inserted the thumb and then withdrew it. Inserted it again and then withdrew it.

Finally, Chief Red Cloud asked, “So what agency are they?”

Reacher stayed quiet.

Red Cloud looked at his daughter and asked, “Did you see their badges?”

Amita nodded and then she said, “They had FBI badges. No doubt about it. I inspected the seal myself, but...”

She trailed off and didn’t continue her sentence.

Red Cloud asked, “But what?”

Amita said, “Mr. Reacher is right. They weren’t FBI.”

“You saw their badges. What do you mean that they weren’t FBI?”

“Their badges were real.”

“So how were they not FBI?”

Amita paused a beat and then she said, “He’s right. There was something off about them. They had real badges. They certainly acted like feds. But they weren’t right. Something about them didn’t fit.”

“So why did you agree to take these guys out on the reservation? Alone? Why didn’t you radio me?”

“I’m sorry, Dad. I know. I should’ve radioed you. It was a mistake. I just thought… I just thought…”

Then he interrupted her, “You just thought that you could impress them. And you were distracted about Michael Jacobs.”

Amita said, “I’m sorry. Yes. I was so excited that the FBI were here. I thought that they were real. I didn’t think about protocols. You know a couple of agents could’ve just walked in, chasing a fugitive. I didn’t think to confirm their identities with the office. And they said that there was no time. They said that they had just chased the guy onto the reservation.”

“That was stupid of you, Amita. You were distracted by Mike Jacobs. And you let these two strangers into our community. They could’ve hurt you. Mr. Reacher did the right thing.”

Amita looked at Reacher. He stayed quiet.

She said, “They said it was urgent. I’m sorry, Dad.”

Reacher said, “They were lying.”

“How the hell would you know?”

Reacher said, “The FBI doesn’t have a field office in Wyoming.”

Amita asked, “So what?”

“The closest one is in Salt Lake City. Which I was just in yesterday.”

“So?”

“Salt Lake City is a long way away from here.”

“Which means?”

“Which means that these guys had plenty of time to tell you that they were in the area. Two FBI agents drive all the way from Salt Lake City? I buy that. But two guys claiming to be FBI and they just show up out of the blue without calling ahead and confirming with local law enforcement that they were coming through. That’s harder to swallow. Their office could’ve easily called ahead while they were on the road. Plenty of time with that distance.

“Also, FBI badges are available on the Internet. Anyone can get a fake badge that looks pretty real online. These guys know that. They wouldn’t just pop up unannounced unless they had something to hide.”

Red Cloud said, “So if these guys weren’t FBI then who were they? And they aren’t federal agents. We need to find them and arrest them. Posing as a federal agent is illegal.”

Reacher said, “I didn’t say that they weren’t federal agents. They were definitely agents.”

Amita asked, “If they aren’t FBI then who do they work for?”

Reacher said, “That’s a good question.”

Red Cloud said, “We should find out. We’ll call the FBI office in the morning.”

Reacher stayed quiet.

Amita said, “What about him?”

Red Cloud said, “Mr. Reacher, as of now you are free. We apologize for the misunderstanding.”

Red Cloud looked at his watch and then he said, “It’s late. I’m afraid that you missed the shuttle to Tower Junction. Do you have a place to stay for the night?”

Reacher shook his head.

“You can stay here. You were going to have to stay the night in a cell anyway. We can leave the doors open for you. Just don’t leave until the morning. The temperatures are going to drop to the low teens tonight. We don’t want you out there freezing to death.”

Amita smiled for the first time and Reacher took note of it like she was smiling at the thought of him freezing to death.

Amita said, “I can drive him now. There’s no reason to hold him up if we’re going to let him go.”

Red Cloud said, “No. He’d better stay the night. In the morning you can drive him and then you can coordinate with the police in Tower Junction and check the hospital there for any sign of these guys. They might’ve checked themselves in since one of them was unconscious.”

A blank expression fell over her face. It said nothing to Reacher, but he recognized that her father knew it. It must’ve meant that she was disappointed. Reacher let go of his contempt for Amita’s actions. He wasn’t the kind of guy to hold a grudge.

Life is too short for grudges.

They talked a little more, but said nothing else about the two guys. After a while Chief Red Cloud called it a night. At the same time Amita agreed and they said their good nights to Reacher and left him alone. The stationhouse lights dimmed to a tolerable shade so that Reacher could sleep.

He returned the chairs to their original places and walked back into his cell. The stationhouse was plenty warm. So Reacher pulled off the gray fleece and then the shirt and folded them neatly and tucked them underneath the cot on the floor. Then he sat on the bed. The springs bounced and squeaked under his weight, but they weren’t uncomfortable. He had slept outside a couple of nights when he was going through West Texas the first time several months earlier. That was when he learned a valuable lesson about West Texas—always take a bus through there. West Texas is long and at one point there is no gas station or any sign of people for 200 plus miles of desert.

Reacher smiled because he thought that it was funny that he was back in a jail cell and it was his own choice.

I could leave, he thought. Later he would wonder if he should have.

Chapter 14

The daylight seeped in through several thick casement windows with crisscross metal layers like mini-bars developed right in the glass. Reacher woke up bright and early, 6:15 a.m. according to the time in his brain. But it wasn’t his internal clock that woke him up so early. It was the rustling noises of Amita Red Cloud as she entered the stationhouse.

She came in and carried a to-go cup with coffee in it. Reacher sat upright and smiled. He thought that maybe Amita had gone home and thought about the talk they had the night before. He imagined that she and her father went outside and talked some more in the parking lot. He probably calmed her down. Maybe now she was warmer toward Reacher. So on her way to the jail she had stopped and grabbed him a cup of coffee, which was the way to his heart like he imagined it was the way to his father’s heart. Somehow coffee had become a way of communicating with the man who was still out there somewhere for him to find. Like a portal between them.

Then he realized that he was mistaken about her warming up to him because she took a sip of the coffee and placed it on a desk. She had bought one for herself and nothing for him.

She walked over to his cell and forced a smile and then she asked, “Ready?”

Reacher stood up and stretched. She stared.

Amita saw that he had caught her gazing at him and for a second she just stared at him and then made eye contact. She said, “Where are your clothes?”

Reacher bent down and picked them up and showed them to her. He stayed quiet. Then he shuffled his fingers through his shirt and straightened out the sleeves and slipped the shirt on. Next he picked up the fleece and slipped it on.

Amita stepped back and said, “Let’s go.”

Reacher asked, “Where are we going?”

“You are leaving the reservation.”

“Why? Did you find the guys?”

“No. You aren’t going to court or anything like that. Like my dad said, you’re a free man, but I want you to leave the reservation. So I’m taking you to Tower Junction.”

Reacher paused a beat and then he said, “So I’m not under arrest or detainment any longer?”

Amita nodded.

He asked, “So why do I have to leave? Maybe I want to stay.”

Amita froze in front of him and stopped and turned and faced him.

She asked, “Do you want to stay?”

Reacher shook his head and said, “Not particularly. I just don’t like being told where I can’t go.”

“Well you CAN’T stay on Red Rain Reservation,” she said.

He stayed quiet.

She pointed to the door. She asked, “You have all of your belongings, right?”

“Not to criticize you, but that’s another thing that you didn’t do that you should’ve.”

“What?”

“Last night you patted me down. But not very thoroughly. I could’ve still been armed.”

“Are you armed?”

“No. But I could’ve been.”

Amita pointed toward the door again and cleared her throat like it was a command. Like Move on, prisoner.

They reached the door and Reacher opened it. He walked out and she followed and closed it behind her. Reacher noticed that she had left her coffee and thought that it would be cold by the time she came back to it, but he said nothing about it. Why should he help her when she acted so aggressive toward him?

The cold hit him like a gale force. It was cold. Like winters in Wyoming could be. Cold he had expected, but this was very cold. He had no idea what the temperature was, but it was low.

The ground outside was moist like the sunrise had melted some of the snow, but not all of it. Not by a long shot. Reacher didn’t even remember hearing it snow the night before, but then again he wasn’t used to snow. He guessed that most snow fell silently.

As he approached the only police cruiser in the lot, he turned and looked up at the sky. It was hazy, but sunlight stabbed through, making holes in the gloom.

Reacher walked to the passenger door of the police car and waited. Amita stopped at the driver side and looked up at him over the top of the car and past the light bar.

She said, “Nope. No way. You sit in the back.”

Reacher didn’t argue. The truth was he was done trying to figure her out. And he realized that in a way it was best for him to leave. What if those guys returned and wanted payback? This way he didn’t have to endure that or jail time or any more of Amita Red Cloud’s wonderful hospitality.

He opened the door, dumped himself down on the rear bench, and slammed the door shut.

At least this time he wasn’t in handcuffs. That thought gave him some relief.

Amita got in after him and she fired up the cruiser. She let the engine warm up for a few minutes. It was cold.

After about five minutes of silence, except for the low humming from the engine and the blast from the air vents as the heater struggled to heat the interior of the car, Amita slipped the gear into park and backed up and pulled away from the lot.

On the way out of the lot, Reacher saw a yellow Jeep Wrangler with a hardtop. He wasn’t sure about the model or year. He figured that it must’ve been Amita’s personal vehicle since she had to wait for the police cruiser to warm up.

They drove on to the main road, which was also covered in snow. She drove slowly over the thick white snow. The snow kicked up gently under the tires. It felt like they were driving on sand. Reacher was good at driving cars. He had grown up in the South and one thing that his mother had done was challenge him to learn not just how to drive defensively like other kids. She had set up obstacle courses for him to drive through out in the mud and woods in Mississippi. She used a winding, muddy track that locals used for mud riding. She required her officers to train on it sometimes in order to make them better drivers. Reacher was never really sure why she trained him or them in it so hard because as far back as he could remember there had never been a high-speed pursuit in their small county that required expert drivers. But that was her. She was always preparing him for a life of high-speed chases and gun battles and hand-to-hand combat.

Maybe she knew that he would one day be living the life that he had lived so far. Because it had certainly come in handy in the past. Either way, he didn’t want to reflect on it too much.

They drove past the signs to the reservation and out back onto Grand Loop Road.

Suddenly, Amita said, “I didn’t search you because I didn’t want to be within your reach. That’s why I left the cuffs on you until you were in the cage.”

Reacher nodded and stayed quiet. He thought: I could’ve had a gun.

But he hadn’t had a gun and nothing happened anyway. As of now he was getting off after having beaten up two federal agents from some agency that he still hadn’t figured out yet.

He ignored her and turned his head and stared out the window. He thought: It’s none of your business. And then he thought about the open road again.

The rest of the drive was silent until Amita turned on the radio. The channel was tuned to a morning show from somewhere else in the county. The guy on the radio gave the weather report and said that the hard blizzard that they were tracking had moved to the north last night and was on a trajectory to head away from the territory, but it had dramatically turned around and now was headed dead at the reservation and Tower Junction. The radio predicted that it would be a full blown blizzard by nightfall.

Amita shook her head at the radio and said, “You don’t want to be stuck here when that thing hits us anyway. Snowstorms here are no joke. You don’t even have the right clothes on. You’d hate it. Storms kill tourists all the time because they come up here and venture into the mountains and don’t plan for them.”

Reacher looked at her eyes in the rearview mirror. He started to speak, but then he thought the better of it. No point in being nice to her now. He stayed quiet.

Chapter 15

Grand Loop Road wasn’t nearly as snowed over as the reservation had been, probably because there was an adequate amount of traffic. The long winding stretch of road had diverse scenery. That was for damn sure. One second Reacher was looking out the window at snow-covered rock formations and then he was seeing snow-covered plains and trees. He thought that at one point he’d seen a snow-covered caribou or deer or moose. He wasn’t certain what kind of animal it was. He knew it was big and had antlers. The creature stopped at a nearby stream that was half-frozen from the freezing temperatures of the night before and it dipped its head down and took a drink.

Reacher looked forward and saw the road wind some more and finally they came up on the outskirts of a settlement that must’ve been Tower Junction.

The first buildings were houses and small subdivisions. Then there was a service drive that turned off and paralleled the road and then jutted north. On the corner there was a gas station. Amita turned off the road and headed toward the gas station. She looped around and pulled into one of the bays and parked the car.

She said, “Mr. Reacher, this is your stop.”

Reacher started to open the door and get out, but he stopped. He looked forward at her and he said, “Officer Red Cloud, I’m not a bad guy. My mom was a cop. I grew up around cops. I know the trade. I was only trying to help you. I wish that we could start over, but I guess it doesn’t matter now. But for what it’s worth I don’t think that you’re a bad cop. Everyone makes mistakes.”

Amita Red Cloud turned and looked back at him. She breathed a heavy sigh and then she said, “Are you hungry?”

Reacher said, “I could eat. I can always eat.”

She said, “There’s a diner around the corner. Sometimes I’ll drive here and go there just to get away. Do you want to have breakfast?”

Reacher nodded.

Amita turned to face the nose of the car and shifted the car back to drive. Reacher sat back and they drove back out of the gas station and turned onto another snow-covered road.

The weather began to turn on them and snow began trickling out of the sky. Clouds hung overhead shading over the town and the roads.

Reacher looked at a street sign and took note that this was now Main Street.

They drove only a couple of blocks. Amita pulled the car into the parking lot of a restaurant called Terry’s Diner.

She got out and Reacher got out the rear door. He immediately noticed the thick snow on the ground and he stepped cautiously. He had never been in snow like this. He was only now wondering if he needed snowshoes. Then he wondered: What the hell are snowshoes?

Amita walked around the front of the car and looked at him standing there peering down at his feet like a big dumb ape, which was pretty much what she thought of him. Then she couldn’t help but smile.

She asked, “Never seen snow before?”

Reacher nodded.

“It was snowing yesterday at the res and you walked through it all afternoon?”

“It wasn’t like this, not nearly as thick and high.”

Amita said, “Seriously. You’ve never been in snow?”

Reacher said, “I grew up in Mississippi. We don’t have snow.”

“Come on. Let’s get inside. Unless you want to stand there all day and wait till the snow comes down and turns you into a snowman?”

Reacher said, “Inside sounds good. It’s cold.”

“All you have on is a fleece. And this is nothing. Tonight it’s going to be cold to the bone, especially if that snowstorm passes over us. Speaking of which, I can’t stay long. Just breakfast. Then I have to head back and help buckle everything down for the night.”

Reacher nodded and stayed quiet.

They entered through a single push-and-pull glass door with a bell way up on the top corner. It dinged as they entered. Reacher had to duck his head down so that he could walk through the door frame. Inside, the diner was plain. Plain walls. Plain long service counter. Plain booths along the walls and windows. Nothing special about it.

Reacher had come to like these kinds of American diners. They were a part of the American landscape and he preferred them over the traditional chain brands. All of which weren’t particularly out of his taste. He just liked the concealment and the bareness of places that he had heard some people describe as a hole in the wall. Plus there was the good feeling that he got, knowing that he was supporting a local business and not a big chain corporation.

So far Reacher had been all over the southwestern United States and he had stopped for coffee at a host of places: diners, IHOP, Waffle Houses, coffee shops, bars, restaurants, and Starbucks. He liked coffee. That was a certainty, but not all coffee was created equal. He had found that often the local establishment had the best coffee. They kept it fresher. There was a Starbucks in San Diego that he had stopped at one day. He ordered the coffee of the day, something called Pumpkin Spice. It was pretty good. Good enough for him to remember it and record it in his worthwhile memory files.

Amita didn’t ask where Reacher wanted to sit; she simply walked all the way to the back corner both. It had a good view of the road and the door. She sat down on the west side which left Reacher with only two options: Sit next to her on the same bench or sit across from her. Of course the obvious choice was to sit across from her. That was what he was sure she had intended. The only problem with this was that it left his back to the front door. And Reacher didn’t like that. He didn’t like having his back vulnerable.

Another thought that ran through his head was that even though he respected Amita Red Cloud, he didn’t necessarily trust her. What if this was all a ploy to get him in another jurisdiction and once she got him sitting down and fed and full then the two agents from whatever agency would enter from behind him and get the drop on him. Not a scenario that sounded very plausible, but he had the thought just the same.

Amita looked up at him and asked, “You gonna sit?”

Reacher plopped himself down on the bench across from her and smiled.

He reached over and grabbed a menu which was already placed on the table. He opened it up and asked, “So what’s good here?”

Amita smiled at him and said, “Nothing.”

Then she laughed for the first time since he had met her.

Startled by this he jerked his head up at her like she had thrown water in his face. He quickly regained composure and laughed with her.

Then she said, “Seriously, the food here isn’t the best, but it’s the closest thing. And you get used to it.”

“They have good coffee?”

“Coffee isn’t that bad,” she said and then she paused and said, “Shit!”

“What?”

“I left my coffee back at the station. That was three bucks at the general store. It’s pretty good coffee.”

Reacher smiled and stayed quiet.

“Guess I can reheat it later.”

Amita grabbed her menu and glanced over it. The glossy cover reflected the lights from above and glimmered into Reacher’s eyes. It reminded him of a sniper scope from off in the distance. The sunlight beams down and gives away an enemy’s position.

The waitress walked over. Her nametag said that she was Maggie.

Maggie was about five years older than Reacher, possibly Amita’s age, which Reacher guessed was somewhere around 25. She had straight auburn hair and a nose with a tiny cluster of freckles like a constellation of stars. She smelled of perfume with a hint of thick smoke underneath it like she had just returned from a smoke break and sprayed herself to cover the smell.

She was medium height and an average build, but Reacher noticed that she had long fingers. They were abnormally long for a person of her size.

She smiled a big, friendly smile and said, “Officer Amita, how are you doing today?”

Amita nodded in agreement. Didn’t answer the question, but Maggie didn’t wait. She looked at Reacher with a look of great interest on her face.

She said, “Now honey, you have found yourself a boyfriend. My, oh my.”

Reacher smiled. He hadn’t seen that coming.

Amita shook her head like she was possessed in an exorcism. Reacher took special note of that, but didn’t let it hurt his feelings. Instead he said, “She did have me in handcuffs last night.”

Which was technically true.

Maggie smiled and turned a shade of red. Amita turned a shade of red and then purple and stared at Reacher with deadly eyes.

Reacher quickly retracted his statement with, “Only kidding. Officer Red Cloud arrested me last night over a misunderstanding. Now we’re friends. That’s all.”

Amita said, “That’s all. Let’s order.”

“What should I get?”

Maggie started to name the specials, but Amita waved her hand and said, “Texas BLT sandwiches and eggs for both of us. Scrambled. And coffee.”

“And toast,” Reacher said.

Maggie the waitress smiled at him and took their menus. She walked away and returned shortly after with silverware. Then she left again and returned five minutes later with two empty coffee mugs and a dark blue thermos of hot, fresh coffee. She placed the mugs down in front of them and poured each a cup of coffee.

After Maggie was gone, Amita said, “I have to live with these people. That wasn’t funny about the handcuffs.”

“Maggie thought that it was funny.”

“Look I’m buying you breakfast, okay, because my dad asked me to. And I do feel a little bad about last night. I really am a good cop.”

“I know that you are. A little overzealous maybe, but lots of great cops have been. Better to be overcautious rather than be lazy and ignorant. I’ve seen both.”

“Thanks. I really am.”

Silence fell between them for a moment and Reacher took a sip of his coffee. It was hot and good. Not the best, not as good as the Pumpkin Spice from the San Diego Starbucks, but it was far from the worst.

He looked up and watched Amita pour an avalanche of sugar into her coffee. It must have been five or six spoonfuls. Then she picked up a Splenda and tore it open and drizzled it into the coffee.

He thought, No wonder you’re so high strung.

“Tell me about Mike Jacobs.”

She looked up at him. A strange look in her eyes. Sadness? Regret? Reacher wasn’t sure, but there was a lot of pain there.

Old boyfriend? he wondered.

“Mike was my high school sweetheart. He always wanted to leave the reservation. Leave his grandfather to live alone way up near the mountains.”

“And you wanted to stay?”

“No. I actually wanted to join the FBI or DEA or ATF, any of those agencies. I wanted to travel and get out of here too. But my dad says that my life is here. It’s important to him that I stick around and help him police the people.”

“You two are alone?”

“There’s a desk lady who runs the telephones four days a week and then there are three other guys that come on in the warmer months. Henry Little is deputized. But in the winter, a lot of people head south or keep to themselves. It gets really cold, especially in January.”

Reacher nodded and stayed quiet. He thought about his mother and his grandfather, who had died before he was born. His mother had stayed and taken over his grandfather’s role as sheriff. Similar story.

“Mike Jacobs was my boyfriend and we were going to get married a year or two after we graduated college. But one day, he vanished, just gone without a trace. No note. No letter. No phone call. Nothing.”

Reacher thought about saying, Gee, I wonder why he left. Did you drive him away? But he thought that it was better to say nothing.

Silence fell between them and Maggie brought the food out.

She said, “Enjoy.”

Reacher said, “So now these guys are looking for him?”

Amita said, “Yep. Now I think you understand my overzealousness as you called it. This guy left me and his people years ago and now he’s wanted by some federal agents who lie about their agency or even if they are feds. Maybe they’re hired mercs or something. With Mike, there’s no telling what he’s gotten himself into.”

Reacher heard the bell sound behind him and the door opened and shut. Amita looked up at whoever had entered. She stared for a hard second and then she dismissed it. So Reacher didn’t bother taking a peek.

He surmised from the footsteps that it was a large man. Large build. Calm walk. Like an old gunfighter. The guy sat down in a booth directly behind Reacher. The bench trembled under his weight and Reacher felt it.

Reacher waited for any sign that he should be on guard about the guy, but Amita didn’t even look back up. So Reacher continued eating.

Maggie came over to the guy behind Reacher and asked what she could get him.

Reacher heard a husky, animalistic voice say, “coffee.” And that was all.

Chapter 16

Amita finished her breakfast and slid her plate to the edge of the table. She stacked her silverware on top and wiped her hands on a napkin. Out the window, Reacher could see cars and trucks passing slowly down Main Street. Drivers used caution over the snow and followed the tracks that had already been made by previous cars. Street sounds of tires over snow and pavement swept into the diner as new customers opened the door.

Reacher turned his head and peered at them. It was an older couple. Holding hands and laughing.

Amita smiled.

Reacher asked, “So where does the name Amita come from?”

“It was my great-great-grandmother’s name. She was adopted by white parents. Way back. And they named her Amita.”

Reacher nodded and asked, “Why don’t you have a husband or boyfriend now?”

A look crossed her face that said to Reacher he might have been crossing a personal boundary. Then again he didn’t really care since she had arrested him and forced him to spend the night in a cell.

The look vanished and she shrugged and said, “I have no time for one. Plus there aren’t a lot of men on the reservation who make good candidates. Most of the population is old or women. Men tend to grow up and leave.”

“Like Jacobs?”

“Like that.”

“I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have left if I was your man.”

She looked up at him with big brown eyes. She nodded and stayed quiet.

It was still a sore subject for her.

Maggie came back to the table, picked up the dishes, and left the check. Reacher started to grab it, but Amita got it first and told him that she was going to cover it. She pulled out her wallet and left the money on the table. She stood up, put her coat on, and zipped it up over her chest.

She said, “Reacher, it was a pleasure. I am sorry for the hostility. This is no longer your concern. I wish you luck in whatever it is you want to do in life.”

Then she walked away and left Reacher to enjoy the rest of his coffee.

Reacher watched her walk out the door of the diner. She stopped for an old faded blue Ford pickup to pass through the lot and then she went to her police car. She opened it, got in, and fired up the engine. Exhaust pooled behind the car. She backed out of her space and pulled away from the lot and was lost to sight.

Chapter 17

The air wafted in again as new customers entered the diner. It was cold and chilled two old guys who sat at the counter. Reacher watched as they visibly made shivering expressions. He drained his coffee cup and started to plan out the rest of his day. He pulled up the road map in his head and thought about the best way to get out of Yellowstone and on with his search for Jack Reacher.

He decided that it was best to head south on Grand Loop Road and around Yellowstone Lake. Eventually he could get to Cheyenne.

Reacher stood up and began to head out of the restaurant when the guy in the booth behind him said, “Reacher? Is that what she called you? Reacher?”

Reacher turned and looked at the guy who remained seated. The guy wore cowboy boots under black chinos and a matching blazer. A thick black sweater was underneath the coat. The guy had a shoulder rig that poked out when the guy stretched his hand out to motion for Reacher to have a seat.

The guy’s face had a wicked scar that cut diagonally down the side of his face and took off half of his lower nose. It was hard to look past his injury, but Reacher studied his whole face and saw that the guy had one grayed-out eye and one piercing blue eye.

Reacher didn’t make any comment or acknowledgement of the guy’s wound.

“Do I know you?”

The guy said, “You don’t know me. Please sit down. I’ll buy you another coffee.”

Reacher thought for a moment. He figured that it couldn’t hurt to sit with the guy. It was still early in the morning and maybe the guy would offer him a ride. Besides he wanted to know how this guy knew his name. So he dumped himself down in the booth and waited for the guy to speak.

Maggie came over and asked Reacher if he wanted another cup of coffee. Reacher nodded and a moment later she returned with a fresh cup. Black. No thermos this time. Just the coffee.

“So what can I do for you? How do you know my name?”

“My name is Alex Shepard. I know your name because the two guys that you beat up, they work for me.”

Reacher stayed quiet. Realized that maybe he should’ve kept walking out the door. But then he thought that it may not have made a difference. Those two agents were most likely waiting outside in the parking lot, probably in a van or SUV with tinted windows. They probably were armed with stun guns. He wouldn’t make it very far, especially with no vehicle of his own.

“I can explain that,” Reacher said.

“It was a misunderstanding. I know. I got that from their side of things.”

Reacher stayed quiet.

“They overstepped their boundaries and things got out of hand. You were only trying to help Officer Red Cloud. I see that.”

“They were harassing her. That’s what it looked like to me.”

Reacher kept Shepard’s hands in his peripherals and calculated that if the guy went for his gun, he could beat him down with two moves. One, hot coffee in the face. Two, smash the cup into the guy’s good eye. Job done. Case closed.

Shepard nodded and said, “I know. They admitted to me that they had stepped out of line. Don’t worry. I’ve put them aside for now. They’re waiting back at out motel.”

He watched as Reacher glanced around the parking lot from the window.

“We’re alone. I promise.”

“Those guys told the cops at Red Rain that they were FBI.”

Shepard nodded.

“They aren’t FBI. And neither are you.”

“No we’re not. We are federal agents.”

“I believe that. So who do you work for?”

“We work for the CIA.”

“Bullshit! The CIA can’t operate on American soil. That’s a big breech of protocol.”

Shepard smiled. The hole where half of his nose used to be turned into one half of an upside-down heart. Reacher wondered what had caused such a vicious wound. The guy must’ve seen some bad war time.

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“No way. The CIA can’t operate on American soil. If you had said NSA then maybe I’d believe you. After Edward Snowden, I think everyone knows that. But the CIA is still bound by a charter to spy only on foreign soil.

“Besides that the CIA is not a law enforcement agency. You wouldn’t be looking for an American fugitive unless he had some kind of intel.”

“Technically, you’re right and you’re wrong. I have to tell you that when I heard that it was your name that had come up as the guy who beat up my two agents, I was flummoxed.”

Reacher furrowed his brow. He was confused by this. What did the guy mean by his name?

“The CIA isn’t allowed to operate on American soil. That part is true, but there is one exception.”

Shepard paused a beat and then he said, “Indian reservations. We can engage in missions on Indian reservations. There are real-life terrorist cells that are born on Indian reservations. It has always been a real concern that one of these groups might try to rise up and overthrow the government or create an act of terror for their cause.”

Reacher stayed quiet.

“As you can imagine, many Indian people feel a little bitter that we ran them off their lands. They feel oppressed by this. So there is a real concern about them.”

“Is that true about the reservations? I never knew that.”

“We’re the CIA. There’s a lot that you don’t know. And, yeah. It’s true.”

“So your two guys were posing as FBI agents to find this Mike Jacobs?”

“That’s right.”

“What did you mean that it surprised you to see my name?”

Alex Shepard paused a beat and then he asked, “What do you know about your father?”

Reacher’s face perked up like someone had said the magic words.

He said, “Not much.”

“I gotta tell you that the resemblance is uncanny.”

“You know my father?”

“A long, long time ago. I knew him. I knew of him really. The last time that I saw him he was being evacuated to Germany.”

“Evacuated?”

“Right. Do you know about his scar?”

“Which one? I know about all of them.”

“The worst one, I guess.”

“Bombing. Beirut.”

“That’d be the one. I was there that day. A suicide bomber blew up near a base and your old man got hit.”

“Some guy’s jaw. I know this part of the story.”

“Right. I know the details.”

“What details? You know how I can find him?”

“Not exactly. But I know all of the details about that day. It was related to a CIA operation, very classified for the time. I know everything from the bombing, your dad’s involvement, all the way down to the name of the guy whose jawbone blew right into your dad’s abdomen.”

Reacher stayed quiet and stared into the guy’s face.

Shepard asked, “How do you think I got this scar?”

Reacher stayed quiet.

“I got struck clear across the face by shrapnel. The blast erupted and shards of bone and metal whipped all around the place. I got hit. Took a piece of my nose and left me with one good eye,” he said.

Reacher said, “And here you are, small world.”

“You got that right. I’ve been in the spy game for decades. You’d be surprised how many coincidences you come across until finally you realize that they aren’t coincidences. They’re all a part of God’s plan. Do you believe in God?”

Reacher stayed quiet.

“Well, if you ever join the agency and you live long enough, then you will. I promise.”

Reacher said, “So what do you want from me?”

“I want to make a deal with you.”

“I’m listening.”

“You help me out and I’ll tell you all that I know about your dad. I might even be able to help you find him.”

“I’m listening,” Reacher said again.

Maggie came back over to their table and asked if they needed anything else. Reacher smiled at her and told her that he wanted another cup of coffee. Shepard looked out the window and said nothing. After she returned with a fresh cup and left again, Shepard looked back at Reacher.

Then he asked, “First I need to clarify that this is a matter of national security. You can’t tell anyone. I’m trusting you with privileged information. Got it?”

Reacher nodded.

“I need you to say it.”

“I got it.”

“Good. That means that even though you don’t have top security clearance, you can still be prosecuted for giving away this information.”

“So can you. For telling me,” Reacher said.

“You got it. That’s right.”

Reacher took a long pull from his coffee and waited.

Shepard said, “Mike Jacobs is a CIA agent. He’s one of my guys. He’s my protégé actually. I handpicked him over a year ago. We mainly operate in North America. Mexico. Canada.”

Reacher stayed quiet, just listened.

Shepard said, “Two weeks ago we got intel that there is a terrorist threat here on Red Rain Reservation. There is a cell that moves throughout the Lakota world. We’ve known about them for some time, but mostly just whispers and rumors. No real credible threat.

“But two weeks ago we became more interested because we learned that the terrorist cell may have acquired a weapon.”

“What kind of weapon?”

“We don’t know. We think that it’s something biological. It’s small, something that was being transported in a metal suitcase.”

Reacher said, “That could be anything.”

Shepard nodded and then he said, “Being that Jacobs was from the Red Rain Reservation, he was the obvious candidate to go undercover.”

“What happened?”

“I sent him in three days ago. I lost contact with him 48 hours ago.”

“And then you sent in your two guys?”

“Right. They went in as FBI agents and were told to keep a low profile in case he was in deep cover. Then they ran into you.”

Reacher said, “Sorry about that.”

Shepard shook his head.

“Water under the bridge. Don’t worry about it. The crucial thing here is to find Jacobs and find the weapon before it’s too late.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Look out the window.”

Reacher craned his head and looked out the window.

“Look at the sky,” Shepard said and raised his hand and pointed off to the horizon to the north.

Reacher saw the gray gloomy clouds that puffed up high above the mountain peaks in the distance. They looked foreboding and menacing and unstoppable like slow-moving lava where all you can do to escape is to run.

“In the next six hours the Red Rain Reservation and Tower Junction and all of the wilderness and mountains and rivers in between are going to be buried in that snowstorm.

“The Indians don’t trust my guys. They don’t trust outsiders. But you have already won over their cops. And that girl, she likes you. I could see that.”

“So what? You want me to go back and work for you?”

“Reacher, that storm is the only thing protecting Red Rain Reservation.”

“What does that mean?”

“The reason why we think that the terrorists have a biological agent is because we’re missing a canister that contains the Ebola virus.”

Reacher stayed quiet.

Shepard said, “If Jacobs doesn’t surface by the time this storm passes over with news of where the Ebola agent is, I’ve been ordered to send in a military strike against the reservation.”

“Bullshit! The military wouldn’t bomb an American target. Not only that, but no pilot would do that either.”

“It’s not going to be done by a pilot. We’d use a UCAV.”

An unmanned combat aerial vehicle was what he referred to and Reacher knew it. Reacher looked down at the table. He studied Shepard. He couldn’t tell if Shepard was bluffing or not. The whole thing sounded like it was straight out of a spy thriller. Then again, that was the kind of thing the CIA did.

“Right. So now you see my concern. I don’t want to bomb a bunch of helpless people. But it’s better to say that the UCAV malfunctioned rather than saying that the U.S. government brought canisters of Ebola on American soil and had it stolen by a small terrorist cell.”

Reacher looked out of the window again at the snowstorm and then he looked back at Shepard.

“So will you help me find Jacobs and stop a terrorist from releasing a deadly virus? For which there’s no known cure or even how it’s transmitted. Remember the thing that we do know is that the Ebola virus is deadly and highly contagious.”

“What choice do I have? I’ll help you. What do I need to know about Jacobs?”

Chapter 18

The morning passed and Shepard gave Reacher a satellite phone that should work during the calmer phases of the snowstorm. There wasn’t much more information that Shepard could give Reacher. He didn’t know any names or locations of the terrorist cell on Red Rain Reservation. Reacher was going in blind.

“I can’t tell you how much we appreciate this,” Shepard said.

About 15 minutes after he and Reacher had walked out of the diner, they were now headed back up the winding road to the reservation. They drove in Shepard’s gray Ford King Ranch truck. Reacher had seen nice trucks before, but this was really something. It was fully loaded with dual captain’s chairs in the front. It was the most comfortable ride that Reacher had had in a long time.

He gazed out the window because in case Shepard peered over at him, he didn’t want to stare at the scar.

Snow fell in a slow arch across the road, creating a dreary gloom. Not a whiteout but the beginning of one. The truck drove steadily with no problems over the snowy terrain. They took it slow because the traffic in front of them was slow. Shepard sped up every chance that he got. He’d slow behind a slow-moving vehicle and then he’d pass around them and speed up again.

The King Ranch had a big advantage over most of the vehicles because they were high up and could see much farther than the cars they’d passed.

Shepard turned the wheel and moved around a small yellow Beetle that was whining to survive the terrain. The petite car was buried up to the rims by snow.

Then he thought back to a girl he had known in high school. He didn’t realize it at the time, but she had liked him. She sat in homeroom next to him. She used to watch through the window every day around 1:15 for the same blue Volkswagen Beetle to pass by, some lady who worked down the street and must’ve taken her lunch break at the same time every day.  Whenever the Beetle passed, she’d slug him in the arm and say, “Punch bug!”

Reacher had an impeccable memory. He had total recall, but for the life of him he couldn’t recall her name because he had never bothered to learn it. He was completely awkward and shy at the time and he was flummoxed that a girl would pay any attention to him. He hadn’t ever paid any attention to her name.

Shepard swerved around another car. The driver blared his horn like he was shocked by the sudden truck that barreled around him. And maybe he was. If the guy was only paying attention to the whiteout in front of him, then he would’ve been shaken by a two-ton truck flying around him.

Reacher asked, “Why not alert the real FBI?”

“I wish that I could, but we can’t let it be known we’re responsible for the virus.”

Reacher nodded. Made sense. The CIA has let some homegrown terrorist cell get their hands on some Ebola virus and now they need to recover it, all while keeping the whole thing a secret.

“The government is okay with bombing and killing a bunch of innocent people over letting out an embarrassing secret like that?”

“Look. It won’t make anything better if we make it public that there’s a terrorist threat involving Indians. Every place that has an Indian reservation would be targeted by hate groups.

“If we tell this community that there is Ebola present, everyone will panic and the terrorists will be forced to release the virus. Then we’ll have to mobilize the National Guard and quarantine the residents of a huge area. And even then there’s little that we can do for them. A lot more people will die if we inform the public.

“So go in there. Investigate. Find Jacobs for me. You don’t need to interact with him. Just find his location. We can go in after the storm and get him out. If he’s dead, then get me a location or a name. Hitting one target will make it a lot better for everyone than hitting the whole community.”

“Do you have the manpower for an assault?”

Shepard switched the wipers to the highest setting and the blades scraped across the glass. Then he said, “I have a small team waiting.”

He paused a beat and stared at the entrance to the reservation coming up on the left. Then he said, “Make sure to call me as soon as the snowstorm passes or when you know something. If I don’t hear from you by morning, I’ll have no choice but to have this place leveled. It’s better to sacrifice a few lives over thousands.”

He slowed the truck and turned without stopping onto the track that entered the reservation. They passed the sign and drove up to the community center.

He pulled into the parking lot and made a U-turn and pulled the truck right up to the curb.

He clicked the button on the center console and Reacher’s door unlocked.

Shepard said, “Open the glove box.”

Reacher grabbed the handle to the glove box and popped it. The door fell open like a crocodile’s mouth and he saw a Walther P99 staring back at him.

It was black with a matte finish. It had a manual decocker and rear slide serrations. The whole gun was nonslip, including the ergonomic grip. It was a small gun: 9mm with a 7.1-inch length from nose to butt. The gun weighed 1.5 pounds completely unloaded. It was a world-famous gun that had been trusted by European and Western military and police forces for decades. There was one other factor that made this particular gun very famous.

Reacher picked up the gun and tilted it in his hand and then he said, “James Bond’s gun? This is the gun used in some of those movies. That’s a little ironic.”

“Take it. It’s fully loaded with 15 rounds in the mag. You might need it.”

So far Reacher had heard an insane story about Native American terrorists, undercover CIA operatives, and a deadly virus. Why shouldn’t there be the gun used by 007?

Reacher took the gun and made sure that the safety was on and slipped it into his pocket. He didn’t chamber it. He didn’t think that he’d need it.

Shepard said, “My number is programmed into the phone. Good luck.”

Reacher opened the door, climbed out into the snowy gloom, and watched as Shepard pulled away from the lot, drove off onto the track, and was lost to sight.

Chapter 19

The community center was surrounded by trees set way back from the complex. Off in the distance, a pair of sandhill cranes stood in the snow taunting each other with calls. They communicated something. Maybe they were friends. Maybe not. Reacher thought that they would’ve flown south for the winter and perhaps they still would. He wasn’t 100 percent sure of their migrating patterns. Yellowstone was not a mecca for birds migrating south. The high altitude and cold winters didn’t make the park an optimal location for birds to migrate to. But there they were. Surely they were going to fly away before the storm moved south.

Reacher moved his eyes from the birds and scanned the horizon. Over the landscape he could no longer see the luminous clouds from the north because the sky was gray and white. He flicked his eyes back to the ground and saw a bear rearing up and staring at him from the tree line.

It looked around casually, then looked directly at Reacher, and then scurried off into the woods like it was more scared of him than he was of it.

Reacher walked past the office to the community center and then around the corner of the building and made his way to the front entrance to the stationhouse. He saw that both police cruisers were parked in the lot as well as a green Jeep Cherokee. It was an older model. Probably early 2000s. The tires were speckled with snow, but relatively clear. Reacher saw his reflection in the front windshield as he passed. He looked like an elongated object that moved past.

He walked under a tin or aluminum overhang and read, etched on a double glass door, simply the word Police. The door squeaked as he pulled it open and heard a buzzer ding in order to indicate that a member of the public had entered the stationhouse.

Inside the station, he was immediately greeted by a bulletin wall with different public service announcements on it: dates that the General Store would be closed, times that there would be town hall meetings held in the community center, and a new schedule for school buses that ran from the reservation to Tower Junction. Reacher guessed that there weren’t enough kids on the reservation to warrant building a school of their own, although he suspected that most kids were homeschooled in such a place. The local public school was unlikely to teach tribal history and matters that concerned the community.

In the center of the bulletin board there was a big black-and-white printed sheet that read: Warning! Snowstorm! Curfew in effect for nightfall!

It was dated for today’s date.

To Reacher’s right there was a small cheap-looking desk with papers stacked on one side and nothing but a small computer on the other. A small white woman sat behind it. She was young, probably early 20s. She had glasses that blended right into her face. She had long, curly red hair with dark streaks flowing through it and was pale. She was skinny in that bony way as if she could double as a teenage boy and fool most people.

She had a very warm smile, showed her white teeth to Reacher, and said, “Can I help you?”

“I’m here to see Officer Red Cloud.”

“Okay. Just a second. She just walked in, I think.”

Reacher glanced down at the girl’s nameplate on her desk. It was Martha.

Martha must’ve been from Tower Junction. He didn’t imagine that there were any white people who lived on the reservation.

She must commute every day, Reacher thought.

Martha stood up and walked behind a partition into what Reacher guessed must have been the bullpen. The stationhouse was a basic rectangle, leaving no more space beyond the partition for any other room, but the bullpen, chief’s office, and the two empty cells at the rear.

Reacher turned his back and looked at the door. He heard a car pull into the lot. The drive belt squealed like it was due to be changed and then there was a loud whine from the brakes, the sound of chunks of snow being thrown away from the tires, and then an emergency brake being pushed in and the click of it locking into place. Then there was the sound of two doors opening and closing.

A moment later, a man and woman of middle age walked into the stationhouse. They smiled at Reacher and waited behind him.

He said, “Good morning.”

They said it back.

Then Reacher heard a voice say, “What the hell are you doing back here?”

He turned to see Amita Red Cloud. She had a confused look stretched across her face that was rivaled only by the expression of fear that he had seen on it the night before when he had beaten up the two CIA agents who were pushing her around.

Reacher felt the Walther P99 in his pocket poking him in the thigh. He tugged at the bottom of his shirt the best that he could to keep the gun’s small bulge hidden from view. The last thing that he wanted to do was to let Amita know that he’d returned with a gun.

In his back pocket was the satellite phone. Basic design. Basic package.

It fit in his pocket with only the antenna poking out. He reminded himself not to sit on it. He was sure that a sat phone that came from a CIA agent probably was built with some durability in mind.

Amita repeated herself and said, “What the hell are you doing back here?”

“We gotta talk,” he said.

“Come back,” she said. And then she looked past him at the middle-aged couple that had entered. She said, “I’m sorry. My dad’s not here. He knows about your problem and he’ll be here shortly if you want to wait.”

The wife nodded but the husband looked mad to have his time wasted like he had had an appointment with Chief Red Cloud.

Reacher didn’t give them a second thought. He walked past Amita and disappeared behind the partition. He walked several paces back to the spot where they had all sat the night before and waited for her to join him.

“What the hell are you doing back here?” Amita asked.

She never indicated which desk was hers so Reacher remained standing.

“We need to talk. Your dad should know about this too.”

“He’ll be in shortly. What’s going on?”

“Let’s go into his office,” Reacher said and walked to the chief’s office. He didn’t wait for permission. He needed to have a private conversation with Amita and didn’t want Martha to overhear.

They walked into the empty office. Reacher turned to Amita and said, “This guy. Jacobs. Is he here?”

Amita turned pale like she was completely knocked off guard about why they were talking about this. Then she said, “We went over that. What does this have to do with your being here?”

Reacher stayed quiet. He studied her expression.

She was lying. He knew it. He didn’t know what she was lying about. Did she know that he was here? Or did she know that he wasn’t here, but she knew where he was?

Reacher concluded that it was better to keep some of the truth to himself. For one thing, the CIA so desperate that they recruited a total stranger to help them locate a missing agent sounded crazy. For another thing, Shepard had asked him not to tell anyone. That didn’t really matter to Reacher since he didn’t owe allegiance to Shepard, the CIA, or anyone else. But he liked Amita Red Cloud and her father. And he didn’t want to see anything bad happen to this community. The threat of bombing the reservation was preposterous. Reacher knew that. But something about Shepard told him that he wasn’t lying about that as an option.

“Reacher! What the hell is going on?”

Reacher decided to trust her. Sometimes the best way to earn trust is to take a leap of faith and garner it.

He said, “The two guys who were up here. They aren’t feds. Not technically. They’re CIA agents.”

Amita did a double take. She looked at Reacher sideways. Then she asked, “Are you high?”

“I know it sounds crazy. But it explains how they got FBI badges.”

“Why the hell would the CIA be here?”

Reacher smiled. He said, “I can’t tell you the details.”

“Don’t even say that you’ll have to kill me!” She said and for the first time a smile crept across her face like she forgot who she was talking to.

Reacher said, “Smiling looks much better on you than scowling.”

“You’re the reason that I’ve been scowling, you and those CIA agents.”

Reacher stayed quiet.

“You’re serious about the CIA, aren’t you?”

“That’s what the guy told me.”

“What guy?”

Then Reacher explained to her about the diner and the guy with the scar. Before he could finish, her father walked into the stationhouse with questions in his eyes, but a hearty smile to greet his returning guest. Reacher, Amita, and Chief Red Cloud talked in his office. Reacher explained to both of them the whole story, except the part about the Ebola virus. He figured that it was best to leave that detail out. They had enough of an unbelievable story to swallow without the doomsday virus scenario tacked onto it. And he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone anything, but Reacher didn’t work for the CIA. He was pretty sure that neither of the Red Clouds would be involved in some crazy terrorist plot.

Amita said, “That’s unbelievable.”

Reacher stayed quiet.

“Well it’s what’s happening. It explains why those two agents were here. Why they passed themselves off as feds.”

“So what do we do now?”

“They want me to find him. I need your help. We don’t have much time.”

Outside the winds howled and the sky clattered and rolled with the echo of a vengeful God. The way that only Mother Nature could sound. The storm was coming and now was the time.

Chapter 20

Reacher stood 6’6” tall—a height that he had inherited from his father. It was a family thing, like many of his attributes and desires and the need to help the helpless.

Cameron Reacher knew nothing of his father in most senses of the phrase. However, he knew that things weren’t always what they seemed. Jack Reacher’s FBI files and case files that his mother had compiled over a lifetime hadn’t said that Jack Reacher was a good man. By all accounts his civilian record showed him to be a man who was followed by danger and crime. His Army record was different. Jack had been a man who upheld the law and got the job done. A decorated officer turned criminal drifter—that was the way he was seen on paper.

Reacher knew different. His father was something much more than a man on paper.

Standing in the middle of the police station on Red Rain Indian Reservation, Reacher towered over Amita Red Cloud. But somehow he felt in his bones that she was the one towering over him. Reacher knew what it was like to be in the presence of a strong woman; his mother had been one. He didn’t flinch or back down or feel intimidated by anyone—man or otherwise, but Amita was the first woman to make him blink for an instant. He thought that if she commanded him to jump then he’d jump.

And suddenly, in the distance, an alarm sounded. Not an alarm from a car or a bank, but something different, something ominous and loud and booming. It was a siren.

Amita asked, “What is that? Wait, it’s the tornado siren!”

Reacher stayed quiet.

Amita looked past Reacher’s arms and at her father whose face had turned blue like he had been out in the freezing temperatures far too long.

He said, “Tornado.”

Reacher asked, “In a snowstorm? Is that possible?”

Amita said, “It’s unusual, but it happens.”

“What do we do?”

Right then Amita Red Cloud said something profound. She said, “Hope for the best. Plan for the worst.”

And Reacher followed her with a renewed sense of purpose because according to the notes that his mother had made about Jack Reacher, notes that he had placed in memory, his motto was those very same words. Once again, Cameron Reacher felt that he was in the right place, that his hand wasn’t being forced; it was being guided.

They ran outside and took a look at the skyline, searching for a twister.

At first there was nothing.

Well, not nothing, Reacher thought.

There was the sky filled with icy clouds and gusting wind blowing toward them from the blizzard that was just over the horizon. Then there were the giant black clouds circling around them like a flanking army. The mountain peaks were blurred and hidden behind a blanket of white. The trees from the forests faded from nearly the front all the way into the background and merged into a landscape of white and darkness creating a cold gray color.

Reacher stepped out not far behind Amita. She ran to her police cruiser, jacked open the door as fast as she could, and dumped down into her seat. She grabbed at the dashboard and pulled up the radio. She turned the ignition key to power the cruiser and began to call out across the radio channel.

Reacher couldn’t hear her from where he stood because of the distance and the gusts of wind. They started moderate at first and then gradually built up in speed and power and force. Within minutes the flag high up on a thick metal flagpole in front of the community center was whipping and flapping like the flag on a sailboat far out at sea. The winds were changing and foretelling of the approaching storm.

Chief Red Cloud walked out near Reacher, craned his head, and used his left hand as a visor protecting his eyes from the flakes and dust from the snow that blew across the terrain in the wind. He looked across the sky in the opposite direction of his daughter and Reacher.

Reacher veered his eyesight left, covering the skyline, then to the right scanning the rest of the sky. That’s when he saw it, a small, but fast-moving twister. It zipped north and south, like a creature that couldn’t make up its mind. He watched as snow lifted up off the ground underneath it and filled the upper body with dark bursts of snow and ice. The funnel twisted out like a snake that had just eaten, with its meal digested down in its lower belly.

The twister looked small, but Reacher could tell that it wasn’t. It was an optical illusion, a trick of the sky. When he looked down at the base of the funnel, he saw that in comparison to the trees, the thing wasn’t small at all.

Reacher wasn’t an expert on snowy climates. Unlike his father, he had grown up in just one place, a deprived past that he was currently changing. He had grown up in rural Mississippi and had seen snow. Tennessee had real mountains and snow and skiing, and Tennessee was a neighbor to his state, but he had never ventured into Tennessee except once with his friends when he was 13. His mother had been against his going to the concert so he had snuck away with his friends to see the show. Reacher’s mom was the county sheriff, so when he had gotten caught by one of her deputies trying to cross back into the county, she was very upset to say the least. Reacher had been grounded for two months and wasn’t allowed to associate with those friends anymore. This hadn’t bothered him that much, except for one friend. He had met a girl that night at the concert, a good-looking red-headed girl. She had pursed pink lips and long legs like the stems of a gazelle. She had had a tongue piercing, which was new to Reacher. Girls in his town didn’t do such things.

One extra feature about her that was new to Reacher was that she had talked to him. He hadn’t been used to girls talking to him. Not like this girl. She was close to him, talking to him in loud, concert whispers in his ear. She had held onto his arm and run her nails gently across his inner bicep, an act that he had never known before but he would really enjoy throughout his life.

The girl was smart too. She was smarter than most of the girls that he had known. She talked different than the girls that he had known. It took him a while to figure it out, but she was different because she was older, much older. She had told him that she was a freshman and she was—in college. She had assumed that he was too.

Reacher remembered thinking that even though he had never seen that girl again, it had been worth every second of the two-month grounding just to have that one memory of her.

Suddenly, he found himself smiling and then he heard Amita’s voice.

“There! To the west!” She was screaming and pointing at the twister. Right in front of Reacher, who shook off his nostalgia and glared at the monstrous twister that carved a path toward him.

At the base, Reacher could see and hear trees cracking and wind howling and swirling.

“Inside!” Amita shouted. “Take cover!”

They headed back into the police station. Reacher waited until the rest went back in first and then he turned and took one last look at the twister that barreled in a direction right toward them.

The sky was turning darker as the twister approached. The clouds above it swirled and formed a whirlpool shape. Reacher thought of a bathtub drain only he was looking at it from the opposite side than the top. Then he turned and headed through the police station door and slammed it behind him.

“Do you have a basement?” he asked.

Amita said, “No. We aren’t used to this kind of thing. Twisters are generally much farther south. In fact, I think that there used to be a shelter, but I can’t remember what happened to it.”

Chief Red Cloud signaled to everyone to head to the back hallway.

“Let’s stay in here for now. It’s probably the safest place because there is no loose furniture.”

Reacher was the last to follow them. The assistant, the civilians that were still there, Amita, and her father all crammed together in the hallway with little space between them, mostly because the hallway wasn’t very long.

Amita crowded close to Reacher. Closer than he had expected, but he didn’t react. He didn’t want to scare her or signal to her that he was uncomfortable with her being so close. Then he remembered that was how he had met that college girl so many years ago. They were in crowded quarters and ended up close together and ended up touching and then talking until finally they were kissing. Reacher wondered if he would kiss Amita. He wondered what that would be like.

And then he thought, Snap out of it! Twister! Remember the twister!

Reacher shook off the urge to grab Amita and kiss her. Instead he looked on with an overwhelming concern for their safety. Somewhere deep inside of his being was a guardian, a cop by genetics.

Then suddenly three things happened simultaneously. First a loud, thunderous roar sounded outside and the wail of the siren was gone. Second the power in the police station cracked like a short circuit and blacked out. And the third thing that happened was that Amita Red Cloud shivered and reached out and grabbed hold of Reacher’s right hand—tight.

Chapter 21

The twister reverberated and rumbled on the rooftop of the community center. The echo rippled through every chamber of the structure. Outside, the wind howled. Limbs and loose shingles clattered across the walls and the roof and banged into the police cruisers and the cars in the lot.

The lights were out and the station was black as night. There were no windows in the hall.

Reacher felt Amita Red Cloud’s hand squeeze his own and he heard her breathing like an engine humming in wait to accelerate.

The twister lived for all of ten minutes, but in that small amount of time it caused a lot of cosmetic damage at the very least. Reacher knew that for sure. They all did. No way was all of the sound and fury of the thing capable of doing anything less.

After the sounds died down to just the howl of the wind, Amita let go of his hand and moved down the hall to check out the station. Reacher stayed a step behind, but followed after her.

Before they made it to the door of the station, they saw the beam of light that shone into the station. It was faded, but lit up the room. The light came from where the door used to be. The heavy, orange door to the stationhouse had been ripped off at the hinges. The sound had probably been loud, but was masked by the volume of the twister.

From where they stood, there was no sign of the door, only the broken metal hinges that swiveled and dangled from the doorframe.

Amita said, “Shit.”

Reacher nodded and stayed quiet.

He walked past her and out the doorway. He gazed out upon the scene in front of him. He wasn’t familiar with cold weather systems, but he had lived through some tornadoes before. Mississippi was a state that had some experience with them, but mostly he had lived through hurricanes. That was a storm system that he had known very, very well.

When it came to tornadoes, he wasn’t sure of the normal lifespan of one, but this one had seemed short.

The scene outside wasn’t as bad as it had sounded. Part of the reason for that was that the whole community had already expected a snowstorm that would last overnight to sweep through. So they had already prepared. Many of the people had already closed their shutters and moved in with their relatives who had houses and basements and generators.

“We have to open the community center as a shelter for people who need it,” Chief Red Cloud said from behind Reacher.

Reacher turned and saw the man standing just outside the doorway.

Amita was off to the south a bit, looking over the horizon. Reacher assumed that she was looking for the twister. But it had died away. Reacher knew it. There was no sign of it anywhere. One minute it had been a beast of destruction and the next it evaporated into thin air.

“Let’s start now. We won’t get a better chance. The snowstorm will get worse,” Chief Red Cloud said.

Reacher nodded. He looked at the sky again and saw that the white grayness was less than a mile away. It was a slow-moving thing. This gave Reacher some hope because Shepard had said that after the blizzard had passed they needed results.

Reacher walked over to Amita and said, “We had better take this time to go and look for Jacobs. It’ll be impossible when the storm hits harder.”

Amita nodded in agreement and said, “Okay.”

Then she went over to her father and explained. Reacher couldn’t hear them. But he saw Chief Red Cloud shake his head in disagreement.

Amita came back and said, “My dad wants us to help with the shelter first. He said that our priority is the community center. I told him how important it is. He’s calling a town meeting. Half of the community will head this way and stay in the community center anyway. So after we get them in we’ll let you ask about Jacobs. Okay?”

“That’ll have to do,” Reacher said. Then he added, “What do I have to do to help?”

Amita sensed his disappointment. Then she said, “How about this? We need to clear the road from falling debris as fast as possible. You and I can go out in the cruiser and do that.”

She stopped talking and looked up at the skyline again.

Then she said, “Looks like we have less than an hour. Let’s get moving and while we’re out, we’ll look for any sign of Michael. Deal?”

“You won’t mind?”

“It’s true that we used to date. He hurt me. But I have a job to do. I tried to help those federal agents or CIA or whatever. And I will help you. Sounds like if we don’t then they’ll only return and cause more problems.”

Reacher stayed quiet.

He headed for the car. He didn’t wait for her.

Amita didn’t read anything into it as he knew that she wouldn’t. She was a hard woman, hard as they come. She followed suit and headed toward the police cruiser.

The door was open and the car’s seatbelt warning beeped as Reacher opened the door and sat down. Amita’s key was still in the ignition, but not turned all the way. She opened her door, plopped down in the seat, and shut the door. She fired up the engine and hit the gas. The car swerved around in a circle and moved forward as she released the gas a little. The tires dug up some snow and dragged a small tree limb behind it for four or five feet and then released it back into the parking lot.

On the snow-covered tracks, the cruiser was slow going until they reached the main street where the tires dug through the snow and met concrete. Then the car drove more the way that it was intended and they headed north at a medium speed.

Chapter 22

Reacher said, “What exactly are we doing?”

“We’re checking out the damage from the tornado. Seeing if anyone needs any help. And praying that no one was hurt or worse,” Amita said.

Reacher stayed quiet. He knew that it was her job. He wanted to help, but he also thought about the missing CIA agent and the possible terrorists on her reservation. He also thought about Shepard’s threat. The CIA will do anything from preventing a weaponized Ebola attack. Reacher didn’t have to wonder about what anything meant. He knew it meant something bad, something irreversible. He knew because his mother had been a military cop for 16 years. He knew because he could imagine. He knew because Shepard didn’t strike him as a man with empty threats.

“Don’t worry. We’re going to look around. Later when everyone is in the community center; you can ask if anyone has seen him. I want to help, Reacher. We are helping.”

“Thank you. It’s a matter of national security, which means that we need to find him. If we don’t, it will be bad for you and bad for Red Rain Indian Reservation.”

Amita paused a beat and then she asked, “What do you mean, bad for us?”

Reacher stayed quiet.

“Reacher, tell me. What is going to happen if we don’t find him?”

“I honestly don’t know, but I fear it’ll be bad. The CIA isn’t supposed to be here. They’re here because of suspected terrorist activities. They aren’t just going to go away until they get what they want. I fear at any cost. And I fear that you will be the one to pay the price.”

“What cost do you mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think that they’ll raid the reservation? Take everyone prisoner until they find Jacobs?”

“I worry that it’s far worse than that,” Reacher said.

He paused a beat and then he said, “Later. Okay? Let’s talk about it later. Let me learn more first.”

Amita said, “Okay.”

They drove on. Taking it slow. Taking it easy. The cruiser drove over the road with no problem. They drove on until they came to a clear path of the twister. Tiny fragments and debris littered the path.

Amita cut on the light bar and let blue lights flash across the terrain. Under the darkening sky, the lights bounced off treetops and reflected from the windows of far-off houses and low mobile homes, strung together in a tight, unorganized sequence.

Reacher let his eyes scan through the area, looking for damage from the tornado. Amita peered around doing the same.

She said, “Look there.”

Reacher craned his head and followed her gaze. He saw several mobile homes that were flipped or turned over or completely torn apart right down the trajectory of the twister.

Standing in a small crowd around the building shrapnel were former residents of the destroyed homes.

Amita said, “We’d better go take a look.”

She turned the wheel and the cruiser turned and dipped over the snow. They drove off the road and onto the flat ground toward the people.

They pulled up a few feet from the people and saw Henry Little was among them.

Amita Red Cloud stomped on the parking brake and nearly launched herself out of the door without bothering to close it. She stepped one foot down on the interior of the doorframe and leaned up over the roof. She called out across the top and said, “Is everyone okay?”

Henry Little looked back at her and said, “Everyone is okay.”

Amita climbed out all the way and signaled to Reacher to follow her.

He climbed out of the car and shut his door. Reacher could feel his feet sink down into the snow. The temperature had dropped steadily and hadn’t really affected Reacher too much. Besides, he wasn’t one to complain, but now he felt the cold like tiny nails poking his skin.

Amita looked back over her shoulder and saw Reacher tailing behind and shivering a little as he walked. She stopped walking and stood close to Henry Little.

“So everyone is okay? What are you all doing out here?”

Henry Little said, “We’re trying to help Samantha search for pictures of her husband.”

Then he stopped and turned and gazed at Reacher. He had a long face with pronounced eyebrows. He looked thoroughly at Reacher. First up and then down and then up again. He said, “Her husband died in Afghanistan. She just received the phone call today. A phone call.”

Reacher stayed quiet.

Little got closer to him. Before, Reacher had thought that Little was a giant. But now he retracted that impression because Little wasn’t a giant. He was a leviathan.

“He fought in the army. Now he’s dead. And now she has lost the very small amount of home that your government allows her to have.”

Reacher stayed quiet.

“Okay. That’s enough, Henry. Come on. Reacher has nothing to do with any of that nonsense,” Amita Red Cloud said.

Little ignored her and continued moving toward Reacher.

Reacher could smell alcohol on his breath. Then Reacher thought about a man who knew that there was a major storm approaching. He was locked in his house. What would he do? Drink. That was something that happened where Reacher was from all of the time. At least once a year it seemed that his state had gone through a few days of a hurricane passing through. Power outages, lightning, and strong howling winds—lots of people drank. So Reacher didn’t judge or say anything about it.

Then Little did something that Reacher didn’t like—he started to poke Reacher’s chest.

Reacher said, “I am sorry about your friend. But it’s no more my government than it is yours. And I don’t make decisions about your land. I don’t make decisions about anything. I’m just a guy. An America? Yes. And I am white. I am from a military family. But I have never played any role in anything that affects you.”

Little said, “Military? You look Army.”

“My father was in the Army. My mother was in the Marines. And I was in neither.”

Little poked Reacher again. Amita stepped between them and said, “Henry! That’s enough!”

He pushed past her and poked again.

Reacher said, “Don’t poke me again.”

Little came close, rose his hand up in the air and held it there like a major debate was taking place in his head.

Amita said, “Henry! Stop! You two are carrying on like high school jerks!”

Then Henry backed down and Reacher sighed to himself in relief. He didn’t want to hurt an old Native American in front of Amita. Not only that, but he also didn’t necessarily disagree. He had no thoughts or opinions on the subject.

Amita said, “We’re out here to tell everyone to start heading to the community center. We’ll be safer buckled down there for the night. It’s stocked with supplies and sleeping bags. Please help spread the word.”

Henry nodded and said, “Yeah. Okay. I’ll start telling people. We’ll all be there. Now they have nowhere else to go.”

Reacher felt bad about these people’s homes. But he surveyed the coming darkness and said, “Amita, we’d better get moving.”

They returned to the car and drove about as far as they could before the snow started and within a matter of moments turned to a hard wind and then harder snow.

Amita said, “This is insane. I’ve lived through storms before but I’ve never seen it come on so fast.”

Reacher stared out the window and shrugged. He had never even seen this much snow and it had only been coming down a few moments.

Amita said, “We’d better go back.”

These were words that Reacher didn’t like to hear. He never went back. Going back wasn’t something that fit into his nature. Going forward was his comfort zone. But he nodded. And Amita backed the car up and k-turned and headed back to the community center.

Chapter 23

Violent winds blasted through the snow-covered streets and quieted buildings of Red Rain Indian Reservation. A stop sign hung broken and flapped in the wind like a metal flag. Shingles on a nearby roof shuddered and rattled like they were going to come off. The houses ached and moaned like old wood in the vehemence of the storm. Some trees bent while others stood strong because their bases were secured by three feet of snow. Old telephone poles ricocheted ice and slivers of wooden fragments flew off the sides like a skin peel.

The snow didn’t fall; it shot and darted across the sky, plunging across the landscape.

One temporarily abandoned home had three broken windows because the inhabitants had forgotten to close the shutters. By the time they returned, the place would fill with snow.

This continued for about 75 minutes and then all of a sudden the storm subsided slowly. It wound down to a milder version of itself, but it was far from over. On a radar screen, the storm would have covered half the map of northern Wyoming.

The sudden calm was merely a pocket in the bigger system, a break from the pounding.

Down the main street, in the community center, Cameron Reacher leaned against the back wall of the main chamber. He faced a crowd of locals. Most of them had their backs turned. They faced each other and chatted. The low rumble of voices hummed through the chamber like a church after mass has ended and everyone begins to stir and gather their belongings, saying hello to members of their community.

Most of the town’s people were over the age of 50. There were some small children and a handful of young adults. No one paid any attention to Reacher, which was the way that he generally liked things. By nature, he was a solitary soul.

From across the room, Amita Red Cloud looked over at Reacher and then turned back to her father. They spoke for a few minutes and then she began walking toward Reacher.

She stopped in front of him and looked up, cocking her head back.

She said, “Tell them. My dad is going to get their attention. He wants you to tell them about Jacobs. This is the fastest way to find him. Ask if they’ve seen him. Someone is bound to say so.”

Reacher said, “I’m not good in front of crowds.”

Amita cracked a smile and then she said, “I can’t believe that you’re scared of them.”

Reacher shrugged and then he said, “Not really afraid of anything. I just have no experience in public speaking.”

“Nervous?”

“No.”

“Okay then, so get ready.”

Chief Red Cloud started to wave his hands in the air and the crowd turned and paid attention to him.

He said, “Thank you for your attention. I know that everyone here is in some serious worry about this storm and about your belongings. I’m glad that you heeded our warnings and decided to come to us here. Every year we get blizzards. This is the worst one that I can recall, but we’re still safe here. Together.”

He started to walk toward Reacher.

“Now. At this time I know that many of you are dealing with the loss of your property because of the twister from earlier in the day. There’s nothing that we can do about that right now.

“Right now we have an important matter that must be dealt with. Unfortunately it’s sensitive. I’m asking for your help. Each of you, turn your attention to Mr. Reacher. He will explain.”

The crowd turned like it was one being. There were less than 100 faces, but more than 50. Reacher wasn’t sure because when they all stared at him, he didn’t freeze up. He just blurred their faces together. He had never come across something that he feared before. He knew that this wasn’t it. But nervousness, that was a different story. Being the center of attention wasn’t something that he liked. It made him feel like the outcast because he was so different from everyone else.

Reacher swallowed and said, “There are dangerous men among you.”

No transition. No preparation. He just said that. The crowd froze. Stared at him.

“There’s a missing federal agent. He’s wanted. This doesn’t mean that he’s bad, just that we need to find him.”

Amita Red Cloud stepped forward and said, “Most of you know him. His name is Mike Jacobs. Does anyone know where he is?”

No one stepped up. No one made a sound.

Reacher waited and scanned the sea of faces, but no one had even a glimmer of recognition in his or her face. There were many other residents missing from the congregation. Reacher wondered if Jacobs was with one of those groups. Perhaps people in terrorist cells would remain in their houses, which would make sense. Terrorists generally live among us, unsuspected, but still they are usually people on the fringes. Hard to hide what you’re doing in direct plain sight. Especially in a small, tight community like this one. Reacher had grown up in a small community and he knew what it was like to try and stay hidden from public view. In a small town, everyone tends to know your business.

Reacher looked at Amita and shook his head. No one in the room knew anything about Jacobs. Reacher doubted that any of them would help even if they did know. At this point it was like a needle in a haystack.

Amita approached Reacher and said, “Some of the people aren’t here.”

“I figured.”

“They live far from the center of town.”

“I figured that too. I can’t blame them for wanting to stay with their property.”

Amita said, “Reacher, Mike Jacobs’ family home is one of those houses. His family sold it to an older man named Sean Gareth.”

“Gareth?” Reacher asked.

“He’s a white man. No one minds him because he keeps to himself. Hardly ever see him in town. Henry usually travels out to his house and delivers supplies once a week. They’re friends. They play poker. Everyone knows about it because Henry usually hates white people, as you saw. But he and Gareth are friends.”

Reacher looked at her. He felt the P99 shift in his pocket. Then he said, “That might be a place to start looking.”

Chapter 24

The small boy had been told to run.

And that was what he did. He ran as hard and fast as he could through the snow. He heard loud noises behind him. Some of them he didn’t recognize. Loud engine sounds. But some he did know. He heard gunshots. He knew those. He had seen movies, bad movies, movies that his parents hadn’t wanted him to watch.

He didn’t really understand what was going on. He only wanted to go home. He wanted to see his parents again. He wondered why he hadn’t seen them.

The man had taken him away from the bad men. He understood bad men. He had seen them in movies too.

What he had never seen was real-life violence. Not like tonight.

Tonight he had seen a man on fire.

The boy walked close to him in the freezing snow. He had watched the man combust and then flail around like a chicken with his head cut off. Then the man had stopped and dropped to his knees, and then he dropped flat onto the ground and continued to blaze.

The boy stared at him, not sure what to do.

There was a lot of noise. Gun shots. An explosion. Crackling fire. A dog barking in the distance. Voices yelling.

The man screaming at him to run. Run.

The small boy turned and ran. He didn’t want to because it was cold. Not near the fiery man. Near him it was warm. But he had to run. He had to listen to the man that he had come here with.

Before he ran, he saw a special object on the ground. He wasn’t sure what it was. But it blinked. It was a small box-shaped object. He picked it up. Saw the blinking light. And he slipped it into his coat pocket.

“Run!” the man screamed again.

The small boy ran into the forest and over the thick snow and away from the nightmare sounds.

Chapter 25

Jack Reacher was far away from Red Rain Indian Reservation and far away from Cameron’s mind. At this moment, Cameron wondered where the hell Mike Jacobs was and how the hell he was going to find him. It looked like they would have to go out into the snowstorm and manually search for him. Door-to-door. They might have to go house-to-house. Maybe not everywhere. The best bet would be to start way out where Jacobs’ family house had been. Maybe he had escaped the terrorist cell and was hiding out. Maybe he was holding up, waiting for the storm to pass so that he could get in touch with Shepard.

Just then two unexpected things happened.

The community center and all of the people inside seemed to freeze as the lights flickered and then the power went out. The room went black.

A hum could be heard surging through the circuitry as the back-up emergency lights kicked on. The room filled with an unnatural feeling as the lights shot on. They were very bright. The white light filled the room like a blast from the sun.

The second thing that happened just then was that the door to the community center burst open.

The power from the reservation was out everywhere and the blackness burst in with the open door.

Reacher saw him first. A small Mexican boy stumbled into the center. He was covered in muddy snow and ice and frost. He shivered even though he wore a thick winter coat that was oversized for him. He came in and fell to the floor right in the doorway. The door slowly lapsed back to close and stopped against his body. Reacher started to scramble toward him as well as some people who were closer to him.

Reacher pushed through the crowd of people, ignoring the mumbling. He grabbed at the boy’s head and pulled him up. The boy was breathing, which relieved Reacher and also Amita. She had pushed through behind Reacher, using him as a forward blocker.

She said, “I don’t know him. Does anyone know him?”

She looked around the crowd of people. They all shrugged one after the other.

She asked, “Who is he? Where did he come from?”

Reacher stayed quiet.

Chapter 26

The small boy woke up lying on a cot in a strange place. He wasn’t sure where he was or how he had gotten there. He knew that one moment he was walking and freezing outside. A storm came and swallowed him up. He was scared, but now he felt safe.

Standing over him was a giant, the biggest man that he’d ever seen. Dark, short hair. Thick. Deep ice-blue eyes. He had a ridged brow and a hard face. He looked like one of those scary monster men from the movies on the channel that his mom said he wasn’t allowed to watch. Grownup movies she called them. Only in Spanish. He knew a little English from watching these movies. He knew bad words too.

The giant man didn’t scare him, even though he was scary, because the man had a nice manner. He was kind to the boy. He had put blankets on him and made sure that the boy was comfortable. Plus there was a Mexican police officer with him. At least she looked Mexican. She had dark hair and brown eyes. But she was somehow different from the Mexicans that he had known his whole life. And she spoke perfect English.

They had waited for the boy to get his breath back and his warmth.

The woman said, “Where are you from, honey?”

The small boy didn’t answer. His English was broken, but he understood that they wanted to know where he lived.

The monster man asked, “Where are your parents?”

The boy said nothing.

The monster man knelt down beside him and asked, “Do you remember anything?”

The boy scrunched his face in a funny expression that the monster man had never seen before.

Then he said, “Loud noise. Engine. Vrrrrm. Vrrrrm.”

The monster man looked at the cop.

She knelt down closer to the boy and asked, “Noise?”

The boy said, “Copper. Copper. Boom.”

The police woman asked, “Boom?”

Then the monster man folded his hands together and separated them in a violent, swift movement like an explosion. The small boy knew what he was asking and nodded.

He said, “Plosion.”

The woman police officer asked, “Explosion? Where?”

The monster man said, “Where did you hear the explosion?”

The small boy said, “Mi amigo. He protect. He protect.”

“Amigo,” the police woman asked. “Where is he now?”

The small boy swallowed and said, “Él está muerto.”

The monster man looked at the cop and said, “He is dead.”

She replied in a hushed voice, “Maybe it was his father?”

The monster man asked, “What’s his name?”

The small boy said, “Miguel.”

Then he paused a beat and said, “Pero algunos chicos le llamaban Jacobs.”

The policewoman froze and turned to the monster man and asked, “What?”

The monster man spoke Spanish because he translated. He said, “But some guys call him Jacobs. Mike Jacobs, our missing agent.”

Chapter 27

The snow piled up to Reacher’s shins. He knew that just by eyeballing it from the community center’s front windows. Even though everything outside was black from the power outage, he could still see because at the moment the stars shone through the break in the cloud cover.

The storm had a major pocket in the center that made it seem like it had blown past, but according to Amita’s father it was just the beginning. He had lived on the reservation all of his life and had experienced plenty of snowstorms.

“Plus,” he had added, “The guy on the radio said that there was more.”

The main street was far too snowed over to traverse by car. Reacher couldn’t see the entire road, only the whiteness of the snow in the parking lot that disappeared into the darkness like a white tongue vanishing down the back of someone’s throat.

Amita came up behind Reacher and tapped him on the back of the shoulder.

He looked back at her. She held out a police coat with the tribal police patches on it and a nice thick lining made of wool that had aged from a white to a sandy color.

She handed it to him along with a brown wool cap.

She said, “These are extras, my father’s. You should wear them. It’s far too cold out there for you to just wear that.”

He said, “Thank you.”

He grabbed the coat and the cap and draped the coat over his left forearm and held the cap in his left hand. He turned and looked down at her.

She said, “We’ve got to get out there. If the boy was talking about an explosion, there could be people who got hurt. We need to check it out.”

Reacher said, “I agree. We’d better get going now. This weather won’t stay quiet all night. We should start at the Jacobs’ family house. You said that he had a house somewhere?”

Amita said, “It’s up on the mountain, far away from almost everyone else.”

Reacher said, “Then that’s what I suggest. If he’s in trouble, he might be holing up there.”

“What about this kid? How does he fit in?”

Reacher said, “I have no idea. But we aren’t going to get the answers from him. We need to find Jacobs.”

“Agreed.”

“How do we get up there?”

Amita said, “Horseback is the only way.”

“What about snowmobile?”

“No snowmobile. The road is the only way smooth enough for snowmobile. I know that snowmobiles can traverse rugged terrain, but not like this. Trust me. Horseback is the best way. The terrain is far too rugged.”

Reacher shrugged. “Sounds good. Let’s get going. Where do we get horses?”

“The police department has some on standby. They belong to us but a local rancher stables them for us.”

Reacher said, “Where?”

“Just down the street. Not far. We’ll walk there. I’ve radioed ahead and told the rancher. He’ll have the horses saddled and ready to ride by the time we walk there. It’ll take us at least 15 minutes in the snow.”

Reacher stayed quiet. He nodded.

Amita said, “Also, my father wants me to give you a gun. We’ll be up there alone. He has to stay behind. He’s the only other officer. It’ll just be the two of us.”

Before Amita said another word, Reacher drew the Walther P99 and showed it to her.

Amita asked, “Where the hell did you get that?”

Reacher said, “The CIA agent gave it to me.”

“Is that the James Bond gun?”

Reacher said, “It is.”

“That’s a peashooter.”

“Hey. It’s not that bad. Not as bad as the smaller Sean Connery gun. This one has plenty of stopping power. Besides, if it’s good enough for 007, then it’s good enough for me.”

“Whatever. Does it work?”

Reacher said, “I haven’t field tested it.”

Amita said, “Better check it. Always check your weapon first. Don’t use an untested gun.”

“I know. I know. Let’s go outside and I’ll try it.”

They walked to the outer doors and Reacher stopped and slipped the Walther P99 back into the front pocket in his trousers. He opened up the extra police coat and slipped it on. The inner lining was nice and thick and warm. The coat was a decent fit. The sleeves were a little too short, but he had expected that. There weren’t a lot of clothes in the world that did fit his arms. Not in the greater sense of the world’s size and population, like when he thought about how many clothes were out there in the world. The world had seven billion people living in it and most of them had more than one set of clothes. Some had hundreds of items. Even thousands. Reacher wasn’t sure. He could imagine some celebrities owning maybe even a million sets of clothes. Some rich old actress. Collecting clothes her whole career. She could have mansions full of clothes.

Seven billion people on the planet. If everyone owned only two sets of clothes, then there would be fourteen billion sets of clothes in the world. Considering that most people owned lots of clothes and then others owned way more, Reacher couldn’t even calculate or imagine how many sets of clothes that there were in the world. A trillion? A hundred trillion? Who knows?

He was grateful to have the warm police coat even if it was a little short in the sleeves.

He followed Amita out into the snow. They walked to the rear of her police cruiser and stopped at the trunk. She pointed to a thick wooden fencepost at the rear of the community center. It was about 60 yards away.

She said, “There. Let’s go there.”

They walked through the snow and closer to the fence. When they got 25 yards from it, she stopped and pointed at it.

“Shoot at that.”

Reacher squinted his eyes so he could see and gazed at the fence and saw older bullet holes in the hoary wood. A device that Amita used regularly for target practice, he presumed.

He wasn’t sure about where she had imagined a bad guy to be, but it if was the obvious place, the spot where a bad guy could stand clearly, then she was a great shot. There was one space with many bullet holes clustered around it like that was where she imagined a heart to be.

Reacher pulled the P99 out of his pocket and rechecked the magazine and loaded it and cocked it. He looked down the sights at the fence. He braced the gun with one hand and held it out with the other. He didn’t need to brace himself for it. The P99 was a decent handgun. No reason to worry about muzzle climb or kick. It was a standard 9mm piece—lightweight and compact.

He breathed in and squeezed the trigger. Reacher hadn’t fired a gun in six months. But somewhere in his genes he knew that he would fire a gun sometime in the future. From what he knew of his father, remembered about his mother, and predicted about his future, he knew that guns were a vital part of that, no matter what.

The bullet rocketed through the air and the gunshot rang out and echoed through the trees and across the tops of the nearby buildings. Reacher fired only once. He tilted his head and looked beyond the barrel at the target. His shot had plugged a standard 9mm hole into the wood.

Amita giggled.

He turned and looked at her and asked, “What?”

“You call that shooting?”

“I hit the target.”

“Your shot is six inches from mine, which is obviously the center mass of that board.”

Reacher said, “I didn’t realize that you wanted me to aim. I was only trying to hit the fence.”

Amita said, “Whatever. Try it again.”

Reacher said, “Better that I don’t. The gun only holds 15 rounds in the magazine. Now it’s chambered and there are 14 rounds left in it. We might need them.”

Amita shrugged and then she said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

Reacher pocketed the P99, but this time he slipped it into his coat pocket. There was plenty of room in there, more than in his pants pocket.

They faced east and walked beyond the community center, along the road for a while, and then they turned north. Amita led the way. She walked through snow with ease like she was born in it. Reacher took slower steps, partially because he was heavy and his feet kept sinking into the snow. He felt like the tin man after a long period of being rusted over and not having any oil. If only there was an oil can for him to use. He wondered how Amita walked so gracefully through the terrain. Maybe it was because she was lighter. Maybe it was because she was used to it. Maybe her boots had some special winter soles. At any rate she was much faster and a lot more graceful than he was.

They walked for 39 minutes and 47 seconds, traversing hilly terrain and walking between some of the thickest trees that Reacher had ever seen, in real life or on  TV or on the Internet or in magazines.

Amita twisted and bobbed and walked through a clearing. Reacher followed. They crossed over a snow-filled ditch and Reacher saw a long wooden fence made of two parallel posts like the ones that he had seen in old Western movies on a cattle ranch. Then he saw a large brick house with snow-covered windows and smoke coming out of a chimney.

He heard sounds coming from the house. Television sounds. The guy still had power. As Reacher neared the house he saw and heard a generator underneath a canopy at the rear of the house.

Amita pointed beyond the house to a stable. She said, “There.”

Reacher saw the rancher. He was a short guy with features similar to Henry Little’s, only he was actually little. Same facial structure, like they could have been brothers.

The guy was smoking a cigarette and standing in a large doorway that led into the stable.

He watched them approach, took one last big puff from his cigarette, and flicked it into the snow. Reacher guessed it didn’t make any sense to put it out first. The snow wasn’t flammable.

The cigarette landed three feet from the guy. The flame died in a matter of seconds, partially because of the snow and partially because it was freezing out. That was the first time that Reacher had realized just how warm his new coat was. He felt much more comfortable than before. The temperature was cold, and that was an understatement to a guy like him, a guy who had never lived in cold weather, not like the mountains of northern Wyoming.

Amita stopped and talked to the guy for a moment and Reacher shook his hand and they introduced themselves.

The guy showed them to the horses. There were three of them, two large black ones and one pinto, with white and black coloring.

Amita asked, “Why are there three saddled up?”

The rancher said, “Your father said that you might need backup.”

“Backup?”

The rancher said, “You know, like reinforcements. He said that you guys were looking for a dangerous man.”

“No. We don’t need that. You stay behind. We can handle it.”

The rancher said, “But your father said...”

“I don’t care what he said. Tell him that I made you stay behind. Tell him that you went and everything was kosher. I don’t care, but you can’t go.”

“But what about the horses? The terrain?”

Amita rolled her eyes and said, “We’ll be fine. I’ve ridden horses before and I’ve lived here my whole life. You know that. No more arguing. We need to get going.”

The rancher shrugged and said nothing else about it. He turned and pointed at the horses and said, “You know what to do.”

Then he turned and strolled off back toward the house. He looked defeated and let down like a big kid not getting his way. Maybe he wanted to go. A dangerous mission probably sounded exciting to him. Maybe the guy never had any visitors. Not much excitement in his life. And therefore he jumped at the opportunity to do her father a favor and watch over her on this excursion. But Amita was right. As a police officer, it was her duty to protect the citizens of the reservation. She made the right call. Reacher didn’t know what to expect when they got to Jacobs’ family house. Maybe they’d find a CIA agent and maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they’d find danger and maybe they wouldn’t. The only thing that Reacher felt pretty positive about was that they weren’t going to find a CIA agent playing hooky. Which was the best case scenario, but playing hooky was something that high school kids did. People with regular jobs. Sometimes even cops and sometimes even soldiers, but never government agents of the most elite secret agency in the world. CIA recruits might have been guilty of playing hooky, but they probably never made it to a second day of being a recruit, much less a regular field agent. This wasn’t kid stuff.

Amita led Reacher to the horses, grabbed the reins on the pinto, and tugged on them. The horse huffed a low rumbling sound and followed her lead out of the stable. Then she looked at Reacher and said, “Grab the other one.”

Reacher assumed that it didn’t matter which horse and he reached for the younger-looking one and followed Amita’s lead. They all walked out of the stables and followed the snowy path that led off back into the trees and up the nearest peak.

Amita used her left foot in the stirrup and pulled herself up on the horse. Then she looked at Reacher, who seemed clueless.

She asked, “Ever rode a horse?”

“Once, a long time ago. I was a kid. I get the mechanics of it; I just haven’t tried in many years.”

She said, “Well. Come on. We don’t have all day. Maybe another two hours by the look of the weather and it’s going to take us 45 minutes to get to Jacobs’ house.”

Reacher shrugged and grabbed the horn with one hand and hauled himself up onto the horse. He pivoted one foot and launched himself over the top of the saddle. Then he righted himself until he was comfortable. The animal moved and shifted to counter his weight.

Amita laughed and smiled and started to make a wisecrack, but she just exhaled instead and shook her head. Then she kicked the horse gently and steered it off toward the path.

She called back to him, “Come on, city boy. Giddyap.”

Reacher smiled. City boy? No one had ever called him that before. But then again she didn’t know that he was from the rural corner of a rural state.

The two of them traversed through the ranch and into the trees. It only took about five minutes before they saw their first dead body.

Chapter 28

It was a dead dog.

Reacher and Amita stared down from their perch on their horses at a half-frozen dead Siberian Husky. Its tongue rolled out of its mouth and across its sharp canines. The tongue was the color of light blue. Reacher guessed that the poor animal hadn’t been dead very long. Less than two hours probably, mainly because it wasn’t covered in snow yet. Then again, the snow had slowed and the heavy tree branches above could’ve acted as an umbrella. Also, the cold weather could have preserved it or it could’ve made it look older than it was by turning parts of it blue.

Amita asked, “What happened to it?”

Reacher said, “There’s blood all underneath its hindquarters. See?”

He pointed at a deep black spot that sank way down in the snow.

He spun slowly and stumbled about and slid off of the horse. Amita followed suit, only she did it with the grace of an experience rider—one fluid action.

They huddled around the dog.

Reacher asked, “Recognize it?”

Amita said, “I don’t know. There are lots of them around here. Popular dog.”

Reacher nodded. He looked at the neck and said, “No tag.”

“They chew them off. Hard to keep a collar on a Husky. They won’t stop until they get out of it.”

Reacher stayed quiet.

Amita said, “No smell.”

Reacher said, “Too cold. The snow has buried part of the dog and probably masked the smell. So I’m guessing that he’s been dead for less than four hours.”

“So what killed it?”

Reacher gripped his hands around the legs. Left hand, front leg. Right hand, back leg. Then he heaved and pulled the corpse out of the snow and peeked underneath.

That was when the smell hit them like a blast of rotten air. It wasn’t a lot of stench, but it had been covered for a long time and now it came out in one big puff.

Reacher leaned back and let the smell waft by while Amita took a giant step back and took in a deep breath.

She repeated, “What killed it?”

Reacher looked down at a gaping hole in the right side of the animal, just above its back leg. Then he said, “Gunshot.”

Chapter 29

The topography through the trees was a gradual rise from a hilly area that eventually turned into a rocky one. The trees soon became sparser and the temperature dropped slightly—a factor of a higher elevation, combined with the gap in the storm closing and becoming blizzard weather again.

They rode the horses at a fast pace every chance they got, but for the most part the trip was at a fast walk. The flatter land had too many trees and the rocky land was too rocky and steep to full-on gallop with a horse. Then all of it was too snowy to force the animals to run. So it took about 45 minutes, as Amita had predicted.

The whole trek, both of them wondered who would shoot a Husky. At one point, Reacher thought, What kind of man would do that?

The other thing that ran through Reacher’s mind was that the whole way so far, there had been a long streak in the snow, followed by paw prints. They were set slow and spread about at first, but then deep and steady, plainly showing the dog’s march to death. The strange thing was that the dog was dragging something. The other thing that was obvious was the long streak of blood that eventually turned into droplets, like at first the dog had been shot, and then the farther it went the more it bled. And the farther they ventured, the more Reacher wondered what it had dragged for such a long distance and where that thing was now.

Amita spoke first about it.

She said, “That dog dragged something through the snow and then died. It must have been something important. What would the dog have dragged when it had a bullet in its leg?”

Reacher said, “I have no idea.”

Chapter 30

Police Chief Red Cloud watched the boy from near the window. He stared back out the window and watched the horizon for Amita. He wanted her to come back safely. Something about this whole situation didn’t make sense to him. It didn’t sit right with him. Why would the CIA be interested in Mike Jacobs? As far as he remembered, Jacobs was a not-so-special kid with dreams of leaving his home. As far as the chief was concerned the only thing that Jacobs ever did right was leave his daughter so that she could live her life without him. And thank God that he never got her pregnant. For that, Amita’s father was very grateful. Jacobs would have abandoned her to raise the kid on her own. Of that, Chief Red Cloud had no doubt.

He looked back at the boy. The boy sat upright. He looked around. No one was paying attention to him anymore. The adults were all preoccupied, talking in whispers.

Amita’s father watched as the young boy looked around like he was making sure that no one saw him. Then he reached into his coat pocket and pulled something out, something dark and small.

The boy shifted in his seat and fumbled with it some more. Amita’s father turned fully toward him and started to walk over. He got about halfway and saw that the boy was playing with a device that had a blinking red light on it. It blinked and blinked like the light on a plane.

The chief walked closer and saw that it was a peculiar thing for a child to have.

He inspected more closely. The device looked strange, like it had some purpose. Not as a toy.

It even looked high-tech, like it was military.

Chapter 31

The darkness surrounded them for most of the journey up the mountain, until they got to the top of a hill. Then everything was red like the sky just before the sun disappears over the western horizon. They couldn’t see the sky because it was filled with smoke. The smoke was thick and dark on the underbelly. Reacher imagined that above the smoke there were more clouds of harsh snow ready to come down.

Reacher stood up in his stirrups and gazed through the trees. He saw it.

Not too far off there was a smoldering structure. A torrent of fire raged and exhaled smoke.

The flames seethed and roared. The good news was that the only thing on fire was the structure. The trees were too far to catch fire and the ground was covered in snow. And soon the storm would return and put the flames out.

“Fire,” Reacher said. “Just over there. Looks like a house. Explosion. Maybe.”

Amita said, “Oh Jesus! That’s Mike’s house. Mr. Gareth!”

She kicked the pinto and screamed, “Yaw!”

The animal made a noise and picked up her pace and Reacher watched as Amita galloped up and passed the trees, heading toward the house.

Reacher kicked his horse in the rear and followed behind. He got to the house only a moment after she did, but he might as well have been a half hour after because she was already off her horse and standing over a dead body. It was turned over and she was kneeling down beside it like she had tried to resuscitate it and failed. Her shoulders hunched over and her head was buried in her hand.

Reacher walked up behind her. The flames crackled and one final remaining section of the house burned and crumbled and collapsed to the ground. The fire ate the house like a monster devouring breakfast.

“Who is it?” Reacher asked.

Amita looked back up at him with a look that Reacher had seen before. He had seen it on his mother whenever someone from her community had died in a traffic accident or a homicide or drug overdose and even a few suicides.

“It’s Mr. Gareth,” she said.

Reacher put his hand on her shoulder. He knew what it was like to support a woman cop during such a tragedy. His mother had relied on him many times for such a thing.

Then he studied the terrain. There was another corpse off about 40 feet from the house.

“Stay here,” Reacher said. He removed his hand and started to walk over to the corpse.

Amita stayed quiet.

He walked over to it and drew his gun. Kept it pointed at the ground down by his side. It was cold in his hand. The bullets, ready for his command, were cold in the magazine with one in the chamber.

Reacher stopped at the corpse and looked around. The fire from the house ripped some more and the flames bounced in the air, allowing him to see in a 360-degree radius for about 100 yards. Orange and red hues shone on the bottoms of the branches of the nearby trees like a strange reflection.

The heat melted the snow from the branches and near the bottom of the house.

The only things that didn’t burn on the house were the brick steps that once led to the front door and probably to a porch. Reacher imagined a big front porch. He imagined that when Jacobs was a boy, he and his father built the porch together. They hammered in the wood and shingled the roof and painted the whole thing. Maybe they hung a porch swing. Father and son working together, bonding. Something that he had never known.

Then years later, Mr. Gareth came along and enjoyed the fruits of their labor. And now he was dead.

Reacher studied the surrounding area. No one was around. No bad guys. No other bodies.

He looked down and investigated the dead body. It was charred. Completely.

Nothing was left but a shriveled dark man. No way to identify him. Anything that was in his pockets was burned to ash. His face was scorched to the bone. He had died a horrible death. If he had lived during the burning, it would’ve been the most horrible pain that Reacher could’ve imagined.

The only way to make a positive ID of the dead guy was teeth or fingerprints. The guy had worn gloves. Perhaps some of his fingerprints were still intact.

Reacher examined him closely. Most of the guy’s clothes were ruined. Burned up. No way to tell anything about him from that, but he was well armed.

Strapped to his leg was a charred gun. Reacher grabbed it and pulled it out of a hip holster. Only the holster came apart. Some of it still stuck to the gun. Fused to it.

The gun looked like a Beretta, but was badly damaged. No way to be sure. It had most likely been a 9mm.

There was also an all-steel three-inch knife shoved into a sheath on the guy’s belt. Most of the belt had been charred to nothing just like the rest of him. The knife was still intact. It was still a little warm from the fire.

Reacher pulled it out. Good knife. No reason to waste it. He couldn’t keep it, but he could put it to use. Maybe this was Jacobs. No way to identify his body by sight. So he grabbed the guy’s hand and peeled one of the fingers free from the gloves. Then he inspected it. Looked like the fingerprint was still visible on his left hand index finger. So Reacher hacked off the finger with one hard stab from the knife. The blade stuck deep into the ground beneath the hand. The tip of the finger leaped off like it was ready to separate.

He left the knife in the ground and scooped up the fingertip. He had nothing to wrap it up in so he just slipped it into his coat pocket—opposite side from the P99.

He returned to Amita.

She said, “Who is it? Is it him?”

“I don’t know who it is.”

“Should I look?” she asked.

“No. No point. The body is charred beyond recognition. Not even his momma would recognize him.”

Amita asked, “What are we going to do?”

Reacher said, “The power is on at the stationhouse right?”

“Generator.”

“I took his fingerprint,” Reacher said.

Amita asked, “How? You don’t have a fingerprint kit?”

“I mean that I took his fingerprint.”

Amita started to ask and then realized what he meant. He took his finger. Instead she said, “We can send it to the FBI. See who he is.”

Reacher stayed quiet.

She said, “What do you think happened here?”

Reacher said, “I don’t know for sure.”

He looked around some more. Walked away from her and stood over some shrapnel from the explosion. The front yard was littered with tiny fragments of the house. No sign of Jacobs. Some of the large pieces still burned far from the house.

Reacher walked around some more. Stared at something about 50 feet from the south side of the house. There were large imprints in the snow. Buried deep. Probably reached into the soil below. Reacher wasn’t sure what it was. Not completely.

The imprints were in the shape of a triangle. Each was several feet apart. There were no other tracks.

Reacher peered up at the sky. There was a clearing above the area and the house. No tree limbs. Just open air.

Amita said, “What?”

Reacher stayed quiet.

Amita said, “Reacher, what is it?”

Reacher looked around some more. He walked back to the charred corpse. Studied it closer. Then he walked back to the fire and stared at it. He looked around the house. Circled it. Searched the perimeter thoroughly. Then he returned to the corpse and searched farther away from it. He made it all the way to the trees before he saw a black object buried in the snow.

It was lone and black. The deadly end pointed directly at him. The safer end dug deep into the snow. He reached down and grabbed it with an assault grip. It was an ultra-short assault rifle by Heckler and Koch—the G36C. It had a collapsible stock and a silencer attached. No scope. This was a serious weapon. Expensive and no special forces. It was more likely used by mercenaries. Reacher figured that it was more likely a favorite of a particular freelance merc. Probably he was a part of a team.

The G36C fired a 5.56mm NATO round. It wasn’t as powerful as a rocket launcher, but it was far from a toy gun.

The G36C had been buried to the trigger in snow. It was backward so Reacher figured that there probably was no snow packed into the muzzle. Even if there had been, chances were that he could remove the silencer and the muzzle would’ve still been clear of snow. He figured that it would fire just fine. Just to be sure he unscrewed the silencer and slipped it into his coat pocket. He ejected the magazine and cocked the gun and a live round popped out of the side door. He repeated the action and nothing happened. No more rounds in the gun.

He inspected the muzzle and looked into the barrel. No trace of snow.

He reinserted the magazine and aimed it up into the trees and set the gun to single round fire. Then he breathed in and squeezed the trigger. The gun fired. The sound echoed in the trees and across the landscape and died into the clouds. The gun worked just fine. He brushed off the remaining snow from around the stock and the handle. There was no strap so he set the safety on and held the gun one-handed with the muzzle pointed downward and his palm around the magazine.

He turned and walked back around the house one more time. This time he walked back to the triangle and then saw something behind it. He walked a little farther and saw a pile of large, shiny metal objects. It looked like someone had dumped a large box full of coins onto the ground. After a moment of studying the metal objects, he grabbed one and squeezed it in his hand and then he walked to Amita.

He made his way back over to her. She was standing by the horses, holding their reins in one hand, down by her side.

She asked, “What the hell is that?”

She pointed at the assault rifle under his arm.

“It’s a Heckler and Koch G36C. Slightly modified.”

“Modified?”

“Silencer,” he said and pulled it out of his pocket, showed it to her, and slipped it back into his pocket.

She asked, “Where the hell did you get that?”

Reacher said, “I’m assuming that the charred body brought it with him.”

She asked, “Is it Mike? Do you think?”

“I don’t. I think that the dead guy over there was trying to attack the house. Mr. Gareth here was a casualty. Probably, Jacobs was holed up inside and he and Mr. Gareth tried to defend the house from invaders.”

Amita said, “Invaders? What is this? That’s a serious weapon.”

Reacher said, “Looks like a siege.”

“A siege? So Mike came to his old home to hide out. Mr. Gareth let him stay. Then the terrorist attacked the house and it exploded? Now what? Mike is dead inside? Or they got him?”

Reacher said, “I don’t know. But I doubt that these were terrorists. At least they aren’t Native American terrorists.”

“So what then?”

“Best guess?”

Amita said, “Yes.”

“I think that there’s something valuable at play here and these terrorists, whoever they are, are trying to get Jacobs. They are desperate and well financed,” Reacher said.

“How do you know that they aren’t Native? Didn’t you say that the CIA said they were Native?”

“That’s what they told me. But the CIA isn’t exactly famous for telling the truth.”

Amita nodded.

Reacher said, “There’s more. They also told me this wild story about a canister of weaponized Ebola.”

Amita’s jaw dropped and she said, “What the hell? You didn’t think to tell us this earlier?”

Reacher said, “I didn’t believe it. Not then.”

“Why not?”

“Weaponized Ebola? On an Indian reservation? Sounds more like fiction. It’s hard enough for me to swallow a story about a terrorist cell made up of local Native Americans and a missing undercover CIA agent,” Reacher said.

“So what? You think these CIA guys are lying to you?”

“One.”

“What?”

“I only met with one CIA guy, Shepard. He told me the whole story. I thought he was full of shit. But now.”

“Now what?”

“Now I’m not so sure.”

“Why?”

Reacher said, “I doubt the story about the Indian terrorists. But there are definitely bad guys here and they’re very serious guys. A Heckler and Koch G36 is expensive equipment. Plus...”

“Plus what?”

“Look around, Amita. Look at the ground. It’s covered in snow.”

“Yeah?”

“Besides the dog tracks leading from the house what other tracks do you see?”

Amita looked at the ground. She ignored the shrapnel and studied the snow. She saw footprints. Everywhere. And nothing else.

She said, “Footprints. Lots of them.”

“What else?”

She looked again and then she said, “Nothing. Nothing else.”

“So how did these guys get here?”

Amita said nothing.

Reacher said, “We had to ride horseback up the mountain just to get here. This house was attacked probably by several guys. There are footprints everywhere and different sets. There were at least five guys here. One is dead. I doubt that they walked up here. So they got here somehow.”

Amita nodded. She asked, “How?”

“Think about the boy. He said that he heard a loud engine.”

“Snow cat? But there are no tracks for that.”

Reacher shook his head. He pointed at the triangle where the deep holes were.

He said, “Helicopter. The bad guys have a helicopter. Those are landing gear marks. The chopper has retractable wheels.”

Amita stared at the holes in the ground.

Reacher said, “And how did the house explode exactly?”

Amita shook her head.

Reacher opened his hand and revealed the metal object that he had found in the snow. It was shell casing for M50 ammunition. It was a colossal bullet. Huge. The bullet would rip a limb off. It would tear a hole through a man so fast that it would knock him off his feet before the bullet exited. It could shoot through an engine block. No problem.

“They blew the house up with machine gun rounds from a big machine gun.”

Amita’s face turned as white as a ghost.

Reacher said, “There’s a mountain of these casings over there by the landing gear marks. I think this was from a Vulcan machine gun. It’s a turret attached to a helicopter. Normally a military chopper would have this kind of equipment. That means that our terrorists are well financed and well equipped.

“Whatever they’re after, I didn’t believe was Ebola. But now, I’ll believe anything. They went through a lot of trouble here to get it. It has to be something worth a lot.”

Amita said, “What next?”

Reacher said, “Next we go back to the station. The storm will be back soon. And we need to send off the prints. Find out who this guy is. Maybe we’ll find out who the bad guys are here. And I need to call Shepard.”

Chapter 32

They rode the horses all the way back to the police station. No reason to return them to the ranch. They decided to lock them up in a large, heated shed that was behind the community center. The situation required immediacy and Amita figured that she could apologize to the rancher later.

They reached the station just in the nick of time because not five minutes later the winds picked up and the snow started to hammer down again. It was slow at first, but steadily accelerated.

Reacher decided to call Shepard.

He stayed outside of the stationhouse while Amita went inside.

He pulled out the sat phone that Shepard had given him and opened it up and clicked it on. The light at the top blinked a blue color and the screen lit up. He searched through the contacts. There was only one—Shepard.

He dialed it.

There was a hum and a whine as the phone was relayed through satellites miles above the earth. Then there was a dial tone and a ring. Reacher waited for the phone to ring.

A voice came on.

“Reacher?”

“It’s me.”

Shepard said, “What’s the status? Did you find Jacobs?”

Reacher said, “No. Not sure that he’s alive. But something else is going on here.”

“What do you mean?”

Reacher thought for a second. He wasn’t even sure that he could trust Shepard. Certainly the man was hiding things from him. That was what he did for a living, lie to people.

Reacher said, “There was an attack on the reservation. House explosion. Looks like a siege. Dead bodies. Evidence of a helicopter.”

The line was silent.

Reacher said, “Is there something that you’re not telling me?”

Shepard said, “Reacher, I told you everything that pertains to the situation.”

“You’re sticking to the story of Ebola?”

“That part is real. It is imperative that you locate Jacobs. If he’s dead, did you get a visual confirmation?”

Reacher said, “No. No body.”

Shepard said, “We have to be sure. If he is dead, then you have to acquire intel. The clock is ticking. The CIA will not allow the weapon to get off the reservation.”

“What does that mean?” Reacher asked.

Shepard said, “You know what it means. You have the same time limit as before: when the storm subsides. Unless you have good news for me by then I’ll be forced to notify the Air Force of a new domestic target for them to bomb.”

Reacher stayed quiet.

The truth was that the whole story and threat seemed unbelievable to him. But Reacher knew from his mother’s stories and clues about his father that government cover-up was a real thing. And a guy like Shepard didn’t strike him as the type of guy who bluffs when it comes to national security.

And most certainly, things were far beyond the stage of unbelievability. The bad guys had a helicopter with guns on it, probably a stolen military vehicle or a foreign one at that. And the nearest government with military choppers that would loan them out to terrorists against America was probably across an ocean. Canada wouldn’t perform such an action in a thousand years and Mexico’s military probably couldn’t afford a chopper like that. Therefore, it was stolen, belonged to a group with access to foreign military arms, or was a civilian chopper, heavily modified after market. None of these options made Reacher feel any better.

He said, “Shepard, you need to do some research to find out who could have a military chopper. Look at radar or whatever; it must still be around somewhere. Probably parked on a rooftop or a clearing within 100 miles.

“No way would they get very far in this weather.”

Shepard said, “I’ll do that. If this isn’t a local band of ragtag terrorists then we have bigger problems, which means that we’ll have no option other than erasing the reservation. We can’t let the Ebola canister reach outside of that area.”

Reacher stayed quiet. He squeezed the phone.

Shepard said, “So get on it. Call me ASAP.”

Shepard hung up the phone.

Chapter 33

Cameron Reacher’s mother had taught him many lessons, but he had also learned from his father, even though Jack Reacher had never been around.

One such lesson that his mother taught him was also something that he guessed must have been his father’s practice too. The lesson is sleep when you can. A lesson that his mother had instilled in him with words, but a lesson that he had learned on the road in practice. It is imperative to sleep when you can because on the road, as in the field, you never know when you will have the next opportunity to sleep.

So Cameron Reacher did two things after talking to Shepard on the sat phone.

The first was to copy the fingerprints off the severed finger that he had carried back with him. Amita refused to touch it, so he inked it and fingerprinted it.

Amita took the sheet with the dead guy’s fingerprint and faxed it to the FBI while the phone lines were still up.

Reacher watched her do it and then he told her that she had better try to sleep. He said that he’d do the same.

The second thing that he did was check on the small Mexican boy. The kid was fast asleep.

Reacher returned to the police station and parked himself in the cell that he’d already slept one night in. By now it felt like a second home.

He took off his coat and left it hanging on the back of a chair that was pulled into the cell from the bullpen. Then he dumped himself down on the bed, lay down fully clothed, and shut his eyes. Time to sleep.

Sleep when you can.

Chapter 34

The snowstorm thundered and roared every so often, alerting Reacher’s ears, but he slept fine. The sounds stirred him for a moment and then he wafted back to sleep. No big deal. Nothing lost. Reacher had never slept in a snowstorm before and so he wasn’t familiar with the noises, but he had slept through hurricanes. He found that for the most part the sounds were the same—a lot of howling from the wind.

Amita stood out in front of the community center talking to her father. She explained to her father everything that was going on. She filled him in on the stuff that he didn’t know. The dead bodies. The fire. The Ebola. Everything.

Her father stroked his face, feeling the stubble from not shaving for a day or so underneath his fingers. A look of great worry fell across his face, a look that she hadn’t seen in years. The last time she had seen it was the day that she told him that she wanted to run away with Mike Jacobs, but then he had left her behind.

Her father said, “What do you make of this boy? What does he have to do with this mess?”

Amita asked, “Has he said anything else?”

“Not in English. He only seems to speak Mexican. Which I guess makes sense because that boy is a long way from home.”

Amita said, “I don’t know what he’s doing here. Reacher doesn’t either. You know…”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Amita, tell me.”

“Reacher is a pretty smart guy. Why is he a bum?”

Chief Red Cloud said, “He’s not. Technically.”

“He’s homeless.”

Chief Red Cloud said, “He is homeless, but he migrates from place to place. So technically he isn’t a bum. He’s a drifter or even a hobo.”

“Why is he doing that? Why live that way? He should be in college.”

“I agree, but it’s his life. Maybe he knows something that we don’t.”

The small boy rolled over on his cot and opened his eyes. He had forgotten where he was for a moment and felt scared. Then he remembered that his friend had rescued him. He remembered that his friend was still out there and would be coming for him. He believed that.

Then he thought about the monster man. The monster man had been nice to him too. Like his friend. The one who saved him. He wondered if they were friends. He wondered if the monster man was here to protect him too. So he sat upright and turned his head and looked right. Looked left. He saw no one that he knew. There were a lot of old people here. They all looked asleep.

He listened to the wind howl and moan. He looked down the aisle for the monster man. Saw no sign of him. He started to feel scared because the monster man was not around. So he turned and twisted his body and slipped off the bed. He was barefoot. The floor was cold underneath him like cement. He knew that. He had cement at his old house.

He walked quietly away from the bed and then he stopped and went back. He had forgotten his toy. He picked up the little black device and watched the light blink. Then he moved again and walked down the aisles. He peered down each one and looked at every face. There was no sign of the monster man.

The small boy decided to go down the hall and turn into a large room that he figured looked like a police station. He walked past a desk and through a doorway. It looked funny. He had seen it before. It was the type of doorway that detected metal. It was silent as he went through it.

Then he walked around some more desks. He checked between them and under them. Still no sign of the monster man.

He turned and heard a rumbling noise from another room. These rooms had bars in front of them.

He walked over to the first room and peered in. There was no one there. He moved to the second one and looked in. Then he saw him, the monster man. He lay sprawled out on a small bed.

The small boy smiled because the monster man was far too big to be on such a small bed.

He walked closer to the monster man and pulled out his device. The light on it was blinking faster. He didn’t know why. He reached up and tugged on the monster man’s sleeve.

Chapter 35

The night passed and grew old or young. If the days were measured in a life cycle, then this day was either an old, dying man or a young kid, depending on when the birth cycle started. So if midnight was death and zero hour was birth, then this night was a young boy.

The snowstorm thundered and roared every so often, alerting Reacher’s ears, but he slept fine. The sounds would grow and then diminish and then return again. After several hours of this, they began to diminish and didn’t return. And Reacher would’ve slept until morning only he felt something. He opened his eye abruptly and realized that he felt something tugging on his sleeve. He craned his head without sitting up and looked directly into the eyes of the Mexican boy.

“Hi, kid,” he said.

The boy said something in Spanish. It was too fast for Reacher to translate and also his Spanish wasn’t that great. High school Spanish only got a man so far.

Reacher sat up. The Mexican boy repeated what he was saying and still Reacher didn’t understand him so he merely nodded.

The boy reached his hand out, palm up, and showed something to Reacher. It was a small black device with a blinking light on it. Reacher snatched it up and studied it. The boy didn’t seem to mind.

Reacher said, “Shit!”

Chapter 36

The device was a Special Forces tracker or at least it looked like it’d be used by Special Forces. Reacher studied it. No trademarks. No logos. No “Made in China.” Reacher figured that it was definitely some kind of overt ops equipment.

He looked at the boy and asked, “Where did you get this?”

The boy shrugged.

Reacher said, “¿De dónde surgiódesde?”

But he wasn’t sure that he was saying the right thing.

The boy said something else in Spanish and Reacher didn’t follow.

Then the boy said, “Bad guy. Copper.”

Reacher knew he was saying a bad guy from the chopper. So he got up out of bed. The little boy looked up at him with big brown, confused eyes.

Reacher held out his hand gently and the little boy grabbed it. Reacher led him back through the police station, down the hall, and into the community center. They crept through, trying not to wake anyone up. Reacher peered around, studying faces, looking for Amita and her father. Then he heard voices in the distance.

He went outside and found them standing near the entrance. The freezing weather engulfed his face like a burst of flames. He nudged the small boy back inside so he wouldn’t freeze and went back out into the cold.

Amita said, “You’re awake. Neither of us could sleep. Not that we should anyway with all that’s going on.”

Reacher studied Amita’s face. She looked tired. Dark circles under her eyes, her makeup practically gone at this point. Her father looked even worse. He needed sleep. His face was worn, like old leather.

Reacher said, “You two should’ve gotten some sleep.”

Amita said, “We’ll sleep tomorrow.”

Reacher hoped that she was right. Then he said, “Do you see this?”

He showed them the device.

“I found the boy with it.”

The father said, “I saw him with it earlier. What is it?”

Reacher said, “It’s a tracker. He must have gotten it off one of the bad guys, probably the dead one. The charred guy. I think that he picked it up while he was escaping. Then he collapsed in the cold and the dead dog we found dragged him through the snow and down some of the mountain until it died from a gunshot. The bad guys must have been shooting at it.”

Amita said, “Why would they shot at a little boy?”

Reacher said, “I don’t think that they were trying to kill him. I think maybe they were trying to recover him.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. But there’s more going on here than a canister of Ebola.”

“What else is going on?”

Reacher said, “Something to do with this boy. He’s from Mexico. We know that, but how did he get here? Where are his parents?”

Amita shrugged.

“We need to find Jacobs,” Reacher said. “He holds the answers.”

Amita asked, “Is he alive?”

Reacher said, “We haven’t found him dead. Maybe he was in the fire, but maybe not. If he didn’t die and the bad guys didn’t get what they wanted then they’ll be back. The boy picked up this tracker not knowing what it was. But this means that now they know where he is. Or they’ll figure it out soon.”

Then Reacher dropped the tracker to the ground and stomped on it hard. Once. Twice. Three times. Finally it shattered into tiny fragments.

Reacher said, “We’d better get ready. This storm is slowing down. We may have visitors. Amita, you’d better check to see if the FBI responded on that print. We need to know who we’re dealing with exactly. And call them. And call the state police. We’ll need some backup.”

“What about the CIA?”

Reacher said, “They aren’t going to help us. But I’ll call Shepard and make sure that he doesn’t use any drastic measures.”

Reacher pulled out the sat phone and dialed and let it ring and ring.

Shepard answered, “Reacher, have you found him yet?”

Reacher said, “I don’t know where the hell you got your intel from, but it’s a joke.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Reacher said, “We got some problems up here. There is no Indian terrorist group. There’s a much bigger threat here. There’s an outside hostile force.”

Shepard said, “What are you talking about?”

“If you want to get this canister of Ebola back, then you need to quarantine the reservation and send in the National Guard. We’ve got a well-armed force coming up here. From out there. They attacked Jacobs at a nearby house and blew it up. And Shepard, they have some impressive firearms. I found a Heckler and Koch G36.”

Silence on the other line.

Reacher said, “Also they have a military chopper. With guns.”

Shepard said, “Military chopper? Reacher, are you sure?”

“About as sure as I can be. I saw the tracks from the landing gear. Also they used a Vulcan machine gun to destroy a house.”

Shepard said, “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. There were shell casings from the bullets all over the ground.”

Silence again.

Then Shepard said, “This is serious, Reacher. We’ll get you out of there. Then you’re right. This situation is too big for us. We’ll have to involve the governor and National Guard.

“Just stay put for now. I’ll get back to you.”

Then he clicked off and the line went dead.

Reacher stared at the phone and slipped it into his pocket.

Amita had left while he was on the call. He looked at the chief.

Red Cloud said, “This Shepard doesn’t seem trustworthy.”

“I know. CIA never is.”

Red Cloud said, “What do you think?”

Reacher said, “I don’t know yet. But we can’t just wait. We need to find Jacobs.”

Amita came back out of the community center, holding a fax in her hand. She showed it to them. Half of the page was blank like it had gotten cut off in the transmission.

She said, “The phone lines are down. Right in the middle of sending it. The Internet is out too. Right now your sat phone is the only working communicator.”

Reacher said, “And that will only last as long as the weather holds up.”

Amita said, “You have to see this guy’s FBI file. There’s something seriously wrong with it.”

Reacher looked at it. The guy’s name was Cory Philips. He had all the basic background aspects that Reacher had expected—place of birth, age, college, military service, Special Forces training, tours in Iraq, and redacted missions as well. The one thing that was unusual was that Cory Philips had died two years ago in a helicopter crash.

Chapter 37

The snow continued to fall, but was no longer beating down. The skies were still clearing and Reacher knew that this meant that Shepard would be getting anxious for news on Jacobs. So far all they had was no terrorist cell, no Jacobs, and no sign of a weaponized Ebola. Instead they had a dead mercenary, who was apparently supposed to have been dead years ago, and a Mexican boy that made no sense why he was even here.

Reacher said, “What the hell is going on?”

Amita said, “I don’t know, but I think that your CIA agent is lying to you.”

Reacher said, “I know he’s lying. He’s CIA. They lie. But what is he lying about?”

Amita said, “What do you think?”

Reacher said, “I think that he’s telling the truth about Jacobs. He might be telling the truth about the terrorists. Someone is attacking us. But I’m not sure about this Ebola thing.”

Amita said, “Maybe his ass is on the line for something else. Maybe he’s just using you because you aren’t affiliated with them. Plausible deniability.”

Reacher said, “Makes sense.”

Amita said, “Call him and ask him. Confront him.”

Reacher said, “No. Better if we find Jacobs ourselves. Get the truth.”

Just then, Amita’s radio burst to life. The radio waves worked again. The storm had ceased enough to allow for the antennas to receive transmissions.

Amita’s father was on the channel.

He said, “Amita! You’d better get back here. Reacher too.”

Amita acknowledged with an affirmative and they headed back inside.

They reached the double doors and found that Chief Red Cloud was waiting outside for them.

He said, “Ray Collins who lives up there on the mountain just came down. He’s inside and scared. He’s spouting off something about an intruder in his house.”

Reacher said, “Where does he live exactly?”

Amita said, “He’s the closest neighbor to Jacobs’ house.”

Reacher said, “We’d better talk to him.”

They went inside the community center, following Chief Red Cloud.

Inside the people were all awake. They sat on the floor or on cots side by side. There were folding chairs mixed up along the back walls with people sitting and facing each other like they had been deep in conversation.

Chief Red Cloud said, “He’s over there.”

He pointed to a short old bald man with a long dark blue sweater and thick boots caked in snow. Reacher figured that he must’ve run from his house and marched straight to the community center and police station.

Amita walked over to him first, greeted him, and patted his shoulders. She had genuine concern in her eyes. Reacher thought that she would make a fine sheriff someday. No doubt about that. He had seen the good qualities needed in an extraordinary sheriff in his own mother and Amita had those same qualities, for the most part.

Then Amita asked him to explain what was going on now that he was calmer. Reacher figured that he must have burst in on a large group of sleeping people and then started making frantic noises, waking everyone up, probably startling them. Now they were confused and scared.

Ray Collins had some fear left in his voice. He described a scene where a large explosion woke him. The Jacobs’ house, Reacher presumed. About 20 minutes after that, a man barged into his house with a gun. He didn’t recognize the man. He said that the guy’s face was covered in blood and snow and grime. But he said it was strange because the man knew his name.

The guy made him wait for a while. The guy took the keys to his truck, even though it couldn’t drive because of the snow. Then the guy just let him go. Told him to run and not come back for a few days.

Amita didn’t wait for any more of the story. She pulled Reacher by the arm and said into his ear, “We’d better get up there. Must be one of the bad guys.”

Reacher shook his head and said, “I doubt it. Why would the bad guy let Mr. Collins go?”

Amita stayed quiet.

Reacher said, “I think that we’ve found Mike Jacobs.”

Chapter 38

Before they left, Reacher decided that it was best to take the Heckler and Koch G36 with him. So he took it outside and test fired it like he had the P99. And it worked perfectly. With single shot fire selected, he aimed and fired a round straight through his earlier target. He hit almost the same area.

Amita shook her head and acted like she was unimpressed. Then Reacher needed a strap to carry the gun, so he asked if Amita had anything that would work, like an old worn pair of boots. He could use the laces. She took him into the stationhouse and opened a cabinet of what appeared to be old lost-and-found items. Reacher found a pair of boots, looked at the size and it was one inch bigger than his own, which was acceptable. So instead of taking the laces from the boots, he took off his own shoes and traded them for the boots. After he laced them up and tested them and was satisfied, he grabbed the old shoes and took the laces out of one. He tied one end of the lace to the handle, made it a tight knot, and then he tied a duplicate knot to the stock. Now he had a useable strap. He double checked that the safety was on and slung the gun over his shoulder and across his back. He carried it like an ancient barbarian carried a sword.

Reacher asked, “Do you have a long gun available?”

Amita said, “I have a shotgun in my police cruiser.”

“Reacher said, “Get it.”

And then he unlaced the other shoelace and readied it. He waited. One minute. Two. Then Amita returned with the shotgun.

It had no strap, as Reacher had figured. So he tied two more knots. One around the barrel and one around the stock. Amita slung it across her back and now they both looked like ancient warriors carrying their weapons this way. Like a husband and wife of old, fighting their way across the land on horseback.

Reacher smiled.

Amita and Reacher mounted the horses and headed out onto the snowy terrain and up the mountain. They followed a similar route as before, making a similar journey, and using the same amount of time, only they turned at a junction that Reacher hadn’t paid attention to the last time and they veered off to the northeast. They came to a clearing and an open spot of land that must have been a snow-covered driveway. There was an old wooden house standing tall with large windows that were much newer than the rest of the structure. Hurricane windows, Reacher guessed.

There was a flagpole with no flag. It was surrounded by a small rock base.

The rope on the pole flapped and batted up against the steel.

Reacher saw that the snow had covered the steps leading up to the house, but that there were footprints through it. And there was clearly a path of footprints that led off toward the main center of the reservation.

“Mr. Collins,” Amita said.

Reacher nodded. He imagined Collins being attacked by CIA agent Mike Jacobs. Jacobs took him hostage, but only to keep him safe from the bad guys in case there were more of them. Then when the coast was clear, Jacobs let him go. And probably buckled down for the rest of the night to ride out the storm. Since Collins was still alive and had only just arrived at the community center, then perhaps he had left his house a little over an hour ago. Running down the mountain, gravity on his side, and adrenaline pumping through his veins, not to mention fear driving him, the guy probably made impressive time. Maybe even less than an hour.

Reacher hoped that Jacobs was still there.

They made their way into the clearing and approached. They decided to tie the horses off on the mailbox at the end of the drive. They didn’t want to approach on horseback in case the intruder started shooting at them. Better to approach on foot.

They both drew their weapons and readied them in case they had to use them.

Reacher took point. He led Amita up to the house. The occupants would have probably heard the horses in the distance, but maybe not. So far they had no problems.

The goal of approaching a house with armed combatants inside is to reach cover as quickly and as quietly as possible.

Reacher had no problem with the quiet part, but moving fast in the snow wasn’t easy. He had to watch where he stepped while watching the house for signs of the enemy.

Amita was good. She approached from the left and Reacher came in from the right.

He glanced at every window and back to the front door. No sign of awareness on the part of the hostile inside.

Amita was faster and quieter than Reacher. She crept up and reached the porch before he did. She stopped, turned, and kept the shotgun pointed toward the front door.

Reacher made it up onto the porch. The boards creaked underneath his bulk and he paused a beat to wait to see if anyone had heard him. Nothing happened. So he continued over to Amita and they paused in front of the door.

She leaned into him and whispered, “I should announce ‘police.’”

Reacher whispered back, “Don’t do it. Let’s breach.”

Amita nodded.

They both prepared to breach the entrance. Amita stood back to the left of the door and Reacher stood in front in a position to kick the door in.

First he reached forward and tried the knob slowly, while prepared to jump right if gunfire came back at him from the other side of the door. The knob turned and the door popped open with a faint groan. Reacher moved to the right with his G36 pointed at the entrance. He pushed the door open with the muzzle.

The door swung open all the way and Reacher peeked in. He saw nothing. He opened it all the way and stepped in, keeping his gun sweeping slowly from side to side, checking corners, and checking doorways. No movement. Nothing happened.

The house was mostly dark. A dim light from a lamp lit up the living room and shone on the floor in the hallway. There were pictures of kids and grandkids littered on the walls. Reacher saw bloody handprints smeared down the wall toward the stairs. One print was right on top of a picture of the whole Collins family.

Amita followed Reacher with the shotgun pointed in the opposite direction and downward. She was careful to keep him out of the area of fire.

He signaled to her to show her the prints along the wall. She gazed at them and nodded. Together they thought of the possibility that their intruder was wounded. They continued to search the hallway and they found nothing.

The living room had more family pictures all over the place. The owner had no television. Reacher liked that. Instead it was obvious what the old guy did for entertainment because on the eastern wall there was a huge bookshelf. It stretched the length of the wall—about ten feet.

Reacher took a glance at the books and scanned the titles. Lots of science fiction. Old ones too.

Then they heard a noise from above—a creak and a thud.

They turned and headed quickly to the staircase. It was in the hallway and faced an open doorway which led to the kitchen. The kitchen was wide open. They could see perfectly into it without having to enter. There were no hiding places.

They both pointed their guns up the stairs. No movement. A light stretched out across the top landing and over the top three steps.

Reacher took point again. Placed his hand up in the air and closed his fist—standard military signal to stop. At least that’s what he thought. He had never been in the military, but had come from a military family and he was sure that he had seen such a signal somewhere before. Probably some bad movie. Amita seemed to understand because she halted. He went first.

The G36 was smooth and comfortable in his hands like it was an extension of him. One thought and his finger would squeeze the trigger and kill the first hostile bad guy that he saw. But no bad guys came out at him. No one moved from the top floor.

As Reached neared the top he saw that there was only one room. It was an open bedroom. It was huge. Took up the whole top floor.

Reacher completed the stairs and entered the bedroom. More books littered the room. They were stacked up high—three feet in some places.

The bed was a king-sized bed that Reacher was sure made Mr. Collins feel lonely if he slept in it alone. There were no signs of a female inhabitant. Reacher figured that Mr. Collins had lost his wife. Imagined that the old guy lived alone.

A lonely life, Reacher thought—solitary like his own. Reacher understood the attraction to such a life. Understood the appeal of it to his father. Some people were meant to settle down. Some people are comfortable with that. Some people are not. Mr. Collins had tried both, apparently.

Reacher lowered the gun because lying on the bed and snoring like a man who hasn’t slept in days was Mike Jacobs. The noise from earlier must’ve been his collapsing in exhaust. He was covered in blood, but obviously alive and well.

Chapter 39

Blood covered CIA Agent Mike Jacobs’ clothes, but none of it was his apparently because there were no visible wounds on the man. Also he snored like a man in a coma and Reacher had never heard of a man who was bleeding to death snoring and sleeping so soundly.

Reacher knew it was Mike Jacobs for two reasons. First, simple deduction: A man broke into a home and released his hostage unharmed. A bad guy would’ve just killed Mr. Collins. But not this guy.

The second reason was Amita Red Cloud’s reaction. She dropped her shotgun and ran to the guy like a woman still in love with her ex. She had recognized his face. Reacher imagined that the only difference was this guy was probably thinner than he once was and he had a full beard. Reacher figured that the guy was once heavier because this version of Mike Jacobs was skinny, like he hadn’t eaten in weeks. His body was bony and frail. And there were two open and empty boxes of cereal sprawled across the bed. As well as two empty bottles of mineral water.

It looked like he had fought the mercenaries at his own house and killed one, gotten the guy’s blood all over him, and then run here. Reacher imagined that for some reason he hadn’t eaten or slept for days. Maybe he was holed up in that house. Maybe in the attic. Maybe the old guy that lived there, Mr. Gareth, hadn’t even known. Jacobs’ stowing away in his attic got the guy killed.

Reacher figured that that was why he sent Collins out on his own so quickly. To keep another innocent man from being killed because of his actions. Now Reacher needed to know what was going on.

Amita shook Jacobs and said, “Mike? Mike? Wake up!”

Reacher stayed quiet. He looked down at a Beretta 9mm. It lay on the bed. He picked it up. It was very light. He ejected the magazine. The gun was empty. He pulled back the slider. No bullet chambered. The gun was completely empty. Jacobs must have fired all of the bullets back at Gareth’s house.

Reacher said, “He fired all of his bullets back at his house. He took Collins hostage with no intention of hurting him. And I think that it’s obvious this has something to do with the Mexican boy.”

Amita stopped shaking him and turned and asked, “But what?”

Reacher said, “I don’t know, but maybe this case will tell us.”

He showed her a bulletproof briefcase that he found near the bed.

She stared at it confused and she asked, “Is that the Ebola?”

Reacher said, “No way! It wouldn’t be in a briefcase.”

“It looks tough,” Amita said.

“It’s bulletproof. No doubt about that, but it’s not made to transport a biological weapon. It’d be a lot bigger and look different. Different metal.”

“So what’s inside?”

Reacher plopped it down on the bed near Jacobs and looked at the combination lock on the outer lip.

He said, “Find a toolbox. We need a hammer.”

Amita nodded and got up and headed downstairs. Went straight to the kitchen and checked under the sink, which she figured was the most obvious place to keep one besides a garage or tool shed. The house had neither, so the kitchen was the next best place to check.

She found a large toolbox. She lifted the whole thing. It was heavy. The tools inside shuffled around and rattled as she moved. She didn’t bother opening it. She figured that it was better to bring the whole thing upstairs.

After a few minutes, she returned to the bedroom rattling a large toolbox. Reacher got up and grabbed it one-handed.

He took all of the weight from her with no problem. Then he set it down on the floor and moved the briefcase to the floor, better to hammer on the lock on a harder surface than on the bed.

He popped open the toolbox and saw a large hammer, grabbed it, slid the toolbox aside, and then hammered hard at the combination lock. It only took three powerful blows and the lock was destroyed. The case had cracked open on the second smash of the hammer and Reacher flipped the hammer and pried open the case with the back of the hammer’s head. In two powerful attempts the case opened.

Reacher jerked up on both feet like he was a jack-in-the-box. He just shot straight up. Amita covered her mouth, which had dropped open in shock.

They both stared without blinking for almost a minute. Soundless and silent. Nothing could be heard in the entire house except the light snow outside and the loud snoring from Agent Jacobs.

The briefcase’s contents sparkled and glimmered at them. It was full of diamonds. More diamonds than Reacher imagined possible.

Chapter 40

Scared the shit out of me is an expression that means you scared me—bad! Those were the words that best expressed how Mike Jacobs felt when he woke up to see Cameron Reacher standing over him.

Jacobs woke up in a strange bed in a strange house. He had confusion and fear in his eyes. Reacher watched as he reached quickly for his Beretta. But Reacher had moved it, not that it would’ve mattered since it was empty anyway.

Amita stepped into view and said, “Mike, calm down. It’s me. It’s Amita.”

Jacobs said, “Amita?”

“Yes. It’s me.”

Jacobs said, “How? Where am I?”

“You don’t remember?”

Jacobs began to sit up and it became obvious that he had a headache like a truck had hit him. It was like someone had shot an arrow right through his head.

Mike Jacobs was a good-looking young guy. He was a short guy, probably 5’8” or 5’9”, but despite the fact that he was skinny, it looked like once he had been built solid like a triathlete. Reacher figured that this guy must have taken his spy craft seriously and especially the physical side. He spent lots of hours in the gym, unlike Reacher who had a naturally solid build combined with walking constantly.

Jacobs said, “I remember. Ditching a truck that I stole back in Tower Junction. And I got a ride to the reservation. I remember sneaking into my old house with...with...”

He started to look around, slowly at first and then frantically. Then he looked panicked. He said, “Tomas? Tomas?”

Reacher said, “He’s safe.”

Amita asked, “What? Who?”

Reacher said, “The boy. He’s safe.”

Jacobs calmed down and said, “Okay. Good. Where is he?”

Reacher said, “He made it out. We got him. Safe in the town. With Chief Red Cloud.”

Jacobs looked relieved and nodded.

Reacher said, “Why don’t you tell us what the hell is going on?”

Jacobs said, “First, who are you? Are you with them?”

Reacher said, “I’m no one. I’m just a guy passing through. A total stranger.”

He figured that it was best not to mention Shepard yet. At this point, he felt that Shepard was not a guy that he should trust.

Picking up on the same idea, Amita said, “It’s true he’s not with anyone. Mike, what’s going on?”

Jacobs sat up and said, “I have to get Tomas and get out of here. They know that we’re here.”

Reacher said, “Slow down. Just tell us what’s going on.”

Jacobs said, “There’s this guy. Two years ago he came for me. At school. I had filled out online applications everywhere. And I was rejected everywhere, but it was the CIA that called me.”

Reacher slipped the G36 across his back with the homemade strap and listened. Amita sat down on the bed next to Jacobs and held his hand.

Jacobs said, “This guy. Shepard. He recruited me after I interviewed and sent me to the CIA farm to learn tradecraft. Then after a grueling experience I was assigned to work on his team. He insisted on me.”

Jacobs turned in the bed and faced a large two-panel window that was behind Reacher.

He said, “This guy. He’s unlike anyone that you’ll ever meet. He can convince you of anything.”

Reacher said, “I know. I met the guy.”

Jacobs started to turn white. It was unlike anything that Reacher had ever seen, but he was not surprised.

He said, “Shepard picked me up in the next town. Asked me to look for you because his guys were getting nowhere. They were searching and harassing the locals, but no one knew anything. I’m guessing because you didn’t reveal yourself.

“You’re bone thin. Like a man who’s been hiding out for weeks. I’ve seen it before. With fugitives. They hide out in the woods or some abandoned house and never eat.

“Shepard fed me this story that you were undercover and looking for a terrorist group on the reservation. Searching for a missing canister of Ebola.”

Jacobs looked confused. Then he said, “I’m so thin because of guilt. I stopped eating a while ago. Then I ran and now I’m like this.

Reacher nodded and continued, “But I never really bought into it. Not really. I believed that he was CIA. I believed that you were missing for some reason. He didn’t want to tell me the truth. I accepted that, but a weaponized biochemical weapon missing on an Indian reservation seemed ridiculous. But he was very convincing. I figured that it was something.”

Amita said, “When did you figure that he was lying?”

Reacher said, “Always. But I didn’t know he was the bad guy in all of this until just now. Look at how white Jacobs turned when I mentioned his name.”

Reacher turned to Jacobs and said, “Why don’t you tell us why you’re so scared of him.”

Jacobs said, “He is evil. Pure evil.”

Amita asked, “What has he done?”

Jacobs said, “He really is a CIA agent. That part is true, but he’s twisted.”

Reacher said, “As I imagine a lot of them are.”

Jacobs said, “He is in the moneymaking business and not the spy business as much as you think.”

Jacobs paused a beat and said, “The man is a hero to the CIA because he has a great track record of acquiring information. But his methods are...”

He paused again and swallowed and said, “Horrible.”

Reacher stayed quiet.

Jacobs said, “He’s in the ransom business to name one thing that he does. My first time out with him was two weeks ago. I was nervous and scared and excited.

“He picked me up at a Texas airport and we went to Fort Hood. They had this stealth chopper, a Comanche RAH-70. It was awesome! We rode the chopper across the Mexican border. Our mission was to gain intel from a Mexican diplomat. He knew of information of a pending military coup. At least that was what Shepard told me.”

Reacher said, “The Comanche RAH-70. It’s real?”

Jacobs said, “It’s very real.”

Reacher said, “Go on.”

Jacobs said, “The CIA uses a carrot-and-stick approach. I thought that we were going to start with the carrot. Only we went right to the stick.”

Jacobs paused again. He looked at Amita. Then he looked down like he was ashamed of the next part of the story.

He said, “We planned a kidnapping operation. Shepard’s guys. They had all worked with him for years. I was the only one who was new. He dressed up the mission briefing like he was explaining it to a new group. But really it was just me. I was the only rookie.

“The other guys are just as evil as he is. He explained it all like a routine CIA mission. Like it was the way things were done. He explained to me that it was like being a cop. They teach you the classroom stuff and then you learn the street stuff.”

Jacobs stopped, looked at Amita again. Her eyes stared into his. Reacher could see that there was still a lot of love between them.

Reacher said, “What happened?”

Jacobs said, “They didn’t tell me what we were doing. Not completely. I swear. We kidnapped this Mexican guy’s wife and son.

“Oh, God! I really didn’t know!”

Reacher said, “Calm down. What happened next?”

“At first nothing happened. Shepard made it all seem routine and fake. You know like we had to be mean to them to make them think that it was real. The guys beat the wife. Right in front of the kid. It felt very real.

“Shepard could see the uneasiness on my face. He kept reminding me that it was all an act. They weren’t really going to do any permanent damage. He was ransoming their lives so that the Mexican guy would share information with us. This is how he always got such great information. He used the stick. But it got worse. Much worse.

“The Mexican guy was scared for his family. Of course. So he gave up all the information that Shepard wanted. He gave him names and dates of all kinds of secret Mexican government goings-on. But Shepard wasn’t satisfied. We didn’t turn the family back over.

“Instead, they raped and killed the wife. It was slow at first. Like they all took turns. They wanted me to participate. But I didn’t. I refused. I stayed with the kid. I protected him from them, but when those monsters killed his mother, I knew it was over for him as well.

“Then I found out that Shepard wanted more than information. He ransomed the kid for diamonds. A shitload of diamonds. He made me pick them up. He promised that they would trade the kid for them.

“So I did it. I’m the only face that the Mexican guy has seen. When I returned to our meeting place, they still had the kid. So I did the only thing that I could. I reacted without thinking. I shot one of them and took off with the kid and the diamonds.

“We stole a car and snuck across the border. I was careful all the way. I used my training to get us away from Shepard and away from Mexico. I really didn’t know what I would do with the kid, but I couldn’t just leave him someplace. Shepard would kill him.

“So we drove on. Occasionally, I traded up our vehicles trying to remain untraceable. And we got to the reservation about two weeks ago. Or I don’t know. I lost time really. The winter came. I kept Tomas fed, but I couldn’t eat. We found food. But my nerves kept me from eating and sleeping. Finally, I passed out and that’s when they came for us.

“I killed one of them, but they killed Mr. Gareth. And I thought that they took Tomas too. But you have him?”

Amita said, “He’s safe. He’s with my dad.”

Reacher said, “Jacobs, I owe you an apology because I led Shepard right to you.”

Jacobs nodded, said nothing.

Reacher said, “We’ll deal with it now.”

Jacobs said, “How?”

Reacher said, “We’ll give Shepard the stick.”

Chapter 41

Darkness took its last breath and relinquished its life. Daylight slivered over the horizon and stabbed through the snow-covered trees and through the shantytown portion of Red Rain Indian Reservation.

Thirty minutes earlier, three armed men and one pilot boarded a Comanche RAH-70 and took off into the air, flying low, just above the trees.

The rotors hummed and the engine vibrated about as silently as a helicopter could sound. As the sun began ascending from its sleep, the pilot could see the rotors’ circular shadow washing across the tops of the trees as they flew west.

Alex Shepard removed the silencer from his Heckler and Koch G36. There was no point in keeping it. Not now. They were going to the beginning of the reservation to where they had received a steady transmission from the tracking device from the guy that they had lost in the attack on Gareth’s house.

Shepard had spoken to the drifter, Cameron Reacher, and confirmed that there had been no sign of Jacobs, but that the small Mexican boy was alive and on the reservation. That was all he really cared about. Jacobs was dead. He was probably in the house when they blew it up. And soon the boy would be in their hands again. He would hopefully lead them back to the diamonds and then they could kill him. Probably toss him out of the helicopter as they flew back to Fort Hood.

No real loss, Shepard thought.

Of course they would have to kill the entire population on the reservation. At least all of the ones who were witnesses. Before they had lifted off, the pilot had made sure that the Vulcan machine gun was completely loaded and they had standby cartridges with plenty of firepower for their purposes.

The chopper flew and yawed and they turned and were over the community center in minutes.

The pilot hovered the craft over the grounds and saw a clear spot in what looked like a snow-covered parking lot.

He twisted in his seat and yelled back at Shepard.

“I’m setting her down right there.”

Shepard nodded and looked at the two agents that Reacher had beaten up earlier.

He said, “Lock and load, boys.”

The agents were dressed in all white, thick winter gear with Kevlar vests on. Each was armed with a G36 and a Beretta holstered as a sidearm.

They jumped out of the Comanche and prepared a stance, all facing the doors to the community center.

Shepard signaled to one guy to cover a hole where an orange door used to be to the police station in case someone came charging out of the darkness. The remains of the door was still on the ground from where the tornado had blown it off.

The guys stood, ready to breach the doors.

Chapter 42

Amita Red Cloud grabbed her radio and called her father, but no one answered the line.

She looked at Reacher and said, “What if Shepard has already moved in? We’ve got to get back there!”

Reacher nodded and said, “I’ll call him.”

Reacher pulled out the sat phone again and called Shepard.

The phone rang and rang, a long minute. Then finally the interruption of quiet breathing came over the receiver and a voice answered in a whisper.

“Reacher?” Shepard said.

“Yes. I have him.”

Shepard asked, “Who? Jacobs?”

Reacher said, “Yes. And I found the case that you’re looking for.”

Shepard paused a beat. He waved at his men to halt their assault on the community center.

“You have the case?”

“I have the case and I have Jacobs.”

“Is he alive?”

Reacher said, “He is. And your diamonds are here waiting for you.”

Amita whispered, “What are you doing?”

Silence fell over the line and then Shepard said, “So then you know the truth?”

Reacher said, “I do. I know that you are a murderous piece of shit.”

Shepard said, “Be careful, son. I’ve got bigger guns than you.”

Reacher asked, “Where are you?”

Shepard said, “I’m in the middle of an interesting operation.”

Reacher said, “The community center?”

Shepard paused a beat and then he said, “How’d you know that?”

He looked around the parking lot to the community center like he suspected that maybe Reacher was watching him this very second.

Reacher said, “Because of the tracking device that I found. We figured that you would come.”

Shepard said, “You found that? What about the boy?”

Reacher said, “He’s here with me. We’re all here. Everyone who matters. Come get us. We’ll give you what you want. No one needs to die.”

Shepard said, “If I don’t get my diamonds, you will all die!”

Silence came over the line.

Reacher paused a beat and then he said, “Tell me something. How did you get that scar across your face?”

Shepard said, “A lucky African hit me with a machete. He isn’t so lucky anymore. He’s dead with his family. Don’t mess with me. Or you’ll get the same.”

Reacher stayed quiet.

Shepard said, “I come there and you’ll give me the diamonds and the boy?”

Reacher said, “I’ll give you the diamonds. You don’t need the boy or Jacobs. They’re free from you. Come get the diamonds and leave.”

Shepard paused a beat. After a long minute he said, “You have a deal, Reacher. But if you try to screw me, I’ll level this reservation to nothing but rubble and snow. You got it?”

Reacher said, “Just come and get your diamonds.”

Shepard didn’t say another word. He just hung up and the line went dead. Reacher switched the phone off and stared at it. He wondered if it had a tracking device on it. Then he figured that it probably was traceable. So he took the phone and slammed it into the wall, crushing it into a bunch of little pieces.

Amita asked, “Why?”

“In case he has a tracer on it too.”

Amita asked, “What if we need to talk to him again?”

“We won’t. Either he’ll be dead or we will.”

Jacobs said, “He’s not going to let us go free.”

Reacher said, “We aren’t going to let him go free either.”

Amita said, “We need the state cops. I can’t arrest them by myself.”

Reacher said, “No one is getting arrested.

Chapter 43

The trees around the house were calm and top-heavy with snow. The wind blew and calmly whistled between the tall trees. The air was filled with nature’s icy breath. Off in the distance, Reacher saw a deer stick its head up over a snow bank. The animal’s antlers were enormous and ridged. Reacher could see the deer’s thick mane like a winter beard and then the eyes peered back at him. The deer cocked its head suddenly and looked off to the horizon. Then it stood tall and turned, darting away quickly into the gloom.

Reacher watched it vanish and then turned his head to see what sound had frightened the deer away. He heard a low rumble in the sky. And after about a minute, he saw that it was a chopper coming in low over the trees. Reacher saw that the helicopter was a military stealth chopper, but he had no idea what kind. It looked like the secret chopper that was outed to the world when Bin Laden was killed. What was the name of that model chopper again? He could recall its look from videos and articles that he had read, but couldn’t remember the model number.

Whatever it was didn’t really matter at the moment because his biggest concern was the Vulcan machine gun that was attached to the chopper. He watched as the chopped yawed and stopped in the air and then turned and circled.

The chopper circled the rear of the house, near where he was hiding. It was a big black thing like a huge bird circling over its prey. Even in the gloom and snowy air, he could see the black polish glimmer.

Reacher waited. He had his G36 strapped over his shoulder. He stared up around the corner of the house at the stealth chopper and waited for the perfect moment. As soon as he was sure that the pilot could see him he would make his move.

Chapter 44

Shepard peered out the window of the cockpit from the Comanche RAH-70. He studied the two-story house in the dark. The pilot looked all around the house. He began to circle it. There was no clear place to land. The trees were too high and thick. There was a nice sized front yard without any trees on it, but the clearing above it was blocked by long branches from the nearest trees. The pilot turned to Shepard and said, “Nowhere to land, sir.”

Shepard stayed quiet.

The guys in the back of the chopper stared forward. Their night vision goggles were turned up, but their gear stayed on and they were ready to deploy.

Shepard said, “Prepare to fire the gun. We’ll kill them in the house and take the whole thing down.”

One of his guys said, “What about the diamonds? And Jacobs?”

“Shepard said, “That little bastard will be dead with the rest of them. We’ll hike back up and sift through the rubble for the diamonds.”

Then the other guy leaned forward in his seat. The harness on his seatbelt moved forward with him in a smooth arc.

He asked, “What about the boy and the Indians?”

Shepard looked over to the pilot and asked, “How many rounds we got left for the Vulcan gun?”

The pilot smirked and said, “Plenty.”

Shepard said, “After we kill Jacobs, then we’ll go back to the town and use the remaining bullets to kill the rest in their sleep.”

A moment of silence went by and then Shepard smirked at the thought of massacring Native Americans.

Wouldn’t be the first time, he said to himself.

The pilot circled one last time and then yawed and prepared to fire the machine guns at the house and destroy everyone inside.

Chapter 45

“Stop!” Shepard said.

He pointed at a figure standing tall near the side of the house. The pilot removed his finger from the trigger and looped the chopper around to get a closer look.

Then they saw Reacher and the others on horseback. They darted off into the trees. The horses moved more slowly in the snow then they would’ve on flat ground.

“Follow them!” Shepard ordered.

The pilot didn’t flinch; he seamlessly moved the chopper up a little higher and sped off in the direction that Reacher had been headed.

Shepard peered out the window and caught glimpses of the three of them running away through the trees. They were dark shadows, moving fast, but were mostly visible in the darkness.

The chopper stayed at a steady speed. They flew after Reacher for a good ten minutes. The air around the rotors was slightly gusty, but conditions were close to optimal for a chase. No way would Reacher outrun them on a horse. Maybe in the summer, on flat ground with trees to cover their escape this plan would have worked, but no way was it going to save them from Shepard now.

The air outside the helicopter was relatively calm, but icy. The steel exterior of the aircraft was cold to the touch, but inside Shepard and his crew were warm.

They swiveled and turned and flew forward, catching glimpses of Reacher and the other two through the trees.

They tracked after Reacher for another ten minutes, climbing higher and higher because the terrain turned mountainous.

They slowed and Shepard peered down again.

The pilot asked, “Where did they go?”

Shepard searched and then he saw them dart off again from the trees.

Three dark figures moved to the north.

“There!” Shepard said and pointed.

The pilot pivoted in his seat and swung the chopper around. They flew off after them for another 30 seconds until they stopped and stared.

The trees had opened up into a clearing. Shepard, the pilot, and the other two guys in his crew watched through the chopper’s windows as Reacher stopped the horses. He dismounted his horse and swatted at its rear.

He was completely alone. The other two horses had no riders. Reacher had led them away from the house.

Chapter 46

Amita and Mike Jacobs waited in the bathroom on the second floor of the house. They did exactly as Reacher had told them. He had said to go upstairs and lie in the bathtub. If Shepard started to fire the chopper’s gun on the house like he had at the previous house that Jacobs had been hiding out in, then the bathtub was the safest place from gunfire.

The house had an old cast iron tub and it was huge. It was probably from the 18th century. Very durable. If anything could provide cover from M50 ammunition it would be that tub. However, Reacher doubted even old, durable iron would be resilient from M50 ammunition, but his plan was to not to allow the chopper to shoot at the house.

Chapter 47

The scar across Shepard’s face turned pure white like it reflected the rage that sat in his stomach at that moment. Reacher, a teenager, had duped him with the oldest trick in the book. He had led them away from Jacobs and the woman cop with a trick that probably outdated the dinosaurs. Shepard’s guys looked at each other and made no comments about the situation. They knew better. One comment about it and he’d throw them out of the chopper. One of them even craned his head forward between the seats and peered down.

The ground was 100 feet below them, at least. The fall would kill him or break his back at a minimum. So he stayed quiet.

Shepard said, “Kill that bastard!”

The pilot smiled and jerked the trigger back on the machine gun in a way that went against his training. Squeeze the trigger, don’t pull it, had been engrained into him from years of military service, but he felt that this was a jerking trigger kind of situation.

The Vulcan machine gun started to twist and then spin. A second before the first rotation, it sprayed out bullets. The sound wasn’t like a loud gunshot from the movies. It was a very mechanical noise like a rotor turning and spinning. Then there was the deafening sound of bullets bursting from the barrels.

The muzzle flash was bright and orange. From a straight-on view of the barrel, the orange appeared as a bright, orange halo. Of course, no one who had ever seen a straight-on hail of bullets from a Vulcan machine gun had ever lived to describe what it looked like to another living soul.

The bullets sprayed in a wide cone from the gun and tore through the trees. Wood splintered and cracked. Branches swayed and cleft in multiple fractures as the bullets ripped through everything. The banks of snow puffed apart as bullets buried themselves deep in the ground. Snow exploded up into the air like bursts of fireworks as the bullets nailed the trees and shook everything loose.

Shepard smiled, thinking that Reacher must be dead.

Chapter 48

Cameron Reacher was like his father in many ways, some of which he didn’t even know yet. But one thing that he did know was that being like his father meant something particular. It meant that he was pretty good at a lot of things, and one of them was staying alive.

There was one thing that separated him from his father. Jack Reacher had been a force for good, traveling around and helping the helpless, but Jack Reacher hadn’t been on a mission. He had been a man who drifted and wandered aimlessly, with no real destination.

Cameron Reacher had a great advantage in this area because he was a Reacher, like his father, but he was a Reacher on a quest. And he had no plans of dying here in the northern territory of Wyoming and certainly not by a hail of gunfire from a madman like CIA Agent Alex Shepard.

Reacher hugged close to the huge trunk of a tree that he was certain was dead anyway. The bark was solid black and felt like it was free from life.

He heard the cracking, mechanical sound of a chain gun as the bullets let loose from the chopper.

The bullets fired out and rocketed past him. All around him bark exploded off the trees and snow burst into the air and fogged up any kind of visibility that had once existed.

He hugged tight to the tree and thought about what would happen if he ever did find Jack Reacher. Would he hug him as tightly as he had the tree? Would he feel like the tree? Hard and lifeless?

Then suddenly, Reacher felt relieved that the horses had run in the opposite direction from the gunfire. At least those poor animals were safe from Shepard and his insanity.

The bullets, the crackling machine, and the orange fire that haloed around the muzzle seemed to go on forever. Reacher’s eardrums rattled in his head from the sound. His bones vibrated and his skin warmed up from the heat expended from the bullets and gunfire.

He had never really felt fear. Being scared wasn’t something that applied to Reachers, but in that moment he felt it. He wasn’t afraid to die. He was afraid that he would die before he could fulfill his mother’s task. Before he could find Jack Reacher.

The bullets pierced the trees around him and surged through everything. The gunfire went on and on, until finally the machine gun ran out of bullets.

Reacher heard the gun rattle emptily as the cylinders rotated and stopped.

That was when he smiled. He knew guns and he knew that the Vulcan machine gun mounted on the chopper generally took about 15 minutes to reload. And 15 minutes in a firefight was a long time. Battles had changed hands. Advantages had changed sides. And wars were fought and won in less time.

He peered out and tried to locate the chopper’s position. He spotted it easily. It was less than 20 yards away from him and maybe 50 feet above the ground.

He had two options: run or stay. If he snuck away at first and then took off running, he might just make it and get away from Shepard.

All hope was dashed when all of a sudden he saw Shepard’s next move.

The helicopter hovered and the side door slid open. A long, black rope fell out and scraped the ground. One of Shepard’s guys leaped out of the opened door and rappelled, face first toward the ground. A second guy came out and covered his friend’s descent with his Heckler and Koch G36. The silenced barrel moved from side to side. No chance of Reacher taking a shot at the descending guy. Not with his buddy covering him. And even if he could shoot the guy, there was no guarantee of taking him out. Both guys appeared to be in some heavy SWAT gear. Probably had some serious Kevlar on.

Reacher would have to step out from behind the tree. Fast. One. And fire. Hit the guy in the head. That would kill him. Dead. The distance wasn’t a problem for such a fast shot, but the snow still filled the air and made the shot hard because the guy wasn’t completely in focus, not to mention that they weren’t motionless targets; rappelling down a rope isn’t a still movement. Reacher was staring through the gloom and it was thick.

Before Reacher could plan a second tactic, the guy was on the ground. He knelt and pointed his gun out and swept the area, looking for Reacher.

The second guy leapt out of the open door next and rappelled the rope fast. Shepard came out last.

Now Reacher had three CIA-trained opponents with superior firepower, air support, and night vision goggles.

He ducked back behind the tree and looked down at the G36. He suddenly felt outgunned.

Chapter 49

Shepard took the lead.

He paced in a hunched fashion, which looked awkward, one of his guys thought. But Shepard was from a different generation of soldiers. The way that his generation had been taught to approach a hostile environment had been to shoot first. His guy had been trained to stay safe first. Keep the gun low, to avoid friendly fire. It was a concept that Shepard probably had never even been taught at all.

The guy to the right and behind Shepard crept along, covering the right flank.

The three men walked for about 20 yards into the forest and the gloom.

The chopper had recoiled and rose higher into the sky. The pilot hovered around and circled the area to give them a bird’s-eye view.

Shepard was the only one with an earpiece and radio that gave him direct communication with the pilot. The other guy held the grenades and the one on the right had backup magazines. This guy was in charge of carrying extra supplies, which made him feel like the least important member of the squad, but it was better than being dead. He had his G36, his Glock, and a Ka-Bar 1280 Combat Kukri Blade with black Kraton G handle. The blade was 8 ½ inches long. And very sharp. It was an unusual knife because of the long blade that curved inward. It was a heinous-looking invention. But it was his lucky knife and he had served with it for years.

He looked back at Shepard and saw that he was giving the signal for them to split up.

Shepard would go straight, the left guy left, and, of course, he’d cover the right quadrant.

Generally, the rule had always been to go up to 35 yards and no farther, but in this case, he bet that the rule was “don’t come back until Reacher is dead.”

He moved to the right. Heard the wind howl and echo through the trees and fresh bullet holes. It gusted and blew across his face. He walked on for 30 yards. Then 35. Then he felt that voice in the back of his head saying, “Too far. Too far.”

He stopped and peered back over his shoulder. He could still see his partner’s back. Then he about-faced and moved forward.

The gloom was getting thicker so he reached up and pulled down his goggles, clicked on the night vision. The device hummed in that distinguishable way that was exclusive to night vision goggles.

His field of vision turned green and bright. The gloom was still thick in the goggles, but he could see much better. He’d especially notice if anything moved.

He continued on.

The gloom seemed to get thicker. It engulfed him. He turned back and looked for his partners. No sign of them. Their snow-colored gear backfired on them in this situation because they couldn’t see each other either. In fact, they were even limited on the directions that they could fire. If he fired his weapon in a southern cone, he might hit his friend or worse, Shepard. That would be bad for him. Very bad.

So he turned forward again and moved on.

Chapter 50

Reacher watched the guy. He remained in the shadows and followed the guy with his eyes. No movement from the rest of his body. Reacher had found a man-sized hole at the base of a tree. It felt like a shallow grave now that he was in it. He had jumped in it and pulled snow down toward him as best he could. He was packed in enough to hide his bulk.

He watched as the clumsy mercenary approached. The guy seemed terrified. Reacher knew this because he knew the terror in the guy’s demeanor and walk like a lion knows it from his prey.

Reacher wanted to open fire on him, kill him where he stood, but he couldn’t. He had no silencer on the G36. He had left it behind. Not that a sound suppressor would’ve helped. The gloom was so thick that the muzzle flash would’ve been like a bright bolt of lightning cracking through the sky and giving away his position.

Reacher could smell the cold, watery scent of snow and the remaining smoke from the Vulcan’s gunfire. It hung in the air—pungent and acrid.

Reacher watched the guy move in closer to him. The guy didn’t step close enough for Reacher to grab him, which had been his plan. Grab the guy fast. Drop him to his knees and silence him. But the guy was too far away. Yet, something even better presented itself. The guy had passed Reacher without even a second look.

Reacher pulled himself slowly out of the hole and began to creep up behind the guy. The snow quieted his steps. He crept and did what he was good at—sneaking up on bad guys.

Ten feet from the guy, Reacher saw the Ka-bar knife sheathed at the small of the guy’s back. With five fluid, deadly moves and one agonizing one, the guy was dead. One. Reacher stepped forward. Two. He clasped his enormous hand over the guy’s mouth. Three. He unsheathed the Ka-bar. Four. He stabbed it deep into the guy’s neck, severing straight through his vestibular and vocal folds. And five. He jerked the blade straight out and let go of the guy. Six. The guy gurgled and rolled around violently on the ground until blood ran out of him and he had no more left to struggle.

Reacher could’ve helped him. Killed him quick, but in the end he thought about the dead dog from earlier.

Reacher liked dogs. So instead of helping the guy, he watched him die.

After the guy was dead, Reacher spit on his dead corpse.

The other guy had walked the farthest away from Shepard. He wasn’t scared of some teenage kid. He was scared of Shepard. So he swept his area thoroughly and found no sign of anyone. No footprints. No noise. In fact his quadrant seemed to have gotten the most damage from the gunfire. So if Reacher had been hiding in here, he was most certainly dead. And if he had survived the firefight, he would’ve been hit by a bullet for sure. No doubt about that. The spray was everywhere. Reacher’s blood would’ve been on the snow and he would’ve been crying like a baby or dead. But there was none of this. So the guy figured that Reacher was either dead or in one of the other directions.

He was just about to give up, when he heard a whisper. He turned. His night vision goggles showed a huge green figure standing in front of him. He thought that it was a bear, but there were no claws. Just one big, long one. And before he could react, Reacher stabbed him straight into the neck, just above where the collarbone dipped down. And with his other hand he swiped the guy’s G36 away from him.

The second guy went down like a puppet with the strings cut. His hand clawed and scratched at his throat as he tried to pull the knife out.

Reacher stepped over him and stomped down on the Ka-bar’s hilt and buried the blade straight through the back of the guy’s neck like a nail.

Then the guy stopped moving and Reacher spit on his corpse as well. After all, he wasn’t sure who had killed the dog. No reason to discriminate now.

He knelt down and pulled the Ka-bar out of the guy’s neck and wiped the blood off on the guy’s jacket. Then he searched the guy. He found nothing of interest except a pouch with three grenades. They were fragmentary grenades. They were the size of a snowball, just like when he was a kid with his mother, only these grenades were heavier than some frozen snowballs.

Chapter 51

The concept of a fragmentation grenade is that it is basically packed with deadly projectiles that explode outward after the pin has been pulled and the device is thrown. It is an elementary, old military weapon. The military fragmentation grenade is the very definition of the phrase: If it ain’t broke, why fix it?

Reacher took the silencer out of his pocket and trashed it. It was useless. Instead he replaced it with a grenade. There were a half of dozen grenades on the dead guy, but why bog himself down with extra weight? So he took one and shoved it in his pocket.

Reacher scanned the cloudy area and saw nothing but trees and smoke. There was no sign of Shepard.

He crept along the footpath made by the last dead guy and followed it back to its origin, where the three mercenaries landed from the chopper. Once Reacher got there, he paused and scanned the area again. Still no sign of movement, but he saw Shepard’s footprints in the snow. That was the good thing about tracking someone in the snow; footprints are obvious. However, Reacher was a Reacher and far from a fool. He wasn’t about to get double bluffed by his own tactic from earlier. And Alex Shepard was a professional veteran of the CIA. He was no fool. Reacher didn’t trust any kind of obvious trail that was left for him by Shepard; so he decided to take a new approach. Instead of engaging Shepard in the dark, he headed toward the sound of the helicopter’s rotors.

The closer he got to the chopper’s position the more the smoke and snow lifted up off the ground because of the jet wash from the rotors’ violent spin.

Reacher stayed clear of the helicopter’s spotlight and out of the pilot’s view. He took the long way around. Slowly and steadily, he walked, staying behind trees and snow banks. Then as he got closer to it, he scrambled between the trees.

Reacher looked up at the helicopter. It was a frightening thing. Black, with a shimmer that looked almost like chrome; the machine certainly had been used to terrify villagers in Syria and other parts of the Middle East. But this wasn’t the Middle East and Reacher knew that he was the thing to be feared here in the dark.

He scrambled one last time and leaned with his back against a tree. He was directly beneath the chopper. He could see that it didn’t even have a tail number. No way for it to be tracked or identified except that it was unforgettable.

Reacher measured the distance between the helicopter and the ground in his mind. It was too high. He needed to get the pilot to lower it. That meant breaking the element of surprise. Against a secret military attack chopper, this wasn’t a good idea. So he reevaluated his plan. Then he smiled because two things were in his favor.

First, the chopper’s side door was still open and second the tree directly behind it had low branches. Instead of lowering the chopper, he would go higher.

Reacher ducked down and waited until the pilot rotated the chopper to face the other direction, which he was doing every 30 seconds. As soon as the cockpit faced the opposite direction, Reacher scrambled to the tree with the low branches and leapt up as high as he could, which wasn’t much because of the snow. He barely reached the lowest limb, but because of his incredible reach he made it. He smiled and thanked Jack Reacher for the arms. Then he pulled himself up and heaved up onto the branch.

One of the advantages of being basically a walking ape was that he was naturally skilled at climbing trees. When he was a kid, playing on the monkey bars was as easy as pie. This tree was no exception.

Reacher climbed. Fast. He reached midway up the tree and saw that the chopper was within throwing distance. He steadied himself and thought of his mother. Snowball fighting. Now grenade throwing.

Under his breath, he said, “It’s the small things in life.”

Then he pulled out the grenade and yanked the pin. It clattered against the tree and tumbled toward the ground. He smiled and aimed and threw. The grenade spun as it went through the air. It flew 40 feet, 45. The chopper continued rotating and the grenade bounced perfectly into the open door. The pilot looked out the window. His eyes connected with Reacher’s and then he turned around and saw that the bouncing noise from behind him was a grenade. He never turned back because the grenade exploded. The front windshield erupted into a fury of glass and blood. The metal ripped and expanded. The front door completely blew off the chopper and was flung to the ground. The rotors exploded and swiveled and stopped completely. The chopper twisted and plummeted to the ground below. Around 75 feet. It didn’t explode when it crashed, not like in the movies. It just crashed and the force of the crash crushed the roof inward. The starboard side collapsed and imploded.

Reacher smiled and thought, One left.

Chapter 52

Reacher descended from the tree quickly because Shepard would be coming. He reached the bottom and scrambled to a place where Shepard wouldn’t suspect him to be. He clambered in close and waited.

Chapter 53

Alex Shepard was a 20-year veteran for a spy agency, well-trained, and dangerous, but never had he ever thought that he would meet someone who singlehandedly could take out his crew and now a military attack chopper.

He ran toward the sound as fast as he could and made it to the wreckage within minutes. Perhaps he should’ve approached more cautiously, but Shepard wasn’t thinking about his training, only his anger.

He stopped with his jaw open and stared at the crumbled steel and bent tail of the chopper. He saw the blood and pieces of glass all over the snow.

He literally couldn’t grasp how Reacher had done this.

He just stared at the wreckage and knew that his guys were all dead. He was alone. He took his G36 and started firing blindly into the surrounding trees. The silencer whizzed and purred as bullets sprayed out. He fired in a rage. The bullets spit out and slammed into trees surrounding Reacher’s hiding place. Some flew out into the smoky darkness and drilled themselves into far-off trees.

Shepard squeezed the trigger until the gun clicked empty. Then he ejected the magazine and began to reload.

That was when Reacher revealed himself.

At first, Shepard was relieved because he saw a bulking figure climb out of the helicopter wreckage. He thought maybe his pilot had survived, but then he realized that his pilot wasn’t a hulk. Reacher was.

Cameron Reacher stood in the wreckage like a machine, like one of those terminators from the movies who walk away from vehicle wreckage, unscathed.

Reacher pointed a G36 straight at Shepard.

He said in a calm, but cold voice, “You are done here.”

Shepard tossed his weapon and lifted his hands up in a universal gesture of surrender.

Reacher said, “Now the sidearm and the vest.”

Shepard moved slowly and unsnapped his Kevlar vest and let it slip off. It bounced slightly on the snow. Then he removed his sidearm and ejected the clip and tossed the gun far off into the darkness.

He grinned and said, “Who the hell are you?”

Reacher said, “Me? I’m nobody. Just a guy. But not a guy that you should’ve messed with.”

Silence fell between them.

Then Shepard asked, “What now? You going to call the cops? You got plenty of evidence.”

Reacher shook his head and said, “No cops. You’d just get out of that somehow. Evidence or not. No, I have a better idea.”

Shepard looked blank.

Reacher said, “You can have a fighting chance.”

He lowered the gun and tossed it into the wreckage behind him. Then he drew the P99 and ejected the clip. He frowned at the fact that he had never gotten to kill someone with it, but this was a better way. He tossed the gun blindly into the dark.

Shepard smiled because Reacher had just made a huge mistake because Shepard was an expert in hand-to-hand combat. Reacher was going down, or so he thought.

Shepard smiled and charged Reacher. But Reacher had never said that he intended to fight fair. So he cheated without hesitation. His mother had never taught him to fight fair. She had trained him to win.

As soon as Shepard was within reaching distance, Reacher pulled the Ka-bar out from behind his back, jerked his left arm all the way back, and with all of his strength he hacked it forward and sidestepped to the right.

The blade buried halfway into Shepard’s face. It sliced straight through his skin and lodged itself into his skull. The knife went into the opposite direction from his other scar and now he was left with an X marked across his face. It would’ve left a very interesting scar indeed, if he had lived, but he didn’t. Reacher had hacked it so hard into his skull that the edge of the blade had sliced into part of his brain. He was brain-dead first and then he fell to the snow and twisted and jerked. Reacher watched as Shepard twitched until he was dead.

Reacher didn’t spit on his body. No need. Besides he was done here.

Chapter 54

Reacher stayed in Tower Junction the next night. He rented a motel room and slept most of the morning away. He woke up to a message from the desk clerk. It had simply said: Terry’s Diner.

Reacher got dressed and left his room with no intention of ever seeing it again.

He walked from the motel and turned one corner and then another until he reached Main Street. He walked until he came to 113 Main Street. It was Terry’s Diner. In the parking lot, he saw Amita’s police cruiser. He entered the diner and saw Aubree, the waitress from the other day. He looked around the room and saw Amita sitting in the corner booth with Mike Jacobs. They held hands and embraced like old lovers.

Reacher walked over to them and said hello.

He sat with his back to the door, a practice that he normally didn’t do, but he saw no harm in it. After all, life is about embracing change.

Amita said, “Hi.”

“Hello,” Reacher said. “I see that you two are doing well.”

Jacobs smiled and said, “Thanks to you.”

Amita smiled at Reacher and said, “Are you hungry? Order something. It’s on us.”

Reacher lied, “I’m good.”

He didn’t want to stay and impose.

Amita said, “We haven’t decided what to do about this situation. What do you think?”

Reacher said, “Do nothing. You never heard of Alex Shepard or Mike Jacobs for that matter; whenever they come. Or better yet, move the bodies out there around the chopper and toss a grenade into it. Then call the state police and tell them that the townspeople heard a chopper crash in the woods during the snowstorm.”

Amita asked, “Will they buy that?”

Reacher smiled and said, “The CIA will cover it up and make that story the truth. They aren’t going to want any attention on Shepard and his enterprise.”

Then Reacher looked at Jacobs and said, “But you have to leave. Go somewhere. Change your name. They won’t look for you. Hell, they’d probably even help you remain hidden just to bury the truth.”

Amita looked at Jacobs and then she said, “I don’t want to lose him again.”

Reacher said, “Give it a month or two, then join him. You wanted to leave the reservation anyway. Your words.”

Silence came over them and Amita and Jacobs smiled at each other like this decision was already made for them. Now they’d plan the life they actually wanted together.

Amita looked at Reacher and asked, “Where will you go?”

Reacher smiled and said, “Wherever.”

Then he stood up, tall. No goodbye. No last look. He just turned and walked out of the diner.

He walked onto the street and shivered a little when a cold breeze swept across his face. Then walked over to the next street and stopped at a crosswalk. He looked up and down the street, both directions, east and west. To the east there was a highway cloverleaf, perfect place to catch a ride. Then he glanced west and saw just on the far corner that there was a group of buses huddled together. A Greyhound bus station. Another perfect choice to move on.

He asked himself which way to go? Then he thought, What would Jack Reacher do? He didn’t know. Not really. So he turned left and walked on.

About the Author

I grew up in Mississippi, where Lee Child’s The Affair, one of my favorite books, is based. If you haven’t read it or any of his other books, I envy you because you get to start from the beginning and experience all 6 feet 5 inches and 250 pounds of Jack Reacher’s adventures for the first time.

Here are some of my favorite Jack Reacher books: Persuader, Echo Burning, The Affair, Nothing to Lose, and Worth Dying For. But they are all great!

If you enjoyed this Cameron Reacher adventure than please go check out my website: www.scottblade.com and sign up so we can be friends. I personal email my readers and will keep you updated on new books or if I’m around your area and of course I will email you my take on Lee Child’s next book.

Coming in July

Foreign & Domestic

A Get Jack Reacher Novel

Cameron Reacher walks the highways of American. Alone. Searching for Jack Reacher—his father. Finally, he has gotten a break.

A Secret Service agent who was friends with Joe Reacher in a past life invites Cameron out to D.C. to talk about his uncle. Cameron meets the agent in a cafe outside of the District. A quant location. A good cup of coffee. A small Secret Service protection detail. And a young, beautiful protectee that Reacher doesn’t recognize.

What should’ve been a simple meeting turns into an international conspiracy when armed, masked men storm the cafe and abduct Reacher and the girl at gunpoint. Soon after, Cameron Reacher comes face-to-face with a group of elite mercenaries led by a deadly enemy from Jack Reacher’s past.

But what this enemy didn’t expect was that he abducted the wrong Reacher.